Kin

Chapter 1: Vernice

Chapter 1: Vernice

It is August, canning season, and the women of the house are gathered to put away snap peas and pole beans in the Louisiana heat. Aunt Irene busies herself plaiting the hair of two-and-a-half-year-old Vernice while the Ward Sisters sing through thick radio static. After the death of her parents, Vernice has shown herself to be peculiar. She walked early and would walk in her sleep, once escaping her crib to the front porch, where she was found humming with her face pressed into the matted fur of a stray puppy. At two and a half, she has yet to speak. Folks worry she is slow. Her cradle friend, Annie, already talks up a storm and gave Vernice her nickname, "Niecy."

Aunt Irene knows there is quickness in the child's eyes, but she fears that seeing her mama shot dead has shocked the words right out of her mouth. Others worry the girl has been taken over by a spirit. Aunt Irene shuts that conversation down, dismissing it as "hoodoo." She worries for a colored girl who seems slow, even if she isn't, a girl who can't say what happened to her.

Then, softly at first, Vernice says, "Mother." She raises her voice to a bellow, and every heart in the house contracts. Only three women stand in that tight kitchen, but nearly the entire congregation will later share the story. Aunt Irene understands it as a command, her dead sister telling her that Vernice is hers for life. Only Mrs. Ola Mae, the midwife, attends to the girl, scooping her into stout arms and cooing, "I hear you, baby." Annie toddles up, and both girls crowd onto the midwife's lap.

The Women in the Family

Women in Vernice's family have never been particularly fruitful. Her grandmother had only the pair of daughters to show for some thirty years of marriage. Four years in the marriage bed, and Arletha hatched only Vernice, and not gently. Mrs. Ola Mae told Arletha to name the baby Miracle, but she called her Vernice, and Irene just after, like all the women in the family.

Aunt Irene is what the old folks call "barren" but what she calls "lucky." She figured this out as a teenager, the summer a revival came to town. She joined the choir and also joined the associate pastor. Eight months later, she returns home slender as a daisy, and Granddaddy flogs her like she is a runaway slave. As soon as she is healed enough to sit on a bus for four days, Aunt Irene leaves Honeysuckle with money from the reverend and cash her mother squirreled away. She ends up in Ohio, just over the Mason-Dixon, where she lives for eleven years. No babies, no beatings. But she laughs at her own folly, remembering how her mother was two steps ahead of her. When she opened her bag on the road, she felt grit and saw crop soil in the corners.

By the time Aunt Irene entertains Vernice with these stories, Vernice has grown into a normal-seeming little girl. She asks why her aunt didn't put Ohio dirt in her suitcase, so it could pull her back up there. Aunt Irene nods at the good question. "First off, I don't practice none of that hoodoo. I don't believe in it, and I don't not believe in it. Second, it's only home dirt that can pull you back." Up in Ohio, she had received a letter saying her mama was on her deathbed, wanting to make amends. The letter instructed Irene to sleep with the paper under her pillow for three nights before answering. It didn't take but two nights. Without the protection of any talisman, she returns to Honeysuckle. "No matter who your mama is, or how long she's been gone, you can't help but miss her. When you are born, she marks you with her milk, even if you never tasted her breast."

Despite Aunt Irene's man already having a wife, he keeps her content in a yellow-shuttered house. When she tells him she needs to go home for one last moment with her mother, he pays her round-trip bus fare. Whether it was the letter or the crop dirt that brought her back, it is Vernice that keeps her there. Six weeks before she buries her mama, she buries her sister, Vernice's mother. Vernice is just six months old. She takes a bottle at night, but in the morning Arletha opens her pink-checked duster and feeds her from her body. Vernice looks just like her. "See my sweet baby?" Arletha says to anybody that catches her eye. Vernice remembers. "If you have ever experienced motherlove, you can never forget the fragrance of it."

