The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist

you going, you little ole dried-up white pussy?” I cherish that memory. It was such a beautiful piece of language, so funny and so bitter and so true. The sun had been so hot that day, beating down on the parking lot, and I had thought I looked so great in my new green dress.
    At one o’clock I crossed the old suspension bridge that spans the Mississippi River at Greenville. I turned right onto Highway 454 and the vast fields of the Delta were all around me. The place that I call home. I passed the house built on top of an Indian mound. To my left were plowed fields, flat and verdant, waiting for seed. On my right were the dense woods of Leroy Percy Park, where I was taken for picnics as a child. I turned onto the River Road, Highway 1, famed in literature and legends. At the entrance to the park I turned left and headed east to Yazoo City. Nothing could stop me now. I was in the Delta and could drive a hundred miles an hour if I liked. No traffic, no policemen, roads as flat and straight as a line drawn with a T-square. Nothing to run into and nowhere to go but into a cotton field.
    Â 
    In Yazoo City I was stopped by a train crossing the main street of town. Forty minutes from my mother’s house. One hour and ten minutes until the wedding and there I was, on the main street of Yazoo City with the streets full of Easter shoppers and a slow-moving train barring every street going east. I turned off the ignition and ran around to the back of the car and started getting out my things. I hung the suit up in the car. I got out high heels and hose. I put on a string of pearls and the earrings. I took the hat out of the hatbox and put it on my head.
    â€œI’m late to a wedding,” I called out. All around me the black and white citizens of Yazoo had stopped to watch.
    â€œHope you can make it,” a man called back. “Good luck to you.” The caboose came into sight behind the broken skyline of the town. Everyone waved and pointed. I turned on the motor, clutched the wheel, got ready to drive, my wide straw-colored hat at a rakish angle on my head.
    At twenty minutes to four I pulled into my mother’s driveway and honked the horn. She came out the door to the kitchen and shook her head. I loved her. She loved me. We had lived so long since I was formed inside her womb. She had held my head when I threw up. Had taught me to believe in fairies. Did I get out of the car and throw my arms around her and say, I love you, love you, love you, never die?
    I did not. “Get that suit out of the backseat,” I yelled. “I’ll be dressed in five minutes.”
    She helped me carry the things into the house and stood leaning on the bedpost while I put them on.
    â€œWhere’s the wedding?” I asked.
    â€œOut in Madison County. Don’t wear that silly hat, honey. This is only a little country wedding.”
    â€œI don’t care. I want to wear it. I’m going to be me no matter where I go.”
    â€œWell, it looks ridiculous.”
    â€œI told my granddaughters to wear theirs. I have to match them.”
    â€œAll right. Do as you please, as always.”
    â€œLet’s go in your car. But I’m driving. I won’t drive fast, I promise.”
    â€œThe key’s in the kitchen, on the rack.” She led me out through the den. Every flat surface of the den is covered with photographs of her children and her sisters and her nieces and nephews and their children and husbands and wives and stepchildren and dogs and prizes and awards and sports events. Every person who comes into that room goes from wall to wall looking at photographs of themselves, checking to make sure they are well represented. One of the great moments of my life was one day when I walked into that den and noticed she had removed a photograph of Dudley standing over a dead lion and replaced it with one of me that had been in Mississippi Magazine .
    We passed through this gallery and out into