Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

my best to tamp it back down, but braying sobs kept welling up and bursting out of my mouth. She came over and put an arm around me; I pulled away from her immediately, then gulped and tried again to squelch myself.

    “Do you know why folks cry?” she said to me conversationally while I scrubbed violently at my streaming eyes. I shrugged. I didn’t much care.
    “God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.” She put her arm around me again. I let it stay there, and then I threw my arms around her soft middle and wailed and snuffled on her sloping shoulder. I gave myself up to it, letting a huge hurricane of pent-up weeping come storming out into the Wal-Mart ladies’ department.
    “Oh, honey,” she said again. “You’re going to be just fine. And you go ahead and get that green if that’s what you want.”
    She was a minister’s widow and a good Baptist. That day she dragged me home with her and fed me on real cherry cobbler, the kind with the pastry you make by cutting butter into flour for half an hour. She talked to me about pastry recipes and the Lord and invited me to visit her church on Sunday. I felt like I owed her for the cobbler and the kindness, so I went.
    It was an all-black Baptist church in a decent blue-collar neighborhood. Everyone at that church was so familiar. It was like visiting home. Sure, I got odd looks the first time I showed up. I felt like my skin was glowing with an incandescent white otherness.
    I could feel the congregation peppering me with sideways glances. But I didn’t feel any malice in their gazes. Every person I met and spoke with was soon relaxed and chatting with me about  the weather or their children or Jesus. I was just as easy with them. It didn’t hurt that I was firmly wedged under the shelter-ing wing of Mrs. Burroughs. Her husband had been the minister at that church up until his death, and she was universally beloved there.

    Later, sitting in American History 101, I realized why I felt so at home at the church. After the industrial revolution came the great migration, as black sharecroppers traveled up to Chicago for better-paying factory jobs and a shot at a new life. But they were all southerners. They formed their own communities, and the culture survived. The people at Mrs. Burroughs’s church spoke with long liquid vowels and blurred consonants, cooked everything in lard, moved with a languorous grace that implied it was 100 degrees outside. They could have been my relatives. Without them, especially Burr’s mother, I never would have survived my first year up north.
    I met Burr when he moved back to Chicago. Mrs. Burroughs had two older girls, both married to military men and gone. Burr was her baby, the first in his family to go to college, much less law school, although his father had been to a two-year Baptist semi-nary.
    If anyone could show me a back door to Burr now, it was his mama. I hit nine for an outside line and dialed. She didn’t seem at all surprised that it was me when she picked up the phone.
    “I guess you talked to Burr,” I said.
    “He showed up this morning at breakfast, wanting my sugar toast,” Mrs. Burroughs said against a background of glass on glass and running water—no doubt the remains of the sugar toast were being scraped away as we spoke. “He was like a bear with the sor-est head you ever saw. I poked around, and when the sore spot seemed to be you, I started waiting for the phone to ring. Took you an hour longer than I bet myself.”

    I told her all about the fight, leaving out the sex parts. She was his mama and a preacher’s wife, after all. But I told her he had given me an ultimatum and walked out, and now he wouldn’t even talk to me to see if I was going to knuckle under. Not that I would.
    Mrs. Burroughs made “mmm-hmm” noises at me and sloshed water around while I spilled my guts. I could picture her standing over the sink in her kitchen with the faded tea-rose