The Day

On the day that turns out to be the Day, Aunt Irene prances around town, enjoying herself the way a person does when she knows she's not here to stay. Her mother is dying, but passing softly, buoyed because her oldest girl doesn't hate her. Vernice is with her aunt, buttoned into a little romper made of the same pink piped fabric as her aunt's cross-back frock. Aunt Irene totes her to Mrs. Ola Mae's place, and the midwife loves on the baby she ushered into the world. The day has been lovely. War rages overseas, but those storm clouds are not visible from Honeysuckle. No bad mojo stirs the air. But now Aunt Irene thinks the thing that should have let them know something was wrong was that nothing was wrong. This is Louisiana in 1941. They are colored. Something is always wrong.

With a smile lingering on her lips, Aunt Irene climbs the front steps of Vernice's mother's house. Her arm is raised to knock when she smells the burnt-copper scent of gunpowder. On the other side of the door, Arletha is dead as Jesus, and Vernice's daddy lies on the carpet, moaning. "What kind of idiot can't even figure out how to kill his own fool self?" Aunt Irene swings her leg, driving her shoe into his face as he groans and weeps.

Raising Vernice

Preparing to lay Arletha in the plot she had bought for her own mother, Aunt Irene writes to her man in Ohio, telling him she won't return to Dayton for a month, maybe two. Certainly, there is a family in town willing to take in a motherless infant. Aunt Irene's first choice would be Mrs. Ola Mae, who lives by herself with Miss Jemison the schoolteacher. They would be excellent mothers. But this is how life works: the women who would be capable mothers too often don't want kids, and too many of those with children probably should have sat that one out. What Irene hadn't counted on is that the women of Honeysuckle want to see her tamed. As folks come to pay their respects, no one asks when she'll be heading back to Dayton.

The day before Arletha's homegoing, Aunt Irene walks a mile east to visit Annie's granny. She explains her situation: no husband, no work down here, a situation in Ohio that can't accommodate children. Annie's granny acts like she thinks Aunt Irene is seeking advice rather than relief. "Irene, nobody knows anything about raising children. Each one is different and you just have to do the best you can to make sure that Jesus will accept them when they get to heaven. And you can find work. You got two hands, don't you? I raised every child that Jesus has seen fit to give me. But only the ones the Lord gives." Annie wakes with a little bleat, and her granny returns with the child hooked on her hip. "Our girls can be friends," she says.

For an entire season, Aunt Irene drags through her childhood home like a ghost herself, baby strapped to her chest and dark circles under her eyes. Finally, on Pearl Harbor day, Vernice's grandmother breathes her last. Facing facts, Aunt Irene writes to the Ohio Man, who pines for his time with her in the yellow-shuttered house. She asks him to send her clothes and put everything else up for sale. A brass-buckled trunk arrives at the bus station in Baton Rouge three months later, and a money order comes by post. The Ohio Man may be married, but he is true to his word. Vernice never does without, is always tidy and well lotioned. Aunt Irene informs her that Jesus loves her, as did her mother. "God will never fault you for loving someone." When Vernice outgrows her first shoes, Aunt Irene sends them to be cast in bronze. Around the time of her first sins, Vernice is baptized. While she is tended to, she is never mothered. Still, the hole in her spirit makes her into the girl she is and then the woman she becomes. Being raised by relatives isn't nothing but a thing, as people say.

The Pastor's Office

Annie, raised by her granny, has thoughts on the matter. "We are not orphans," she declares when the girls are five or six. Vernice agrees; her mama is deceased and her daddy is dead. Annie's mama, Hattie, is doing GodKnowsWhat, out in GodKnowsWhere. Nobody has seen hide nor hair of her since before Annie could sit up by herself.

One

Chapter 2: Annie

Chapter 2: Annie

Annie and Niecy have been friends since they were babies, two motherless girls in Honeysuckle. Niecy's mother is remembered as a sweet angel gone too soon. Annie's mother, Hattie Lee, is remembered as "trifling." Annie explains what that word really means: it's not like "motherfucker," which still holds fire and caring, and not like "ain't shit." "Trifling" is a sneered damnation with no coming back from it, especially for a woman.

Hattie Lee left Annie with Granny when Annie was just born, having nursed only once. They say Hattie Lee used peppermint oil to drive Annie away like you run mice out of an attic, and three days later she was gone. Granny never speaks against her child. "Not yet don't mean not ever," she says. "Hattie Lee will be back, by and by." City people might use a book-word like "indefensible." That may be the best definition of "trifling": a person who is impossible to defend, but if you love her, you have to try.

