Overview:  A small sleepy town. Harrowing secrets that powerful people want to keep in the dark. Two children who have the gift of vision. Can the secrets stay hidden?

SPIRAL'S PRELUDE:
Duke Ellington's Jump For Joy and Black, Brown and Biege are playing on the juke box. Be-bop has emerged. Ella Fitzgerald is about to embark on her solo career. Outside the pet dog lounges on the front porch. The sun is high and fish is frying in the kitchen. It's the 1940s. Children play in the street. Car horns honk on the other side of town. Shopping malls have not yet been thought of. The day stretches out long. Chores are plenty and arduous. Yet, life seems simple. It is a time of great change and this town is called Greasy Plank.

Welcome . . . . Pull up a chair . . . Come on in . . . .

Listen to Denise read from Spiral

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She had inherited this quiet disease from her mother.

PART I

Chapter One

 

The summer of 1934 was an unusual summer in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the summer children became scared to go outside and play. Although they never said a word, not even amongst each other, the children knew through the many warnings their parents gave them something more fierce, dreadful and evil than ghosts, goblins and imaginary monsters was outside . . . maybe at the park, just around the corner from their family home, perhaps at the edge of the school yard. . . .

"Come 'ere, little girl," a wiry, middle-aged man said while he curled his finger. "Come on, now. I ain't gonna hurt you. I know you're going home from school. It's a long way. Come on with me. I'll give you a ride home so you don't have to walk all that long way."

The freckle-faced girl grinned shyly at the man who was leaning out of the side of a rusty, old pick-up truck smiling and winking at her. A moment later, the little girl sat on the passenger seat with the man. She giggled each time he reached over and tickled her. In between a burst of laughter, the girl looked up at the man and asked, "What's your name?"

PART II

Chapter Two
It was four years later -- August 21, 1938. Tammy Tilson moaned, "God, help me," as she made her way from her bedroom to the bathroom. "Oh, God help me. Everything in front of her was blurry. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She inherited this quiet disease from her mother. The mounting stress in her life was only helping to insure that she would die young. "Oh, God," she whispered while she neared the bathroom, "Who killed that little girl?"

It started yesterday evening when the news aired. Tammy had been in the kitchen cooking when she heard, "News Flash." She turned away from the stove and turned the radio up. "All of Memphis, a little girl is missing. The little girl was outside playing in front of her parents home on Monroe Street when neighbors say they saw a man pick her up in a truck. Before the little girl's neighbors could race to the girl's rescue, the man grabbed her and sped down the street. The little girl hasn't been seen since. . . "

That was last night. Now it was early morning, and men were still being ordered from their homes or right off the street to report to the police precinct. There, angry police officers lobbed a series of questions at them in loud, threatening voices. "Where were you last night? I didn't ask you where you were in the morning, you moron. Don't wanna hear another word about morning. Damn it! I'm asking you where you were between the hours of ten and eleven last night! You work? You got a job? Got your own car? Did you drive that car last night? Where'd you go? For how long? Were you gambling last night, boy? Were you out late last night, boy? Where were you?"

The possible answers to the questions only brought more questions to Tammy. After all, her husband, Philip, was one of the men rounded up early this morning. He told her he had been working at their grocery store when cops came down to the store, their car sirens spinning and blaring, grabbed him by the back of his neck and snapped a pair of tight handcuffs around his wrist. They drove him to the police precinct and questioned him for five long hours.

Tammy glanced at a clock on the wall. It was six o'lock in the morning and her husband had only been home for two hours. Tammy went into the bathroom, closed to the door and sat on the toilet with her head between her knees. Life had never been easy for her. She had grown up the daughter of a woman who took ill with bad pressure when Tammy was only seven years old. Tammy couldn't remember a time when her mother played with her or spent longer than two hours out of bed. Oldest of her eleven siblings, from the age of seven, Tammy grew up taking charge and working as hard around the house and on her family's farm as a grown man. Even now she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't working. Not until she was grown and married did the hard work bring a reward. She and her husband were the first Blacks in Memphis to open their own business at the center of town, a place usually reserved for companies owned by wealthy entrepreneurs and adult children of former politicians who hadn't outgrown riding their father's coattails. They were the first people in town to go door to door asking for signatures to sign a petition to have mysterious house fires on the poor side of town fully investigated. They stood up to the mayor when he told them, "y'all ought to be grateful folks support y'all and allow yaw to thrive in these parts. Truth be told, in a lesser town, y'all would've long been dead . . . shot or something another."
 

Even now she couldn't remember a time when she wasn't working

After she sat on the toilet with her head between her knees for a few minutes, Tammy raised her head and stared out the window. She thought about her husband. He was good to her and their four children. She knew she was the only person he trusted. All his life he made-do and kept his deepest thoughts to himself. He was like a locked door that would only open for her. If not for her, he wouldn't have told a soul he was the one who came upon his mother hanging from the barn loft. He was only six years old. All he knew to do was scream and run. Mothers didn't kill themselves, he told himself while he ran to tell his father to hurry and get his mother down from the top of the barn. His mother wasn't dead. She was just swinging in the air. It was all so easy to believe until his father raced back to the barn with him. The tortured look on his father's face and the hard groans moving up out of his father's mouth made him step back and hide behind his father's thick legs. After he told Tammy the story when they were first married, he never said the words 'my mother' again. To Tammy it was as if her husband had no mother. It was as if he was born straight out of his father's rib.

Seconds later, when Tammy heard her daughters talking in their bedroom, she stopped recalling the past, stood from the toilet and washed her face. She'd keep moving. She'd stand with her shoulders heightened and walk like she didn't fear anything. For her children, she would.
 

She was the one who talked Philip into purchasing the large grocery store they bought seventeen years ago.

"It's gonna be all right," she repeated to herself until she entered her bedroom and saw her husband, Philip, wrestling in his sleep. Her husband had never been in trouble with the law. The cops had no right to embarrass him in front of their customers, handcuff him and force him to go with them to the precinct, a place where justice was never allowed for the poor or Blacks. While Tammy watched Philip try to sleep, she thought back to their first grocery store. If not for the store, her husband and she would just be farmers who would never break even despite how many hours a day they worked. She almost smiled. She was the one who talked Philip into purchasing the large grocery store they bought seventeen years ago. She didn't even argue when he demanded that the store be named after his kin. Two weeks later the store was torched and burned to the ground. Tammy ran after the hooded men in the trucks and two police cars as they laughed and cursed their way back down the street, away from the burning store. You bastards! God'll get you for this! God'll get you for this!" Sheshouted while she threw heavy rocks at the trucks and cars. She didn't stop throwing rocks until she heard one of the car windows shatter.

"We'll get another store," Philip told her that night while he sat next to her on the front porch cradling a shotgun in his lap.

"Do you know how much money we are out? Insurance company ain't gonna give us no money for the store. They'll say it was our fault the store burned to the ground."

"I know. I know." He reached out and tapped her hand. "We'll build a new store. And if those ignorant asses burn this one down, they're gonna get a load of what's in this here shotgun."

With the help of men in the community, they did build another store, nearly twice the size of the first one. The grand opening of Tilsons Grocery Store in Greasy Plank, a small town in Memphis, Tennessee's Shelby County, was the first story on the cover of Memphis Prize, the city's only Black newspaper at the turn of the century.
 

A vase of yellow tulips decorated the center of the large newly hewn table. The flowers seemed like a decoy, a sign of how much effort Tammy was putting into convincing her family that everything was all right. Above the flowers, sunrays came through the windows with a strong glare, and yet an ominous foreboding pointed at the family.

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