strolled north, searching. Suddenly distant voices—shrill and excited—drifted on the air.
Instantly, she ran across the beach toward the woods, where an oak, more than eighty feet from one side to the other, stood knee-deep in tropical ferns. Hiding behind the tree, she watched a band of kids strolling down the sand, now and then dashing around in the waves, kicking up sea spray. One boy ran ahead; another threw a football. Against the white sand, their bright madras shorts looked like colorful birds and marked the changing season. Summer was walking toward her down the beach.
As they moved closer, she flattened herself against the oak and peered around. Five girls and four boys, a bit older than she, maybe twelve. She recognized Chase Andrews throwing the ball to those boys he was always with.
The girls—Tallskinnyblonde, Ponytailfreckleface, Shortblackhair, Alwayswearspearls, and Roundchubbycheeks—hung back in a little covey, walking slower, chattering and giggling. Their voices lifted up to Kya like chimes. She was too young to care much about the boys; her eyes fixed on the troop of girls. Together they squatted to watch a crab skittering sideways across the sand. Laughing, they leaned against one another’s shoulders until they flopped on the sand in a bundle.
Kya bit her bottom lip as she watched. Wondering how it would feel to be among them. Their joy created an aura almost visible against the deepening sky. Ma had said women need one another more than they need men, but she never told her how to get inside the pride. Easily, she slipped deeper into the forest and watched from behind the giant ferns until the kids wandered back down the beach, until they were little spots on the sand, the way they came.
* * *
• • •
DAWN SMOLDERED beneath gray clouds as Kya pulled up to Jumpin’s wharf. He walked out of the little shop shaking his head.
“I’m sorry as can be, Miss Kya,” he said. “But they beatcha to it. I got my week’s quota of mussels, cain’t buy no mo’.”
She cut the engine and the boat banged against a piling. This was the second week she’d been beat out. Her money was gone and she couldn’t buy a single thing. Down to pennies and grits.
“Miss Kya, ya gotta find some udder ways to bring cash in. Ya can’t git all yo’ coons up one tree.”
Back at her place, she sat pondering on the brick ’n’ boards, and came up with another idea. She fished for eight hours straight, then soaked her catch of twenty in saltwater brine through the night. At daybreak she lined them up on the shelves of Pa’s old smokehouse—the size and shape of an outhouse—built a fire in the pit, and poked green sticks into the flames like he’d done. Blue-gray smoke billowed and puffed up the chimney and through every crack in the walls. The whole shack huffing.
The next day she motored to Jumpin’s and, still standing in her boat, held up her bucket. In all it was a pitiful display of small bream and carp, falling apart at the seams. “Ya buy smoked fish, Jumpin’? I got some here.”
“Well, I declare, ya sho’ did, Miss Kya. Tell ya what: I’ll take ’em on consignment like. If I sell ’em, ya get the money; if I don’t, ya get ’em back like they is. That do?”
“Okay, thanks, Jumpin’.”
* * *
• • •
THAT EVENING Jumpin’ walked down the sandy track to Colored Town—a cluster of shacks and lean-tos, and even a few real houses squatting about on backwater bogs and mud sloughs. The scattered encampment was in deep woods, back from the sea, with no breeze, and “more skeeters than the whole state of Jawja.”
After about three miles he could smell the smoke from cookfires drifting through the pines and hear the chatter of some of his grandchillin. There were no roads in Colored Town, just trails leading off through the woods this way and that to different family dwellings. His was a real house he and his pa had built with pine lumber and a raw-wood fence around the hardpan dirt yard, which Mabel, his good-sized wife, swept clean as a whistle just like a floor. No snake could slink within thirty yards of the steps without being spotted by her hoe.
She came out of the house to meet him with a smile, as she often did, and he handed her the pail with Kya’s smoked fish.
“What’s this?” she asked. “Looks like sump’m even dogs wouldn’t drag in.”
“It’s