Annie has one photograph of Hattie Lee, a school-days picture creased by a diagonal line across her chin. Hattie is only fifteen, with a skeptical mouth, as though she already knows nothing good is coming her way. Niecy has a whole album of photos of her mother. Their favorite is the wedding portrait, in which Niecy's mother stands before a mirror arranging her pearls, with no hint that the man who will undo that necklace will eventually kill her. Annie's mother, rough as an emery board, seems born to die.

Maybe Granny has more mementos, Annie thinks. After dinner she asks. Granny saws her pork chop into tiny bites and sucks them until soft. "Each child I birthed pulled a tooth out of my head," she says, and lifts her shirt to reveal a torso ribbed and puckered with stretch marks. Six children, she says, and by grace she has one picture of each. Annie brings up Niecy's nineteen pictures, and Granny delivers the truth: "The road Vernice is walking is paved different from yours. It ain't fair, but that's the way life takes us. But remember always that every path leads to the cemetery and it's up to you to be ready to see the Lord." No wonder Hattie Lee escaped, Annie thinks. She wanted to live, while Granny looked forward to climbing in the grave. At eleven years old, Annie can feel what her mother felt sitting at this same table. "She's not trifling," she says. Granny doesn't answer until she has swallowed her meat: "You have never heard me speak against my child." But people say she left me, Annie insists. "Don't pay them talebearers no mind. Don't give the fire a log and it goes out." Annie surrenders. Like her mother, she just wants to get away.

Hattie Lee Returns

When Annie is in the tenth grade, Hattie Lee comes back to Honeysuckle. She does not call on Granny. She does not even sneak over to the schoolyard to get a look at her daughter. She loiters through town for a few hours, stops by to see Mrs. Ola Mae, then ducks into The Den, the little place where people who drink in the middle of the day go. She asks Mr. Daniel, the owner, for four dollars and seventy-five cents. In return he asks for her address and copies it onto a lined sheet of his receipt book. A week later he hands it to Granny. Memphis. "She says she likes the music," he reports. Granny asks how she looks. "Tired." Then Granny hollers for Annie Kay and sends her outside.

Annie sits at the base of a sweet gum tree, waiting for the pecans to drop. At sixteen she is full into her majority, with breasts for days and hips, but no rump. She feels like a dump truck. When the air turns cold, she goes back inside, where Granny has covered her plate with a clean dish towel. "Didn't she even want to see how I turned out?" Annie asks. Granny says she cannot say which is the harder cross to bear: having Hattie Lee for a daughter, or Annie trying to be her daughter. Hattie was her youngest, number six, and she salted the fields on her way out. "You can't blame her for how she was born," Annie says. "Satan prowls like a lion," Granny shrugs. "Somebody did something to her," Annie insists. "Somebody done did something to everybody. That ain't no excuse." Annie stands in the middle of that clean, raggedy kitchen, sobbing until the front of her blouse is spotted. Why didn't Hattie even come and say hello? Granny reaches deep into her bosom and fishes out a scrap of damp paper: Hattie's address. "She wouldn't have gave it to Daniel if she didn't want to hear from nobody."

Inside The Den

A week or so later, while Niecy is at choir rehearsal, Annie goes to see Mr. Daniel. The Den is not exactly a juke joint, because there is no band on weekends. It is a stripped-down place: if you have the coins, he has the booze; if you need to sit, there is a stool. Before it was a not-juke joint, it was a normal house. Mr. Daniel was born in the back bedroom. His father was a hellfire preacher who beat the sin out of everyone in the family. When the reverend finally died, Mr. Daniel knocked out a few walls and announced that 319 Edwards Street was now The Den, a dwelling where sin is not only tolerated but encouraged.

Two men in green paper mill shirts sit at the bar. Mr. Daniel greets Annie: "Well, if it ain't my effort to be an honorable person, come back to bite me in the ass." He tells her to just call him Daniel. She tells him she is not a little girl. "The only folks that got to tell you that they ain't little girls, is little girls," he answers. She gets to the point: "You know Hattie Lee Henderson's my mother, right?" "Well, I can't help you with that." Why did she come here? For a drink, he assumes. Did she come to see him? No, she came calling on a different Daniel, a fellow named Jack. That's a joke. Jack Daniel's. She went to see Ola Mae as well, so if Annie is going on a confrontation spree, she should stop over there on her way home.

