church bell piercing the air with the weight of what was left unsaid. Gladys heard her too. She shouted, “Good afternoon!” Her voice lled the void of dead space before Ms. Mattie could say more. The deaconess turned her pillbox hat–covered head toward the interruption of what she hoped would become a gathering of information. Gladys and Eugene stood in front of the porch overlooking the fork in the road, arm in arm, a ection apparent if only for appearances. “Good day to you, Ms. Ruby, Mr. Sampson, Ms. Mattie.” Eugene tipped his hat. “How do?” Ruby answered. “Blessed and highly favored, how ’bout yourselves?” “Boy, when the last time you st epped foot inside the house of the Lord to even be on his blessin’ list?” Ms. Mattie’s face crunched into a scowl. “To tell the truth, it’s been a while, but I’ve passed enough churches back and forth on the train to know the Lord heard at least one of my prayers.” “Oh yeah, what’s that?” Ms. Mattie asked. “He saw t to bless me with a wife.” Eugene squeezed Gladys’s arm against his body as his smile spread across his face. “I came to ask y’all proper, but she told me yes when I disembarked at the d epot.” It had only taken a week of wearing spit-laced herb pastes— pokeweed, yarrow, and the like—beneath a bundle of bandages for the gash on Gladys’s face to close. She took it as a fortuitous sign since it was just in time for Eugene to arrive. An omen of sound judgment to give herself over to his advances. When she stood waiting at the d epot, her healed face half-hidden beneath a new hat, it was her rst test to see if he could tell something was o , that she was di erent. He couldn’t. Not like Ms. Mattie, who grunted an m m - h m m and shoved the pie in her white-gloved hands toward Ruby and Sampson. “I’ll leave this here and be on my way,” she said. Ruby caught the pie Ms. Mattie released like it was still hot from the oven and burning through to her skin. Relieved of its heft, Ms. Mattie slip-slapped her palms one against the other and ambled down the three stairs. The humidity-worn wood sagged in the middle under the strain of her weight. Back
on solid ground, standing right in front of Gladys and Eugene, Ms. Mattie dusted the front of her white skirt suit and adjusted the matching hat. She said, “The other deaconesses and I are praying for you, Gladys. But congratulations on the engagement. I think this is a ne time for you to get married. A ne time. Don’t you, Ruby?” “It was right kind of you to bring over this pie and well-wishes for our girl,” Ruby said. “Give the other mothers our regards.” Ms. Mattie nodded her head and marched back the way she came: toward the church for choir rehearsal, her stop at the Duprees’ a well-devised scheme to know more than what she’d heard through town chatter. “Take this inside, would you?” Ruby passed the pie to Sampson. He looked down at the condolence confection and tried to see its aky, sugary goodness as compassion and not cruelty. Grace instead of gossip. Looking up at Gladys and Eugene still standing at the foot of the st eps, he shook his head, got up from the bench, and went inside the oppy screen door. It slammed behind him, its clang the shame he wished he could voice. But all he had to show for his su ering was food. The pie from the deaconesses. A whole roasted hog from the deacons. Money and macaroni and cheese from the pastor and rst lady. Potato salad and collard greens from the mother board. A pound cake from the presiding elder. Green beans and perloo rice from the ushers. His kitchen was a kaleidoscope of cuisine and culinary delights he had no appetite to indulge. One by one, two by two, or even in threes and groups bigger than that, the entirety of the congregation of St. Jos eph’s had come to call on the Dupree house. “Did you tell everyone else before me?” Eugene asked. “They hardly seem surprised.” “Perhaps I spilled the beans a little,” Gladys answered. The glee in her voice was a sound she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t of herself but who she’d become, who she’d transformed into, in six days’ time. “Well, since it’s out now, I guess we getting married,” Eugene said. He threaded his ngers through Gladys’s and raised their hands high above his head, drunk on happy. “Mr. Sampson, why don’t you bring that pie back outside and celebrate with us,” he yelled toward the door. “Yeah, Daddy, c’mon out,” Gladys encouraged.
