Zibby Mag

This excerpt is part of our First Look column where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks into upcoming books across all genres!

Thriller meets historical fiction in this gripping new novel from Wanda M. Morris, author of All Her Little Secrets. Two sisters in the Jim Crow South are on the run—one from the law, and the other from societal shame. As Violet and Marigold flee to different corners of the country, they don’t know they’re hunted by a man with mysterious motives. Fans of The Vanishing Half and The Sweetness of Water will love Anywhere You Run, out October 25.

Pre-order your copy here!

1
Violet Richards

My older sister, Rose, had been dead for almost eight years, and still, she was bossing every part of my life like she did the day she died. After her funeral, I swore I wasn’t ever stepping foot inside another funeral. All those tears and heartache to spill over a dead body, the soul of which was long gone. Brown bodies that were tired and worn out, their earthly usefulness ended. Or the other bodies mangled from the wretchedness of living too close to white folks who killed us for sport.

The Richards family had had too many funerals, and I didn’t go to any of them after Rose’s. That included Papa’s death a few years after Rose, and Momma’s passing last fall. Even now folks around town still talked about that shameful Violet Richards gal who wouldn’t go to her own momma’s and daddy’s funerals! After all those funerals, I was fresh out of tears. I was the reason for all them deaths. And the guilt of it scratched and picked at my heart as if it was a tender scab on a days’ old gash.

Now it was just me and my sister Marigold left. Seem like after Momma died, the two of us wandered about aimlessly in the little lives all that death and loss left us with. I dreamed of being anywhere but here. Both of us desperate to leave

Jackson but forced to stay by the fear of wandering out in the world without our parents. Even as old as we were, losing both Momma and Papa had left us barely holding on. Death can cut you like that. Everyone—aunts and uncles, deacon- esses from church—made promises to be there for us, to fill in and pick up where Momma had left off. But in the days after her death, everybody went back to their own bills and kids and troubles. Maybe they thought me and Marigold was grown women and that we’d figure it all out somehow.

We talked and pretended like everything was okay. But it wasn’t.

My older sister, Rose, had been dead for almost eight years, and still, she was bossing every part of my life like she did the day she died.

Last year, after Momma’s funeral, everything sorta spun off in a blur. There was the houseful of people sadly shaking their heads and speaking quietly about how there was no finer woman in all of Jackson. But Momma’s upstanding reputation among the neighbors and friends wasn’t enough to dull the swollen pain of my having contributed to putting all those people I loved—Rose, Papa, and Momma—six feet under.

A couple weeks after Momma’s funeral, I pulled out a bottle of Cutty Sark I’d stashed behind my bed and convinced Mari- gold to split it with me, liquid courage for us to get through the task of dividing up Momma’s things. The scotch numbed us, but it didn’t make the task any easier. Marigold kept Momma’s Bible, with its worn leather cover, and I kept her old Timex watch, with the mother-of-pearl face. Marigold said it was fitting that I should have her watch, since Momma spent so much time looking at it to see if I would make curfew. I also kept Rose’s old diary that we found among Momma’s things. I guess if I was the one responsible for Rose’s death, I should be the one who kept the reminder of what I’d done.

All them funerals cut a hole deep down inside me that I kept trying to fill up with all the wrong things. For almost a year, I’d been staying out and dancing until all hours of the night at Snooky’s Joint, smoking reefer and drinking gin like it could quench my thirst. When Momma was alive, she used to warn me: Ain’t nothing open after midnight except hospi­ tals and legs. Now Marigold had gotten to the point where she stopped asking where I’d been or who I’d been with. I guess she probably didn’t want to hear the answers. Or maybe she was too busy grieving all those deaths I had caused.

Sometimes I think the only thing all that partying did was make me forget my common sense. I guess that’s why I didn’t even see Huxley Broadus’s truck when he pulled alongside me the night I walked home from Snooky’s. Before I knowed what hit me, he had blocked my path and was headed round the side of the truck after me. I kicked and fought back the best I could, even left a few fingernails and bite marks in him. But it didn’t do me no good. Me, running and screaming like somebody would come and save a colored woman out in the middle of the night. Nobody saves colored women like me. The best we can do is to save ourselves. Too bad for me.

Too bad for Huxley, too.

Jackson, Mississippi, was a big enough place that if you didn’t go to church or work for any of the white families in town, maybe you could hide out, disappear among the crowd. I didn’t fit into either one of them categories. I was simply a colored woman who’d killed a white man in Mississippi. It didn’t matter that I’d gone to the police about his attack days ago. I needed to get out of town. Fast.

Now, a few hours after I’d killed Huxley, I waited in the humid breeze under a sprawling magnolia in the front yard at 2:30 in the morning and smoked a cigarette. Each puff crawled down my chest and smoothed out my fraying nerves, making me believe I could really pull this off. I might finally be leaving Jackson and all the ghosts I had created. I hadn’t even told Marigold what I was planning. If I did, she’d either think I was crazy as a loon or try to help me, and I didn’t want no harm to come to her.

I waited. A chorus of crickets, and barn owls rustled and hooted out into the night darkness, restless, like me. Moon- light fell around our old clapboard house in a bright bluish glow. Maybe it was the moonlight or maybe it was all those ghosts hovering over the house and wishing me Godspeed or good riddance. Papa used to call this “our palace,” with its chipping paint, squeaking floorboards, and all those ghosts. I closed my eyes and could see the inside, walls covered with the lingering reminders of what we used to be—pictures of Momma and Papa on their wedding day, his bushy mustache, her hands clutching a small bouquet of wildflowers, as they stood in front of a house. There was a picture of Marigold from the first grade, missing two front teeth, and another of Rose dressed for her first school dance with Silas Monteque, his jacket too big and her with a bashful smile. And in the middle of the wall was a picture of Momma, Papa, Rose, Marigold, and me in front of the Greater Saints AME Church.

If you didn’t go to church or work for any of the white families in town, maybe you could hide out, disappear among the crowd. I didn’t fit into either one of them categories. I was simply a colored woman who’d killed a white man.

I gazed up at the porch. Me and Marigold still hadn’t taken down that puny string of holiday lights from last Christmas hanging along the porch banister. I hadn’t wanted to put up a Christmas tree or any kind of decorations after Momma died, but Marigold insisted, saying it was what Momma would have wanted. I didn’t argue with her. Marigold was always smarter than me and it showed whenever we argued.

After Rose died, folks always liked to compare me and Marigold, like we was two different shoes. Like I was a har- lot’s high heel and she was a sturdy oxford. Marigold was the smart one. I was the pretty one. Marigold was the one who made good decisions. I was the one who made fast decisions. Marigold worked hard at getting rid of what she called her “accent.” Me? I just talked the way I talked. Marigold, with all her dreams of going to college and becoming a lawyer. And then there was me. I didn’t have no dreams unless I was asleep. So maybe I enjoyed a social outing more than I did a schoolbook. But that didn’t make me a bad person. Why people always think things got to be this way or that with nothing in between? Hell, me and Marigold was more alike than we was different.

She would understand my leaving.

I was doing this for both of us. When I got settled some- where, I would call Marigold and explain everything. Maybe I could send for her, and we could live together again. She’d understand. She was the smart one.