The door inches open, and who is standing there but Niecy, innocent as a hymnal. "Hello, Mr. Daniel," she says, and for some reason he does not correct her. He calls her "Little Miss Vernice" and asks after "that gorgeous Irene." Niecy takes the oily rag and swipes the bar like an old hand. Annie does not know if she has been caught or if she is the one doing the catching. Mr. Daniel hands Annie a life lesson: "You can never know another person." Then he hauls up a jar of dill pickles, wraps one in wax paper, pries off the stem with his fingernail, and forces a lemon drop into the sour heart of the pickle. One for Niecy, one for Annie. Then he sends them on their way. "Niecy knows I don't allow sweet things in here." Annie still has no answer about her mother. He tells her not to make this into the mystery of the Lindbergh baby. Even Little Miss Vernice could tell her, and if not, ask Irene.

Outside, the air tastes sweet. Niecy munches her pickle; Annie throws hers into the ditch. "You been in there before?" she asks. Niecy shrugs: just to get a pickle. "You the one who sneaked over here while I was gone to choir rehearsal." Annie admits she did not tell her what she was doing because she did not know what Mr. Daniel was going to say. "About my mama," she says. Niecy loops her arm through Annie's and nudges her toward home. "Whatever they say about your mama is lies." It is meant as comfort, but it hurts. Annie's mama is the kind of person that whatever gets said about her is bound to be ugly. Annie tells her: Hattie was here. She did not come by the house, but she came to see Mr. Daniel. Why would that be?

Niecy covers her mouth and speaks through her fingers: "Are you thinking that Mr. Daniel is your daddy?" Maybe, Annie says. She likes the idea of an educated father living just on the edges of scandal. Mr. Daniel has a wife he brought back from Tuskegee, which explains why he and Hattie could not properly be together. Men are drawn to sad-eyed women. Hattie wore her disappointment like a brooch, Mr. Daniel was tempted, and who could blame a man for being a man, and who could not respect a gentleman who refused to leave his wife? Hattie could not bear to live in Honeysuckle and see her True Love sitting up in church with another woman, Sunday after Sunday, until she could not take it anymore. Niecy warms to the plot: maybe Hattie confronted him at the butcher shop right

Chapter 3: Vernice

With high school nearly behind them, Vernice and Annie measure their lives in fabric and thread. The two girls sew their own graduation dresses and their Easter outfits, careful with every stitch because they know the cost of cloth: their people sweated in white ladies' kitchens to buy the lengths they now snip around butcher-paper patterns. Vernice makes a butter-yellow pinafore. Annie sews a sheath in the stunning blue of South Carolina crabs, adding darts that show off the nip of her waist and the flare of her hips. Twirling before her mirror, Annie announces she will wear it in Memphis. Honeysuckle, she says, is too saved for people to dance and let loose. Vernice imagines herself at Spelman College in Atlanta. Annie presses her to come to Memphis instead, and when Vernice asks Annie to come to Spelman, Annie pushes back: they don't knit with the same needles. Miss Irene has trained Vernice to be a young lady; Annie's granny just wants her to eat without laying on her back for it.

Vernice admits, when pressed, that she wants to be a mama, maybe two or three kids, all of them dressed from the same bolt of cloth. Annie is not fooled by her breezy tone. She mocks Vernice's country modesty, her lack of a boyfriend, her dream of a husband like Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Then Annie kneels and pulls an Oshkosh suitcase from under her bed, gray and scuffed from her grandmother's employers' travels. She has been packing. She and Clyde, and Clyde's cousin Bobo, are going to Memphis. Vernice is the only one who knows: Annie has her summer earnings and Clyde has a car. Annie is not in love, she insists, just in like. She hangs her blue dress on a wire hanger, pulls on a worn duster, and asks Vernice to come with her. For a moment, Vernice is ready to leave everything behind, the new pistachio-green suitcases Aunt Irene has on layaway, the white chapel dresses, the guilt she carries for an aunt who never wanted children. She would run behind Annie the way Annie runs behind Clyde.

