The Cotton Queen Read Free

not the only one thinking about my future. A few weeks after the parade, Uncle Warren gave me his advice.
    “A woman’s only chance in life is to marry well,” he told me one day as we worked together in the shoe shop. “Smart or dumb, pretty or plain, it’s the man she marries that makes the difference.”
    He fitted the heavy work boot he was mending onto the shoe form of the straight stitcher.
    “If a girl was really looking out for her future,” he pointed out, “she’d look no further than Acee Clifton.”
    He bent over the sewing machine for a moment or two, allowing me to take in that thought and consider it. Uncle Warren had lost his left leg in the war, the artificial one that the Army had given him as a replacement didn’t bend and, as he worked, it stuck out from the side of his bench at a curious angle.
    “Acee Clifton?” I repeated the name as a question.
    Acee was in my class, but he was not the kind of fellow that really caught a girl’s eye. For one thing he was short. Not shorter than myself, I suppose, but he looked short and he was pudgy. He always seemed to have his nose in a book. In a high school where football and basketball were studied far more intensely than science or math, Acee was the least athletic guy in my class. Somehow I couldn’t see him as future husband material.
    The sewing machine stopped. Uncle Warren looked over at me, his expression sober and serious.
    “I wouldn’t have you aiming too high,” Uncle Warren said. “I don’t think there’s any sense in a girl trying to get above her raising. But Acee’s got money, family connections and a good mind. He’s going to be someone someday. If those silly girls down at the high school had any sense at all, they’d be tearing down his mother’s door to get a date with him.”
    As far as I knew, Acee hadn’t had many dates.
    I thought about what Uncle Warren said. And I spent more time just observing Acee, talking to him, trying to get to know him. But I also wanted a second opinion. So I went to Aunt Maxine.
    She was ironing on the back porch. She claimed to enjoy the task, saying that she found it relaxing. Of course, she was still hot and sweating from the effort, even though it was already a breezy, crisp fall afternoon.
    I told her what Uncle Warren had said.
    Aunt Maxine shrugged. “He’s trying to be practical,” she said. “Women will have their romantic dreams, we all do. But the truth is, the man you marry pretty much determines your station in life.”
    She set the iron up on its end and took a deep breath of hesitation before continuing.
    “Your uncle Warren is thinking you are like your mother,” she said, biting her lip as if uncertain about revealing what she intended to say. “She was a truly sweet person, but she should have married again. There’s no doubt that she loved your daddy, but that doesn’t always come along in life. It certainly doesn’t come along often. She’d have been far better off finding herself a good man who knew how to make a living, than pining away as a young widow and working herself to an early death. I’m sure Uncle Warren just doesn’t want you to make the same mistake.”
    I nodded, thoughtfully.
    “So I shouldn’t marry for love?”
    “No, no, I didn’t mean that at all,” Aunt Maxine said. “I think the only way to marry is to marry for love. Just try to fall in love with somebody...somebody like Acee Clifton.”
    Truly I tried to follow her advice. I was kind and polite when I saw Acee at school. I even made a point of choosing him as my partner in science lab. But I was a girl. Girls couldn’t take the lead in that sort of thing. And I was never much of a flirt.
    In the end, it didn’t matter. I went on a Christmas hayride with Tom Hoffman. He was a farm boy who sat two rows behind me in World History. He played on the baseball team. But he wasn’t one of the top athletes in the high school. He was just a sort of regular guy. He was tall, almost six