Tina Mcelroy Ansa Read Online Free PDF Page A

downtown and only had fifteen minutes for their lunch break would order their lunch one day ahead so when they sat down at the counter and picked up their forks, their plates would be set before them ready for them to dig in.
    Woolworth’s was just one store closing downtown that broke Mulberry’s heart. Fragrance-scented Davison’s, where her mother had bought her Hanes stockings by the box and the Vanity Fair slips and bras and panties that Lena had worn as a teenager and took away to college, was just a shell with nothing inside but dust and trash and the occasional remains of a squatting runaway. The new store out at the Mulberry Mall didn’t even have the same name.
    Burton-Smith was another one. Lena’s grandmama had insisted that the small millinery store had the widest and most grand selection of cloth and notions in the whole area. Women making their weekly pilgrimage each Saturday to the store’s sewing department would dive into the bolts of cloth and skeins of yarn and spools of cotton and silk thread.
    People talked about the store as if it were a person.
    “Well, I mo’ go down to Burton-Smith to see what
he
got.”
    But that was all gone now, too.
    Some folks in town felt that way about the whole area. Downtown gone. The expressway cutting through the heart of the city. The outskirts of town turning into office strips and manufacturing complexes. At least, the new construction brought a level of prosperity to folks Lena knew: Houses were bought, businesses were started, offspring were sent to college, second cars were purchased. But she could see no good godly reason for the changes in downtown.
    She stood in the empty parking lot behind her place of business for a moment with her butt resting against the side of the car. She was surprised that she was still a little weak in the knees from her incident in the car.
    Instead of going straight into the back door, Lena took her regular longer route down the alley where Mr. Brown’s service station stood, around the corner and up Broadway, blessing empty spots where muchof her Mulberry history had occurred. She blessed Miss Emily and the peanut shop. She smiled and remembered all the old and young heads she had seen sitting up in Stanley’s Barber Shop talking trash and playing checkers while Mr. Stanley slowly and painstakingly swept the linoleum floor repeatedly of short black prickly hairs.
    Her high-heeled Chanel mules made a
clack-clack
sound on the smooth concrete of the wide country-town sidewalk. The sound seemed to echo up and down the empty street. It reverberated past where the old Greyhound bus station—immortalized in a local blues singer’s lyrics, “I’m washing dishes in the bus station cafe now, but I won’t be washing for long”—had stood, smelling of two-day-old traveling people with their bag lunches of fried chicken and pound cake and bananas crowded into the waiting room of the bus station. The sound of her heels echoed past the site of the historic Burghart Theatre, where Bessie Smith had performed in the late twenties; past where women, legendary “Broadway Jessies” in tight skirts, the scent of cheap perfume emanating from their pulse points, had lolled in the lobby of the barely respectable Cornet Hotel on the corner of the alley.
    To many folks, Lena McPherson
was
Mulberry.
    Walking up the street by herself, Lena evoked the swing and feel of decades of her people in Mulberry. It was a shame that no one was around to appreciate how good she looked striding up Broadway.
    Lena’s looks laughed in the face of her forty-five years. It was not so much that she looked young for her years, which she did, for which she could thank her father’s melanin-rich chocolate-brown genes, as it was that she looked like herself, just as she always did. Barely changed from the time she walked Broadway as a girl dressed in her blue and white Blessed Martin de Porres Catholic School uniform.
    Lena had grown taller than people in town had