Excerpt from Chapter 1- Meeting Mostly Selma

Thrace knew the precise dimensions of his wife’s secret little room but never bothered to tell her. He thought every woman could have secrets even if she needed a room to keep them in, and though these weren’t the kind of things he ever put into words, his wife could have a bunch of secret rooms as long as they were all inside his house. 

Clifton Thrace considered himself lucky, but the truth is that he wouldn’t have allowed for any other possibility. He possessed a distinctly individual world view, one he’d crafted from experience and hard work, eliminating what he considered excess. Everything that was important to him, was important. 

He had wanted his wife from across a clearing on top of a mountain he had climbed looking for a family that had once possessed more land and property than any other family like them. From the looks of the shack where he found them, fortunes had changed. Before he had gotten close enough to smell her, Thrace felt his reason being eclipsed by the aura of a woman who looked as if she could effortlessly scale a tall pine. If they were the Macombs, her great grandfather had been featured on a list he possessed titled, "The Curiously Successful Negro."  Harvard University had supposedly initiated, compiled, and updated the list for more than a hundred years. The negroes on the list had eked out far more than a simple living before, during, and after slavery. Clifton Thrace had been investigating privately over time. He had come across the list in his father and grandfather’s things and wanted to know if the fate of these families had remained solid and their fortunes kept. In the middle of his investigation had been this extraordinarily beautiful woman, the great great granddaughter of Lloyd Earl. 

Lloyd Earl was the first to amass what would eventually become the largest fortune on the list. He had purchased and owned land and property from Georgia to Washington, D.C.; including homes, churches, cemeteries, farms, and even a hotel where only negroes stayed, where slave owners housed their slaves if the slave was lucky. Inside Mr. Lloyd Earl’s hotel, slaves and all others were treated like masters. 

Thrace found the last of the Lloyd Earl/Macombs on a mountain in Georgia. He had stumbled into a clearing directed by the church folks from the town who cautioned him that whatever he wanted probably wouldn’t be found even if he spent a month with Aberdeen Macomb. 

She had been sitting on what could only be described as an elaborately carved stool when he spotted her not too far from her front door. He glimpsed her behind the steam hissing up from the pot that sat between him and her. He moved closer, cautiously. Country people sometimes had dogs that only came into view when necessary.

He might have characterized her as an old witch living in the woods simply because of the setting, though she was an incongruently elegant woman. She stood gracefully and the wrapped dress she wore fell, revealing her shape and height. 

“I’m Clifton Thrace,” he stepped forward and raised his hand.

Aberdeen smiled as if she’d been expecting him. “To what do I owe this honor?” she said as if she’d recognized his name.

“The honor is mine.” He wondered how he would explain his sudden appearance, how he’d work into the conversation that he’d come to find out what had become of the family fortune.

“Surely, it is. We don’t usually have city visitors up this far,” Aberdeen said, clearly waiting for his explanation. “I’m Aberdeen Macomb.”

“I—” Thrace hesitated, wondering why he hadn’t already put his motives into an acceptable sentence.  “I—”

“This is my daughter,” she raised her arm in the direction of the woods behind her, and, as if conjured, out stepped the most oddly beautiful woman that Thrace had ever seen. Thrace coughed and grunted, clearing his throat, wishing he had planned something to say.

Her hair was - wild and long; he couldn’t quite tell where it began or ended. The mass of curly dark hair twirled in stark contrast to her paler reddish skin. She was slender and smooth with tight muscular legs that looked as though she could easily traverse miles. As soon as she came fully into the clearing, she retreated again and disappeared.

Thrace seemed to be struggling with his breath and Aberdeen said, “just wait.”

In the next few moments, her daughter stepped back out of the woods and then disappeared again. Thrace wondered if she was playing some sort of game or looking for something.

“If you let her, she’ll be in and out all day.”

“Your daughter?” was all Thrace could manage.

“She’s grown a little too restless for this mountaintop.” Aberdeen said.

“Has she been living away?” Clifton asked.

“Off and on but always back. She needs to be far enough away so she can’t get back.

“Oh.” 

“Do you have a car?”

“Yes, in town.”

“You have my permission to take her for a ride.”

“Whe—” Thrace began to say and then caught himself, “do you think she’d like to?”

She came out of the woods again, walked towards Clifton Thrace, brushed by him, and said, he thought, “I’d love to,” in a tired alto as if speaking cost more effort than she wanted to expend.

“This one here is,” Aberdeen turned and watched her daughter walk into the house, and said, “not sure.”

Clifton thought Aberdeen had identical twins or something but was a little too shamefaced and tongue-tied to ask.

“She won’t be long,” Aberdeen said and sat back down on her stool.  

Moments later, the daughter came out of the house in a beautiful dress, carrying her shoes and a bag. Her hair was now neatly slicked and tied back except for one or two strands hanging in front of her left ear. The shack must have had a magic room inside. She smelled like flowers, the woods, and homemade soap. Her dress clung to her lean body; full, large breasts sat high over her small waist. She had a bit of a boy’s narrow hips with a little girlish flesh thrown on top. 

She led him back through the woods and at first, he wondered, then understood, that she’d know exactly where to go. It had taken him hours to climb but only forty minutes to get back down. They broke the tree line and she walked directly to his car. On the way, they passed a few town folks who looked at the two of them as if they were two headed surprises.

“Which daughter is that one?” he heard one nearby man ask the other.

“They don’t look that much alike, but you still can’t tell them apart,” the man answered and they both snorted.

Aberdeen’s daughter stood by his car and waited. Thrace walked over and opened the trunk, pulled the bag off her shoulder, and put it inside. She reached for it at first, as if she might not want the bag out of her sight, but then relented.  

He drove her to the county line and stopped.

“A little further please?” she asked. “I think it’s about ten miles further.”

He drove until she asked him to stop.

“We can go back now,” she said, “if you’ll come back.”

“Of course, do you mean…” Thrace said.

“Tomorrow,” she answered.

He took her on two more rides, each one longer and a little more joyful than the one before. The windows were down; air flew through the car and whipped around them. Each time, they stopped at a gas station and Thrace bought them different drinks. After the third ride, on the return, she’d leaned towards him, and gently touched him right behind the shoulder. 

Her hand on his back that first time stung him with heat he could still feel.

“Don’t take me back,” she’d said, again her voice tired but firm and clear. 

He looked over at her to be sure. He was her rescuer, the one to take her out of the woods. He knew it to be true, yet something in him, even at that moment, had sensed more. 

Maybe she was the one who had been in charge from the very first moment that he’d seen her step out of the woods. She had choreographed her own escape. 

Later, he’d relive their very first moments together. The woman who had urged him to take her away, even the voice she’d used. He’d never heard her speak again in quite the same way. He told himself that he exaggerated their beginnings. Once he had her with him, he’d never seen or heard that same woman again. He toyed with the idea from time to time that maybe a switch had occurred, and that he had married the twin.

So yes, his wife was strange, and he did not know if the cause was the mountain woods where she had grown up, the burden of such beauty or some other family trait, and frankly, did not care. She was no longer a separate person but a consequence of his good sense and taste.  

In his way, Thrace had anchored her and now she was free to float as she pleased within the great big sea of his belongings.