Sudan: A Novel (53 page)
Authors: Ninie Hammon
Idris and Aleuth sat beside the dying embers of the cooking fire as it shot little red sparks into the night sky. Akin was asleep on her sleeping mat. Aleuth rose and stepped to the door of the tukul to look in on her. Just to check. The girl was sound asleep with Shema wrapped in her arms.
When Aleuth returned, Idris looked at her with a knowing half smile. He, too, constantly checked to see that Akin was there, that she was safe, that she really was home.
Aleuth sat down on a log in the flickering firelight, picked up a stick and pushed aimlessly at the coals. Finally, she forced herself to give voice to the thought that had been hiding just out of sight, like a puff adder in her mind.
“They could come back.”
Idris looked at his wife. He wasn’t surprised by her words, and he slowly nodded.
“Yes, they could come back.”
Now that the thought had been free, words spilled out after it in a torrent.
“They could come back anytime...tonight, tomorrow...and take her away again, steal her—steal
both
of them.” Aleuth’s voice had the beginning sharp edge of hysteria. “Idris, they could make Akin a slave again! They could take her and Shema away and beat them and starve them and...” Her husband didn’t tell her the fate Akin had so narrowly escaped; he didn’t have to.
“Idris!” This last was a frantic, desperate plea: “How can we protect our children?”
Idris stared into the glowing embers for a time before he lifted his head and looked into his wife’s eyes. When he spoke, his voice was quiet.
“We can’t.”
THE END
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-- Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.
He returns to the hollow for the first time in 20 years for the memorial service on the anniversary of the disaster, but Will doesn’t know his arrival has set in motion a chain of events that will threaten the lives of another crew of miners digging coal in a mile-deep hole under Black Mountain.
As he reconnects with Aintree Hollow, with Granny Sparrow, whose grief has imprisoned her; JoJo, who carries a terrible secret of her own and Jamey, a mentally handicapped boy who carves magical coal statutes, Will doesn’t see the mounting danger. Or that the boy holds the key to it all.
When the fate of innocent miners is again placed in Will’s hands, can he summon the courage he lacked two decades ago? Is he man enough to save them, even if it means he must do the one thing he fears most?
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talks briefly about FIVE DAYS IN MAY.
On a warm May Friday in 1963, a mammoth tornado hurls across the empty plains toward the little town of Graham, Oklahoma. The writhing column of destruction a mile wide and eight miles high is not just on a collision course with the town, but with the lives of four of its residents, each of whom has already planned their own personal rendezvous with death that day.
Jonas Cunningham has reached the end of his rope, now he lives only to free his precious Maggie from the fog of Alzheimer’s. His 16-year-old granddaughter, Joy, is desperate, too. She’s pregnant. And scared. And sees only one way out. Joy’s father, Reverend Mac MacIntosh, has lost his wife and his faith, and on Friday plans to “kill” his ministry.
But as Mac meets daily with a strange, mystical death row inmate during the final five days of her life, everything begins to change. Set to be executed at five o’clock that Friday, Princess knows things she can’t possibly know about Mac’s life and sees things she can’t possibly see. And she is determined to carry to her grave an incredible secret about the little sister she confessed to beheading 14 years ago.
When the monster twister bears down on them, all four of the people who’d penciled in “death” on their calendars for that day in May actually do make eye contact with dying. But they don’t come to the crossroads of life and death by the path they’d planned and they don’t leave with the result they expected. And they don’t all survive.
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talks briefly about HOME GROWN.
Somebody shot Jim Bingham, shot him dead on the street in front of his own newspaper office, and now his heartbroken daughter must abandon the world of academic journalism for the real world of running the newspaper he left behind.
But Sarabeth Bingham soon discovers that marijuana-growing has corrupted the idyllic little central Kentucky community where she grew up. The sheriff can’t get a marijuana conviction because the county’s jury pool is tainted. Her cousin grows weed and has lost his wife and daughter to the world of drugs. After three children find dope money in an abandoned building and the dopers kidnap them to get it back, Sarabeth heeds the words on the plaque that has always hung above her father’s desk: “Don’t mess with a man who buys ink by the barrel!”
In the next issue of the newspaper, Sarabeth declares war on dope in a blazing front-page editorial! Now, the growers have to shut Sarabeth up. And dopers fight dirty.
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talks briefly about
THE LAST SAFE PLACE.