Solemn Read Free

She thought to ask Pearletta if she could babysit the baby, to hold the child and stare into its eyes. But Solemn was young. And Pearletta had never shaken hands with her mother. It was inappropriate to ask without that.
    To go back, these were plain black people. They made a heaven for a time.
    Even when their safest part of the world began to crumble and tumble on down, it still smelled of fresh paint, like a stretch of new city projects some decades ago instead of now. They didn’t own the land. As good neighbors they had come there in spurts to hide from an untrusted ending to Vietnam, a death penalty reborn to America, a season of cicadas come down to Mississippi, and shirked offers for their hands in the tenant farms aplenty. This was cheap, so much nicer. The rest of them followed a few of them who found a distant portion of a tiny place called Bledsoe, on outskirts of the bigger place Koscuisko. There, lynchings had been possible but spared. There, none had yet erected mailboxes or signposts of ownership. There, the dejected and homeless and faithful could cover their heads. It was just there, a part of town with no townspeople. So some had come there with old rusted pickup trucks and improvised tents and donated trailers and short mobile homes HUD had just begun to regulate. But they didn’t own the land.
    They piled up like pioneers headed somewhere and fugitives run away. They dug multiple outhouses to share all-around including upkeep. They cleaned and reinstated a well. They made babies and families. They pooled the kids among them to a few schools they could actually go into now, so long as they could figure out a way to get there without asking a white person to come pick them up. They didn’t vote.
    There, every head of a household could be proud. They were all owners. In less than ten years they got so used to it they talked about it outside of it too much. When sounded as loud to strangers as eyes on potatoes once the pantry is spare their contentment and joy sheared down. They got found out. And they never owned the land. A young Eastern European immigrant turned tenant farm capitalist turned real estate developer in Vicksburg got mind to buy their sprawling prairie, install electricity and piping, cajole Bell South to bless them with phone lines, assure them: “Oh no, y’all can stay.” In lieu of fenced plots (“Too expensive”), he wound rope around staves. Then he charged bit by bit for the people’s rights to stay there, until their forty acres accidentally had its own spot on a Mississippi map as well as its own name: Singer’s Trailer Park.
    Now let’s skip ahead.
    The night a baby child was lost down the well there, Solemn helped her mother clear the table and straighten up after supper. Lucky tonight she was; no wash piled. She was restless and curious with no one curious enough to see it in her. With exception of Lutheran school and Baptist church, both of which scared her, Solemn lived to get out. She was afraid of a pattern or fate or inheritance demonstrated when only she and her mother alone occupied her home night after night after night. In Solemn’s house, the men stayed out. Night after night after night. More troubling than their absence was Solemn’s guess she was supposed to accept it but not imitate it. It was unfair.
    Sometimes she found loose change in the dirt, even stuck to spilled, dried coffee or soda in the cupholders of unlocked cars. She would put it away, into her savings, she rationalized. But she didn’t speak up about it when she could tell her daddy stomped off after talking about the bills or her mama smoked after looking at them.
    Starting with a dollar she found under her pillow upon losing her first tooth at seven, she kept her money collection in the secretly dismantled underside of her music and jewelry box–in–one, its lid encrusted with rhinestones and a gray unicorn affixed to a top for the handle.