PROLOGUE

It was raining real hard the day we buried my daddy. Mama said it was because the angels were crying; but after hours of drenching downpour I doubted the angels were crying tears of joy about seeing Daddy in heaven but instead were just downright upset about having him there.

My father was a diabetic and a drunk—two conditions that don’t get along well with each other. Doc Langley kept telling him the drinking was going to kill him but Daddy never listened. He was playing cards with Beef, Dewey, and the rest of the boys one night when he had what they described as “some sort of fit” and passed out. They thought he’d just drunk too much so they let him be, head down on the table for the next twelve hours while they finished their game. By the time one of the boys got the good sense to think Daddy wasn’t taking a catnap (trust me when I say that taking just twelve hours to figure something out was a record-breaking feat for them), they fetched the doctor, but Daddy was all but gone. Doc said it wouldn’t have done any good if he’d gotten to him earlier—the alcohol poisoned his  bloodstream and threw him into a diabetic coma. He was twenty-eight years old. I was nine.

The day we buried him was the same day I first saw a black face up close. East Tennessee didn’t have slaves during the Civil War, so there was never a large population of black people to settle there. Many lived in Greeneville but in my nine years of life I’d never set foot anywhere but Morgan Hill. My brother, John, and I were riding in the car with Aunt Dora when we got behind an old pickup. Aunt Dora was looking for a way to pass when a tiny head popped up from inside the truck bed. He was a little boy, no older than John, and the color of pure milk chocolate. His head was round and bald and his eyes were as big and black as shiny marbles. He hung on to the tailgate and stared at us. I remembered hearing Mama talk about some coloreds who had moved to town but I’d never seen them, and in that brief moment I found myself gawking at him. He almost lost his footing when the truck lunged over a rut in the road and, as suddenly as he appeared, the little boy smiled real big—the biggest, whitest smile I’d ever seen—and ducked down into the truck before it pulled onto the drive that led to the Cannon farm.

“Well, look at that,” Aunt Dora said. “There’s them coloreds your mama said moved to town. They should shake things up.” I didn’t really know what she meant at the time but all that would change soon enough.

That was the spring of 1947 in Morgan Hill, Tennessee. Morgan Hill is fifty-five miles northeast of Knoxville where it lays claim to the most beautiful rolling, green hills you’ll ever see. Thomas Morgan was the first to settle there in 1810. He lived at the base of a small hill he deemed Morgan’s Hill in honor of himself. The s was eventually dropped. Who knows why. In 1947 Morgan Hill boasted Walker’s (a tiny general market with a single gas pump in front), the Morgan Hill Baptist Church, and the Langley School Building (named after Doc Langley’s great granddaddy), which housed grades one through twelve in one hot, cramped brick building on top of the hill right in the middle of town. We were a poor community; some of the homes, ours included, that were hooked to electricity just three years earlier couldn’t afford the electric bill so we continued to use coal oil lamps. We milked our own cows, butchered our own pigs, grew our own vegetables, and scraped out a living the best we knew how.

Now you might think that what you’re about to read has a great deal to do with my father and growing up poor in east Tennessee, but there is so much more—what captured my heart was the hope of belonging and the dream of family. Fifty-four years have passed and many of the details have blurred, but the memories of the heart are as alive for me today as they were then. The woman I am has a great deal to do with that ninth year of my life. It started out as any other year, nothing extraordinary, but as each day unfolded it became remarkable in every way. There are times when I’m still amazed that we made it through. It has been said that every life has a story. This is my story, although it belongs to so many others, for I was never alone. They were always with me . . . and still are today.