The Gold Cadillac

The Gold Cadillac Read Free Page B

Book: The Gold Cadillac Read Free
Author: Mildred D. Taylor
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together. I figure that makes us about the richest folks in the world.” He smiled at my mother and she smiled too and came into his arms.
    After that we drove around in an old 1930s Model A Ford my father had. He said he’d factory-ordered us another Mercury, this time with my mother’s approval. Despite that, most folks on the block figured we had fallen on hard times after such a splashy showing of good times and some folks even laughed at us as the Ford rattled around the city. I must admit that at first I was pretty much embarrassed to be riding around in that old Ford after the splendor of the Cadillac. But my father said to hold my head high. We and the family knew the truth. As fine as the Cadillac had been, he said, it had pulled us apart for a while. Now, as ragged and noisy as that old Ford was, we all rode in it together and we were a family again. So I held my head high.

    Still though, I thought often of that Cadillac. We had had the Cadillac only a little more than a month, but I wouldn’t soon forget its splendor or how I’d felt riding around inside it. I wouldn’t soon forget either the ride we had taken south in it. I wouldn’t soon forget the signs, the policemen, or my fear. I would remember that ride and the gold Cadillac all my life.

Author’s Note
    For a few years when I was a child, I lived in a big house on a busy street with my mother, my father, my sister, and many aunts and uncles and cousins. We were originally a Mississippi family who had migrated to the industrial North during and after World War II. My father was the first of the family to go to the North and that was when I was only three weeks old. When I was three months old, my mother, my older sister, and I followed. A year after our arrival, my parents bought the big house on the busy street. During the next nine years, aunts and uncles and cousins from both sides of the family arrived yearly from Mississippi and stayed in that big house with us until they had earned enough to rent another place or buy houses of their own.
    I loved those years.
    There were always cousins to play with. There was always an aunt or an uncle to talk to when my parents were busy, and there seemed always to be fun things to do and plenty of people to do them with. On the weekends the whole houseful of family often did things together. Because my father, my uncles, and my older male cousins all loved cars, we often rode in a caravan out to the park where the men would park their cars in a long, impressive row and shine them in the shade of the trees while the women spread apicnic and chatted, and my sister, younger cousins, and I ran and played. Sometimes we traveled to nearby cities to see other family members or to watch a baseball game. And sometimes we took even longer trips, down country highways into that land called the South.
    I have many good memories of those years, including the year my father brought home a brand-new Cadillac. I also have memories of those years that long troubled me. I have woven some of those memories into this story of fiction called
The Gold Cadillac.

BOOKS BY MILDRED D. TAYLOR
    The Friendship
    The Gold Cadillac
    Let the Circle Be Unbroken
    Mississippi Bridge
    The Road to Memphis
    Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
    Song of the Trees
    The Well

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