Free Tiny Dancer by Patricia Hickman Page A

flinched. Then he took his seat again and finished stringing the guitar, clipping the excess strings from the neck. He set to tuning it, humming out the notes in a la-la-la-la-bum-bum cadence.
    I sat down next to her. A big square of gauze was taped beside the preacher’s eye. It had a stain of red and his right eye was bruised. So as not to be obvious, I did not gasp. The last I time I saw him was the morning he was high-tailing it down through the foggy lane, the day voter registration opened up to the local black families. I was slow to piece together the fact that he had met with ruffians that morning. Although I didn’t know for certain, I was in no position to ask. He might think it impolite for a white girl to pry.
    He fingered the strings again and I saw his knuckles, all scraped and scabbed over. He would not look at me.
    Dorothea said with a certain degree of pride, “The Reverend has perfect pitch.” She habitually referred to him as the Reverend, I noticed. But perhaps she thought he was getting too heady for such compliments, for she said, “It nearly makes up for the rest of his imperfect ways.”
    A pig carcass smoked underground in the usual pit dug out of the ground for the smoking process. I wanted to know where he had learned to cook in such a manner as I had never seen the likes of it at any of the picnics I had attended. “I never saw a pig cooked in the ground,” I said.
    Reverend Theo might not have responded at all if Dorothea had not have given him a look that would ice fish. Finally he said, “My mother is Cuban.”
    “May as well tell her the rest. You always do,” said Dorothea.
    He paused a good long while. Then he finally said, “My father was a soldier visiting a friend and, I might add, passing off some seriously secret military papers to an underground agent while in Cuba.”
    Dorothea rolled her eyes. “Here it comes.”
    “ Now you know it’s true,” he said defensively. “Daddy was a spy and what with him looking, first of all black, and secondly, of no importance, it was easy for him to enter and leave without much of a fuss. He might have done his business and left, but a Cuban girl named Esperanza caught his eye. She had a thing for American soldiers. When she saw this strapping young black man buying pottery off her mother, she stepped right up and introduced herself and invited him that night to a family dinner. My daddy could not stand to be away from Esperanza for even a day after that night, so her father would open the front door first thing of a morning and there he would be. That’s when Esperanza’s daddy, Domingo Perez-Estrada, ordered a sit-down with this young American soldier, Cuban style. That meant the whole family gathered for a time of asking him questions.”
    “ More like bringing down the Spanish Inquisition,” said Dorothea.
    Reverend Theo continued. “A few days later in front of the whole family he presented Esperanza with a little gold ring he had bought off a Cuban shopkeeper.”
    “He proposed?” I asked.
    “Right then and there. And of course Esperanza said yes. They were married that same week in a village church. My father said he never saw so much food. It was as if the President had come to Cuba the way they welcomed him into their family. And since my mother Esperanza was put in charge of smoking the pork for all the family to-dos that is how we come to have such a tradition in our family.”
    “About half of that is true,” said Dorothea. “She was a good cook. And she did say most of the village came to the wedding.”
    “Taught me and my brother her Cuban ways. My black grandmother taught me the rest, so there you have it,” said Reverend Theo. “I’m the best cook in the family.”
    “You have the biggest head maybe. My father-in-law helped Esperanza escape Castro’s regime, of this I’m certain,” said Dorothea. “The man had some backing, but I don’t know about him being a real spy.”
    “ They don’t tell