Lone Women by Victor LaValle EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Victor LaValle
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Genre: Sisters Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Publish Date: March 28, 2023
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who live with shame, and
those who die from it. On Tuesday, Adelaide Henry would’ve called herself
the former, but by Wednesday she wasn’t as sure. If she was trying to live,
then why would she be walking through her family’s farmhouse carrying an
Atlas jar of gasoline, pouring that gasoline on the kitchen floor, the dining
table, dousing the settee in the den? And after she emptied the first Atlas
jar, why go back to the kitchen for the other jar, then climb the stairs to the
second floor, listening to the splash of gasoline on every step? Was she
planning to live, or trying to die?
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There were twenty-seven Black farming families in California’s Lucerne
Valley in 1915. Adelaide and her parents had been one of them. After today
there would only be twenty-six.
Adelaide reached the second-floor landing. She hardly smelled the
gasoline anymore. Her hands were covered in fresh wounds, but she felt no
pain. There were two bedrooms on the second floor: her bedroom and her
parents’.
Adelaide’s parents were lured west by the promise of land in this valley.
The federal government encouraged Americans to homestead California.
The native population had been decimated, cleared off the property. Now it
was time to give it all away. This invitation was one of the few that the
United States extended to even its Negro citizens, and after 1866, the
African Society put out a call to “colonize” Southern California. The
Henrys were among the hundreds who came. They weren’t going to get a
fair shot in Arkansas, that was for damn sure. The federal government
called this homesteading.
Glenville and Eleanor Henry fled to California and grew alfalfa and
wild grass, sold it to cattle owners for feed. Glenville studied the work of
Luther Burbank and in 1908 they began growing the botanist’s Santa Rosa
plums. To Adelaide the fruit tasted of sugar and self-determination.
Adelaide had worked the orchards and fields alongside her daddy since she
was twelve. Labored in the kitchen and the barn with her mother for even
longer. Thirty-one years of life on this farm. Thirty-one.
And now she would burn it all down.
“Ma’am?”
Adelaide startled at the sound of the wagon man.
“Good Lord, what is that smell?”
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