Historical Fiction
Date Published: Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Publisher: Peanut Butter Publishing
In rural Radford, Tennessee, in the 1950s, a white family is killed in an
automobile accident.
Upon hearing the news of her parents’ and grandfather’s deaths,
Jessa runs away with her dog, creating problems for her town, especially for
the sheriff, her parents’ friends, and the Black community that falls
under suspicion. Racial distrust shapes the town’s response to
Jessa’s disappearance, and as the weeks stretch out, the weather poses
increasing challenges for Jessa as she shelters in a hollow tree while
attempting to provide for herself and her dog, Cassie. Help appears from an
unexpected source as a family mystery is revealed.
The Missing Girl and the second book, Jessa Is Back, are placed right in
the midst of “the good old days” and serve as a reminder of the
unabashed nature and danger of white supremacy in the 1950s. These provide
us an opportunity to examine the parallels in events unfolding today
Excerpt:
The Missing Girl
It was already dark in the forest,
but Jessa and Cassie knew the way to the hollow oak,
Jessa’s secret tree, where she had
a hideout. The tree had been her mother’s secret tree, too, and
of course her grandparents had
known about it, but it had only gotten better since her mother had
played there. The entrance into the
hollow tree bore the mark of a lightning strike. The gap
opened as a split between two
massive roots, revealing the hollow core. Leaves had blown in
and cobwebs caught at her face as
she crawled inside, but she brushed them away and collapsed
on the crisp, fragrant leaves.
Cassie curled beside her, pressing her body in mute consolation for
the great
hurt, and Jessa sobbed until she fell asleep
As she turned to leave, Jessa
noticed Grandad’s jacket hanging on the back door. She lifted
it off the hook and buried her face
in it, absorbing scents that evoked memories of riding on his
shoulders and being boosted into an
apple tree. As she stood there, hugging the jacket,
Grandma's warm presence seemed to
flow down the hall towards her. For a moment, everything
was whole again, and Jessa was
wrapped in love. Then the magic was broken, the house cold
and empty, and Jessa in a panic to
get out. She shoved the jacket through the open window and
slid through herself onto the
porch, dragging the paper bag across the counter after her. She
surveyed the kitchen. Nothing
seemed out of place, so she pulled the window nearly closed and
pushed the
screen in firmly.
Gradually, Jessa was formulating a
plan. She thought: I have lots of skills. If I live here and
take care of Cassie, it’ll prove I
don’t need foster parents. After a while, I’ll go back to town and
show them I can cook, keep house,
and go to school. I’ll carry on Daddy’s work with the school
board and tell them how much we’ve
learned from Mr. Alton’s music program. I’ll convince
them to
keep music in the white schools and add it to the colored school. I know I can
do it!
“Rick, when you came to our house
yesterday, asking about the girl, we both said we hadn't
seen her. That was true, but at
breakfast, reading the paper, I recalled something. You see, I
went home for lunch with Laurene
yesterday, as I always do, and I drive right by the Olsen
place. There was this old black pickup
ahead of me. It stopped and Mr. and Mrs. Olsen got out.
They turned around, like to thank
the driver, then rushed to their garage. Laurene and I figure
that must have been before they set
out to get the old man. But the point is, as I was driving by
the truck, I noticed the truck
driver was a colored man and I thought that was kinda unusual. It
wasn't until I read the Landsdowne
paper that I realized there was suspicion of foul play, and
thought
maybe I should report it.”
“Time to wash up,” she announced.
Cassie dashed over, muddy and wet, and they went
down the bank together.
Along this stretch, the water
spread out in a wide bend, creating a gravel beach that
extended far into shallow water.
Cassie walked out and lapped, but Jessa waded out without
reaching water deep enough to scoop
up a drink, so she ventured further. As she scooped up the
cold water her shoes sank deep in
the sand. Chilled inside by the cold drink, miserable and
exhausted, she stood there,
shaking, realizing there was no one to tell her to get out of those wet
shoes or run her a hot bath. She
could hear Mommie’s gentle voice urging her to come in,
Grandad’s concerned admonitions,
and Grandma clucking over how she was sure to catch her
death of cold. Nobody was left –
Nobody cared… At home, her mother would have stripped off
her shoes and steam would already
be rising from the bathtub. At her grandparent’s house, the
bathroom heater would have been
turned on and warm water would be running in a tense stream
into the high claw-foot bathtub.
