No Daughter of the South by Cynthia Webb Read Free Book Online

pregnant (Again! Already? They’re not Catholic, are they?) Whose husband had left her. Whose husband was drinking bad again. These were hard-working women, for whom this was a rare opportunity for female companionship and conversation. I think it took the strong combination of community grooming standards and the purifying effect of the pain inflicted (the pulling of strands of hair with a crochet needle through tiny holes in a plastic cap looked excessively sadistic to me) for them to allow themselves this luxury.
    Although I had submitted to Bobby’s arts on very few occasions, and then only under the most extreme compulsion, I felt a strange sense of loss. The rituals of Bobby Ann’s House of Beauty, which had appeared to me to be at least as sustaining to my mother as those of her church, were no more.
    I pulled back from my mother’s reach. “No, Momma, I like my hair just fine the way it is.”
    The puzzlement on her face was obvious. She couldn’t understand why her only daughter wanted to look so tacky, her hair hanging down all wild and witchy like that. What had she ever done, except sacrifice her own life to her children, that would cause her daughter to ruin her own looks just to spite her mother? Shit, I thought. My plane had landed less than two hours earlier, and already I was stuck in that mess again. To save myself, to keep from getting sucked into the quicksands of my complicated family currents, I had to keep my focus on why I’d come.
    “Momma, did you ever know anyone named Elijah Wilson?”
    She frowned. “I don’t think so. Should I? Is he one of the Grove Hill Wilsons?”
    “No.” I hesitated, then plunged in. “Momma, did you know any of the black people who lived around here? Back when I was little, and even before that, before I was born?”
    “What a question! Let me think. Well, you know, you just did not see many black people around here in those days. Not like in some cities or towns. There just weren’t any around. When I was a child in Selma, well, everybody had their colored help. But, by the time I got married and moved here with your father, only the best-off did. And I didn’t know any of them personally, if that’s what you meant.”
    “When they integrated the schools, where did the black children come from?”
    “Oh, them. They lived way out over by Piney Woods Road. A few families, not many. I don’t know where they did their shopping, because we never saw them in town. Some of the men were grove workers for your Uncle Billy, and Miller’s Groves, but I don’t know any more about it than that.”
    “Do they still live out there?”
    “I really don’t know. I haven’t been out that way in quite some time. It was all country back then, you remember, between here and there, but you wouldn’t recognize it anymore, the way it’s built up.”
    You wouldn’t recognize it anymore . I had heard that phrase so often, whenever I came back to Port Mullet. I was finally beginning to realize the fundamental truth of it. I wouldn’t recognize anything. What had made me think that I was any more qualified than a Californian or Texan or hell, a Japanese, for that matter, to come waltzing into town and start researching the life of a man who had drowned thirty-five years ago? I hadn’t really been here even back when I lived here.
    Momma picked up my glass and took it into the kitchen, then returned with it refilled with ice and tea. “Now, Baby Sister, I don’t want to upset you...” I held my breath as she continued, “...but I saw Johnny the other day.”
    “Johnny who?”
    Tears welled up in her eyes, messing up her blue eyeliner and matching eye shadow. “You’ve got no business talking to me like that, young lady.”
    I sighed. “All right. I’m sorry. How is he doing, Momma?”
    She wiped under her eyes. “He still hasn’t remarried. I think he still holds a candle for you. He always worshiped the ground you walked on. You know, I always thought that if