A Morning for Flamingos Read Online Free PDF

from tar paper, scrap lumber, and roofing tin. Chickens pecked in the dirt yards, the ditches were littered with garbage, the air reeked of somebody cooking cracklins outside in an iron kettle, which produces an eye-watering stench like sewage. On the corner was a clapboard juke joint, with tape crisscrossed on the cracked windows, and because it was Friday afternoon the oyster-shell parking lot was already full of cars, and the roar of the jukebox inside was so loud it vibrated the front window.
    Tante Lemon’s house was raised off the ground on short brick columns, and a yellow dog on a rope had dug a depression under the edge of the house from which he looked up at me and flopped his tail in the dirt. Flies buzzed back in the damp shadows beneath the raised floor. I knocked on the screen door, then saw her ironing at a board in the corner of her small living room. She stopped her work, picked up a tin can, held it to her lips, and spit snuff in it.
    “They think they send you, I’m gonna tell where that little boy at?” she said. “I ain’t seen him, I ain’t talk with him, I don’t even know Tee Beau alive. That’s what y’all done to us, Mr. Dave. Don’t be coming round here pretend you our friend, no.”
    “Will you let me in, Tante Lemon?”
    “I done tole them policemens, I tell you, I ain’t seen him, me, and I ain’t he’ping you, me.”
    “Listen, Tante Lemon, I don’t want to hurt Tee Beau. He saved my life. It’s the white man I want. But they’re going to catch Tee Beau sooner or later. Wouldn’t you rather I find him first, so nobody hurts him?”
    She walked to the screen and opened it. Her dress was wash-faded almost colorless, and it flapped on her body and withered breasts as shapelessly as rag.
    “You going lie now ‘cause I an old nigger?” she said. “You catch that boy, they gonna carry him up to the Red Hat, they gonna strap him down, put that tin cap on his little head, cover up his face with cloth so they ain’t got to look his eyes, let all them people watch my little boy suffer, watch the electricity burn up his body. I was on Camp I, Mr. Dave, when they use to keep womens there. I seen them take a white man to the Red Hat. They had to pull him along the ground from the car, pull him along like a dog wrapped up in chains. Then all them people sat down like they was at the ballpark, them, and watch that man die.”
    She raised the tin cup to her lips and spit snuff in it again, then picked up her iron and began pressing a starched white shirt. She smelled of dry sweat, Copenhagen, and the heat rising from the ironing board. The walls of her house had been pasted with pages from magazines, then overlaid with mismatched strips of water-streaked wallpaper. The floor was covered with a rug whose thread had split like crimped straw, and the few pieces of furniture she owned looked as though they’d been carted home a piece at a time from the junkyard where Tee Beau used to work.
    I sat down on a straight-backed chair next to her ironing board.
    “I can’t promise you anything,” I said, “but if I find Tee Beau, I’ll try to help him. Maybe we can get the governor to commute his sentence. Tee Beau saved the life of a police officer. That could mean a lot, Tante Lemon.”
    “The life of that pimp mean a lot.”
    “What?”
    “Hipolyte Broussard a pimp, and he was gonna make Tee Beau do it, too.”
    “I never heard that Broussard was involved with prostitution.”
    “White people hear what they want to hear.”
    “I didn’t see anything like that in the case record, either. Who’d you tell this to?”
    “I ain’t tole nobody. Ain’t nobody ax me.”
    “Where was he pimping, Tante Lemon?”
    “Out of the juke, there on the four-corner,” she said, and nodded her head toward the outside of the house. “Out in them camps, where them farm worker stay at.”
    “And he wanted Tee Beau to do it, too?”
    “He make Tee Beau drive them girls from the juke down to the