Free Lousiana Hotshot by Julie Smith

Rhonda in some context they wouldn’t know about. But in the end, she thought it too risky, and when she got to the funeral, she thanked her stars she hadn’t done it. She was almost the only black person in the congregation.
    Oops, Eddie, the joke’s on you.
    Evidently, Rhonda had been white, which must mean Pamela was white as well— a peculiar thing, considering this crowd, to hang with two black girls.
    There was another strange thing— though there were only five or six black faces in the pews, the choir was nearly all African-American. She could pick out Cassandra and Shaneel, very solemn in their black robes, Cassandra looking drawn and miserable. Pamela, though, appeared to be sitting with her family, the little redhead with the long straight hair, Talba thought.
    Rhonda, by contrast, had lustrous long black hair, clearly visible from her casket at the front of the church. Evidently, she hadn’t been cremated. Talba felt her throat catch as she forced herself to look at the face, pale and thin, set off by a pale blue dress with lace; something vintage, Talba thought. It looked like silk from where she was. Her imagination roved freely, concocting, before Talba could stop it, a vision of the girl as she must have looked, alive, in that dress— tall and very thin, black hair blowing in the wind, granny boots on her feet, skin pale and delicate, body a little too wispy.
    Druggie,
her mind said, and her eyes overflowed.
What the hell?
she thought.
I didn’t even know the girl.
    Someone from the funeral home closed the casket, and she nearly sobbed aloud.
    Talba had never been to a funeral before, in fact had never set foot in a Methodist church. She and her mother were Baptists, and plenty of her friends were Catholic, but she didn’t know that many people who weren’t one or the other. (Except for a few Muslims, of course— there were plenty of those around. And the odd Pentecostal.) She didn’t really know what to expect, but the proceedings had an antiseptic quality that surprised her.
    The family came in right after the minister. They were brought in in a formal procession, after which there was a prayer and a chance— while everyone’s eyes were closed— to survey the crowd more closely.
    The choir was made up mostly of women, though there were a few men, most of them older than the one she was looking for, and some of them white. There was one who looked to be in his early twenties, a short round kid with a shaved head and such a cherubic expression he looked like an African-American Cupid.
Not him,
she thought.
If the rapist was Rhonda’s friend, it wasn’t somebody from the choir. Anyhow, that kid couldn’t seduce a sheep.
    In the congregation, none of the bowed heads appeared to be Aziza’s, though surely she’d come back from her business trip by now. There were a few older black couples, though. Talba guessed they were parents of choir members. She didn’t see a single black male under forty.
    Almost as soon as the hymn was over, the choir stood and began to sing, an uplifting hymn, the sort that church people call “joyful,” but by the second bar, Talba was crying.
    She was amazed at herself. What the hell was this? Not only was she crying, she was sobbing, in great big embarrassing gulps, as if she’d been Rhonda’s best friend. The woman next to her reached out and put an arm around her shoulders, and the woman’s touch was anathema, poison, felt like fire. Talba didn’t know why. She almost screamed, but stopped herself in time, and jumped away. In the silence, she could hear sniffling from the front of the church.
    When the hymn was over, the fit stopped, whatever it was.
    The minister came forward to thank “the choir of Gethsemane Baptist Church, which has come to worship with us today and to help us surrender up to God the soul of Rhonda, beloved sister of Pamela Bergeron, a devout and faithful member of the Gethsemane choir.”
    Talba was struck by the word “devout.”