The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,47

and the Methodists, but they don’t know anything for sure, either. They all—you all—seem to need to believe in something. You have to have a story.”

I didn’t like it when she talked like that, setting herself apart. I thought of how tenuous her presence was and how she might slip away as inexplicably as she had appeared.

“I’ve been reading about the Milky Way, too.” She swept her arm in an arc over our heads, then patted the ground between us. “This is all we really know.” Her voice resonated with urgency and calm. “It is a mystery, but it’s beautiful, Evelyn. And it is all we need. All we are.” She held up a fistful of dirt and let it fall between her fingers.

A breeze passed over, filled with the cool promise of rain.

I knew she spoke the truth. She brushed her dirty fingers over my lips, transferring the primal grit to my tongue.

She may have become like me physically, but I was, in my own curious way, becoming like her.

There was one other thing I couldn’t begin to explain to Addie: “Whites only.” Clarion was completely segregated in 1948. Except for the women who came into town to work as maids and the men who picked up the mill workers’ kitchen slops for hog feed, the only time Addie and I were around black people was at Pearl Freedman’s barbeque shack. Hers was the only business in town that served both black and white people. Her barbeque ribs and pulled pork were the best in the county. Her place near downtown, corrugated tin on top and three sides, was dark and hot year round and filled with a distinct blend of sweat, spices, and wood smoke. If the wind blew right, folks would be salivating in the post office as they bought stamps.

When Joe and I were kids, Momma often sent us over to Pearl’s to pick up dinner. I loved the tart, hot ribs, but Pearl scared me. She stood over six feet tall with arms like hams and breasts larger than my head. Pearl was very dark-skinned, and in the dimness of her shack, her features were difficult to pin down.

She’d flash a big smile at us as she handed over the warm ribs wrapped in wax paper and then folded into sheets of newspaper, and boom, “You enjoy, now. I hope Lily Mae sends you back real soon.” Her accent wasn’t the same as the other black people. Some said she was Gullah and a “conjure” woman. She’d take our money and retrieve the change from a cloth bag stored deep in her cleavage, dropping the warm, moist coins into our small, open palms.

Pearl’s only child, Peg, was close to my age, a tall girl but, unlike her momma, slender in the waist and hips. She hunched her shoulders forward and slunk everywhere, like a cat that had been kicked and was trying to avoid the next foot.

One Saturday, Addie and I were downtown, a quiet still time in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. We’d picked out a yellow gingham at Ina’s shop for kitchen curtains. While Addie paid, I stepped outside. Peg walked by, clutching a shopping bag to her chest.

“Good morning,” I said.

Peg smiled, almost too fast to see, and then returned her gaze to the sidewalk. I remembered her grin from when we were little girls, each peeking out from behind our momma’s skirts. She had not been shy then. Her gaze was direct, her smile quick and wide.

Addie joined me and we headed toward home. The street was empty except for us and Peg about half a block ahead. Addie watched her carefully.

“If she had been the one to find me, I would look like her,” she said.

My skin prickled in the heat, and a wave of dizziness rolled over me. What would it be like to be able to say that about anyone you passed on the street? I looked at Addie and tried to imagine her different, my features gone from her and Peg’s emerging from the muddy new surface of her.

A car pulled up suddenly at the next intersection, John Thompson at the wheel. John’s family lived outside of town in a little house surrounded by bored hound dogs and dying cars. He hated “Yankees and niggers,” as though it was the only occupation a man needed, the kind of vehement racism that allowed the rest of us to feel noble in our more genteel and subtle