T-Bone pointed to the picture. “I believe that there is Miss Fannie sitting in that oyster shell.”
The woman in the photo couldn’t have been more than about seventeen years old. Ibby gazed at the long legs and the ample bosom. It was the beauty mark on the side of her face that gave it away. Ibby let out a gasp.
“She sure was something,” T-Bone said after a while.
Ibby couldn’t take her eyes off Fannie. “She sure was” was all she could manage.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Doll’s words ripped through the air. “What are you two doing in here!”
T-Bone scrambled to his feet. “Nothing.”
Doll waved a finger at him. “How’d you get in here, boy?”
“I run across a window. Pried the shingles off. Found this here empty room. I didn’t know . . . I mean, I thought . . .” T-Bone was talking so fast his words ran together like one long sentence.
“And what? You thought what?” Doll snapped. “How long you been up here?”
“Just a minute or two.”
“You better not be lying to me, Thaddeus Trout.”
“I ain’t lying,” T-Bone said as he cast his eyes down.
“Get on out a here.” Doll jerked her head toward the open window. “And don’t let me catch you up here again. You hear?”
“I’m going,” T-Bone said, one leg already out the window.
As Ibby stood up, Doll noticed she was trying to hide something behind her back.
“Now, missy, what you got there?” She motioned for Ibby to hand it over.
“I found it hidden in the little closet in the corner.”
Doll turned the album over in her hand. “Anyone else know about this?”
“Just T-Bone,” Ibby replied.
“Come on out of this room,” Doll said.
Ibby slid past Doll and went over and sat on her bed. Doll came and sat next to her and opened the album.
As Doll was looking through it, Ibby asked, “Have you ever seen this before?”
“No, baby, never laid eyes on it until just now. I suspect it been locked away for a good long while. That turret room’s been locked up ever since Master Balfour fell out the window.”
“That is Fannie in that photo, isn’t it?” Ibby asked after a while.
“Yes, baby, believe it is.”
“Was Fannie really a stripper, like Annabelle Friedrichs said she was?”
Doll glanced over at her. “Wouldn’t exactly call her a stripper. More like an exotic dancer.”
“Did my mama know about Fannie?” Ibby asked.
“No, baby. I don’t even think your daddy knew.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Well, baby. It’s like this. Back when Queenie first started working for Miss Fannie, and Mr. Norwood would go off on one of his stints on the river, Miss Fannie would often take to drinking to keep the loneliness away. Sometimes she let her lips flap.” Doll turned and looked at Ibby. “Now I know what you’re thinking, but don’t go judging too harshly. Things was different back then. Them fools in Washington went and passed a law called Prohibition, making it illegal for people to buy liquor. Then the stock market crashed—people lost their homes, their jobs. Nobody had two wooden nickels to rub together. Your grandmother, she come from a family of sharecroppers. Her daddy had to give up his land, had no money coming in. So Miss Fannie, she had no choice really. She left home at sixteen, all on her own. Now, Miss Ibby, try to imagine how hard that was for a young girl.”
Fannie marched off into the night, away from the sharecroppers’ shack, made of hobbled logs and a rusty metal roof, down a long dirt road cloaked in darkness from the towering pine trees. She’d done it many times before, making her way sleepily toward the sugarcane fields before sunrise. Most mornings she could hear the shuffling of the other field workers and the occasional cough from one of the children trudging solemnly beside their parents. She remembered the first time she’d made this trip, at the ripe age of five. From sunup to sunset, her job was to gather the cut cane and load it onto the waiting donkey carts at the end of the row, weaving and ducking as she went along to avoid the sharp edges of the cane knives being wielded by the field hands.
On this late September morning, Fannie’s muted footsteps were barely distinguishable from the whispering of the pine needles high above her head. She was making an extra effort to be quiet. She didn’t want her father to catch her sneaking away in the middle of the night.