The Last Queen of the Gypsies. William Cobb
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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 she looked like a featherless little bird that had fallen from the nest. Nothing was moving, anywhere. She was eleven years old and she had never had a lick of schooling and had never felt the lack of it; her Gypsy familia were migrant fruit pickers, and all she remembered was moving from place to place in one old beat-up truck or car after another. There were too many fruit pickers now, and there wasn’t enough work to keep grits on the table, so they had split off from their band in the hopes of finding something, anything. When they could find a shack to live in they were lucky, and they might stay in one place for more than a day or two. But mostly they just camped and moved. “A Gypsy’s life is moving, always moving,” her father said, “to stay in one place is to die.” There would have been something strange going on if her family had known beforehand what they were having for their next meal: fatback or plain biscuits, dried beans or canned sourdeens and soda crackers, a loaf of white bread dipped in somebody else’s leftover bacon grease, whatever the few pennies of the day’s labor would buy in whatever unpainted country store was nearby to where they were camping for the night. She would look with thirsty longing at the tin advertisements for RC Cola and Nehi orange drink tacked up all over the rough outside walls of the store, knowing that one day she would walk in there and buy all she wanted. As it was, her brother and her sisters would just take what they wanted—and extra food for the table, too—while their father distracted the store owner by bargaining about the price of a can of lard or a pound of bacon.
Minnie started walking down the side of the road, going in the direction her family’s car had gone. She tried to pick out the ruts of their car, but she couldn’t tell one rut from another. She just put one foot before the other, gliding along like she was walking in some dream she was having, not even a nightmare because there were no scary animals or ghosts or tsinivari, or anything that she could see. There was just nothing. She did not register the tangled live oaks beside the road, nor the palmettos, nor the sawgrass, because they were so much a part of her young environment she would have noticed them only if they had not been there.
She walked for a long time, aware only of the padding of her bare feet in the sandy soil. The sun was moving down the sky to her left. She figured when night came she would just curl up in a nest of grass and pray that a snake or an alligator didn’t find her there, and the next day she would go on, because there was nothing else to do. As long as she kept moving, like her father said, she was all right. That was the extent of her plans.
Presently the woods to her right began to thin, and she came to a clearing with an old house set back from the road, a narrow sagging front porch, the house a kind of faded patchy pink from the red it had once been painted. She stopped and looked at the house, at the two black, blank windows on either side of the front door that was standing open, windows that—if the door were a mouth—would be two blind, empty eyes. She could smell the ashes of last night’s fire, rank and sour, so the house was lived in, occupied, and she remembered what her mother had said, that they would feed her like they would a stray dog. She would approach the house and ask for food. They couldn’t do more than turn her away, could they? She started across the sandy yard and a mangy hound came out from under the porch and growled at her. The hound was splotched light and dark gray and its ribs stuck out on both sides. She was not normally afraid of dogs, but she was afraid of this one. He looked like he was nigh on to starved to death. And he didn’t yap, but growled from way down inside him, like the growl was coming from his whole wasted body and not just from his lips and throat and his yellow teeth showing on both sides.
“Nora Lee, hush up,” she heard a voice say, “git your scrawny ass back under that porch.” She had not seen the old man come out onto the porch, because she wouldn’t take her eyes off the dog. He had on what looked like a long john top and overalls and a grizzly gray beard. He grinned at her and his snaggled teeth were stained with tobacco, snuff she figured. His thinning gray hair was wild and sleep-mussed, as though he’d been napping. The old hound whined and went back under the porch, where Minnie could see his eyes, still watching her. She came on into the yard.
“You got any spare leftovers?” she said.
“Say what?” he said, cupping his hand behind his ear like he was going deaf.
“Somethin to give a person to eat,” she said, louder.
The old man scratched inside his whiskers with one finger. He peered at her as though she were standing in fog. “I ain’t never had a pretty little girl hobo come by here lookin for a handout,” he said. “What you doin way off out here?”
“I’m headed to Tallahassee,” she said.
He looked out at the road, all around the yard. “Walkin?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Well, you got a hell of a long way to go,” he said. He was looking her over. “You ain’t colored, are you?” he asked.
“No, sir,” she said.
He seemed to chew the inside of his lip. “You just a little darker than the average little white girl,” he said, “is why I asked.”
Minnie heard a low growl from the dog under the porch. “Ain’t I told you, Nora Lee?” the old man said harshly. He stomped his foot on the floor. “Goddam old dog,” he said, “ought to shoot her, is what.” He kept looking at Minnie, his jaw working slightly like he had a small chaw of tobacco in there.
“Well?” she said impatiently. “You gonna give me somethin to eat, or what?”
“You feisty, ain’t you?” he said. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Minnie Francis,” she said. She knew better than to tell him her Gypsy name. She hardly ever used it, anyway, except in the familia.
“Well,” he said, “come on into the house then.”
“She’s slow, is why,” her mother had said to her father. “She ain’t like the other girls.”
“Ain’t a thing wrong with her except them eyes,” her father had said.
“She’ll poison whoever’s around her. She’s the handmaiden of Beng, is what I’m tellin you. And anyway we can’t afford to feed her.”
“Gypsies don’t do that to their own,” he said.
“They do if they starvin to death. People are so poor they ain’t even got any chickens or pigs to pick up. We can’t find work.”
“We’ll take her on to Tallahassee,” her father said.
“Ain’t nobody in Tallahassee gonna want her, not long as she’s got the smell of hell on her.”
Minnie