Overwhelmed in his own unknowing and the activity of his imagination, Sampson uttered his lips until he was out of breath and slammed the heavy door of the house he’d built with his own two hands. Eugene looked from Gladys to Ruby. Hands clasped over the paunch of her belly, she chuckled a bit before explaining away her would-be husband’s abrupt d eparture. “Don’t mind him. He can’t stand to let go his only girl. Whatchu got in your hand there?” Ruby motioned at the heavy bag still tucked beneath Eugene’s arm. “Just some copies of T h e D e f e n d e r for you,” Eugene said. “I wrapped them in sheets, and it’s a good thing I did. The d eputy down at the d epot was trying to search me for contraband.” “Which d eputy?” Ruby asked. “Stringer,” Gladys said through closed teeth. Ruby looked up and eyed her daughter. “He didn’t give you no trouble, did he?” “He made a threat. Said we been lynched for less, but I know how to handle his kind,” Eugene answered. “They let us go,” Gladys added. “Who is ‘they’?” Ruby asked. “JB was there too,” Gladys answered, referring to the d eputy’s son. Ruby, stone-faced, looked to Eugene and waved her hand, motioning for the bag. He st epped up on the porch, set the biggest case he carried at Ruby’s feet, and then rejoined Gladys. Fingers entwined, she squeezed his hand and let her head rest on his shoulder as her body rolled with relief. She had survived. Twice. “We’re getting married,” Gladys said to herself. “Yes, we are, cher.” “How soon?” Ruby asked. “Next time you come back on the train. Yes?” Gladys asked Eugene. “What my wife wants, my wife gets,” Eugene said, his smile big and bright. “Well then go’n in the back and tell your grandmama and Mama Em the news,” Ruby said. “That oughta perk them up.”
Dutifully, they did as directed and walked around to the house in the back. They k ept to the brick facade of the new house instead of skirting by the fence and the patch of dirt where nothing grew. They pretended not to notice the stream of cars headed toward Ms. Teena’s or the smell of fried sh wafting through the air. No matter, though. Soon enough, everyone from the Dupree house on down to the church would know Saturday night at Ms. Teena’s had begun. From the smell, to the sound, to the looks of the packed dirt parking eld, evidence would abound that the weekend was in full swing. But it was still early yet. Early enough for Jubi and Emma to be sitting on their own front porch, which faced the back of Ruby and Sampson’s home. Like Ruby, they too were dressed in all white, from the wraps on their heads to the long skirts draping their ankles. They’d been wearing their healing clothes since Gladys staggered home from the elds. Jubi snapped beans, and Emma sat still, her wrinkled ngers clasped tightly around an inheritance left by her George: a hand-carved cane. Between them, on either side of the door frame, the threshold marked with a line of salt, sat a bowl of water and a bucket of what looked like ash but was really goofer dust. A libation for the lost ones and a weapon against the wicked meant to su ocate ill intentions before they got a foothold to form. Emma and Jubi guarded their entryway, protective over whose energy, living or dead, was allowed inside. As Eugene guided Gladys closer to her kindred, the old woman’s hand stopped him before her aged voice said, “Don’t come any closer.” “Just came to call on you to tell you the news,” Eugene said. “And what’s that?” Jubi asked. “We’re getting married,” Eugene answered, ebullient. Jubi dropped the beans in her hand and set her bowl to the side. She never let her gaze linger long away from Eugene’s face. Assessing, determining, she nally said, “Y’all make a ne couple. Don’t they, Mama?” “They’ll do,” Emma said. Her blue-rimmed, nearly blind eyes never left from their xed position. She stared o into the space between the two houses. Entranced, Emma didn’t move her mouth or further crease the wrinkles in her face. She barely breathed. She
studied the ripples of the water bowl as if she could read them. As if they imparted a knowing hearers would beg to be privy to. “Gladys, go inside and get you something to drink,” Emma said. Releasing Eugene’s hand, she asked, “You want something? Lemonade? Tea, maybe?” “What’s in this house is for you.” “What she means is that all the food and drink is back by Ruby and Sampson,” Jubi clari ed. “I said what I meant, Jubilee. Gladys, go’n in the house.” Eugene had no choice in the matter. Standing before the women, sweating in his uniform under a sun that was far from setting, he waited for Gladys to reemerge. “So, whereabouts you from again?” Jubi asked. “Louisiana way, right?” “Yes, ma’am. Assumption Parish.” “So, how’d you take interest in our Gladys?” “Well, ma’am, after this became my permanent route with Pullman last year, I decided to make sure I knew my way around since I’d spend a day or two down here before we headed back north. That’s when I met Gladys.” And that was almost the truth. Eugene didn’t so much as meet Gladys as he saw Gladys and devised a scheme to run into her. He had been at Ms. Teena’s one Saturday after the train came in, taking a piss between the cars parked in the eld, when he saw her emerge from the big brick house with a basket. Corn liquor–covered eyes watched as she pulled sheets from the line and disappeared back inside. To Eugene it was as if the home had swallowed her whole, Jonah in the belly of the whale, only she wasn’t spit up in three days’ time. He waited around to see if she would come back out. Maybe come ’round the other side of the fence, where he could buy her a drink and dance her across the ground until her ankles were dirty and musky sweat gathered between her breasts, but it wasn’t to be. Back on the train Monday morning, he asked his partner, Dewey, as they loaded bags into the carriage about the sight he’d seen. Irreverent in his words, he asked as much to try to make her acquaintance as to con rm she wasn’t an apparition.
