The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

by Edward Kelsey Moore

group of town leaders led by Alfred Ballard—whose house Barbara Jean would one day own—decided to build a ten-foot-high, five-mile-long stone wall to protect the wealthy whites who lived downtown when the race war they expected finally came. Though further north,

poor whites were on the east side of the wall with the blacks, but the town leaders figured they could fend for themselves. When the new inhabitants proved less frightening than predicted, commitment to the wall project faded. The only section of Ballard’s Wall that made it to the full ten-foot goal was the portion that divided Leaning Tree from downtown. The rest of the proposed wall ended up as isolated piles of rocks, creating a dotted dividing line through town.

But the history taught in school and what black children were taught at home took off in radically different directions at the subject of the naming of Leaning Tree.

In school, they learned that early settlers called the southeast area of town Leaning Tree because of a mysterious natural phenomenon—something about the position of the river and the hills—that caused the trees to lean toward the west. At their dinner tables, the children of Leaning Tree were told that there was no mystery at all to the crooked trees.

Their parents told them that, because downtown was on higher ground, Ballard’s Wall cast a shadow over the black area of town. The trees there needed sunlight, so they bent. Every tree that didn’t...

and visibly tilted. A name was born. Barbara Jean’s house was on the worst street in the worst neighborhood in Leaning Tree. Her street was only eight blocks from Clarice’s house, only five from Odette’s. But as they turned onto Barbara Jean’s block, Clarice surveyed her surroundings and thought ...

resemblance it held to the landscaped, middle-class order of her street or the quaint charm of Odette’s old farmhouse, with its fanciful octag...

Noisy, nappy-headed children ran naked over lawns that were mostly dirt accented with patches of weeds. Barbara Jean’s house was the best on her block, but that wasn’t saying much. It was a little brown shack whose paint had faded to a chalky tan color. This house was only better than

its neighbors because, unlike every other house on the street, the glass in all of its windows seemed to be intact. Odette climbed up the two steps from the walkway and rang the bell. No one answered, and Clarice said, “Let’s just leave it on the stoop and get going.” But Odette started banging on the door with her fist. A few seconds later, the door opened just wide enough for Clarice and Odette to see a big man with red eyes and blotchy, grayish-brown skin staring at them. His nose was flat and crooked, as if it had been broken a few times. He had no discernible neck, and most of his face was occupied

This time Odette said, “Ouch, quit it.” “Why did you do that? We could’ve been out of here and gone.” Odette said, “We can’t just leave her here with him.” “Yes, we can. This is her house.” “Maybe, but we’re not leaving her alone with him right after she buried her mother.” There was no use arguing with Odette once she got a notion stuck in her head, so Clarice said nothing more. It was clear to her that Odette had looked at this cat-eyed, stray girl and set her mind on adoption. When Barbara Jean emerged from her

cramped cell, she was wearing a glittery

red blouse and the same black skirt. Her hair, which had been pulled back and pinned up, now fell around her shoulders in waves, and she had applied lipstick to match her blouse. She may have stun...

The man came back into the room. He said, “You look just like your sweet mama,” and Barbara Jean looked at him with a hatred so strong that Clarice and Odette felt it like a hot wind sweeping through the room. As the man fell into his chair and reached for the bottle, Barbara Jean s...

before Clarice and Odette had begun their farewells to the bleary-eyed man at the table. Outside, they stood in front of the house looking at each other. Clarice couldn’t stand the silence. She lied the way she’d been taught to do after meeting someone’s unpleasant relative. “Your stepfather seems nice.” Odette rolled her eyes. Barbara Jean said, “He’s not my stepfather. He’s my mother’s … He’s nothing is what he is.” They walked about a half a bl...

But you don’t have to take me anywhere. I can just walk around for a while.” She looked at her watch, a dime-store accessory with yellow rhinestones surrounding its face and a cracke...

be asleep in another couple hours. ...

Odette she said, “Thank your mother for making the chicken. It was real nice of her.” Odette hooked an arm under Barbara Jean’s elbow and said, “If you’re gonna walk, you might as well walk with us. You can meet the latest victim Clarice’s bo...

tries to get down her pants.” “Odette!” Clarice screamed. Odette said, “It’s true and you know it.” Then she tugged Barbara Jean in the direction of the All-You-Can-Eat. “Oh, and Barbara Jean, ...

welling up of Christian sympathy after gaining a deeper understanding of the difficulties of Barbara Jean’s life—her dead mother, her dreadful neighborhood, her sad little hole of a bedroom, that man Vondell. And those things would one day be true. Within months, Clarice’s mother and cousin would learn that any petty criticism or harsh judgment of Barbara Jean would be met with icy silence or an uncharacteristically blunt rebuke from Clarice. And Clarice would eventually confess to Odette that she felt tremendous guilt about having been the source of many of the rumors about Barbara Jean. Her cousin might have started the rumor

At

seventeen, Clarice was unable to see the true extent to which she was ruled by a slavish devotion to her own self-interest, but she understood that her primary reason for becoming friends with Barbara Jean was that it had benefited her. On the night she and Odette dropped off that putrid-smelling chicken, Clarice discovered that Barbara Jean’s presence was surprisingly

conve...

Clarice made a mental note to give Richmond hell later for bringing him. James was the worst of all the regular guys Richmond had scrounged up for Odette. He was nice enough, and he’d had a fondness for Odette ever since she’d beaten two teenage boys bloody when she was ten after they’d called him “Frankenstein” because of that ugly knife scar on his face. But he was, Clarice thought, the most boring boy on the face of the earth. He barely made conversation at all. And when he did, it was pathetic. The only topic James talked with Odette about at any length was

her

mother’s garden. He worked for Lester Maxberry’s lawn care business and he came to their dates armed with helpful hints for Odette to pass along to Mrs. Jackson. James was the only boy Clarice knew who could sit in the back of a car...

about nothing but compost...

