Solemn

 

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About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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For my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, with love: Shirley Whitlow, Vanilla Hudson, Magnolia Whitlow, Lola Buckhanon, and Mary Lee Luckett. And their husbands, our men: Gus Whitlow, Tommy Hudson, Nora Whitlow, and George Buckhanon.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must first thank some special writers for reading parts of this book in its various incarnations, and particular members of the Chicago Writers Workshop who encouraged my native writing compulsion back to the surface: Tacuma Roeback, Diane Gillette, Allie Tova Hirsch, Maggie Queeney, Steven Ramirez, Dan Portincaso, Matthew Thomas, Laura Nelson, Aaron Frankel, and Susan Dickman. They read through the first avalanche of characters and scenes I created years back; I owe a huge debt to them for helping me sort through the wave and stick with it. This book would not be here now without them.

The same goes for Sisters in Crime, the best organization for women writers I know of. I am so proud to be part of them. I am appreciative to organizational leaders Martha Reed and Cari Dubiel for giving me a spotlight in between books, through appearances for SinC at conferences and on true-crime television shows. My sisters' newsletters, SinC links, programs, and events are godsends that keep me typing.

I have bounds of gratitude for my inspiring and committed literary agent, Albert Zuckerman, and his Writers House ship, Mickey Novak and Michael Miejas, in particular, for always igniting the real writer in me and blessing me with a literary haven to be proud of. I am so happy I found them. I give thanks to my publisher Sally Richardson; editor Monique Patterson; editorial assistant Alexandria Sehulster; copy editor Barbara Wild; cover designer Elsie Lyons; and the entire team at St. Martin's Press/Macmillan, for bringing my private work out to the public world once again.

Some passionate editors at global and nationwide literary journals encouraged the book through their acceptance of early and revised excerpts they published for the public and me: Bianca Spriggs at
pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture
at University of Kentucky; Shinjini Bhattacharjee at
Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal
; Erin Bass at
Deep South Magazine
; and the beautiful editors of
gravel Literary Magazine
of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

And the cats, for everything: Nibbles, Bubbles, Ralph, Alice, Sparky, Pepper, Mona Lisa, Nittle Kitty, Red, Mr. Midnight, and Sybil.

 

1

BLEDSOE

 

I
think I was just past eight when it all started down in Singer's Trailer Park.

That woman down the way, past the well, was not my mama's friend or my daddy's or nobody's there. She was just somebody, movin round us like some old relative showed up at the funerals before it's time to eat: lookin like the dead, finishin all the jokes, nicknamin, pickin bones. But my daddy was a good man and a fix-it man and he got in between loose dogs chargin and picked up kids tripped in the dirt. He was that kind of man. Good-lookin too: brick color, long lashes, good hair.

When he met the younger woman down the way, Mama was at church. It was a Wednesday, Bible study. And Landon—all mysterious—was out with his friends and they was probably shoutin bout guns, power, revolution, fuckin em up, fightin em off, turnin tables, drawin lines. My mama put supper for us on the stove fore she left. I wanted pizza though. Daddy agreed: he drive me out for it, throw away the box. And then I could watch things on TV Mama normally turned off. Then I could turn on the radio until Mama get home, then set it back on them AM gospel stations where the singin and music make me think about the Saturday night scary movies.

We went out to our Malibu, sunk in the gravel near our trailer under moonrise, so the car shined more than it did in the day. With the radio on some fast song, and the smoke from my daddy's Kools working cross the dash, and the long but easy road to town in front of us, we saw the barefoot woman walkin at side of the road, heels in her hand. If the headlights hadn't been turned on bright, cause they had to be, we mighta missed her. Or we coulda struck her. She walked long in our direction near middle of the road like she ain't never carved no place on one.

Daddy slowed down. He recognized the woman. We could all recognize each other, when we wanted to. I wanted to keep goin. We had green beans and yams and fried corn and some trout on the stove, but they was there the last week. Maybe the week before. Recently. It was fishin time. We wasn't gonna go hungry, I knew. Still …

Daddy waved his hand out the window cross to the woman. The woman looked up out of, like, this daze. She waved back. She still didn't seem to know him. He knew her though.

