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The Last Queen of the Gypsies
A novel by William Cobb
NEWSOUTH BOOKS
Montgomery | Louisville
Also by William Cobb
Coming of Age at the Y
The Hermit King
A Walk Through Fire
Harry Reunited
Somewhere in All This Green
A Spring of Souls
Wings of Morning
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright © 2010 by William Cobb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-242-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-062-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010015024
eBook conversion by Brian Seidman
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
For
Jonathan
and
Sara Beth
Contents
1 - Central Florida, November 1932
3 - Central Florida, November 1932
6 - The Panhandle, Florida, July 1964
7 - New York City, December 1942
8 - South Alabama State Fair, September 1964
9 - In Northern Virginia, April 1943
10 - Gwinnett County, Georgia, October 1964
11 - Near East Dublin, Georgia, June 1949
12 - Coastal Georgia Fairgrounds, November 1964
13 - Piper, Florida, December 1949
14 - Coastal Georgia Fairgrounds, November 1964
15 - Piper, Florida, January 1950
16 - Fort Myers, Florida, Winter 1964
18 - Fort Myers, Florida, Winter 1964
1
November 1932
They put her out along a deserted road, put her out the way you would an unwanted puppy or a croker sack full of kittens that you couldn’t quite get up your nerve to throw in a creek and drown. Just drove off and left her. For one thing, she had one green eye and one blue one, which her mother knew from the ancient times was bad luck. And the old gajo preacher at the migrants’ camp where they had been living for the last six months said it was a mark of the devil to have mismatched eyes. And she was another mouth to feed, which, in that passel of children, stair-stepped from three years old up to sixteen, didn’t make that much difference, as far as she could see. But her mother obviously didn’t feel that way. “She’s the one too many mouths to feed, I’ve done told you,” her mother had said. “Then put me out, too,” her big sister, Evalene, had screamed. “It ain’t right, Mama!”
Minnie could still hear her sister’s protesting as they went on down the road, the old Ford roadster shaking and trembling over the ruts in the dirt road, half-heartedly paved with crushed oyster shells. The other children were crying, too, trying to jump out of the car, and Minnie could hear her mother wrestling with them, yelling at them, biting off her words like she was chomping at an apple, and Minnie could see in her mind’s eye her father, his stained old black felt hat jammed down low on his head, nearly covering his intense black eyes, just staring straight ahead down the road between the tall saw grass and twisted live oaks to where the road went on toward Tallahassee, where they were headed, her father looking for work, any kind of work, not just fruit picking because there was too much competition now he said. Or at least find some bread lines. But you could get killed in a bread line if you were a Gypsy. Hungry gaje folks were dangerous. Minnie stood there thinking about her father getting killed in a bread line. “Good riddance,” she said out loud, to the live oaks alongside the road. It was not clear even to her whether she meant the eventuality of her father getting killed in a bread line or her family going on down the road, leaving her there.
“Somebody’ll take her in,” her mother had said, “feed her. Folks do feed a stray dog that comes up in the yard.”
“Not if they a Gypsy and they got one green eye and one blue one,” her father had grunted, never once taking his eyes off the road in front of them; you could barely hear him over the rattling of the falling down car going so slowly over the ruts the dust could wind up and around and catch up with them, engulfing them in their own leavings.
It took her family a long time to disappear, the road flat and off toward the horizon, straight as the edge of a well-honed axe, like something scratched in a sand dune with a stick, and when they dropped from view, almost like the sun going down, their noise went with them, until there was nothing left but a final little puff of dust. Soon that, too, settled back to the earth and left the air, the space, around Minnie silent, so quiet she wasn’t sure there was any air about her at all, thought that maybe she had died and this was the hush of hell, the place that old crazy preacher talked about, scaring her and her brothers and sisters. Her father didn’t believe in the white folks’ hell, nor their heaven either; he was mad at God and everybody else. Her mother was scared of their God and everybody else. She made them pray to the Gypsy God. She whipped them often, and screamed at them. She wasn’t somebody you could like very much.
Minnie stood very still. There was a chill in the air and she could feel it through the thin cotton dress she wore, a hand-me-down from her older sisters, washed so threadbare the pattern of interlocking flowers was barely visible. She didn’t have on anything else but her underpants. She had no coat. She was so skinny and bony