Free Ugly Ways by Tina McElroy Ansa Page B

way his camouflage jacket hung on his shoulders, a bit too large for him, that he was shooting bad.
    It was nearly pitch dark by now, but Emily was confident that Betty wouldn't worry about her when she didn't go directly to her sister's house at the top of Pleasant Hill. Emily thought Betty was used to her wanderings around town when she came home to visit. Although she felt the town hadn't been kind to her, with its gossip and harsh judgments, Emily still loved Mulberry like an old friend. Other than her sisters, she felt her hometown was all she had. The only thing that anchored her to the world was her identity in Mulberry, even if it was as "the craziest Lovejoy sister." She knew all the back streets, even the ones that no longer existed, the ones changed by the construction of the interstate through the middle of Pleasant Hill. The community had complained that the plans were drawn up just to disrupt the black neighborhood. But the highway didn't bother Emily even though it left parts of the community with dead-end streets that overlooked kudzu-covered trees and the expressway instead of more houses. She kept in her mind just how the town had looked when she was a child and walked everywhere, even downtown, by herself.
    There was little Emily didn't know about Mulberry. Her job as an archivist gave her easy access to all kinds of material. She had not only mulled over countless old documents—plantation logs, census records, deeds, birth certificates—and ancient newspapers at the state archives in Atlanta and in the local Mulberry libraries to learn the history of the place. And as a senior researcher for the state of Georgia, she had more access to files and archives than most.
    She had also made it her business to know the daily and current shape of the town. In Mulberry even in the nineties, Emily thought, people still seemed to know more of the intricacies of other people's intimacies than in any other little town she knew of. Things you would think no one but the parties involved would know. That's how people gossiped in Mulberry. "And he reached over his plate of liver and onions, picked up a dull dinner knife, and threatened to stab her to death with it if she said one more word to him about that garbage disposal."
    Listening as she got her hair done to the talk in Betty's first beauty shop, Lovejoy's 1, the one she opened in East Mulberry, Emily would wonder to herself sometimes, now how does she know what they were eating and just what he said? But it was never questioned. The other women would nod their wet and cur-lered heads in affirmation, slap their copies of
Essence, Lear's, Ebony, Mirabella, American Visions,
or
Vogue
against their thighs, and go on to the next topic.
    Emily clung to everything that reminded her of the Mulberry she remembered or thought she remembered as a child.
    As a child and a teenager, she never imagined that she would ever feel tenderly toward a town, a community that pegged her and her family crazy, that gossiped about them, that even scorned them when party lists and invitations to be local debutantes were sent out. Not in a million years did she think she would care about Mulberry. But as Mudear always reminded them, "Keep living, daughters."
    Emily even chose Lovejoy's 1 to have her hair done each week because it reminded her of old times. The beauty shop was still housed in the original building that Betty, when she was in her mid-twenties, renovated for the first shop she opened. There, she built up a large and loyal following with older women who still preferred to have their hair straightened with a hot comb. She eventually moved them into the era of straightening perms and got their daughters' and granddaughters' business to boot. Eventually, the smell of burning hair in the air was replaced with the stench of straightening chemical perms. But in an antique display case at the front of the shop by the receptionist's desk, Betty still kept examples of the original