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would make do. It was her twentieth year, 1928.
    It wasn’t long, of course, before everyone began to realize that the crashing of the stock market that next year wasn’t going to affect just the rich. The poor, like Rosalie, would become even poorer.
    Soon there was no way to make ends meet. She couldn’t find a job to pay for her training and there was no hope of help from home, for if they hadn’t been able to raise their own food on the farm her family would have starved.
    All of which was no more and no less than she expected. She hadn’t really thought that she was going to get away with it, that even with education she could escape. Book learning wouldn’t do it in these desperate times they had now started to call the Depression. Hard work, if she could find it, was what it was going to take simply to survive.
    The next ten, eleven, twelve years ground by. Rosalie clerked in a grocery store six days a week, ten hours a day. She grabbed a bite when she could, often too tired when she got home to her rented room to make herself anything. After all those years over her mother’s stove and in the normal-school kitchen, she’d lost her taste for cooking anyway. Food wasn’t important; she’d rather sleep.
    Her pleasures, an occasional movie, a visit to relatives, were measured out as carefully as spoonfuls of expensive store-bought sugar, pinched as tightly as the pennies she stored up, roll after roll. Rosalie was ever watchful for waste and ruin. There was always the danger that even the sugar could be spilled, the pennies slip into a crack or be snatched away.
    She loved to count the rolls of pennies, watch them grow. When there were enough, she’d lease and maybe someday buy a little corner grocery store across the Coupitaw River in West Cypress. A wholesaler, Zeb Miller, had told her about it, and when the day came he stocked it for her on extended credit.
    “You work too hard, Rosalie, not to have something of your own. My wife said, a woman like you, all alone in the world, we ought to help you all we can.”
    What he didn’t say was that before too long he would present the bill—but she should have known.
    He came making a sales call far too late one night just as she was closing, pressed himself against her as he pinned her behind the counter.
    “Just a little sugar,” he begged. Rosalie could feel the anger that was just on the other side of his plea. He wasn’t going to like it when she said no.
    “I did you a favor. Now can’t you do me one?”
    She loathed herself even as she gave away what she’d been keeping so long, her chastity now coin in a disgusting business transacted in her bedroom in the tiny four-room apartment behind the Norris Grocery and Dry Goods Store. Of course it didn’t stop there. Zeb came to collect what he thought was his due once a week, just as regularly as if it were on his territory schedule. That’s what she was, she thought, part of Zeb Miller’s territory—until she became pregnant. Then he forfeited his leasehold, sent a junior man to take her orders for canned goods and housewares, orders she wrote in a trembling hand. For she was dizzy and sick to her stomach all the time, as much from shame as from the baby.
    Finally she sneaked over to Aunt Georgia’s house in the Quarters one night. The old colored woman was supposed to be able to cure what ailed you, no matter what, they said. Smelling of snuff, the tiny grizzled woman with a rag tied around her head had taken one look in Rosalie’s eyes and muttered, “Unh uh. Cain’t. Too far gone.”
    So Rosalie had gritted her teeth and lain through night after night of sweaty waking nightmares. In the midst of one halfway through her fourth month, she began to hemorrhage. At dawn, alone, she delivered herself of a tiny dead thing in her blood-soaked bed. She allowed herself a few tears and then closed her mind to the whole affair. It was over, buried. She couldn’t afford the luxury of thinking about it, not