Dewey said, “Them Duprees don’t hang around over there. Only amongst their own and at the church on Sunday.” Two weeks later, when he was back in Land’s End, Eugene skipped the raucous night at Ms. Teena’s for the conservative quiet of St. Jos eph’s on Sunday morning. That is until the choir started singing, the musicians started playing, and bodies started moving, so full with the Holy Ghost Eugene could hardly tell the di erence between what was happening to the worshippers around him and what happened in the juke. The only noticeable di erence was the family in the front pew giving their bodies over to God to ride with abandon. Amongst them was the woman he knew would become his wife, though then, he didn’t even know her name. “You drank it all?” Emma asked as Gladys appeared in the doorway. “Yes’m,” she answered. Eugene stared at Gladys in her black dress and hat, sandwiched between the women in white. He said, “Cher, we gon’ have to get you a nice dress before the wedding. Let me take you into town and you can pick something out.” “Won’t be no need of that,” Jubi said. “Ma’am?” Eugene questioned. “She got a nice white dress inside she can wear.” “I do?” Gladys asked. “You will,” Emma said. The holes in the conversation didn’t bother Eugene. Dewey had told him the Duprees were di erent, stando sh and arrogant. “They think real high of themselves and real low of the rest of us,” he’d said. But Gladys hadn’t been that way with him. She’d been easy to talk to, eager even. The shift he should’ve sensed, he didn’t. The change happening inside his woman, he couldn’t name. He was unaware that Gladys’s retreat behind the wooden walls of the women in white was more than just a barrier to entry but a blockade he would always be forbidden access to. Who she was inside and who she became outside were altogether di erent from the girl he got to know every other Sunday during his weeks in Land’s End. Perhaps if he’d been on the Sunday last, there would’ve been no need for the secrecy. The twoness. But he wasn’t. And so it was.
“How you feelin’?” Jubi asked. “Good as ever,” Gladys answered, with a smile Eugene didn’t know was forced. “Anything?” Emma asked. “No, ma’am.” “Eugene, where you staying while you here?” Jubi asked. “I usually stay at the boardinghouse close to the d epot.” Jubi tsked. “Well, that’s no good now. You engaged to my grandbaby and planning a wedding. That makes you family. Why don’t you go on up to the house and see if Ruby and Sampson can’t nd room for you. Gladys can sle ep back here by us, so there ain’t no more talk than what needs to be.” “That’s a ne invitation,” Eugene said. “Just hope Ms. Ruby and Mr. Sampson don’t mind.” “They won’t mind,” Emma said. “They won’t mind at all,” Jubi reassured. “Go’n back up there, get you something to eat, and take a rest. You family now. It’s as good a time as any to start treating you accordingly.” “Thank you kindly. I’ll see you for supper, cher?” “She’ll be ’round,” Emma said. Gladys watched as Eugene made his way through the dirt patch around to the front of the new house. “You need to get back in the water,” Emma said, once he was out of sight. “And take your hair down, wash it, and leave it alone to dry,” Jubi added. “It’s enough crisscrossed out here without you inviting evil to live on your head.” “Yes’m” was all Gladys could say in response. Standing between them, she removed her hat and took the tail end of her braid captive in her hands. She unraveled Ruby’s work until her hair fell in waves dusting her shoulders as it tickled her back. “Much better,” Jubi said. “I’ll get your water ready.” She scooped up a pinch of the ash mixture before she stood from the chair. Throwing it over her shoulder, Jubi pushed past Gladys into the dim inside.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” Emma said, staring into the distance. “Shouldn’t be long at all.” “You sure?” Gladys asked. “I should be—” “These things take time,” Emma said. She shifted the cane to hold Gladys’s hand. “I don’t have much time left.” “You got plenty more ahead of you than behind you. Won’t be no trouble for you today. Tomorrow either.” Gladys nodded. It was all she could do. Belief didn’t belong to her yet. The reassurances of others was all she owned. One hand on her belly, the other squeezing Mama Em, she looked down at her body, wishing she could see beneath fabric, beneath skin, to bone and blood, but she didn’t have that gift. She didn’t know how to read waves or manipulate the dust. The call of her kindred muted, she looked down to Emma, sitting in the chair. The old woman squeezed her hand as she stared beyond. “Won’t be no trouble at all.” I N A WAY , E MMA WAS right. Trouble didn’t nd Gladys that day. Or the days and weeks after. It wasn’t until after her wedding and wedding night, when she was packed and dressed in her Sunday best to board the train with Eugene for Chicago, that trouble found her. But even in the grip of its agony it was more like relief. De ep-sighing, long-exhaling, back-stretching, neck-cracking relief. If Gladys had to pinpoint the moment of her undoing, it would have been on the platform at the station in Land’s End. Standing beside her mothers, Ruby, Jubi, and Emma, who had all come to see her o , she felt a utter. Standing out in the sun, the covered part of the platform reserved for white folk, the utter rolled up and down her body at once. Reverberating in its wave, Gladys undulated with the tide, her mind momentarily bereft of thought. Emma was the one who noticed. She poked over on her cane, white fabric owing in the breeze, and placed a hand on Gladys’s back. She steadied her great- granddaughter and advised her to breathe.
