The Last Queen of the Gypsies. William Cobb

      1

       Central Florida

      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

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