Tina Mcelroy Ansa Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY TINA MCELROY ANSA

  BABY OF THE FAMILY

  UGLY WAYS

  FOR JONÉE,

  WHOSE LOVE SUSTAINS ME

  “At Last,” music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon, © 1942 (Renewed) Twentieth Century Music Corporation c/o EMI Feist Catalog Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “Bring It on Home to Me,” written by Sam Cooke, © 1962, renewed 1990 ABKCO Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

  “Do I Love You,” by Cole Porter, © 1939 Cole Porter. Copyright Renewed, Assigned to Robert H. Montgomery, Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical and Literary Property Trusts. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “For the Good Times,” by Kris Kristofferson. Copyright © 1968 Careers-BMG Music Publishing, Inc. (BMI). All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  “He Called Me Baby,” words and music by Harlan Howard, © 1961 (Renewed 1989) Beechwood Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.

  “Here Comes the Band,” by Burton Lane and Harold Adamson, © 1934 (Renewed) EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “Love and Happiness.” Copyright © 1972 by Irving Music, Inc., and Al Green Music, Inc. (BMI). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.

  “My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More.” Andy Razaf. Razaf Music (ASCAP) C/O SGA. 50% USA.

  “My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More,” lyrics by Andy Razaf, music by Eubie Blake. Copyright © 1930 Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc., and Razaf Music. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  “Someone to Watch Over Me,” music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, © 1926 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  “You’re My Thrill,” words by Sidney Clare, music by Jay Gorney. Copyright © 1933 by Bourne Co. and Movietone Music Corporation. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  “You’re My Thrill,” by Sidney Clare and Jay Gorney, © 1933, 1949 (Copyrights Renewed) WB Music Corp. Rights for Extended Renewal Term in U.S. controlled by Gorney Music Publishers and Bourne Co. All Rights for the World controlled by WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Blessings! That’s all I’ve gotten in the time it has taken to write this book.

  Belief in God, Spirit, Life and Redemption has been a blessing.

  Lena and Herman are a blessing.

  My family, who respects the time and solitude my work calls for. A blessing.

  The memory of my brothers Walter and Charles who continue to run through my life. A blessing.

  Zora Neale Hurston, whose wise brilliant spirit hovers lovingly at my elbow the whole time I am writing, and often exclaims “Go on, little girl!” A blessing.

  My sister Marian Kerr, who led me to the title of this work, continues to be a friend and source of inspiration. A blessing.

  Mrs. R. J. Shelton, my beautiful, remarkable, rediscovered grandmother, who knows me better than I know myself. A blessing.

  My two editors are indeed blessings. Blanche Richardson is a good friend who became my editor. Martha K. Levin is my editor at Doubleday who has become my friend.

  I could not have done it without either of them.

  Michael V. Carlisle, my agent. We have, as they say, “been through things together.” He is a blessing.

  My island companions Zora, Ladysmith and Tuck. Blessings.

  All my friends who loved, supported and understood me when I disappeared for nearly two years to write this novel.

  Blessings all.

  Including St. Simons Island, which continues to bless me by offering the love and acceptance of home.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE CLEER FLO’

  CHAPTER 1 BREEZE

  CHAPTER 2 MULBERRY

  CHAPTER 3 DANCING

  CHAPTER 4 SECRET

  CHAPTER 5 HOSPITAL

  CHAPTER 6 HOME

  CHAPTER 7 GIRLFRIEND

  CHAPTER 8 DUTIES

  CHAPTER 9 RITES

  CHAPTER 10 MAGIC

  CHAPTER 11 SMOKE

  CHAPTER 12 VAPOR

  CHAPTER 13 HERMAN

  CHAPTER 14 CATCH-UP

  CHAPTER 15 STARS

  CHAPTER 16 LOVE

  CHAPTER 17 BUSINESS

  CHAPTER 18 LIL SIS

  CHAPTER 19 LUCKY

  CHAPTER 20 CHINABERRY

  CHAPTER 21 MINISTRY

  CHAPTER 22 SOM’UM-SOM’UM

  CHAPTER 23 HAUNTED

  CHAPTER 24 HORSE

  CHAPTER 25 BLACKBERRY

  CHAPTER 26 DOWNTOWN

  CHAPTER 27 LIVIN’

  CHAPTER 28 MULES

  CHAPTER 29 REAL

  CHAPTER 30 HER MAN

  CHAPTER 31 THANKS

  CHAPTER 32 FUCK YOU

  CHAPTER 33 SHELTER

  CHAPTER 34 FORGIVE

  CHAPTER 35 TELL

  CHAPTER 36 CRAZY

  CHAPTER 37 STORM

  CHAPTER 38 PERIOD

  PROLOGUE

  CLEER FLO’

  People in Mulberry had not put two and two together at first. Folks living out in the country along the Ocawatchee River hadn’t, either. Nobody had. But Cleer Flo’ was at the base of all the changes that were going on around town that spring after the Big Flood of ’94.