Annie's grandmother interrupts. Hearing a sound before Vernice can, Annie shoves the suitcase back under the bed and snatches on her duster. The old woman stands in the doorway, suspicious of closed doors and not believing in children shutting them. She sends Vernice home, claiming Irene needs her. Vernice walks away wondering what the woman saw, what her spirit could not abide, and worries that the corner of the suitcase was showing beneath the bed ruffle.

That night, lying in her familiar bed, Vernice thinks of her mother, dead at twenty-two, just five years older than Vernice is now. She pictures Arletha walking down Russell Street with a basket of clean laundry, stepping to the edge of the road as a Rambler barrels toward her, the sheets tumbling into a ditch. A man with bun cheeks came to see about her, a man who would put a baby in her belly and a bullet in her head. Vernice hopes her mother was in love at least. Sleep turns to suffocation: she is dreaming but awake, breathing and choking. Old folks say a witch rides your back at such times, and at two a.m. Vernice believes whatever the night tells her. She calls out, "Mother!" and then, when the air clears, she calls her mother's Christian name, "Arletha?" Whatever was in the room departs. She wanted to welcome her but banished her instead, and she knows why: what child calls her mother by her given name? Even a spirit cannot bear such disrespect.

Aunt Irene comes in and finds Vernice slapping her own face. Vernice tells her Arletha was there. Irene asks what the spirit had to say, and Vernice wails that she hurt her mother's feelings. Aunt Irene has no patience for it. She delivers a bitter accounting: Arletha had a job and a plan to get to Ohio, with Irene ready to match every penny, but she laid down with a fool. No woman in this family needs to get married, Irene says. For them to get a baby takes loving, prayer, roots, and luck. Arletha had to work at ruining her life, and now she has the nerve to come back as some half-ass haint. Irene confesses she never knows what to say to children.

The next morning, the weather is playing games: it is only spring, but hot like summer. Vernice wonders if it is a sign. She ties a green ribbon at her hairline to avoid being pinched by the boys still clinging to St. Patrick's Day, then walks toward Annie's block. Before she rounds the corner, she hears Annie's grandmother squalling. Vernice runs, scuffing her loafers, and begs to know if Annie is dead, remembering the offended spirit in her room the night before. Annie's grandmother sits on the porch and lets her feet hang. She has birthed six children; three are in the churchyard, two more are who-knows-where, and now this one. She mourns that there will not even be a space for her in the cemetery. The Lord is her shepherd, but she is wanting.

Neighbors gather. Miss Jemison, breathless, arrives, and Mrs. Ola Mae, the midwife, meets her at the center of the yard. The chapter pauses over these two: Miss Jemison went off to Atlanta for her education and came back for the children; Mrs. Ola Mae was married for a hot minute when she was not yet seventeen, widowed before her first Christmas as a wife, and never looked for another man. She planted the herbs and roots to do the work her mother and grandmother did. When Miss Jemison came home with her teaching certificate, Mrs. Ola Mae took her in as a boarder. Vernice sees Mrs. Ola Mae touch Miss Jemison's face softly, quickly, like a feather floating to the earth, and she thinks she saw it, then thinks maybe she didn't.

Miss Jemison takes Vernice's hand. Mrs. Ola Mae will not go inside, because there will be a baby this evening and it is not wise to tend to the dead and the newly born in the same day. Miss Jemison tells Vernice that the last gift she can give Annie is to make sure she is fit for people to see her, and that after this, Vernice will be a grown woman. Vernice steels herself and thinks of Aunt Irene, of how someone always has to find the body. She pushes past Miss Jemison to be the first to see Annie, to shut her eyes with her right hand.

But the room is empty. No dead Annie lies on the bed. No suitcase disturbs the dust ruffle. A note is tacked to the mirror. Miss Jemison and Vernice figure it out at the same time: Annie ran away, with a fellow, most likely Clyde. Was she expecting? Not as of yesterday. They sit on the bed and laugh with an intensity and pleasure Vernice has never experienced before or since. Miss Jemison wraps her strong arms around her and pelts her face with kisses, and Vernice closes her eyes to accept the sweet relief. She tells Miss Jemison that Annie has gone to find her mother. Miss Jemison falls back onto the carefully made bed. She thought Annie gave that up years ago.

