Liberating Paris
Page 38
“Ever’body.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Mavis Pinkerton married some ol’ gal.”
“Did not.”
“Did so. And Marcus’s grandpa married an old white woman.”
“Who?”
“I know her, but I forgot.”
“You’re tellin’ a story.”
“Am not.”
“Wood and Milan McIlmore got married again, too.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. Guess it didn’t take the first time.”
Elizabeth seemed worried.
“Well, you better not ask me to marry you.”
“Who said I wanted to? I’m never gettin’ married. I’m gonna live with my daddy.”
By the time they were off and running again, the others had already come across the strange, mysterious box, along with its former contents, which had now been scattered across a wide area. Marcus spotted the American flag that had once draped Dr. Mac’s coffin and said, “Man, this is cool. I’m keepin’ this.”
As he gathered it up, India Lanier already had on the homburg that Sidney Garfinkel had worn when he first arrived in America. It covered her eyes and with typical Lanier bad taste, she also put on the World War I gas mask and then, after Tracee barked at her, discarded it. And Elizabeth Brown picked up the long drum majorette’s baton that Milan had carried during the last parade on Main Street. Cake put the chain with the dog tags around her own neck and Lily and Travis got into a fight over Serious West’s boxing gloves, which Lily won. But her hands were so small, she had to struggle to keep them on. Travis then scooped up the football, along with a little sack of tin nickels from Jeter’s Market, declaring that he was going to spend them somewhere. Cake told him they weren’t worth anything, but he put them in his pocket anyway.
What had been only a breeze all day now turned into the kind of wind that whips laundry around on a clothesline. Marcus’s mother came outside to collect her linens and called to her son, but he was already too far away. She struggled to remove some sheets as the metal circle that held the clothesline started to clang against the pole. Marcus and the others were running along the top of the river bank, heady from the excitement of their find. Lily was out in front, taking powerful steps that rustled her skirts as she punctuated the air with the boxing gloves. Marcus and Cake each held a corner of the unfurled flag and, even though it was horizontal, like a tablecloth, the wind lifted it and caused it to ripple as they ran. Tommy Epps’s dog tags from Vietnam beat against Cake Brundidge’s chest and India Lanier tossed the championship football back and forth with her brother, whose pockets jangled with make-believe money from the Depression. And Elizabeth Brown strutted, holding the baton across her chest, while the dog periodically circled her.
They were all laughing as they picked up speed, running against the current of the river—unaware that they carried with them just a few of the most noble items from the twentieth century, along with some others that didn’t amount to much at all. But none that would be left behind now for posterity. It was enough to make you think that maybe you can’t put a town in a box, after all. Or inside a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot superstore. There are some people in Paris, Arkansas, who will tell you that theirs was once set down on a place called Main Street. But that place is gone now. Leaving some to wonder that there is nowhere left to put the town but inside children like these.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my editor, Claire Wachtel, for her immediate and unflinching belief in this novel and the ideas that inform it. Her expertise and bold commitment have been a source of confidence and encouragement for me. I also want to acknowledge my agents at ICM, in particular Jennifer Joel, who have represented my debut novel with devotion and care. In addition, I am indebted to Pam Spengler-Jaffee for her steadfast guidance in presenting this book to the public.
Many thanks to my literary lawyer and invaluable friend, Tom Baer, for his wise counsel and meticulous attention to the life of this book. I wish to thank my first writing agents, Bernie Weintraub and the late Stu Robinson, for giving me a hand up. Also my agent of twenty years, Dan Richland, for his enduring friendship and steadfast belief in my writing. And many, many thanks to writer and actress Mary Kay Place for her love and encouragement right from the start. Most especially, I thank my mentor and dear friend, Jeff Sagansky, who has nurtured this novel from its inception and who, more than anyone else, is responsible for my career as a writer.
I am indebted to my good pals and fellow writers, Pam Norris and Paul Clay, for sharing their southern roots and highly original observations that continue to color my own writing. To Calder Clay and Dan Brundidge—many thanks for your memorable stories, which helped to season the male friendships presented herein. Also my deepest affection and appreciation to Michael Plonsker and Bob Myman for their sage advice, loyalty, and friendship. And I want to especially acknowledge my dear and devoted friend Dara Monahan, who did not work on this project, but rather a hundred others that made this one possible. To Hayden McIlroy, so many thanks and much love for your stubborn friendship and for sharing your great adventures. I am also greatly indebted to my own ferocious English teachers, Mrs. Ruth Minetree, Miss Oleta Daniel, and Miss Mamie Brown.
I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved cousin Dr. Carl Judson Launius, who passed away in December 2003. I stand in awe of his courageous life as a quadriplegic and a poet. And I thank him for inspiring the character of Carl Jeter, as well as for the use of his poem “Woman, Burning in the Air.”
I also wish to thank my family and childhood friends for the life that we have shared together and the experiences and stories that so abundantly infuse this novel. In particular, I am indebted to my best friend Nancy Garrett, my Aunt Lou and Uncle Ed, the keepers of Christmas, and to my hometown of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and its cobblestoned Main Street and all of its former inhabitants, including storeowners and courthouse employees, for allowing me to grow up a little like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.
I am grateful to my husband, Harry Thomason, and his brother, Dr. Dan Thomason, for sharing recollections and perceptions of their own upbringing in Hampton, Arkansas. I also thank my brother, R. R. Bloodworth Jr., for his expansive courtroom personality and incomparable ability as a raconteur of small-town life.
My love and heartfelt thanks to Adrienne Crow, my “adopted” little sister, whose razor-sharp research and tireless commitment to this book have been a bedrock of its existence. And special thanks to Douglas Jackson, whose loyalty and caring and uncanny ability to keep everything running smoothly never wavered during the writing of this novel. And my profound gratitude to my assistant, Allen Crowe, who so generously gave up a year and a half of his life to help with this project, whose good and steady disposition kept me going and who has immeasurably enhanced these pages with his brilliant ideas and personal anecdotes.
And finally, thank you to the law firm of Bloodworth and Bloodworth and all of my male relatives who have labored there—first, my grandfather, lawyer and civil rights activist Charles Thomas Bloodworth. I thank him for instilling in me his great love of English literature and for taking a bullet to the chest from the Klan with humor and grace. I also thank his four lawyer sons—from my own father, a reluctant Japanese war crimes prosecutor, to my Uncle Charles, a zealous judge advocate at Nuremberg, for their fine and fierce ideals about mercy and justice, racial equality, and social tolerance. Although, like Main Street, their voices are quiet now, they continue to be an inspirational mainstay of my writing, with my father’s voice, as always, tempered by good whiskey.
About the Author
Linda Bloodworth Thomason, the acclaimed creator of Designing Women and Evening Shade, has written more than two hundred episodes for network television. She is currently writing and directing her first feature film and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, director Harry Thomason.
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Credits
Cover illustration by Honi Werner based on a photograph © by Owaki-Kulla/CORBIS
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LIBERATING PARIS. Copyright © 2004 by Linda Bloodworth Thomason. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Mobipocket Reader August 2005 ISBN 0-06-089520-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloodworth Thomason, Linda, 1947–
Liberating Paris: a novel / Linda Bloodworth.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-059670-8
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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