Jessa’s teeth chattered. She was alone, frightened, and nobody
cared.
Cassie
approached, seeking her hand with her cold nose.
Also in the Series
Historical Fiction
Date Published: Tuesday, October 8, 2024
Publisher: Peanut Butter Publishing
Jessa is a different person when she returns to her hometown.
The integrated schools in Oregon allowed her to form a friendship with a
Black girl, and now she sees the local Jim Crow practices in Tennessee with
new eyes. Supported by her Oregon relatives, she becomes an advocate not
only for the inclusion of music throughout the school system of Radford, but
also for friendships that cross racial lines. While she becomes a gadfly to
the school board, her interactions with other members of her town
precipitate crises that uncover support for her position as well as staunch
opposition.
In the South, and also in the rest of the country, a long road stretches
from the 1950s to the present, and we must judge how well we have lived up
to the vision that Jessa’s discovery of interracial friendship
revealed to her.
Excerpt:
Jessa
is Back
Jessa wanted her new-found family
to experience all the wonderful things that Tennessee
had to offer. Her parents had run a
music store and loved all kinds of music, but they had never
been to the Grand Ole Opry in the
few times they’d traveled to Nashville. It was always
something that they would get
around to doing someday. Now, that would never happen, but
Jessa thought this would be a good
opportunity for the Acrees to get to know Tennessee better, so she persuaded
them to plan the train trip to arrive for the Saturday event.
They sat near the front of the bus
for the ride downtown. The bus chugged its way up the
hill, made a turn, and stopped in
the traffic. April tapped Jessa’s shoulder and pointed out the
window where they had a view into
an alley. Halfway down the alley, colored children were
lined up by the fire escape stairs.
Jessa grimaced as she recognized
what was going on – Negro children and some teenagers
were waiting in line to pay to see
the matinee. The main line was in front of the theater, but they
couldn’t join that line or sit in
the main auditorium. Instead, they would pay to climb the fire
escape stairs and be hidden in the
balcony, out of sight from the main auditorium. Jessa thought
of Janie, and how much fun they had
the last day of math class, beating out the boys in the
teacher's version of a spelling bee
for geometry. If Janie were here, she would see that line…
Jessa began to count all the ways
that Tennessee would separate Janie from her, just because Janie was Negro. She
wondered whether Portland had laws that she didn’t know about and decided to write
Janie and ask.
Jessa recalled evenings when her
father had come home from a meeting of the School Board
so discouraged that he was ready to
resign. They’d even insulted him, suggesting that his interest
in getting instrumental music on
the curriculum was only a way to drum up business for the
family’s music store. That argument
made sense to the other school board members but Jessa
knew why he dreamed of music in the
schools. Among his fragmented memories of his parents,
his fondest were of his father
playing a hammer dulcimer and his mother and father singing
together. After they and his sister
and brothers died of the Spanish flu, he’d been transferred from one foster
home after another, and after that, he’d worked to support himself and put
himself through school. He’d never gotten a chance to play an instrument, and
it had been many years before he even learned the name of the instrument his
father had played.
Fran handed the jar to Jessa, who
darted out the door. She turned to watch the two women
happily working elbow-to-elbow at
the sink. There was an element of disbelief at the sight of the
white and colored woman talking and
laughing together in her kitchen, and the topic, she
gathered, was their children. She
felt left out. Soon, a stack of clean dessert plates stood waiting
for Fran to put away. Margaret was
saying, “I do hope he’ll be able to go on with his music. He
really loves it! I don’t know what
Sarah will want to do, but you should watch her dance when
Papa and Eddie play together –
she’s a whirling dervish!”
“Well, she ought to have a chance
to pursue whatever she wants to,” Fran found herself
saying.
“That’s right kind of you,” said
Margaret, turning to her.
Fran looked as if she would burst
out crying. Margaret said, “What’s the matter, honey?