Worst of all, James was always exhausted. He had to be at work early in the mornings, and he took classes at the university in the afternoons. So just when the evening got going, James would start nodding off. Odette would s...

Clarice had her hands full with Richmond. He was back to his cheating ways with a vengeance. It was like the old days. Richmond catted around, not

Mrs. Roosevelt and the drinking. That woman was at her flask morning, noon, and night.) Mrs. Roosevelt and Mama sat in the corner of the examining room during my checkup and during the tests that came afterwards. They came with me again a week after that first appointment and listened in as my doctor, Dr. Alex Soo, told me that I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

And Eric, he was as quiet as his father, and no one but me, who had listened over the phone as he cried his heart out over lost love more than once, knew that he felt everything twice as deep as his brother or sister.

From the moment I told the Supremes I was sick, Clarice would try to take

over my life. First she’d want to take charge of my medical treatment. Then she’d get on my very last nerve by trying to drag me t...

Barbara Jean would just get all quiet and accept that I was as good as dead. Seeing her grieving for me ahead of time would bring back memories of all she’s lost in her ...

My brother, in spite of being raised by our mother, had grown up and become a man who believed that women were helpless victims of our emotions and hormones. When he found o...

child and pester me just like he used to when we were children. And James. I thought of the look I used to see on James’s face in that horrible, gray-yellow emergency room light whenever one of the kids suffered some childhood injury. The smallest pain for them meant despair for him. Whenever I came down with a cold or flu, he was at my side with a thermometer, medicine, and an expression of agony on his face for the duration. It was like he’d pooled up all the love and caring his father had denied him and his mother and was determined to shower it onto me and our children ten times over.

How clRice...bj ..james woulf react if tjey knew about odette'snon hodgkknszhmphboma so... She wouldn't tell them

made up my mind right then that I’d keep this whole thing to myself for as long as I could.

Glory skipped her husband’s funeral service

to meet with a real estate lawyer. She moved next door to her sister Beatrice in an Arkansas retirement village a week later.

Clarice had no doubt Veronica would show up on her doorstep pleading for a handout sometime in the near future.

Richmond said, “Sharon’s marrying Ramsey Abrams’s boy?” When Veronica nodded yes, Richmond looked right and left to see if anyone was within earshot and then whispered, “I don’t want to talk bad about the boy, but does Sharon know about the stuff with him and the ladies’ shoes?” “Not that Abrams boy,” she snapped. “Sharon’s marrying the other brother.” Clifton, the Abrams boy now engaged to Sharon, had spent his teenage years getting stoned and committing petty theft. As an adult, he had spent more

Clarice was reminded then of what she found most insufferable about Veronica. Her cousin had an awful way of making her look at her own worst traits just when she didn’t want to see them. Whenever Clarice was around Veronica, she had to acknowledge that in Veronica she saw herself. It frightened her a little to think that the primary difference between them was the moderating influence of Odette and Barbara Jean.

After Lester’s business was sold and all of the money issues had been seen to, Barbara Jean decided that she needed some sort of regular activity to give shape to her days. So she found a job. Then she found another. And another. All three were volunteer positions; still, it was the first time

Every Friday morning, Barbara Jean went to First Baptist and did office work. She answered the phone, filed and made copies, all the things she had once done for Lester when his business first took off. After the office closed, she went downstairs to the church school and led Bible study class for new members. Even her pastor, Reverend Biggs, was impressed with Barbara Jean’s biblical knowledge. Finally, she thought, all of those drunken nights in her library with Clarice’s

There were many days when her two sentences guiding the museum guests to their waiting place beneath the flag were the only words to cross her lips from sunrise to sunset. Those days were her favorites. She saw the other

Supremes two or three times a week, and that was all the conversation she felt she could handle. Walking back to her house from the museum, she followed Plainview Avenue as it rose toward the center of town and the intersection of Plainview and Main, where her house stood. If she turned her head to the left and peered downhill, she had a perfect view of the remnants of Ballard’s Wall and the entrance to Leaning Tree Estates, as the housing development that now occupied her old neighborhood was called. One early November day as she left the museum for home, she looked

This is barbara jean

She had done her best to adapt. In the three months since Lester’s death, she had organized her time so that she was on the move nearly all day, every

But now, studying those crooked, old trees, Barbara Jean had to admit to herself that she had failed to thrive. No matter how activity-filled her days were, it was her nights that owned her. That night, she entered her fine home and heard the voice of her mother whispering bad advice and viperous recriminations in her ear. And after managing to fall asleep in her bed, she was wide awake within an hour, believing that she had felt Lester shift positions in the bed and then heard his congested cough coming from the bathroom. Was it pneumonia again?

Adam played up there that night just as he had thirty years earlier. The dark, cluttered storage rooms and mazes of filing cabinets held no menace for an adventurous boy who was never frightened, even when he should have been. The sound of Adam humming to himself in the

As soon as she nodded off, they returned. Loretta, Lester, Adam, and now Chick.

By the start of her senior year of high school, Barbara Jean was spending most of her time with Clarice and Odette. She hung out at one of their houses every day after school, doing homework, listening to records, and gossiping until at least eight. That way, when she got home she could tiptoe past Vondell, who was pretty much guaranteed to be passed