White Lightning: Truth is a powerful elixir

by Minton Sparks

Overview

"I had been wrestling the place I came from for years."

Losing her salty-dog grandmother "Jebo" rocked Penny Sue's life completely off the rails. But Jebo knew better than to leave without a proper goodbye. She left Penny Sue something that felt as unexpected and potent as Jebo herself.

Four diaries--filled with a lifetime of scratched down family secrets and penetrating poems.

As Penny Sue slowly turns the pages, she unearths the secrets of a tightlipped family that keeps the past blurred and buried. But where is the fourth diary? And who is sending Penny Sue ransom notes with brazen and unorthodox conditions for obtaining it?

As the painful, gorgeous truth in Jebo's diaries works its magic, it frees Penny Sue to see the woman she was meant to be . . . and a realization that sometimes lightning really does strike twice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781418578428
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	04/08/2008
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	712 KB

About the Author

Minton Sparks is a spoken-word poet. Her DVD, Open Casket, recently released in the US and the UK. After having toured with Rodney Crowell, Elizabeth Crook and Will Kimbrough, this year Sparks will participate in the International Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee for the first time.

Read an Excerpt

White Lightning
Truth is a Powerful Elixir

By Minton Sparks Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2008
Minton Sparks
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59554-263-2


Chapter One Doris Jenkins was extremely tender-headed, so I eased the aqua rods out of her hair, careful not to tug too hard else she'd holler out. I liked to trim Doris's ends before rinsing out her perm. The snipped ammonia-smelling wisps of hair were tickling the tops of my feet when the call came through. I had to make it to Momma and Daddy's house as quick as I could. Left Doris stranded in my swivel chair examining the cuticles on her arthritic hands. Poor lady looked like a somber poodle in a black cape sitting there.

"You're gonna have to rinse it and comb it out yourself, Doris; my grandmother's dying." I lifted my jean jacket off the hall tree and jerked open the door.

"Grab you a clean comb out of that blue rinse water."

"What?" She didn't hear me over the noise of the door bells.

"I said, after you rinse, grab you a clean comb out of that blue water in the sink."

I'd left my tennis shoes out in the car, so I had to run barefoot across the parking lot.

* * *

Friday afternoon traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Summer Avenue heading east out of Memphis at five o'clock. One cloud, a misshapen rabbit running at full tilt, hung in the early evening sky. Had plenty of daylight savings time left for me to make it before dark. I took Covington Pike all the way to the Brownsville exit before cutting over to I-40 to save a little time. Turning the corner at the Shell Station, an empty Bud Light rolled up under the brake pedal. Fumbling on the floorboard for the loose bottle, I felt wet drops on my car mat. Blood dripped from beneath a flap of skin on my big toe. Must've sliced it walking to the car. The cut wasn't deep but it was jagged. I grabbed a pair of white gym shorts loose in the backseat to stop the bleeding.

For a split second I thought about pulling over and calling Darrell, but the white paint in the middle of the road kept clicking by. Where's my music? I groped the knobs on the dashboard and found an empty hole where my radio reliably rested. What? My eyes darted back and forth, back and forth, from the road to the dark hole, keeping time with the click click of the blinker light-don't die don't die don't die. I must've tripped my blinker whipping out of the parking lot. I'll be damn. Copper wires dangled like raw nerves from the socket of a pulled tooth. The tooth in this case being my JVC radio, a wedding present from Darrell six years ago. The Reese's Pieces, McDonalds' sacks, and old dream catcher hanging off the rearview mirror, were now evidence at a crime scene. Some idiot had worked a coat hanger or Slim Jim down into the passenger side window and ripped off my radio while I'd been working. The black rubber, formerly sealing the window, was flapping in the wind. Don't die don't die. Once I cut the heater off and got the blinker settled I resigned myself to the high-pitched whine whistling in the vandalized window. For the rest of the ride I couldn't decide what to think about.

Daddy was disappointed when I decided to go to beauty college right out of high school. "Smart as you are, Penny Sue," he said, "you could be the first Pritchett to get a degree."

Even though the focus was on fixing hair and painting nails, I still liked the idea of beauty school. Just saying it made me feel good. Jebo understood. She said she felt the same way about her music.