Vernice remembers the time she and Annie went to the picture show in Alexandria when they were nine or ten. Aunt Irene was seated down below with the white folks, in her full maid's uniform, and the girls nibbled jelly beans, biting them into fourths to make them last. A newsreel showed African children starving to death. People around them tittered, embarrassed. Vernice felt so sorry for the children with their bone-covered arms and flies on their faces. She asked why their stomachs pooched out when they had nothing to eat. Annie bit a sliver of jelly bean and said their bellies were pretending because they did not want anyone to know how empty they was. The sadness piled up in Vernice, layers of it: starving to death, then being so ashamed that your body malformed itself to hide it, though everyone could tell anyway. She wondered if the children knew that people in America could see them. Annie hoped nobody ever told them.

Vernice suggests maybe Annie was not searching for her mother, just running off with Clyde for the regular reasons. Miss Jemison tells her she is not a good liar, and then says it is a compliment. Vernice would have said Annie was not much of a liar either. In all these years, Annie never said a word to dirty the wash water. But secrets, apparently, she was good at. Sitting there with Miss Jemison, Vernice struggles to decide if secrets and lies are twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.

Chapter 4: Annie

Annie slips out her bedroom window in the middle of the night, suitcase packed so tight it looks ready to bust. Clyde's old Packard inches up to the house on tiptoes—partly because they are running away from home, and partly because the car is stolen from Clyde's mama's boyfriend. Annie is about to slide into the front seat next to her boyfriend when she sees a pretty girl scootched up against him, close enough that her titties seem to grow out of his driving arm. Clyde introduces her as Babydoll. Her real name is Ruth. In the orange moonlight, Babydoll smiles with her dogteeth showing, and Annie knows exactly what happened: this girl gave Clyde some. Annie had considered giving him her cherry herself, to seal the deal of their running away, but she decided he'd be more motivated if something wet and funky awaited him at the destination. Now she kicks herself for acting like she had the only you-know-what in Allen Parish.

Bobo pops out of the back door and talks Annie into the car with his fancy vocabulary, loading her suitcase beside three others just as beat-up. Annie asks if they all got their suitcases from their mamas' white folks. Babydoll and Clyde did—Bobo's was a gift from a lady friend, a burgundy leather valise that came from her husband. Clyde barks at Bobo to stop lying and get in the car.

They drive through the dark with one headlight, radio static filling the silence. The Green Book says they have two more hours before a safe room for the night, but everyone has to pee. Clyde pulls over. The fellows bounce out and turn their backs for modesty. Babydoll leads Annie into the bushes, stomping her feet to run off small red-eyed critters. She reaches into her cleavage and pulls out a few limp squares of tissue, offering Annie three. When Annie refuses, Babydoll warns her nobody wants to be cooped up in a car with somebody pissy and pissy both, then delivers a blow: "He was mine way before you even met him." Clyde's mama tried hard to get him work in Honeysuckle, and if anybody has a right to feel robbed, it's Babydoll. Annie snatches the tissue, furious but reasonable. While they squat in the dark, Babydoll reveals that Clyde was going to ditch Annie entirely—Bobo said it wasn't right to leave her high and dry. Annie fires back that her mama ran off before she was even weaned, so she doesn't know her daddy or what brothers and sisters she might have. She tells Babydoll this to prove she isn't the soft, shy princess Babydoll takes her for. But in the powerful blackness, Annie longs for Niecy, the friend who keeps her from being the thing she most doesn't want to be—just as Annie keeps Niecy from being poor or homely. Leaving Niecy behind means being compared to girls like Babydoll and coming up short.