“This is just the beginning,” Emma said. “You gon’ have to hang on for your own self when you gone.” “Yes’m,” Gladys answered. She didn’t have time to unravel Emma’s riddles while she waited for Eugene to nish loading the other passengers’ bags beneath the carriage. Only when those moth wings e volved into long reedy ngers, extended its hand, and closed its st did Gladys dwell on the old woman’s words. Y o u g o n ’ h a v e t o h a n g o n f o r y o u r o w n s e l f w h e n y o u g o n e . They’d been playing on a loop since the stop in Meridian. An hour past Memphis and the words muted in her mind as she concentrated to ke ep from expelling her horror. She was rooted to her seat. The ghostly nubs of her knuckles could push nails through drywall from the way she gripped the rails beneath her window. Teeth ground against each other, led down to blunt terrain, left her mouth chalky dry. “How you doing, cher?” Eugene asked. Gladys shook her head and yawned. “I’m okay. Go’n back to work and stop worrying with me.” “It’s my job to worry about you. You’re my wife.” “No, your j o b is to worry about your passengers.” She added a smile, small, because she couldn’t both banter and bear down. Eugene eyed her with tiny lids closed to near slits. He said, “I’ll come back to check on you after I make this next set of rounds.” If he noticed the color that had drained from her features, he didn’t say. In the low light, she hoped he didn’t see. That he wouldn’t wonder what was happening beyond the facade. Though she never asked, Gladys was sure Eugene knew enough about womenkind to know that if trouble occurred it was bound to show. Laying her head against the closed window, she breathed in through her nose and out with her mouth. The scent of fried chicken, dinner packed by the other passengers, lingered around her as she loosened her hold on the rails. Her toes bumped up against her luggage as she tried to make herself as comfortable as possible. Her dreams formed the face of her father, Sampson, his cinnamon skin furrowed in grooves like the symmetrical rows of soybeans grown on the farm when cotton had drained the dirt of its life. The lines had set in sti
and stony since the day he wasn’t allowed to darken the doorst ep of the old house. Instead, Sampson hid behind old copies of the C h i c a g o D e f e n d e r Eugene had brought, reading the stories as if they were new. As if he didn’t know how they ended. In his chair, paper in front of his face, hard hands gripping the printed pulp, the leather formed around him like parentheses. When Gladys said her nal goodbye, a mousy mu e no one but a daddy could decipher, all Sampson could do was turn the page. Though her face barely registered for him, the moment was burned into Gladys’s memory and found its way into her dreams. While asle ep, she remembered who she’d been, and who she’d shed in order to become something she didn’t recognize. A woman, all sharp angles and set mouth, sad eyes and small smiles that didn’t connect. Iron words and a steel heart created a cage around the softness she sloughed o as life leached from her loins on the train ride north. The car cradled her crib-like and rocked away every inch of who she’d been in Land’s End. When Gladys opened her eyes, Sampson was gone from her mind for good. “C’mon, cher. We’re here.” Eugene shook Gladys’s arm like a baby rattle. She shifted in her seat. “Can I use the bathroom and clean up a little bit before I get o ? ” she asked. Eugene looked around. His excitement urged him to say no. He wanted to show o the woman he’d brought back as his wife to the guys who called him crazy for ke eping up a long courtship when, as they put it, “It’s plenty of Southern-bred gals already here. No need for you to go catch a fresh one.” “City take over too quick,” Eugene had reasoned. “The gal I got be sweet like sun-cured tea and cast-iron-cooked corn bread.” He was betting Gladys would ke ep the ways of her mothers longer than the ladies he’d been known to ke ep company with over the course of the cold winters. “I just wanna freshen up, change my dress.” She sensed his reticence. “I’d hate to st ep o the train in a big city still looking like old Land’s End.” “Go’n ’head, cher.” Eugene smiled. “Make sure you put a coat on too. The cold up here is like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’ll be waiting by the door to help you down proper.”
