Tina Mcelroy Ansa Read Online Free PDF Page B

things would follow.
    For decades, folk sitting out in front of shops and businesses and bars and restaurants all up and down Broadway and Cherry had shouted their intimate acknowledgment of her parentage and birth.
    “Hey, there, Lena. There’s my girl! There’s that special girl! Come here, Lena, I bet you can give me a good number to play.”
    Lena always thought they didn’t know the half of it. Sometimes she could even close her eyes when it did not frighten her too much and envision her own birth scene at St. Luke’s Hospital.
    Dr. Williams at Nellie’s feet, old Nurse Bloom next to him, the other young nurses standing around them, looking like they had seen a ghost.
    Lena had indeed come into the world looking like a spirit with a caul—a colorless piece of fetal membrane—stretched over her face. The attending physician and the midwife-nurse seemed touched by the rare birth. Everyone there did.
    Even the youngest nurse’s aide in the tiny black hospital knew
something
about a child born with a caul over her face. In her head, Lena could see the young medical assistant leaning over her hospital crib and cooing, “Ooo, little baby born with the veil over your face, you
are
lucky like everybody say. I saw your daddy’s big old Cadillac outside. And you know you gon’ be happy ’cause you can see the future and have spirits to guide you. And they say you gon’ even be able to see and hear people’s thoughts.
    “Um, you
are
a lucky little baby girl,” the nurse’s aide had said, shaking her head in envy.
    Lena had heard the same thing all her life. These shouts greeted her each time she came downtown to her father’s whiskey store and juke joint or to view the features at the Burghart with her brothers or go shopping with her mama.
    “Hey, little girl, I know who your daddy is. You Jonah’s daughter. The one born with the veil over her face. You Jonah’s child, all right. Look at ya. Look like your daddy spit you out. Makes you wonder if Nellie had anything to do with it, don’t it?”
    Now, other than in folks’ stories and in photographs lining the walls of her office downtown and at home, the phantoms of all those people, sounds and smells were just about all that was left.
    Save the sound of the heels of Lena’s mules on the sidewalk, the only thing stirring on the once-busy corner now was the idling green and cream city bus that sat at the intersection spewing out dieselfumes as the driver waited for his scheduled time of departure. Coming from the now-deserted downtown area this early in the morning, the uniformed driver had a glazed look in his eyes and no passengers.
    “Um, um, um,” Lena said aloud to herself as she turned the corner onto Cherry Street and took out the gold ring of twenty or more keys from her purse, “downtown Mulberry, a ghost town.”
    She said it, the pronouncement on her hometown, in the same way that she reminded herself from time to time, “Um, um, um, Mama and Daddy and ’em dead.”
    From the front, the liquor store and the bar and grill that comprised The Place sat side by side in the two-story brick building. But actually the small square whiskey store fit into the missing corner of the larger L-shaped juke joint. Although folks called the entire building The Place, they were usually only referring to the bar and grill. A wall of colored windows separated the liquor store from the grill side.
    Thick black lettering on a white background on a sign hanging over the entrance to both establishments read:

BLUE BIRD CAFE GRILL and LIQUOR STORE
    Lena walked past the entrance to the juke joint and stopped in front of the liquor store. Through the plate-glass door, she could just make out the outline of the handsome portrait of her parents, with the brass engraving underneath, “Jonah and Eleanor McPherson, The Founders.” She had hung the portrait above the shelves on the liquor store side of The Place in an antique picture frame her mother’s friend Carrie