Free Absalom's Daughters by Suzanne Feldman

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    Back home in the early evening with the empty wagons, Cassie found Lil Ma in the yard, hanging sheets. “Judith’s gone,” Cassie said.
    Lil Ma looked at her in surprise. “Gone where?”
    â€œShe’s up and left to find her fortune in Virginia,” said Cassie. “She’s going to be a big singing star.” Even as the words left her mouth, she could hardly believe it. “I thought she left with that albino boy, but he’s still here.”
    Lil Ma pulled the last of the sheets from the basket but didn’t pin it up. “Judith would never go anywhere without you.”
    Cassie held out a handful of clothespins. “She has a car; she’s got food and a gun. She has a plan.”
    â€œThat girl never had a plan in her life,” said Lil Ma. “She can’t leave without you.” Lil Ma let the wet sheet drop back into the basket and looked up at the second-floor window. She lowered her voice. “When your grandmother heard about that albino boy. The look in her eyes. You just can’t imagine.”
    Lil Ma took her back under the roof of the porch, where they couldn’t be seen from upstairs. “That boy’s the dream she’s been having all these years. She thinks your baby’s going to be like a white shell. Before it’s born, we’ll leave and go further north, where your grandmother thinks there are plenty of children like that, and we would fit right in.”
    â€œBut it isn’t true?”
    â€œChild, how do I know if it’s true?” She grabbed Cassie’s hand. “Come inside. I have to give you something.”
    Cassie followed Lil Ma inside, through the kitchen, past the irons on the stove, through the door, and into the space behind the counter. Lil Ma reached under the counter and pulled up one of the floorboards. Underneath was a cigar box tied shut with butcher string. Lil Ma opened it, revealing the neat piles of bills, counted out ten, and gave them to Cassie. “Sit,” she whispered.
    Cassie sat. Lil Ma took off her own hard-soled shoes and knelt on the floor in front of Cassie. She pressed the bills into the shoes and put the shoes onto Cassie’s feet and tied the laces. Upstairs the floorboards creaked.
    â€œBe sure no one’s looking when you take them off,” whispered Lil Ma. “Use them for a pillow when you sleep.” She was crying. “I don’t want you to leave,” Lil Ma said. “But find your sister. Go with your sister.” She pulled Cassie to her feet, kissed her, pressed her out the front door of the laundry, and closed it.
    Cassie stood for a moment in the February chill. Then she ran. The brogans clunked, and the money slid back and forth under her feet. She ran into the sunset dark of Negro Street.
    Was Judith in the woods? Cassie knew what the Justice boys would do to the old junk car if they found Judith with it. Everyone would be able to tell something was wrong in the woods by the column of black smoke that would rise from the burning tires. What they felt like doing to Judith would leave no column of smoke.
    To her relief, she heard a car coming as she came to the end of Negro Street. She couldn’t see it yet, but it coughed and choked like the car in the woods. Its engine sounded clogged and unreliable. Cassie’s heart both leaped and sank. Judith was coming to get her, in a car that wouldn’t make it to the other side of town.
    It wasn’t Judith, though; it was Beanie Simms, coming back from the shoeshine.
    He leaned out the window. “Where the heck you runnin’ like that, gal?”
    â€œMister Simms,” she said, already breathless, “where’s Porterville?”
    His face compressed into instant understanding. “I don’t know ’zactly where,” he said. “But it’s east o’ here. You ask the folks in Hilltop. Follow the railroad tracks.