A Young Adult Novel
Pearl, a 13-year-old runaway orphan, roams the countryside of Mississippi disguised as a boy in the company of a hobo called Newt, in the year 1922. When she finds him dead from fusil oil poisoning, she’s cast adrift until a well-to-do family, the Spauldings, takes her in, where Dr. Spaulding’s wife, Dorothy, and her kind servant Laylia nurse her back to health. She is soon befriended by Dorothy’s irrepressible sons Adam and David, their wise, motherly cook Hildy, their clever handyman Israel, and finally by their niece, Marguerite, a gifted young artist confined to a wheelchair, the same age as Pearl. But can Pearl escape her past and the dark secrets that threaten her new home? And can she protect Marguerite from her ambitious mother, Sabrina, who wishes to bask in her own daughter’s glory and separate the girls from their precious friendship, the first either of them has ever known?
Will Sabrina break her daughter’s gentle spirit, and what can Pearl possibly do to stop her?
Excerpt: (Warning: This passage contains language and dialect that some may consider offensive. This is strictly for the sake of authenticity and is not meant to be demeaning to anyone.)
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I’ve almost got it. It’s just a few inches out of my reach.
But I’ll fall off of this damn stone wall on my head if I reach down any further, and I can hear a dog barking. If I had the sense I was born with, I’d say to hell with it, but I’m not that kind. Then I remember my fishing hook. It’s in my shirt pocket. I hope the string don’t break. I don’t know how heavy that jug is, or if I can find another hook if this string breaks.
There…it’s almost got the handle. That’s a nice looking jug. I hope it’s got something in it. And that nobody sees me hooking it.
I should let Newt do this. It’s him that wants the jug. I wouldn’t touch the nasty stuff with a ten-foot pole. You never know whose spit might be in it. But Newt will drink anything that don’t drink him first. If I ever get to be like that, somebody please shoot me.
There—I’ve got it! It’s not all the way full, I can tell. String, don’t break. Don’t you dare. Now it’s mine! Well, Newt’s.
Then that dog comes running! A great big devil of a mutt straight out of hell. He comes roaring my way and I’m thankful for that wall. I sure don’t plan on ending my life being some ugly dog’s dinner.
Newt’s waiting. He’s a colored man, high yeller some call him. His hair is part orange, part grey, and one of his eyes is kind of greenish where the other is a yellowy brown. His britches are so full of holes, he don’t have to open them up to pee.
My name is Pearl, but he calls me The Mouse, for my mousy-colored hair and sneaky ways. The day I ran away from the orphanage, I stole me a scissors and cut my long pigtails off. Then I stole me some boys’ clothes off a clothesline. I found this hat later. It’s too big, and ugly as homemade sin, but it covers my whole head so you can’t see much of my face. And my britches only have one hole in them, last time I looked. It’s in kind of a private place, but as long as I keep my legs together, you can’t see it. At the orphanage, Matron always told us girls to keep our legs together. How were we supposed to walk? I asked her. I got a smack in the face for that. I’m only just now learning to keep my mouth shut….
“You gots it!” Newt says as I come chugging up with my jug. His jug.
“Yeah, I gots it,” I say. He don’t mind if I imitate him, so long as I’ve got the goods.
“You daddy’s girl, baby,” he says as he takes the jug and uncorks it, then tips it up and pours it in his mouth all in one gulp. Some of it runs down his chin and neck. What you can see of it through the beard. How he can drink that mess, I’ll never know.
“Dat strong,” he says as he comes up for air.
“It better be,” I say, “after I like to got myself et up by a big ugly bitch of a mutt to git it. From now on, you get your own damn licker. And I ain’t your baby and you ain’t my daddy.”
“Now how you knows dat?” he chuckles. “I could be, for all you knows.”
I have no idea who my daddy is, actually. My momma left me with Granny when I was a baby, then took off. Granny said she was going to the city to find work, but she never did come back.
“My momma was a white lady,” I say. “If you messed with her, they’d of hung your crazy ass.”
“Dat ain’t all dey do,” he says a little more seriously. He looks down at himself, all the holes in his britches.
“You need you a new pair,” I tell him. “But I ain’t stealin’ you none. You gotta get ’em your own self.”
He chuckles some more. I don’t.
“You need you a bath too,” I say. “You smell like something crawled up inside of you and died. They’ll probably run you out of town if they get a whiff of you.”
