The white man was grinning and holding something in his hand.
“It was laying on the floor near the fireplace. Burnt a little ’round the edges, but still clear.” The white man’s voice was excited. “I almost threw it in the trash, but I looked at it and realized it was you.”
Joe sighed. The heat and this man’s babbling were toying with his patience. He took the picture from the man and stared at it. His heart skipped a beat. His breath shortened and then he turned and sat heavily down on the stairs.
It was him. Him and Bertie Mae.
“That’s you, ain’t it?” the man bellowed and slapped his knee in triumph.
Joe stared long and hard at the picture. Stared into the truth he’d tried to avoid the whole time Sugar was there. He didn’t need a picture of him and Bertie Mae to see that she was a clear product of the two of them—he’d thought it the first time he saw her, but had convinced himself otherwise. Now he stood, his stature a bit stooped, and placed the picture safely in the breast pocket of his shirt.
He took the first step toward home, where he would speak the first word of an age-old story and ask, for the first time in his life, for forgiveness from his wife.
While Bernice L. McFadden was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she grew up listening to family stories of Southern living. The roots of the South became her touchstone and the inspiration for Sugar, her first novel. Bernice still lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on her second novel.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
AFTER
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