  Everyone in the state of Georgia knew about Cleer Flo’, the newly miraculous time when the waters of the Ocawatchee River—usually, perennially, historically, almost always a red muddy, sometimes nearly ocher color—ran as cool as the dreams of a drought-stricken people, as clear as a melting glacier, clear right to the bottom. But no one connected it with the other unusual events.

  All around the edge of the little Middle Georgia town of Mulberry near a gentle bend in the Ocawatchee. All around the crest and bottom of Pleasant Hill community. All around the nearly deserted neighborhood surrounding the old downtown district. All around unexpected pockets in and around Mulberry County in the spring of 1995, there was life going on and going on at a furious pace.

  Flora and fauna.

  Not only a record number of Mulberry babies were being created and born, but flowers were growing and pollinating with strange hybrids, forming new creations; long-dead perennials were coming back to life; Early Girl tomato plants grown in the muck that had been under floodwaters bore so much fruit that the plants sagged to the ground in home gardens all over town.

  Migrating birds, especially ducks—mallards, teal, pintails, canvas-backs, shovelers, widgeons—were stopping in the area in record numbers. Even seabirds were being sighted on big inland ponds and lakes near town.

  Birders from around the region were wildly enthusiastic. They scurried through Mulberry like coveys of birds themselves, high-powered binoculars hanging from their necks like wattles. They had reason to be excited.

  The turkey buzzard population that had spent the winter at Lake Peak Park was almost darkening the sky in its migration back north and taking a few local chickens, young pigs and a newborn goat with it. The common loon’s unfamiliar loud crazy yodel could now be heard frequently at dusk. The vermilion, green and electric-blue feathers of the painted buntings, which never migrated north of the state’s lower coastal regions, were being spotted all over wooded spots. And in the forests around Lake Peak, the county’s largest lake, twenty-two southern bald eagles were sighted where none before had ever been spied.

 
Some naturalists said that the increased fowl activity was probably due to bad weather up north. But the experts didn’t have explanations for other happenings in nature. Albinos of all species were being born in and around Mulberry. The year after an albino buffalo was born in the American West, bringing Native American nations together, an albino doe was sighted in the woods by Lake Peak and two albino hummingbirds were spotted at a backyard feeder. Near Lake Seminole, two hunters fording a creek came across a ten-thousand-year-old mastodon’s massive jawbone stuck in the muddy bog.

  After the Big Flood of ’94, all the receding water did not soak back into the earth immediately. The ponds and puddles and ditches of standing water gave rise to generations of mosquitoes that swarmed all over the county in the warm spring. But no one really had time to complain about the biting, stinging pests because swarms of dragonflies appeared right after the mosquitoes showed up and began eating. The dragonflies zipped through the spring air feasting on the mosquitoes so quickly, so efficiently, that the bugs didn’t have time to bite and rebreed.

  After a while, few folks in Mulberry paid the experts any attention. Most anybody with any sense finally laid the strange occurrences in nature to the unusual behavior of the river since the Big Flood.

  The Ocawatchee was a different river now.

  It still came meandering out of the North Georgia mountains, but by the time it eased into Middle Georgia where it usually gently sidled up to Mulberry, it had taken on so much effluence from other swollen rivers and estuaries that its old banks could barely contain it.

  Preachers and ministers and evangelists all over the state used the raging Ocawatchee in their “Jesus Baptized in the River Jordan” and their “Wading in the Water” sermons.

  But the river’s new intensity was nothing compared to its other changes. Contrary to what the experts predicted, the state of the Ocawatchee River that rushed through Mulberry now was pristine. Although the river retained some of its old orange muddy color most weeks out of the year, now on some days it actually ran clear, a crystal-clear river green, like spring waters clear enough to drink.

  Folks in Mulberry began thinking they could predict the days of Cleer Flo’, but they couldn’t. Cleer Flo’ seemed to come and go on its own.

  Other rivers in the region and to the south—the Flint, the Ocmulgee, the Green, the Withlacoochee, the Big Indian—all overflowed their banks, too, during the Big Flood of ’94. On the Ocmulgee, a gasoline pipe running along the overwhelmed banks was engulfed with the floods and burst, turning the waters into a river of fire and curling clouds of black and gray smoke.

  An old woman dressed entirely in white stood on high ground near the flaming waters and preached for three days and three nights straight of the fire next time. Then she disappeared.

  “See, see,” she had shouted, “He tried to tell you about your ways. He sent streams of water from the sky down through the valleys into the rivers to warn you. Oh, but you wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t heed. Now! Now! It’s the fire next time.”

  But neither the fiery Ocmulgee nor any of those other state rivers ever came up clear and pure. Only the Ocawatchee. And the river—Mulberry’s river—began to grow in state lore. The story began to be circulated in beauty and barber shops; on street corners and at office coffee machines; over store counters in the Mulberry Mall and under shade trees outside of churches, that the new reborn waters of the Ocawatchee were miraculous waters, healing waters, good for anything that ailed you.

