Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

She laid out her tables with white cloths, and in the summertime, even put sweet-smelling night-blooming jasmine in glass jars right there in the center. And it wasn’t like Miz Zeola’s girls were mud-duck ugly. While most of them didn’t have the bright color and light eyes, her brown-skinned girls were more than fair-to-middling pretty. The madam trained them to keep a man in ecstasy longer than any other whorehouse in all of Nashville. John was sure of that by all those pleased moans and grunts he heard coming from the rooms upstairs when he went to the pantry door to pick up the dirty dishes. John had known better than to sample his employer’s wares—that had gotten many a country boy fired right quick—so he wasn’t sure what the women looked like under their fancy dresses, but he guessed their stuff couldn’t have been any finer than his Annalaura’s.
     
     
    A ride on the horse-drawn trolley cost five cents. Since a nickel was hard come by, John opted to walk to Miz Zeola’s. The twelve blocks gave him plenty of time to think about his wife. She hadn’t been his pick right off, of course. At twenty-two, he was still too wild. He hadn’t reached full-grown manhood when he first discovered the effect he had on women. Working the tobacco like he did had given him the muscles to fill out his tall frame. His older brother, who sheltered him after the death of their parents, always told him that he was far better with words than was safe for a black man. And when that first married woman started batting her eyes in his direction when he turned on his smile, he went straight home and got out the broken bit of that looking glass his sister-in-law used for her own primping. He practiced showing those teeth for hours.
    When he used his “Yes, ma’ams,” and “No, ma’ams,” together with his well-practiced smile, along with those words that came easy to him, just about every colored woman in Lawnover fell all over herself trying to make nice. He was more than happy to accommodate, though he had never been a fool. John Welles wasn’t about to get shot for messing with another man’s woman. He poured on the charm for the ladies but always knew where to stop the dime. Trouble was, it didn’t taken him long to go through most of the eligible women, old or young, in Lawnover. Soon, he stepped on over to Clarksville and the “sportin’ houses.” Now, there was action. The whorehouses in that town were about as rough as the back end of a barn compared to Miz Zeola’s, but those old rusty country girls had taught him many a new trick in the back room of those juke joints. And then he’d met Annalaura.
    Met wasn’t exactly the right word since he’d watched her grow up. She was seventeen and still living on the Thornton place with her Aunt Becky when he finally took serious notice of her. There she stood in her Sunday best with those buttons across the front of her dress ready to pop. She was the only woman in the room who wasn’t falling all over him. He’d taken her a long way since those days. After they married, he’d even shared a few of his whorehouse secrets with Annalaura. Of course, he had sense enough not to tell her where he’d learned those things, but that was easy since she’d come to the marriage bed with no idea of what to do with a man. At first, he thought he could talk her into anything. He smiled at the remembrance of her frowned-up face when he reminded her that all wives were expected to do what their husbands wanted in bed. She’d gone along with most of it, but hardheaded Annalaura had drawn a quick and deep line in the dirt over some of what he asked. Neither the devil nor her husband could make her cross over it. The grin on his face was wide as he reached the brothel’s screened-in back porch.
    He knocked on the big oak kitchen door at Miz Zeola’s. Most folks who had heavy front doors with fancy carvings and curlicues all over them had knotty pine, skinny-as-a-stick back doors. Not Miz Zeola. She always kept her kitchen door locked and insisted that it be made of two-inch solid oak with strong brass hinges. She let everybody know that she didn’t want anybody coming through her doors, either front or back, without her knowing exactly who he or she might be.
    “Yokel, ain’t you early?” Big Red, Miz Zeola’s head cook, was already elbow deep in flour and lard making the crusts for the pies when he undid the lock.
    By the smell of it, at least two peach