In the bathroom, barely big enough to turn around in, Gladys shed all that was left of her last weeks in Land’s End. Blouse, skirt, silk slip, pantyhose, and undergarments were swapped with r eplacements, the old tied and tucked into a ball in the corner of her suitcase. She washed with the water that trickled from the tiny sink and re-dressed. Gladys chanced a look in the circular mirror about the size of a steerage porthole. Her hair, neatly wound and pinned at the back of her head, gave full view of her face. She searched it for any sign of di erence. A physical designation that she’d been stolen from, discarded, and put back together again. She looked for cracks like what would’ve shown on a shattered porcelain vase. But there was nothing, thanks to the quick work of the women who refused to su er injury and gave no mind to labels like “survivor,” “victim,” or “victor.” At the bottom of the metal st eps, Eugene stood with his hat in hand, waiting. When Gladys appeared in the entryway, he bowed at the waist. “Madame.” He o ered his hand. She took it and wished she had on dainty lace gloves to match his manners, like the ones she’d seen Jubi make out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Gloves or no gloves, she held his hand with her pinching ngers as he took her suitcase. “Welcome to Chicago, cher.” They made their way through the grand concourse and past the ticket counters until they were outside surrounded by buildings taller than she’d ever seen. Eugene hailed a jitney from downtown to Forty-Seventh Street. Inside the car-turned-cab, Gladys listened to the men go back and forth about women and sports and the recent weather as she mustered the concentration to ride out the waves rolling through her body. The driver didn’t help her none. He cut in front of buses, trucks, and cars as if he were playing a game only he knew the rules to. There was no order to his maneuvering, just sharp whips in and out of lanes. Gladys gripped what she could as she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. There was no way over, under, or out. Her only choice was through. From the car to Forty-Seventh and King Drive, where masses of people loitered the corners as much to see as be seen, to the cramped basement
kitchenette two blocks away, the commotion inside Gladys’s body forced her through. “Where is the bathroom?” she asked. “On the other side of the beaverboard, cher. We may have lucked up this week. Don’t seem like nobody else renting the other rooms in here. We might have the whole place to ourselves, and right in the heart of Bronzeville.” His eyes held a mischievous gleam Gladys couldn’t meet. She clip-clopped her way to the facility and closed the door behind her. Leaned against the hard wood, Gladys slid down to the cold tile oor and lay with her belly on the ground, the cool a friend to the skin of her cheek. Curled in a ball, she remained unmoving as what had become familiar on the train returned. When she managed to pull herself up, it was only to strip down. Standing in front of the sink in her slip and brassiere, Gladys washed her hands and stared in the mirror. She was still looking for di erence, the markers of her misfortune, but all she saw was herself. The face she’d always had, skin the color it had always been, long hair pulled back and wrapped around itself in a neat and unmoving position. It was the closest she’d get to the braid Ruby gave her after her bath. The one Jubi wished she didn’t have and Emma called evil. Staring at herself in the mirror, she tried to nd the evil done to her, something like the mark of the beast Pastor Erickson talked about when he delivered a ery scripture from Revelation, but there was nothing. No mark, no brand, no bruise, no streak, smudge, nick, or scar. Just her face and two sets of dirty clothes that could easily come clean in the wash. H a d n ’ t t h e y a l r e a d y ? The rap of knuckles on the closed door shook Gladys away from her searching. “Can I come in?” Eugene asked. The knob on the unlocked door turned before she could answer. “You all right in here, cher?” Eugene looked rst at Gladys’s face then scanned her clothes- less body, covered only in silk chemise and lace. He stood with one foot over the threshold. No longer in his uniform coat and hat, he’d changed into a brown pair of slacks and white T-shirt, attached suspenders draping his thighs.
