The Bernice L. McFadden Collection. Bernice L. McFadden

what’s it say?”

      Easter was bewildered. She’d seen Rain flip through pages of the newspaper as she sat sipping her morning coffee.

      “Pardon?”

      “I asked you,” Rain growled, eyeballing her, “what’s it say?”

      “Ma’am?” Easter was still confused.

      “Goddamnit, don’t ma’am me!” Rain yelled. “You poking fun at me?”

      Easter scurried backwards. “No, I just thought—”

      “Yeah, I know what you thought,” Rain spat before turning and stomping off.

      Her ankle wasn’t broken, but it was sprained. The result of a cartwheel gone wrong that sent Rain crashing to the floor, where she lay stunned, her legs splayed wide open. The men in the audience leaned in and groaned with pleasure. Rain was not wearing any underwear.

      In her tent, on her cot, between sips of white lightning, she moaned, cussed, and confessed that she was getting too old for that particular type of bullshit. Easter sat at her feet, listening quietly as she gently pressed the chunk of ice onto Rain’s bruised skin.

      “I’m twenty-eight, you know, an old woman. I ought to be ashamed of myself,” she slurred as the flame of the oil lamp danced in her eyes. “I thought I was gonna be famous, but ’stead look at me, dancing and singing for niggers that got a day’s worth of dirt under their fingernails.” Her words were soaked with disappointment. “My mama probably turning over in her grave.”

      Easter stared down at Rain’s pretty toes.

      “What about you? What you wanna be? I know you don’t wanna be my maid for the rest of your life, do you?”

      Easter shrugged her shoulders. Being with Rain for the rest of her life sounded just fine to her.

      “I don’t know, haven’t really given it much thought.”

      Rain turned the flask up to her lips and drank deeply. “Stand up, girl, raise your dress and let me see your goods.”

      Easter turned a crooked eye on her. “What?”

      Rain’s face went slack. “Well someone’s got to do it, might as well be you.”

      “Do what?”

      “For all the writing and reading, you just as dumb as a doornail, ain’t you?”

      Easter blinked. She was completely lost.

      Rain leaned over and peered directly into Easter’s wide eyes. “You gonna have to take my place in the show until I’m healed.”

      Easter’s jaw dropped.

      “Close your mouth, chile, this place full of flies,” Rain chuckled.

      Easter knew Rain’s entire routine by heart, every hip-swaying, groin-thrusting boom-chica-boom-chica-boom-boom-boom move, but that didn’t mean that she could pull it off in front of an audience of sex-crazed sharecroppers. And furthermore, Easter didn’t have Rain’s curves—she was as flat as a board.

      Nor did she find it easy to melt into the music, so her attempts at a lascivious bump-and-grind were appalling; in fact, she resembled an epileptic in the throes of a seizure. Comedy was not her intent, but it was the end result and the audience roared with laughter and threw pennies at her feet.

      “You a clown, girl! A straight-up fool!” Rain howled when Easter chicken-walked off the stage and into her open arms. “It wasn’t me, but it was good!”

      “You think so?” Easter was panting.

      “Better than good,” Rain said, and then pressed her warm lips against Easter’s. It happened just that once but Easter would relive it a million times in her dreams.

       CHAPTER 5

      Ten shows and three towns later, Rain’s ankle was healed, good as new. Easter was glad for it, because she was growing tired of playing the fool. The show was working its way down the Savannah River toward Elberton and Easter had fifteen dollars saved. A few more weeks and she figured she’d have enough to hop a train heading somewhere. Maybe, she thought, Rain would come with her.

      But Slocum had other plans for Easter, and one evening as she sat eating her dinner of fried snook and boiled potatoes, his bloated, bow-legged shadow fell over her.

      “What?”

      Slocum grinned as he ceremoniously unfurled the burlap poster he held, revealing a colorful caricature of a cross-eyed, tongue-wagging, knock-kneed Easter.

      Rain clapped her hands together and squealed, “You’ve arrived!”

      Arrived where? Easter wondered. The bowels of life? The filthy heels of existence?

      That night after the show, the moon sat low and full in the sky as Easter made her way to Rain’s tent. This was something she looked forward to all day. It was their time and their time alone in which they did whatever they wanted. Sometimes Easter would sit snug between Rain’s legs as Rain used the comb to carve fine lines through Easter’s thick hair and then braided it into neat rows. Other times Easter would paint Rain’s toenails or knead the knots in her neck until they melted away. Sometimes they’d play Bid Whist or just talk. Always, Easter waited for another kiss, but it never came.

      “You never stop scribbling in that notebook, what you scribbling?” Rain had pressed until Easter broke down one day and began to share the stories she’d written about Waycross and the people who lived there. Easter read aloud the tales heavy with Southern dialect and folksy wisdom and Rain’s eyes rippled with the images Easter’s words created. “You should write a book like dem white folks. You just as good as they are.”