  The county officials felt it was their sworn duty to warn the people about the danger of their new fondness for drinking from the river during Cleer Flo’. Even after county officials discovered Cleer Flo’ water was purer than the water they pumped to nearly every household in Mulberry, they continued to crank out flyers and leaflets and lectures on the long-term danger of drinking the clear river’s waters.

  Of course, it didn’t help a bit that the days of Cleer Flo’, summer and winter, also brought a kind of Gulf Coast “Jubilee” to the landlocked muddy banks of the Ocawatchee. Big fat mullet, catfish, croaker and whiting showed up in angler’s baskets all up and down the river, in record sizes and record catches. People who had spent their whole lives turning up their noses at anything that came out of the red muddy Ocawatchee River, people who had called mullet from the town’s river “mudfish” and made faces, now practically fought with their neighbors for first pick among the ice chests of mullet and catfish that men and women in trucks and station wagons brought to sell in certain lucky, money-in-hand neighborhoods.

  The spring flood changed the town. The flood changed its citizens. For a few days, coffins from lowlying cemeteries raced down the streets of Mulberry on the back of muddy orange water, bumping the doors of businesses near the old downtown river section. One plain-spoken rescue worker from Middle Georgia said on National Public Radio: “There was coffins all in the streets. But I was too busy trying to save the live ones to think ’bout the dead ones.”

  Looking at television news reports of the Great Flood, people would forget that this was their hometown, the streets of Mulberry hidden under all that rushing muddy water, the tops of Mulberry’s trees peeking out from the new rush of a raging river running anew through the formerly dusty streets. Rushing water covering tops of cars, the tops of homes, tops of warehouses.

  There were distinct signs of trauma throughout Middle Georgia and especially in Mulberry the year after the Big Flood. When the children went back to school in the fall, there were so many fights, outbursts and flare-ups in the halls, classrooms and rest rooms that school officials had to shorten the school day until after Christmas.

  Children lost their way going home from school and became hysterical in the streets, throwing their books and backpacks on the ground. Some ran up on strangers’ doorsteps looking for something familiar and stood there crying and banging on the front doors.

  It was the worst flood Georgia had ever experienced. Potable water had to be trucked in for six weeks. The property loss was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And when it was all over, twenty-three people turned up dead.

  Lena McPherson alone, it appeared, weathered the storm that brought the floods to her hometown without any repercussions.

  But most folks weren’t a bit surprised at her luck. “Ain’t that just the way,” they said, thinking about their cheap little soggy sofas and mattresses, their portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and their Sears and Kodak photographs floating through the streets of Mulberry, ruined forever.

  “That Lena McPherson know she got it made!”

  1

  BREEZE

  “Quit!” Lena said. She lifted one hand from the leather-covered steering wheel and brushed up the nape of her neck rapidly with the tips of her short pale polished nails a few times, briskly knocking her long thick copper braids into the air and making the large heavy gold hoops in her ears swing back and forth.

  “Quit!”

  She drew the word out long, as if she were seven years old and talking to a playmate who would not stop messing with her or to one of the little boys who used to rip and run up and down Forest Avenue and visit her brothers in the basement.

  “Quit!”

  She said it again as she drove down the long dirt road and across the narrow wooden bridge that connected her property at the edge of town with the main road, U.S. 90, that led into Mulberry.

  She sucked her teeth lightly with the tip of her tongue and wrinkled her nose and tried to act irritated, though she almost had to stifle one of her deep throaty giggles as she did it. She wasn’t really angry, just bothered and distracted.

  So distracted that she hadn’t even noticed as she drove above the river’s rushing water that Cleer Flo’ had started.

  This early misty morning in April, however, Cleer Flo’ was the last thing on Lena’s mind. It was this light breeze playing around her ears and neck that had her full attention. It had been toying with her there for a week or so. The tiny gusts reminded her of ten
derness mixed with lust.

  Right then she felt it again across the nape of her neck at her “kitchen,” where the thick sandy hair thinned and curled. She shook her head sharply, brushing her braids around her neck like a wool scarf, and that seemed to drive the breeze off for a while.

  “Uhmm.” Involuntarily, Lena let out a little sound.

  She checked for the fourth or fifth time to make sure the lightly tinted windows were closed tightly and the breeze was not escaping into the car through the vents. She had even turned her favorite girl group from the seventies off the CD player so she could investigate just where this breeze was coming from. And she loved her Emotions in the morning.

  “Come to me. Don’t ask my neighbor,” she sang to herself softly, absentmindedly, in her off-key voice as she pulled out of her dirt road past the bridge onto the main highway that ran side by side with Mulberry’s Ocawatchee River and brushed her neck again. Glancing to her left for traffic, she caught a glimpse of her long narrow buttery brown face and full copper-tinted lips in the side mirror. A perturbed, peeved expression was playing around her nose and mouth. It surprised her to see that annoyed look still there. She half expected to be blushing.

  Actually, she felt she had to stop herself from dipping her head shyly, giggling from the touch that intruded on her as she drove her dark copper-colored 450 SLK Mercedes, a car that mirrored the color of her hair and didn’t even exist yet for most ordinary folks, toward her place of business in downtown Mulberry.