“Sorry. I, I mean—” Jax stammered. “All I meant by it was that I would like to, um, ask for you. You know, formally. How do they say it down south? Betrothed?”
“You’re serious?”
“I am.”
Miriam shot him a look that could’ve intimidated Satan. “Why?”
“Why?” Jax laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“Because you’re the most fascinating girl—woman—I’ve ever met. And it’d be an honor. I think it would be an honor. And that’s just fine if you need more time. Take your time. But I know. I just know. Can’t really explain it. Say, sometimes you just know a thing. And listen, I’ll be honest. I can’t say I’m a good man. I’m not. I hung around some rough folk back in Chicago. I’m not sure I even know what love is, what it looks like. But I do know, what I know more than I know myself, is that I would spurn God for you. So. Who do I need to ask? For your hand?”
“My daddy dead,” Miriam said. She went back to staring out the Mustang’s window. “Beaten beyond recognition. Body thrown in the Mississippi. Never even knew the man.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It’s all right,” Miriam said, considering. “My mama the one you’ve got to worry about.”
CHAPTER 4
August
1978
A knock at the door caused August to stop playing the piano in the parlor. She growled in frustration. She heard the knock again. Then again. She threw her long braids over her shoulder.
“Fine!” she called out. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”
She swung herself around on the piano’s swivel stool, slid off, and skipped to the door. She threw it open wide and found herself taken aback by whom she saw there. A tall man stood before her in a uniform she thought looked familiar. He wore a thick, dark-green khaki jacket and a matching cap and trousers. A silver badge on both shoulders caught and reflected the July morning Memphis sunlight.
“We don’t want anything you selling,” she said.
The man laughed. “You must be August. Heard a lot about you.”
August frowned, jutted out her right hip, and placed her hand there. She eyed the man. “Who told you jack all about me?”
“August!” Miriam appeared from behind her, her smile as bright as fireflies in an evening field.
“That’s not how we talk to folk.”
August pointed at the man, incredulous. “That’s how we talk to Yankees.”
“Girl, go play outside.”
“Oh, sure,” August shot back. “Great idea. Let me go grab a Barbie—no, no, you right—let me go play in the street and suck my thumb and catch frogs and let this strange Negro up in our house.”
“I can’t hit you because Mama won’t let me. I ask her every day,” Miriam said.
“You said she had a smart mouth, but damn.” The man removed his cap and placed it snugly underneath his arm. “May I come in?” he asked.
August cast her sister a side look. At almost fifteen, she already matched Miriam’s height.
“Yes, of course. Welcome,” Miriam said, with a rush to her voice August had never before heard.
“We really doing this, huh?” August threw her hands up. “Fine, come in.” She waved. “There’s the piano, the couch, the Victro—the old record player. That’s a random cat that must have come in when you interrupted my piano practicing, a lovely gold rotary phone. You got a carpetbag big enough for all this?”
“August Della North, get yourself somewhere scarce, please, before I do it for you.” Miriam’s voice was a combination of singsong and a cat hissing.
August threw up her chin and bellowed, “Mama!”
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Miriam said to the man. “We weren’t raised by wolves, I promise. Would you like something to drink? Tea?”
“We’re pouring the thief drinks now? That’s what we’re doing?” August asked. She shook her head and then called out again, “Mama! Mama! Come here. Meer is over here giving sweet tea to a Yankee.”
August heard her mother approaching from the back of the house, muttering to herself, “Lord, give me strength.” August grinned at Miriam and crossed her arms.
When their mother came from the kitchen, she was dressed in her gardening uniform—overalls and a wide Huckleberry Finn straw hat. She had come from the back garden with a basket full of burgeoning okra and turnip greens. She held gardening gloves, caked with dirt, in one hand. She took a long look at the scene in the front room and was silent. Then she said, with cool finality, “August, go play outside.”
She half-obeyed. There was a plum tree that rested along the left side of the house, right against the parlor’s stained-glass windows. Its dark branches created a shady half canopy around the house, its fruit staining the surrounding ground a dark purple.
“I was minding my business,” she whispered to herself as she climbed the plum tree. “I swear I was minding my business. Kicked out of my own house. And all I wanted to do today was play the piano.” She reached a branch right underneath the window. “Perfect,” she told herself.
And it almost was. The voices coming from the parlor would become muffled whenever a loud car’s engine rolled down Locust Street. But August heard enough to know that her sister would be leaving Memphis.
“So, you want to take my joy from me? My firstborn? What a Yankee won’t steal from a Southerner, God only knows.” August heard the contempt in her mother’s voice. “You want to take my Miriam from me? My sole daughter of Myron’s.”
August gasped, shocked that her mother was telling their business to a stranger, and a Yankee at that. She knew, of course, that she and her sister had different fathers—her mother had been open about that for as long as she could remember—but she’d never heard her mother volunteer that information to someone outside the family. Outside Memphis.
“My word, speaking of that August, did she not offer you some sweet tea?” August heard laughter well up in her mother’s voice. “That one. Spitfire. Acts like she was raised by wolves instead of a God-fearing Southern woman.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” came the man’s deep voice.
“So, you come to take Miriam off me. My only proof I ever loved a decent man.”
“August’s father wasn’t decent, I take it?” the Yankee asked.
“You wouldn’t believe who that girl’s father is if I told you, which I am not doing on this Sabbath. This Sabbath, I’m giving you an honor I doubt you can live up to: making Miriam happy for life. Now that’s a bigger honor, a bigger responsibility than any of them shiny badges and medals on your shoulders.”
“With all due respect, Miss Hazel—”
August raised an eyebrow. Miriam must have briefed him on the proper Southern etiquette for addressing widowed women. That fact, more than anything, told August that her sister was serious about this man.
The stranger in the Marine Corps uniform continued: “I am a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps. I have a steady salary, and I’m certain I’ll make captain. When I do, we’ll move to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Picked us out a pretty little house on the shore. I can provide for Miriam.”