Lilly’s Journey

As I lay in bed, I thought back to the previous week when Rosalie had first arrived. I recalled listening to my grandfather saying, "Where you suppose she gone sleep?" My grandfather, Homer Clayborn, had posed that question to Mother, but he didn't wait for an answer. That was a good thing because Mother didn't talk much anymore. My grandmother's name was Eunice Clayborn, but everyone called her "Mother." "Ain't nowhere for her to sleep," Grandpa had continued, answering his own question. "She might as well just stay on where she is. We overcrowded in this here shack, and ain't no room for one more person." Of course, the shack had housed at least six people at one time. But what Grandpa really meant was that he didn't want any more residents, not even on a temporary basis. I didn't know if it was Mother who had changed Grandpa's mind, but shortly after that conversation, we drove into town to pick Rosalie up from the bus station. She lived with her parents and her older sister, Rhonda. They had moved away several years earlier so my aunt, Eula Mae Baker, and her husband, Willie Earl, could find work. I was four the last time I had seen Rosalie. My cousin's head was crowned with short curly black hair; her skin was brown; and, when she talked, my attention was always on the beauty mark on her left upper lip. We looked nothing alike, except for the wide nose that was a family trait. I was the lightest person in my family, and the only one with reddish-brown hair that, to me at least, felt like sandpaper. Rosalie was fourteen. And when she came to town, it was like when Mother added too many cayenne peppers to her homegrown collard greens or when the fireworks went off on the Fourt of July. She was all sass and attitude. When she came to town, my life changed. Or at least my mind did-I began to dream. Rosalie was smart and as bold as a lion. She wasn't even afraid of Grandpa, which I thought was a requirement for everyone who lived in the shack with him.