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Peace and Blessings,

Mary Monroe

CHAPTER 1 - MILTON

CHAPTER 1

MILTON

November 1939

WHAT WAS THIS WORLD COMING TO? I DONE HEARD—AND TOLD—a lot of outlandish fibs myself, but this one took the cake.

Me and Yvonne had a lot of enemies, but I never expected one to stoop low enough to finger us with a made-up story about a crime that could have got us lynched or sent back to prison for life. I still couldn’t believe them peckerwood cops busted up the birthday party that me and Yvonne was having to celebrate Willie Frank’s thirty-fifth birthday two nights ago and arrested us for setting up a white girl to be raped.

This was the second time I’d been busted on a bum rap. Thirteen years ago, one of my buddies invited me to go to a grill with him to celebrate my twenty-first birthday. Even though me and him had done a slew of robberies and broke into rich folks’ houses together, he hadn’t bothered to let me know that he was going to rob the place that night. The night cook always worked alone and had been robbed before, so he was prepared. As soon as my buddy pulled out his gun, the cook grabbed a gun from under the counter and shot him dead. I didn’t have nothing to do with that crime, but nobody believed me. I spent the next eight years working on one of the most brutal prison chain gangs in the state. Yvonne had had her troubles with the law, too. Before we met, she’d spent a couple of years locked up for causing an old woman to fall and break her hip when she’d tried to detain Yvonne during a shoplifting incident at a candy store.

We had turned our lives around, got married two years ago, and started a bootlegging business. Prohibition had ended years ago, but a lot of folks still bought alcohol from bootleggers because it was cheaper so we jumped on that bandwagon right away. On top of going into a profitable business, me and Yvonne had even found Jesus. Being on the straight and narrow hadn’t done us much good, though. Because here we was, back in trouble with the law again anyway. I could not believe it. What had I done to be in a pickle for the second time for something I didn’t do? I wondered. God must have been punishing me for all them other crimes I’d got away with. I pushed that thought out of my mind because it was so unpleasant, it gave me a headache.