“I allergic to water,” he says. Liar. He just don’t like to get wet.
“Well, let’s go on to town now,” I say. “We need us some money. It ain’t goin’ to make itself. And you owe me a penny for that jug.”
This town is bigger than the others I’ve been in. It’s called Deaconsburg. It’s pretty in some parts. There’s a plenty of trees and flowers, and nice houses like the one I mean to live in one of these days. It’s a white cottage with red roses growing all up one side of it, white ones on the other. And a green door that’s round on top and got a little round window in it. That house has my name on it. I’ll walk up to it after school every day and open the door and smell bread baking. There’ll be a cat sleeping by the fireplace in the winter time, and a little piano with a doily and a vase of flowers on it. And my name “Pearl” on the wall above it in cross-stitch letters. And somebody brings me cookies and plays ragtime music on that piano. I’ve heard ragtime music, and it’s the jolliest stuff you ever heard. They can play it in heaven for all eternity, for my money.
But I’m not looking for that house now. We’re going to the town square, me and Newt. It must be Saturday because there’s a lot of folks about, chatting or looking at newspapers or buying stuff from the vendors on the street. One man is sitting in his motor car, waving at folks who pass by, tipping his hat at ladies. One lady has a metal basket on wheels. It’s got loaves of bread in it and what looks like a big ham and a watermelon, and my stomach is growling but I tell it, down boy. I don’t have no money in my pocket now. But just wait.
Newt pulls his mouth-harp out of his shirt pocket. He can only play it after he “wets his whistle,” as he calls it. But after he wets that whistle, he can do it proud. Folks are listening now. Many stop in the middle of what they’re doing and watch him. Then he raises his eyebrows at me and I know what to do.
I learned how to dance by watching kids in other towns. But maybe I didn’t really need to. My feet seem to know how by theirselves. It’s why Newt says I might be colored. White folks can’t dance like that, he says.
I dance, and folks watch and smile. I grin back and hold out my hat for the coins they give us. One man gives me a piece of candy. I’d rather have the money, but I don’t say no to the candy. It’s a Tootsie Roll. Who says no to Tootsie Rolls? Nobody.
We make twenty-one cents, which is some good money. I get half of it, and Newt lets me keep the penny that’s left over. Usually, he keeps it. But since I got him that jug, he promised me the extra penny. This one’s right nice. It’s shiny and has this year, 1922, on it. I flip it into the air and slap it down on my arm to see how many times it’ll come up heads. I flip it about thirteen times, since I think that’s how old I am. It comes up heads about eleven times. Maybe this will be my lucky day.
Me and Newt been traveling together for about three months or so. Ever since the day I first heard him play in another town square. It was the gayest tune, and I started dancing before I knew it. Didn’t even think about it, my feet started moving by theirselves, and there I was. He was usually nice to me and he never hit me, so I figured I was better off with him than I was by myself. He could tell some good stories too, although I know they were mostly lies. I asked him once if he remembered the old slave days and he said his momma was a slave and his pappy was her owner. I thought that was kinda romantic. He sure can play that mouth-harp. We got chased out of that town together, because he was playing to distract folks while I stole oranges from the basket in front of the general store.
Now we can get us some grub. They wouldn’t let Newt enter a store, and I can’t hardly blame them the way he smells, but there’s a man selling hot dogs in a stand down the road, and I get Newt and me four of them, two for each of us.
“Where you learn to dance like that, son?” the hot dog man asks me.
“Charm school,” I tell him. If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never know where that came from. Sometimes these things come to me before I can stop them.
The hot dog man cracks up laughing so hard, his cheeks get as red as the hot dogs.
“For that, son,” he says, “you can have you an extry one. Nobody made me laugh so hard in a donkey’s age.”
I grin at him sort of tight lipped. I don’t like to show my teeth.
Me and Newt split the extra hot dog. But he don’t eat his half, and he gives it back to me.
“I ain’t feel so good,” he says. He’s not faking, I can tell.
“No wonder,” I say. “After the way you drunk that licker so damn fast. You never know what might be in that stuff. You need to lay off of it.”
“Mebbe,” he says, holding to his stomach, “hot dogs really is made out of dog meat.”
“I use to think that too,” I admit. “Before I growed out of it.”
Now he’s starting to scare me. He really does look sick. His face draws up and he groans, clutching at his belly. A minute later, he’s puking in the grass. I have to run before I get sick too….
Yellow Rose Publications 