Babydoll asks what's in Memphis for Annie. "My mama, folks say." Babydoll laughs and claps three times: "You didn't want Clyde. All you wanted was a ride!" Annie protests that she likes Clyde, but Babydoll insists she doesn't—"And it's better that way." She herself wants Clyde, wants to be wherever he's at. Clyde and Bobo appear, and Bobo, in his unrelenting formal way, begs them to get back in the car before they get lynched. As the Packard catches, Clyde thanks Jesus; Bobo says "Giddyap"; Babydoll says "Here we go." Annie says nothing. Her mind is on Niecy, who will show up at Granny's tomorrow ready for their walk to school, starched and pressed. Maybe a bright side of Annie being gone is that Niecy will have somebody to get mail from. Granny will whoop and holler about Annie's empty bed, but her heart will hum like two legs on a cricket—she was sick of kids sleeping in her house and hatching more butts for her to wipe. Annie rides the next three bumpy hours apologizing to Niecy for not saying goodbye, and to Granny for never saying thank you.

It takes the rest of spring and half of summer to reach Memphis. Except for two days, all of it is spent posted up just west of Bogue Chitto, Mississippi. Before daybreak on the first day, the Packard overheats. Clyde has two gallon jugs of water ready, and his preparedness proves he sold everyone a pocketful of wolf tickets. The water runs out by daybreak. Glazed, sticky, tired, and irritated, they pull up to a cheery rooming house vouched for by the Green Book. A plump lady in a stiff green duster and grape-embroidered apron comes out: Lurelia Dubose. She speaks her name like an accusation. Annie gives her name like a confession. Lurelia asks what they want. Clyde explains they need a place to sleep while they find someone to fix the car. Babydoll meets Lurelia's attitude with her own: "Dollar bills don't have no use wrote on it. We got money to pay you for a room. That's the only part that's your business." Lurelia asks if they're married—"Because this ain't a place for grown people to lay up." They fall silent. She makes them rent two rooms and stay at least two weeks, a rule she probably invented on the spot while counting their money through their clothes. Annie has sweated so much her hair is balled up like a bird's nest, and hoochie-coochie wafts off Babydoll and Clyde in waves, but Lurelia refuses them. Bobo tries his polished charm—"No room at the inn?"—and Lurelia snaps back, "It's Easter time, not Christmas." She gives them Christian charity anyway: directions to a woman named Lulabelle, with the warning that they can't call on her before lunchtime. Bobo manages to get four butter-and-sugar sandwiches, water for the radiator, and directions to a live oak tree for shade until 1 p.m.

Under the live oak, Bobo lectures about the Secession Oak in South Carolina, where the South decided to declare war, and the Angel Oak. Clyde tells him to shut the hell up—"I didn't drop out of school to listen to you play teacher all damn day." Annie says it's interesting to her.

At one on the nose, they head out. The Packard's knocking engine adds growling and screeching, then just stops. It quits the way a woman does when she can't stand a cheating man for one more second. Clyde twists the key, Bobo coos under the hood, but the car rejects them. The fellows push it with their shoulders against the frame; Babydoll steers; Annie trots beside, too ladylike to help but too nice to add weight to the load. Bobo sings Hambone songs from his daddy, who fought in the war. Clyde sweats his shirt see-through. Finally Annie decides being ladylike isn't all it's cracked up to be and lends her strength, the car feeling like an extension of her body. Bobo calls her Rosie the Riveter. They push for nearly an hour, moving west as slow as the sun, through a gate gooey with too many layers of paint. A wooden sign reads LULABELLE's in loopy letters.

The place looks like an abandoned farm—dusty fields, falling-down barns and silos, no animals, and nearly a dozen gray cabins made of warped planks, each with a little porch but no rocker, no shade. Babydoll says it looks like slavery times. Annie says sharecropping. "Potato, potahto," Bobo says. "Can't you just be normal?" Clyde says. The shacks are occupied—ladies' clothes hang from short clotheslines, the odor of frying food drifts—but no voices are heard. To the north stands an impressive Jim Walter home, gray with black shutters and plaster posts, the kind of mail-order house Annie knows from a catalog that used to come for Mr. Daniel. A woman in black trousers and a white collared shirt opens the door. She looks a little familiar, but Annie can't place her. She introduces herself as Lulabelle, and Annie explains that Lurelia sent them. Lulabelle laughs at how her sister sent them packing for being unmarried and unable to afford two rooms. Then she asks if they're four Christians. Clyde says they're all baptized. Babydoll volunteers that she's Catholic, as if it makes a hill of beans' difference. Lulabelle waits a beat, then spreads her mouth into a welcoming smile: "This here is a whorehouse."