Pearl

By Kamela Runion Edwards

A black river teases the edges of this town. It winds just close enough to sniff at its sand heaped fields and seared long leaf pines, and that river chooses to move on to some other place. The water is shot through with the darkness of a grave, so that at only two feet you can’t even make out the bottom to know where to step. You might not want to step into it neither, because it’s called the Tar River, and copperheads live on its banks.

As a child, I watched thunderheads, dark and heavy as coal, visit our town, but not stay – clouds different from the people. Rain poured from them and rattled the surface of the Tar until the whole river shook. No longer cloud, the rain was part of the river water then; like it or not, and it took on the jetty stain from the fallen in banks, the toppled over pokeweed, and the bare, rotting birch roots.

Mama’s people came to the river over eighty years ago. They left the Tar at its bend and kept on coming, up the rutty, powdered road, past the panting tobacco patches, beyond the town’s white shuttered courthouse, and shack of a sheriff’s office. On they went, and to the land that they turned and worked and smacked back down and dug up and planted and heaved until it gave up and became their own…