Don’t cry – tell me what’s the
matter.” She brushed her hands on the apron and reached out to
Fran, who was blubbering.
“Sometimes it just overwhelms me.
We’ve always wanted to have children – I’d give
anything to have a lovely family
like the two of you have!”
“You poor dear! It is sad when it’s
that way! Aunt Helen and Uncle Adam never could
have children, and they just seemed
to adopt the whole family to fill the gap.”
Karen felt a pang of conscience,
remembering that they had taken Jessa away when Jack and
Fran had been ready to provide a
home for her.
At that moment, Eddie and Michael
burst in the kitchen door with Cassie, eager to show the
jar crawling with lightning bugs.
“We collected them for Sarah – she can have them in her room
for a lamp
to watch until she falls asleep, just like Jessa used to do!”
Mr. Wexler said, “I’m sorry,
Jessamine. “There’s no way we can stretch the budget to add
music to Overbrook’s curriculum.
We’re still struggling to cover the salary boost we gave the
Overbrook teachers.”
At the back of the room, Ted
Hufford rose. “Mr. Chairman, may I be recognized?”
Everyone turned to look at the
reporter.
“Certainly. The Radford Post’s
reporter, Mr. Hufford, is recognized by the Chair.”
“As you know, as part of my job, I
attend the board meetings and report on the deliberations
and actions taken. I seem to recall
the discussion about the salaries at Overbrook, which were
hiked to bring them into line with
those at the white schools, after many years of differential pay.
The action was adopted to meet the
stipulations of Plessy vs. Brown. At best, it was a halfway
measure that didn’t address the
real needs of the students and teachers at Overbrook.
Furthermore, it cannot have escaped
the attention of the Board that last year’s Supreme Court
ruling supersedes Plessy vs. Brown.
It will no longer be enough to maintain a ‘separate but equal’status for the
colored and white schools.”
The board members stirred or leaned
back in their chairs but nobody responded.
They were startled when Jessa spoke
up. “It isn’t ‘separate but equal’ if the white kids have
music instruction and the colored
kids don’t. If you have to have salaries that are the same then
don’t you
have to have instruction that is the same?”
Looking through the kitchen window,
Fran watched the team working on the deck and
carried on a conversation with
herself. It definitely took some getting used to, the sight of her
husband, his sleeves rolled up,
working and laughing with a black man, and Michael and Eddie
smoothly coordinating their end of
the job. The deck work was half completed when Fran called,
“Coffee break! Cookie break!
They brushed sawdust off their arms
and knees and scuffed their feet on the doormat before
entering the dining area, where
Fran had set out coffee, milk, and a platter of warm cookies.
“I’ve been smelling these cookies
for a while, and when the odor of coffee reached me, I
knew we were in for a treat, Fran.”
Jack hugged his wife, appreciating how smoothly she seated
everyone and dismissed their
concerns about getting sawdust on the carpet.
Again, by welcoming Jacob and Eddie
into their home, they were breaking rules that had
bound her behavior her whole life.
She found her heart swelling with amazement that it didn’t
hurt at all. Furthermore, Jack was
obviously enjoying himself as a member of the work team, and
that was
what mattered most to her.
Jessa continued down the path with
Cassie cavorting by her side. “You think we’re going to
go back to living in the tree
again, don’t you, girl?” She sat just outside the tree and stroked the
dog. Everything felt so different,
now. Warm instead of cold, safe instead of hunted, loved
instead of lonely. Jessa buried her
face in the dog’s wooly head. If she cried, now, it would be
with a full heart, a happy heart.
The previous day, she’d been overwhelmed with memories of
the tree, her refuge when she was
cut off from everyone. Now, she could see the beauty and
wonder of it through the eyes of
others, and love for her tree and her grandparent’s land swept
over her. Leaning back, she looked
up at the trunk spreading its strong branches high into the
sky. She addressed it, “I love you!
I love you!” Cassie squeezed past her into the interior and
Jessa followed her and caught the
dog in her arms and hugged her. “I love you too, Cassie!” She
opened the tin of cookies and got a
couple each for herself and April. “Cassie, here’s one for you,too! – there’s
plenty!”
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