Chicago. She’s heard the craving out loud, the tales of where money runs like water and after you arrive it takes—what, a minute?—to forget that Alabama ever held sweet for you.
She wants to find a factory that works ritual into her knuckles. She’s never heard a siren razor the dark. She wants Lucky Strikes, a dose of high life every Friday, hard lessons from a jukebox. Wants to wave bye to her mama. All she needs is a bus ticket, a brown riveted case to hold her gray dress, and a waxed bag crammed with smashed slices of white bread and fat fried slabs of perch. With the whole of her chest, she knows what she’s been running toward.
Apple cheek and glory gap-tooth fills the window of the Greyhound. For the upcoming, she has hot-combed her hair into shiver strings and donned a fresh-stitched skirt that wrestles with her curves. This deception is what the city asks. Her head is full and hurting with future until the bus arrives. She stumbles forth with all she owns, wanting to be romanced by some sudden thunder. She tries not to see the brown folks—the whipcloth shoe shiners, the bag carriers—staring at her, searching for some sign, aching for a smell of where she came from.
How does a city sway when you’ve never seen it before? It’s months before she realizes that no one knows her name. No one says Annie Pearl and means it.
She crafts a life that is dimmer than she’d hoped, in a tenement with walls pressing in hard and fat roaches, sluggish with Raid, dropping into her food, writhing on the mattress of her Murphy bed. In daytime, she works in a straight line with other women, her hands moving without her. Repeat. Repeat. When her evenings are breezy and free and there is jiggling in her purse, she looks for music that hurts, cool slips of men in sharkskin suits, a little something to scorch her throat. Drawn to the jukebox, she punches one letter, one number, and “This Bitter Earth” punches her back, with its sad indigo spin. Dinah settles like storm over her shoulders. And she weeps when she hears what has happened to homemade guitars. How they’ve forgotten to need the Southern moon.