“Harold, hurry up. Ain’t you got that old truck running yet?” Emmett asked nervously.
Harold grunted an obscenity in reply from under the hood of the ’82 Ford. “Looks like something fell down off the alternator,” he said. “Can’t detect a spark.”
Emmett’s head appeared under the hood, his eyes wide.
“Yeah, well, I detect the sun going down in this here ‘Sundown Town.’ If we ain’t gone soon . . .” his voice trailed away.
“Yeah, I know. I know.”
“And why we gotta get broke down next to this old monument? It gives me the creeps.”
The monument in question was the likeness of a noble local hero: General Jackson from the Confederate War. It had been planted next to a cedar grove located in downtown Makersville. The limbs of the cedars were warped but strong. They never yielded in a storm.
Emmett’s head reappeared.
“And whose idea was it to sell white rice in a Sundown Town anyway?”
Lynne Webster
Here’s a definition for sundown town:
A sundown town is a town, city, or neighborhood in the United States that is purposely all-white, excluding people of other races. The term came from signs that were posted stating that people of color had to leave the town by sundown. They are also sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns.
Write On the Edge 