Whistling Past the Graveyard

Starla has a nightmare where Jimmy Sellers and a bear chase her. She wakes up sick, and Eula and Starla approach a tiny, dilapidated home. Two Black girls peer out the window, but a man and a woman answer the door and turn them away. Eula and Starla enter an abandoned tiny home, and Starla wonders why the Black family didn’t help her. Eula says that it’s for the same reason white people wouldn’t help her—people tend to reduce others to their skin color.

Starla and Eula find another house with a man on the porch. The man doesn’t have aspirin. He says that he lets God heal him; however, he mentions that there’s a drugstore nearby. They ask another woman for help, but she refuses. A Black woman with white hair, Miss Cyrena Jones, takes them in and lets Starla sleep on her couch.

Cyrena doesn’t have children, but she teaches grades 3, 4, and 5 at the elementary school. As the school is tiny, the school combined the grades.

Starla has been asleep with a fever for a week, and Eula found a job. Cyrena thinks that Starla is “fortunate” to have Eula helping her and

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