"I wouldn't take anything for the way my music makes me feel," she'd say. "Not a million dollars, not a great big house, nothing."

Beauty never touched Momma. It was like she was immune to its power. She didn't even like flowers. Can you imagine not liking flowers? When I was a little girl I'd cut out pretty pictures from Ladies' Home Journal magazine and paste them onto card stock as gifts to cheer her up.

"Thank you, hon," Momma'd say flatly, her fingers wiggling down toward my voice for the homemade card, her eyes glued to her television story, As the World Turns. Then without missing any of the drama, she'd spin around on the stool and carelessly slide my picture into the chewing gum drawer beside the kitchen sink.

My artwork often featured what they referred to in the magazine as the "Florida room"-that giant wicker fan, those soft pastel colors, and all that sunshine streaming in the sparkling windows, the housewives in the photos beaming in the midst of all the splendor. Made me question the power of floral throw pillows-could they really cause a mother to smile down at her daughter the way the picture showed?

Momma either neglected beauty or never had an eye for it in the first place. The walls in our house were painted hospital beige all my life. Most of our furniture leaned toward putty blue. I think the colors matched her moods. Damped down.

As I pulled up to the curve, I thought about how that house was full of hideous furniture, all of it overstuffed and slightly flawed. Daddy'd brought home "seconds" every six months or so from his furniture store. He'd deliver them himself-roar up over the curb and into the front yard in the delivery truck-busted the oil pan twice best I remember. He'd honk the horn for Momma, Jebo, and me to come out and help him drag whatever new ugly piece of furniture he'd brought home in the front door.

"Get that blame truck off my grass, Porter," Momma said every time he did it.

Sometimes he'd carry off the existing couch into a storage shed outside, but more often than not he crammed the new piece of furniture right on into that front room that he called our den. I never realized how crowded our house was until I moved out of it.

* * *

Momma's prized grandfather clock boom-chimed as I pushed open the paneled front door. After six strikes, dead silence.

"Daddy?!" I ran and called up the narrow carpeted stairway to the converted attic. "Daddy, you up there?"

Daddy knelt on the floor beside Jebo, dabbing her brow with a cool washrag and holding her paper-thin hand. His white sock poked through a hole worn in the sole of his Weejuns. (He still wore dress pants and a sports jacket around the house though he'd sold Pritchett's Furniture a month ago.) His soft eyes, swollen and red, turned toward my voice.

"Jebo's gone, Penny Sue. Couldn't have been no more than two minutes ago."

In the corner, Momma fidgeted in the white wicker rocking chair beneath pictures of Grand Ole Opry stars Jebo had taped to the dark-paneled walls. An oscillating fan on the bedside table swiveled its neck around the room, a continuous final exhale.

"Is this too summer-y?" Momma looked at me and said. I swear that's exactly what she said, not "Hi," "Bye," or "Kiss my foot," but "Is this too summer-y?" Holding her flower-print skirt out at an angle like she was about to perform a seated curtsy or something. While my Jebo was growing cold in the bottom bunk, beneath a sweetheart quilt. I ignored Momma's comment and went over to hug Daddy's neck.

"I'm so sorry, Daddy." I turned and whispered, "Momma, can you get me a Band-Aid?"

She scurried out the door, happy to have something to do. Over on the far wall, beside the one window in the room, hung Jebo's prize Gibson guitar-the narrowest part of the neck hanging between two nails. I crouched down beside Daddy on the sea of yellow shag carpet, where no doubt silverfish swam, patting his burly back and cautioning him not to rear up and hit his head on the angled attic ceiling. Didn't realize I'd bit through my lip until I tasted the blood. After that, neither of us said another word as he covered Jebo's face with the quilt and then gently traced the pattern with his finger.

Come to think of it, it was in that rich silence that I first heard the sound track come on. I looked around to see if Momma had flipped on the radio, but she'd tiptoed downstairs. The song playing in my head was "The Queen Anne's Revenge," a sorrowful fiddle tune played on mandolin. I like to think that the music gave Jebo comfort as she crossed over to the other side.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from White Lightning by Minton Sparks Copyright © 2008 by Minton Sparks. Excerpted by permission.
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