Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas

"Sisters, girlfriends and troublemakers--you know who you are--you are fearfully and wonderfully made! In other words, God doesn't make junk. Thankfully, his children do, and that's why we have been blessed with flea markets just about everywhere." "The queen has spoken!" "My name is Odessa Pepperdine, and I amnotjust some silver-haired small-town queen bee,my dears.I am theQueen Mama of all queen beesin the sweet little hive of friends I have made among the shoppers and shopkeepers at the Castlerock, Texas,Five Acres of Fabulous Finds Flea Market. And it was on my say-so that we titled this little bit here Chapter One." "Even though, you'll soon discover, therealChapter One doesn't actually get started in earnest for a few more paragraphs." "That's Maxine Cooke-Nash, my sister in Christ and formerly--" "Stranger in the community.That's what Odessa always saysabout us.'Sisters in Christ, strangers in the community.'We grew up living parallel lives on opposite sides of the proverbial tracks." "What tracks?" "I saidproverbial.You know, just my delicate way of letting folks know that we stuck to opposite sides of town, you keeping company with people from your church, and me staying mostly inside the African-American community." "Only back then, when we were young, they didn't use that term, African-American." "Oh, no, they didn't." "They say you can never describe things in terms of black and white, but Maxine and I can tell you, if you were coming up in Castlerock in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties you could." "Amen, Odessa,Amen." "And coming up back then, Maxine and I were both active in the Campfire Girls, then went on to play high school basketball--probably against one another more than once. Later we each graduated top of our classes at Christian colleges, married ministers and settled down to raise our children, all within a few miles of one another. And we never met until we both tried to buy the same thing at the flea market." "Are we tellingthispartnow?" "Oh. Oh, no. No, actually, we reallydohave something in mind in starting out things this way. As I said, I'm Odessa and this is Maxine. Say hello properly, Maxine." "Hi,y'all.Don't mind me.I may not say much,especially when Odessa is holding forth--and let's be up front, when is shenotholding forth or holding court or holding just about anything exceptback?""Ahem." "Anyway, I may not say much, but when Idospeak up, I try to make it about something worthy of the effort." "And she does. She certainly does. Take what she had to say about the way I wanted to begin to tell the story about what happened when...well, there I'm getting ahead of myself." "Which she does, and I have to rein her in." "We're a good team like that, aren't we, Maxine?" "Yes, we are. In fact, when it comes to reining in Odessa, I'm just about the only one whocananymore." "Before...well, before all the things between the pages of this book happened, I never needed reining in. I was raised to be seen and not heard. Encouraged to be a good little minister's wife in the way of ninja-style church ladies everywhere, who appear when they are needed and disappear into the wood-paneled walls of the church basement when their service is not required." "I cannot feature that, Odessa." "Of course you can't,because now I am what people like to call 'irrepressible." I've heard other words used to describe you, Miz Pepperdine." "Oh, Maxine, you crack me up." "Likewise, Odessa honey." "See, wegeteach other. We speak the same language, you might say. Though we did not start out on the best of speaking terms at all. Oh, there now, that reminds me! I was explaining about the way we decided to start our story out.Jones, Annie is the author of 'Sisterhood of the Queen Mamas ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373785575 and ISBN 0373785577.