Tina Mcelroy Ansa Read Online Free PDF

expected. Her mother had teased her daughter all the time when they were standing together, “Shoot, Lena, I could eat peas off your head.” But she couldn’t. Nellie only came up to about Lena’s earlobe. Lena had shotup over Nellie, who wasn’t very tall at all, in her teen years to nearly five foot seven inches and stayed there the rest of her life.
    She wasn’t what one would call thin or slender. She had full high breasts, a small delicate-looking waist and a slender trunk like her mother, so she appeared willowy. Yet she had inherited her father’s family’s round low butt and big shapely legs.
    “Look at her, Nellie,” Grandmama would say as they both pinned half-finished tailored Sunday suits and wide-skirt party dresses on Lena’s teenaged body, “she look smaller in clothes than she do buck naked. She got one of those deceptive bodies like your people.”
    And Nellie, pins in her mouth, hands on her hips, would have to nod her agreement.
    Lena’s clothes, now made by all the top designers—Versace, Lagerfeld, Lauren, Robertson, Mizrahi, Karan—seemed to just barely graze her body as if she had just finished spinning around.
    That made her look young, too.
    Gloria, The Place’s manager, would look at Lena some mornings striding in dressed in the short white suit with colored bows all over it that Patrick Kelly had made for her when he was still a struggling designer in Atlanta, and just chuckle with admiration and envy. “Girl, you know you lucky. You got the best traits from
both
sides of your family!”
    Precious, Lena’s rotund personal assistant at the Candace office, would watch her boss slip out the back door of the realty office complex—her breasts and butt bouncing
just a bit
with every step she took—and just sigh. All Precious could do was wordlessly bite into another tasteless rice cake and go back to work choking back hopelessness.
    Walking up Cherry Street, Lena looked like Mulberry from a few decades before: healthy, a little country, bursting to grow, mysterious, comfortable, familiar, prosperous, old-fashioned yet current.
    Unemployed, unattached men, some of them fairly young, drifting through the old center of downtown Mulberry on a bus or a freighttrain would spy Lena striding into The Place and stop to yell, “Hey, baby, you got a nice ass to be almost a
redbone!”
    Lena wasn’t a redbone. But she did have a lot of red in her skin. Folks down at The Place would put her “somewhere between teasing tan and pecan tan.” And that was just about right.
    Her brothers had teased her at puberty that she looked like a lowercase
s
from the side when her preteen breast and hips and ass had begun to develop. Thirty years later, she was still shaped like an
s
but now she was a capital
S.
    Lena had a sly look about her sometimes. Around the eyes. Not a mean, manipulating, calculating look. Rather a mischievous, chuckling, sparkling, I-know-a-secret kind of look. She had had it all her life. Her laughter, a deep, knowing, throaty chuckle, went with it. Although most people could not quite describe that look or the laugh, not exactly, almost all of them felt they liked the look of it on Lena’s face and the sound of her small-town southern voice. And they felt some connection to her because of it. Nothing they could put into words or wanted to. They just felt it.
    “Well,” people in Mulberry said decades after her birth, “you know Lena was born with a caul over her face. And you know what that little piece of skin mean. But our girl ain’t just lucky and pretty ’cause she was born with a veil. She special.”
    “Yeah, you ought to get her to rub that no-luck rabbit’s foot for you, Jerome.”
    That sly look was partly what made old winos like Yakkity-Yak and Black as a Skillet continue to think Lena was special until the day they died. It was what attracted sinners and saints to her equally. It was what made children trail behind her in department stores just knowing good