The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

The sky had looked threatening when Lizzy came to work that morning, so she had brought her umbrella. There was no sign of rain clouds now, however. So Lizzy put on her yellow straw hat (the color exactly matched her sunny yellow print dress), gathered her newspaper column pages and the folders, and went downstairs. Charlie Dickens wasn’t there, but she left the pages with Ophelia, who took them to her Linotype machine at once.

As Lizzy turned to leave the newspaper office, she saw the stack of ready print pages that had just arrived on the Greyhound bus from the print shop in Mobile. These pages—which would be incorporated with the local news in Charlie’s print run—were already made up with the latest national and world news, sports, comics, and women’s news. The headline: Roosevelt Promises New Deal.

Curious, she paused and skimmed the article, but if the writer ever spelled out what a “new deal” was, she didn’t see it. She hoped it wasn’t going to be like the promises Hoover made when he was campaigning back in 1928, telling voters that presidents Harding and Coolidge (who also happened to be Republicans) had “put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot’ and a car in every backyard.” Hoover promised more of the same. “The slogan of progress is changing from the full dinner pail to the full garage,” he had said, back in 1928.

A full garage, Lizzy thought a little wistfully—and she was still riding her bicycle. Not much progress, was there? As if to underscore that thought, as she went out the door, she glanced down Franklin Street and saw an old Keystone iron-wheeled farm wagon in front of Hancock’s Grocery. It was hitched to a scarred brown mule, patiently flicking its ears and tail against the flies. A woman wearing a slat bonnet and a feed sack dress waited patiently on the wagon seat, a baby in her arms, a diaper over the tiny face to shield it from the sun. A small boy, towheaded, barefoot, shirtless and dressed in ragged overalls, sat in the back of the wagon with a black and white dog.

Parked beside the wagon was a rusty old Model T Ford. Mr. Betts, the Ford’s owner, had made it into a truck by the simple expedient of taking out the backseat and the whole back end of the car and adding a big wooden box that stuck out over the back bumper like the bed of a truck. The box was filled today with a wooden crate of live chickens, a goat with its legs trussed, and a bushel of shelled corn.

And next to Mr. Betts’ old Ford was Mr. Elias’ older brown Packard, which lacked the passenger-side door, as well as both front and back bumpers. An old leather belt was slung across the missing door to keep Mrs. Elias from tumbling out when her husband turned a sharp corner.

Lizzy shook her head. There might be plenty of new cars in the garages in Mr. Hoover’s neighborhood, but not here in Darling—and not many full dinner pails, either. What would it take to get things moving forward again, even if Governor Roosevelt were elected? What could one man—even somebody as powerful as the president of the United States—do in the face of such a difficult situation? Mr. Hoover was a decent, good-hearted man who cared about people. Surely he would have changed things if he could—but he hadn’t. Mr. Moseley said it was because members of his party wouldn’t let him put any spending programs in place to boost the economy, but Lizzy didn’t understand that. She had heard that the government was in debt to the tune of some sixteen billion dollars, an almost unimaginable sum. How could Mr. Hoover spend money the country didn’t have?

Lizzy was still pondering this question as she walked down the dim courthouse corridor and into the clerk’s office, where she put the folders on the desk. Donna Sue, the judge’s clerk, turned around from a file cabinet and asked if Liz had heard that Myra May and Violet had hired a new cook.

“I knew they were holding auditions,” Lizzy replied, “but I didn’t know they had found somebody already. That was quick. Have you tried her food yet?”

“I stopped in there this morning,” Donna Sue said. She was a hefty woman who ordered her dresses from the Montgomery Ward “stout ladies” pages and was obviously enthusiastic about food. She paused, an oddly puzzled expression on her round face.

“It was the strangest thing, actually,” she went on. “Last night, I dreamed about my mama’s grits and sausage casserole. She used to make it for Sunday breakfasts, and it was always so good. It’s my favorite memory of her. When I woke up from the dream, I could almost taste that casserole.” She closed her eyes and licked her lips.