“You goin back to Singer's?”

“I am,” she said. She squinted through the bright lights in her eyes.

“It's dark out here to be walkin like this,” my daddy told her. “I'll lift you.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I'm fine.”

“Barefoot out here?”

And then the woman looked cross both sides of the road fore she walked to us.

“Get in the back, Solemn.”

I left my door open for her. She slid in my place. I took up in the back. In time with old music, I tapped my feet at back of the woman's seat. Daddy turned us farther from pizza in town right back into the gates of home.

I couldn't hear they conversation, over the music and the speakers thumpin out bass on me. It felt good. Like my own fists workin themselves up and down Daddy's spine when he was stiff. He gave me dollar bills for my little hands to run down his back, cause now I was too heavy and my feet was too big to walk on it like I used to. But a word or two bout “that nigger” put me in grown folks' talk. I looked at my daddy's eyes in the rearview mirror and noticed a glint in em.

“He switched up on you like that?” he asked the woman. “Put you out your own car, made you walk all the way back here?”

“He's unpredictable,” the woman said. She was the color of a prune. “Gets these mood swings. A simple night out can turn into a mess. Can't reason with him none.”

“I've known him for a little while now.”

“Who?” I asked. They didn't hear me.

“Well, you should know he got a temper,” the woman confided.

“I heard a little bit of it,” Daddy said. “We all pick up boys in these parts. Do what we can. I heard nobody wanted to work with him too long.”

“Imagine being married to him.”

Daddy passed our trailer and moved down a steep we never had to go down.

“I'm near the woods,” the woman said. “Past the well. One of the last ones.”

It wasn't no camp lanterns on the last ones. Mama told me to call em “compact” to be polite, cause one time she heard me call em “shacks” and said I was careless. These crows flocked and slumped at edge of the well, sleep. Just when I thought they was all too identical and might only be decoration, all they gray eyeballs shot out at once. The car stopped and the music stopped. And Daddy turned down the radio to say bye.

“I thank you,” the woman said. “It's chilly in the air, and I'm just now gettin over somethin'. Makes it all worse, huh?”

“No problem,” Daddy told her. “That woulda been too far to walk.”

“And I'd already come so far. I got some cognac in the house, if you want.”

I wondered what was cognac, cause I'm always up for a new thing.

“I gotta get my daughter some pizza … my wife don't cook on Wednesdays.”

“Oh?”

“Bible study.”

“Oh.”

“Best I'm gonna do tonight is sneak a beer in with the pizza.”

“Understood,” the woman said. And I think she called me “pretty.”

But there was somethin bout a woman punishin her own feet with a dirt road when she coulda worn shoes, namin her husband “that nigger” when her own name went unsaid, and seein my father a good man made her sound more than I think she intended it. He spinned up the path back to our trailer, and dropped me off.

“Yo mama cooked,” he told me. “Lock the door.”

I knew how to be by myself. Daddy was always away playin cards or talkin at the well while I fussed on my own with my balls and Barbies. In the quiet time when crickets chirp and porch lights fade out one by one, I had a plate of cold yams and soggy fish on my lap. I snuck off half a cheese Danish cake I couldn't have no coffee with in the mornin. My cat squat with her paws at the rim of her litter box. A toad stuck to the window in front of the TV, scootin round in its film. Daddy came back 'fore the church van pulled up.

“Who was she … the woman?” I asked him, a sloppy grin on his face and a syrupy sweet on his breath and beads of sweat at his lip. It was a puzzle. In just that little bit of time, such a normal known face became so incorrect.

“She a neighbor of ours,” Daddy told me. “You don't know her sweetheart.”

“Why was she just walking down the middle of the road all by herself?”

“I don't know,” my daddy said. “But don't tell your mama for me, you hear?”

And I never told. And a few more Bible study nights after that he disappeared, left me with a cold supper and a secret. But it was always too dark for me to go out at night to prove if the crows was real or not. So, I always went down there in day to see if the woman was. And even though it came to be hard to recall why that well came to be my place to be, I knew Pearletta Hassle most certainly had been real.