Free The Turner House by Angela Flournoy Page B

in. Her overworked father was too tired to care about gossip, but her mother, two older sisters, and four younger brothers took to aggressive whispering.
Ain’t he have a job lined up? They got phones Up North, don’t they? Well, at least he
married
the girl, fore he run off. I heard they roundin up colored men at the train station and sendin em to the war if they don’t have no proof of work. He supposed to be preachin with Tufts, why’d he run outta here in the first place? He liked to do right, but with a mama like his maybe he just ain’t got it in him.
When Viola entered a room in their two-bedroom shotgun house, voices retreated abruptly, like water from the shore.
    Francis could have stayed in their tiny town, devolved into a drunk and a whoremonger, and Viola’s family would have supported them with fewer complaints. Aspirations to leave set her and her new husband apart. Ever since the Budlongs of Brunswick County, Virginia, had found their way west to Arkansas, no woman in her family had left for anyplace farther than Pine Bluff, which was less than twenty miles east. She had two brothers in Cleveland and a third in Omaha, but they were men and their lives their own. And Francis
was
supposed to be preaching. Viola had met him in church when she was thirteen years old, shortly after she stopped going to school. He was already tall at fifteen, golden and thoughtful. He usually read the opening scripture for Reverend Tufts on Sundays, and Viola noticed that he knew most of the Old Testament by heart. A more impressive feat than memorizing the new one. The Reverend Tufts was not a tall man, but he was handsome and imposing in his Sunday robes. Viola imagined that Francis would one day look even better in those robes because he would be more humble, and not clutter his sermons with flourishes like Tufts did. When you got the call like that, so early in life, what was there to do but preach? You didn’t necessarily need a college degree like Tufts had, you just had to know the scripture and feel the pull of the pulpit for admirable reasons.
    When Francis said they were moving to Detroit, that Tufts had given him a letter of introduction and a little money to send him on his way, Viola had insisted she wouldn’t go. “Just cause somebody tells you to up and move don’t mean you move,” she’d said. “This time it do,” Francis had muttered back. They were in his room in Tufts’s house, on the first floor behind the kitchen, their makeshift honeymoon suite, and they could hear the reverend creaking around upstairs. It was the first time she’d sensed that she ought to hold her tongue with Francis, that she should tamp down the flurry of questions in her throat to spare some part of her new husband’s pride. A difficult feat, but she managed it. Francis left two days later.
    On her way back from another fruitless visit to Jean Manroy’s telephone, Viola saw her sisters, Lucille and Olivia, standing on the porch of her mother’s house. Lucille carried Cha-Cha, just four months old, in her arms. When she came closer she saw that Olivia held a white envelope in her fist, so tight it looked like she meant to crush it. Viola ran up the walk and snatched it out of her hand. Its seal was intact, and it had an incomplete return address.

Dear Viola,
I am in Detroit. Grateful enough I have a job and somewhere to sleep. I am saving my money and will find a way. I do miss you.
F. Turner

    Francis had enclosed $7. Seven dollars! Not enough, not at all. Viola had left school to work in the fields with her older brothers and sisters on their father’s sharecropping plot. The boys picked cotton and the girls held out the stiff burlap sacks for collection. The longer Francis stayed away and kept sending such little money, the more the fields called her. It was either that or housework for white folks, which is what Olivia and Lucille had opted to do a few years