“You need me to call the doctor?” “It’s over now.” “What happened, cher?” “You wanna look at me when you ask me again or you want me to ke ep pretending like you ain’t heard?” “I’m asking you, Gladys. I’m asking you.” “Who told you?” “Dewey said some things. Some folks on the train, Black a n d white, gave me them pitying looks. You know the ones.” She did know. It was the look Ms. Mattie had the day she dropped o the pie. It was the look all of Land’s End had, whether she saw it personally or not. She felt the familiar faces turn against her. Wide mouths crooked with contempt and big eyes colored with compunction even if their noses tipped slightly toward heaven, haughty with how the Dupree women had fallen again. What Ruby had outrun had caught up with Gladys. She nodded. He knew. “Word gets ’round,” Eugene said. “Then it’s no need of me recounting what happened. You know enough.” “Why ain’t you tell me what was going on, cher?” “Wasn’t for you to know.” “Who told you that?” “Mama and them. They didn’t even tell my daddy.” “And you think he don’t know?” Eugene st epped fully into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and leaned against it. There was nowhere left for the secret to go. Nowhere for the unsaid to run but into him. Still hunched over the sink, staring at the one crease across her forehead, Gladys answered. “I didn’t say he didn’t know. I said he wasn’t told. Everything don’t need to be voiced. Everything don’t need to grow wings, ride the air, and visit folk you don’t know with stories they got no stake in.” “I got more stake in your story than anybody else does. We married now.” “I know.” “Your troubles are my troubles.”
“Ain’t no more trouble.” Eugene moved toward her, closed the distance between them. He opened his arms and gave her a choice. She had to make up her own mind about what she wanted. Which family she belonged to. The Dupree women on the farm or the husband she’d moved one thousand miles to be with. It wasn’t no use being in the same city, the same house, if it was a thousand miles’ worth of words unsaid between them. He knew all about unions built on bricks with secrets on the other side. Just because the lies faced the ground didn’t mean they descended into the d epths. A little shallow digging always wrenched them loose. What’s k ept quiet is always looking for any reason to get loud. Gladys sighed, let go of the sink, and st epped back. In Eugene’s embrace, she allowed what she knew and what he’d heard to be absorbed into him. She didn’t tell and he didn’t push but pressed together the power of the whispered, the pitied, became a solute in solvent. The salty, the acidic, and even the sweet turned tasteless if there was enough water to drown it. “You know, cher,” Eugene began, hands pulling loose the pins in her hair. “We can start again.” Looking up to see both of their countenances in the mirror, Gladys nodded ever so slightly as her hair, loosed from its hold, waved around her face. She agreed on one condition: to go to school and become a nurse like she’d planned all along. He nodded his yes against her ear as his hands grabbed hold of her strands and crossed them one by one at the nape of her neck until he’d formed a loose braid. When he nished, he draped it across the front of her left shoulder. Gladys reached her hand to meet his as she sank further into him until only the wall held them up. Only the wall heard what was said. In the small, cramped space, the weight of their bodies weighed down what wanted to y and su ocated what sought to be known. Even the moth wings stilled, and the long ngers retracted. Gladys looked at their re ection, the hair he’d braided a symbol of their union. They were entwined. The crease that had crossed her was gone. Dissolved.
What Eugene did for Gladys, only one other Dupree woman before Nadia knew how. Nadia, while the rst to make a living out of the enterprise of doing hair, wasn’t the rst to heal in that way with her hands. There was, of course, the one no one knew about. The one whose legend lived in one-line rumors too horri c to be believed. And then there was the one Nadia would never remember meeting. J u l y 1 9 3 4 R UBY WAS SEVENTEEN WHEN SHE rst put her hands in her hair to do more than just gather it together at the nape of her neck or pin it in place in an elaborate creation piled atop her head. It was about the same time she met Sampson. On a day in town, on the other side of the tracks, Ruby ran errands for Jubi and Emma like she’d been doing since she was a young girl. Mostly she carried things back from Danube General Store. Fabric, eggs, milk, sugar, rice. Items the women needed that they did not or could not grow on the farm. It was on one of these treks when Ruby saw a gure she thought she recognized. Years had passed since she’d seen his face the color of a cinnamon stick with de ep-set eyes, a ballpoint nose, and heavy lips like the back end of a loaf of bread. Ruby had to dig down to her earliest memories for a name. It still hadn’t come to her by the time he stood before her, trying to pull from his own bank of remembrances. They spoke friendly, smiles and nods, before they entered the back door of the store one at a time. But speaking to people because it was custom and holding conversation because you knew them were two altogether di erent aspects of communication.