Read Online Dixie Diva Blues by Virginia Brown - Free Book Online Page A

Bitty is always an amusing pastime.
    “Well,” Carolann said after a moment more of sitting in the car and staring out the windows produced no new solution, “ I’ll try the front door. If this is the right place, surely someone will be here to greet us, give us keys, or whatever. Right?”
    “You’d think so,” I said, and heard Gaynelle give an exasperated sigh.
    “If they are, they must have walked or flown in,” she said. “No other cars.”
    “Maybe the parking area is behind the shack?” Carolann suggested.
    I barely refrained from banging my head against the car window. If Bitty didn’t give up and admit she’d turned down the wrong road, we would most likely be found in a day or two, four stranded women still arguing about whether or not we’d made a wrong turn. I cleared my throat and tried for tactful.
    “Bitty. It’s dark. And storming. Your car is stuck in the mud, and we didn’t bring enough candy bars to last us through the winter. So here’s the deal: admit nothing. Just call Triple A and get us towed out of the quicksand.”
    Bitty looked at me, glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the shack. Rain beat on the car in a steady drum. Finally Bitty took out her cell phone. She punched a few buttons, and when someone answered said, “Triple A? I’m stuck in the mud in Clarksdale . . .”
    We arrived at the real Shack Up Inn within forty-five minutes. Apparently tow trucks are a thriving business in Clarksdale, because one showed up within ten minutes of Bitty’s call. He pulled the heavy Mercedes out of the mud hole and onto firm asphalt, and gave us directions. We were only off by about a mile.
    “My poor Franklin Benz,” said Bitty, looking at her mud-spattered car when we finally got out in the right parking lot. She names her cars after settlement checks from her ex-husbands. She has three cars and a house, all paid for with divorce money. It’s not that she doesn’t have the stamina to stick to her marriage vows; it’s just that she marries the wrong kind of man. Jackson Lee is the first man she’s been close to that doesn’t want something from her other than fidelity and love. By now, Bitty is understandably skittish about marriage. I don’t blame her. My one and only marriage ended with a fizzle instead of a bang like Bitty’s last divorce, and it was still traumatic.
    “All it needs is a good washing,” I comforted Bitty, “and the Benz will be as good as new.”
    She sighed. “I know. It’s just sad to see it so mistreated.”
    “Come on, Bitty.” Gaynelle held out her hand. “I hear the tinkle of ice cubes. They’re playing our theme song.”
    While Gaynelle ushered Bitty toward the door of the Cotton Gin and the source of music and libations, Carolann and I met with one of the employees, and then headed off carrying our overnight bags and sacks of groceries. The shack is situated beyond the cotton gin and near what may have once been a barn; tall shapes like silos loomed against the night sky beyond. The Robert Clay shack was ours for the night; it has peeling red paint and a sagging front porch, and like all the other shacks, a tin roof. Rain hissed lightly against metal as we stepped up onto the porch.
    As Rayna had said, there were about nine or ten shacks in a crescent line behind the old cotton gin. I had seen a sign at the plantation entrance—a stone’s throw from Highway 49—that named the Hopson Plantation as the first in the country to be fully automated from the planting of cotton to the harvesting and baling of it. That was back in the 1930s. I guess that somewhere down the line someone had decided it was more fun to fix up and rent out shacks than it was to plant cotton and be at the mercy of Mother Nature for a paycheck.
    “This is a fabulous idea,” Carolann said. “I wish I’d thought of it. Aren’t these cute?!”
    She was right. Our cabin was decorated in shabby chic/poverty. Something that a prosperous sharecropper might have.