Louisiana Lament

Lura. Just as sho’ as you’re born. Mmmm-hmmm. Lura. You can take that to the bank.”
    “Really? Lura like you?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Lura like me.
Mmmm-hmmmm
.” She fanned herself with a round cardboard fan attached to a tongue depressor and sporting a picture of Jesus as a white man.
    “And what was her last name?”
    “Well, now, that I don’t know. Never did, probably. But one thing I can tell you—she was a Methodist. Went to that church over by Claiborne. You know the one?”
    A Methodist. What a thing to remember after all those years.
    She left Miz Lura with promises to come again, thinking that if the woman had gone to the trouble of living ninety-two years, she at least deserved a visitor now and then.
    That afternoon she phoned Darryl and reported her progress, feeling more peaceful and in tune with him than she had for a long time. Then she went in the kitchen and started cooking again, for Corey and his wife Michelle.
    Corey had fulfilled the Wallis family destiny. He’d actually embraced one of Miz Clara’s chosen careers for her children, though the lowliest of them. Corey was a mere doctor, but Miz Clara was happy to take what she could get. She was tickled pink in fact, and Talba resented him for making her look bad. But as Talba said in her own defense, in a democratic country, a baroness wasn’t going to get elected president, or even to Congress, and Miz Clara would just have to live with it.
    It was bad enough Corey was the favorite child—at any rate, the one most often bragged on—but Talba didn’t like his wife, either. Why, she wasn’t sure—a kind of reverse snobbery, perhaps. Michelle came from a prominent Creole family, Creole in the sense of light-skinned black. Michelle’s skin was very light indeed, her hair very nearly straight. Was this what bugged Talba, the simple fact that she was so different? Sometimes she thought so. But it wasn’t nearly so simple—it was more that she sensed a deep snobbery and disapproval coming out of Michelle, which in itself wasn’t so bad. But the phoniness surrounding that made Talba plain tired—stuff like trying to compliment Talba on her taste when she clearly hated her showy baroness clothes.
    Or maybe it was nothing deep and psychological at all. Maybe Michelle really was the narrow-minded little airhead Talba thought she was.
    Miz Clara was frying the chicken and making cornbread to go with that and the greens. Talba was supposed to do the rest of the meal, and though she knew Michelle would prefer something like brown rice and a fruit salad, she took a perverse pleasure in mashing the potatoes with a ton of butter and milk and whipping up the peach pie. Well, the pie was for Corey—he dearly loved peach pie.
    “Be sure and make plenty,” Miz Clara said. “Remember, she eating for two.”
    Hope she gains a ton of weight,
Talba thought. The one thing she could identify about Michelle that really did make her jealous was the woman’s snaky body. Formerly snaky—she was about to have the first Wallis grandchild, a fact about which Talba felt deeply ambivalent. (Of course Michelle’s family—the high-and-mighty Tircuits—were probably highly embarrassed about it, which was the irony of it all.) But to Talba, though the Wallises had neither name nor social position, their greater intelligence made them superior.
    “There the doorbell now.”
    Talba was just pulling her pie out. “Go get on your shoes, Mama. I’ll let them in.”
    Miz Clara already had her wig on, but she hated getting out of her blue slippers before she had to. She cleaned white people’s houses for a living; she liked to give her feet a rest when she could.
    Talba had to hug the damn woman; there was no way around it. Michelle’s eyes flicked over her. Talba had on orange jeans and a lime-green T-shirt—not her performance clothes, which Michelle plain didn’t get, but still chosen more or less to irritate her sister-in-law, who wore black slacks and a crisp white blouse.
    Talba said, “You look nice,” and watched Michelle struggle to think of a way to return the compliment.
    “Big as a house,” Corey said, but she wasn’t. She looked like a snake that had recently eaten. “Nice pants, Little Bird.”
    “You mean that ironically, of course.”
    “Of course.” He grinned.
    For a long time, there’d been tension between them; lately, they were feeling easier with one another, and Talba felt she shouldn’t blow it by being mean to his