The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls Read Free Book Online Page A

chickens, only they were the size of ponies, with long necks and legs and dark brown feathers. Their heads bobbed as they moved along with big careful steps.
    “What the heck are they?” I asked.
    Uncle Tinsley gave that little chuckle of his. “Scruggs’s emus.”
    “Like ostriches, right?” Liz said.
    “Near enough.”
    “Are they pets?” I asked.
    “They weren’t supposed to be. Scruggs thought he could make some money off them but never figured out how. So they’re the world’s ugliest lawn ornaments.”
    “They’re not ugly,” Liz said.
    “Take a look at them up close sometime.”
    Once we got to Byler, Uncle Tinsley gave us what he called the nickel tour. The main street, lined with big green trees, was Holladay Avenue. The buildings were old-fashioned,
made of brick and stone. Some had pillars and carvings, one had a big round clock with Roman numerals, and you got the feeling that Byler once was a bustling and prosperous place, though it looked
like nothing new had been built in the town for fifty years. More than a few of the storefronts were vacant and had masking tape crisscrossing the glass. A sign on one door said BACK IN HALF AN HOUR , as if the shopkeeper had intended to return but never did.
    Maybe it was because of the humid air, but Byler struck me as very sleepy. People seemed to move slowly, and a lot of them were hardly moving at all, just sitting in chairs under store awnings,
some of the men in overalls, talking, whittling, or leaning back, chewing tobacco and reading newspapers.
    “What year are we in here?” Liz joked.
    “The sixties never happened in this town,” Uncle Tinsley said, “and people like it that way.”
    He stopped the Woody at a red light. An older black man wearing a fedora started across the street in front of us. When he got to the middle of the intersection, he looked at us, smiled, and
touched his hat. Uncle Tinsley waved.
    “Who’s he?” I asked.
    “Don’t know him,” Uncle Tinsley said.
    “But you waved at him.”
    “You only wave at people you know? You must be from California.” He burst out laughing.
    The mill stood at the end of Holladay Avenue, right on the river. It was made of dark red brick laid in patterns of arches and diamonds, and it covered an entire block. The windows were two
stories high, and smoke poured out of a pair of soaring chimneys. A sign in front said HOLLADAY TEXTILES .
    “Charlotte tell you much of the family history?” Uncle Tinsley asked.
    “It wasn’t Mom’s favorite subject,” Liz said.
    Before the Civil War, Uncle Tinsley explained, the Holladay family had owned a cotton plantation.
    “A plantation?” I asked. “Our family had slaves?”
    “We certainly did.”
    “I wish I didn’t know that,” Liz said.
    “Those slaves were always treated well,” Uncle Tinsley said. “My great-great-grandfather Montgomery Holladay liked to say if he was down to one final crust of bread, he would,
by God, have shared it with them.”
    I glanced at Liz, who rolled her eyes.
    If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about all American families who could afford them owned slaves, not only Southerners. Ben Franklin owned slaves. Anyway, he continued,
the Yankees burned down the whole plantation during the war, but the family still knew the cotton business. Once the war was over, Montgomery Holladay decided there was no point in shipping cotton
to the factories up north to make the Yankees rich, so he sold the land and moved to Byler, where he used the money to build the mill.
    The Holladay family, Uncle Tinsley explained, had owned the cotton mill—and pretty much the town itself—for generations. The mill was good to the Holladays, and in turn, the
Holladays were good to the workers. The family built them houses with indoor plumbing and gave out free toilet paper to go with the toilets. The Holladays also gave out hams on Christmas and
sponsored a baseball team called the Holladay Hitters. The