Triggered by an accidental meeting with a relative she has not seen in a long time, long buried memories resurface, revealing a shocking truth to Odessa about the sexual abuse that marked her early family life. A first novel. Odessa is the fifth of what will eventually be eight children in the highly dysfunctional Blackburn family. She is three years old when her grandmother dies and the last shred of joy goes out of her life. The Blackburns have family ties both in a small town in Mississippi, their place of origin, and in St. Louis, where many family members have journeyed in the mostly fruitless hope of finding a better life. Their father drinks too much and terrorizes the children with his boundless, violent temper. Their mother is an ineffectual woman who makes up stories to explain away injuries and mishaps, stories that become part of family lore and skew the reality of their lives. After her mother, Odessa takes the brunt of much of the brutality, ever shrinking inside herself until she slowly learns the long-held family secrets that underlie the violence. Lockhart's first novel is evocative of Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye in its sensitive portrayal of a young girl trapped in family violence, damaged by brutality, and longing for love. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Zelda Lockhart' s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in publications including WordWrights, Sojourner, Calyx, and Sinister Wisdom. She received her B.A. from Norfolk State University, and her M.A. in Literature from Old Dominion University. The Funeral When we pulled off in the station wagon to head home to St. Louis, Granmama stood in the wake of dirt and rocks waving, her black hair blowing violently in the wind of the storm that we were leaving. I watched Granmama from the back of the station wagon until first her copper skin faded into the colors of the landscape, and then the speck that was her dress drifted, as if blown by the wind, out of the road and up the stairs of her front porch. That was the last time I saw her. Granmama's funeral was held in the church where she had taken us on summer Sundays. The church stood tall and blinding white in the middle of a stretch of orange Mississippi dirt. Our family sat on the front pew, and because I was the baby, I sat next to Mama, holding her arm tight while my sisters and brothers sat quietly with their eyes wide open. Mama and the aunts wore veils, all their heads erect, their eyes and mouths invisible. The sun filtered through the stained-glass window, breaking the light into streams of orange and yellow where dust particles floated like dandelion seeds. Our Grandeddy sat on the elder's pew at the front of the church. The wood dipped where he sat rocking to the soothing sound of the choir. He was the fattest black man I ever knew, and in the stained-glass light, he was so black, he was almost purple. The whites of his eyes were yellow like yolks. I stared at his face full of misery and regret for the woman that I never saw him hug or kiss. Their relationship was a lot like Mama and Deddy's, always cutting each other down with a list of regrets, but the babies came like seasons. That day Grandeddy's face was hard and cold, not grinning behind a sip of white lightning like it usually was. In his white shirt and suspenders he looked worn, his age dusty on his black skin. I rocked with him and the rest of the family, and looked all over the church for some shift in things that would help me understand what was happening. He rolled the program tighter and tighter where the roughness of his hands against the paper sounded faint behind the harmony of the choir. Their voices lifted into the beams of the church and resonated inside my chest. Walk the streets of glo-ry Let me lift my voice... The sweetness of the voices pushed Mama and the aunts into sobs and tears that sent me into tears, and I struggled to get around Mama's shaking arms and into her lap. The adults fanned themselves to the beat, moaning like Granmama's cow when Grandeddy took her calf and sold it down the road. I watched Grandeddy. The music paused, and the reverend stood. His voice echoed in the rafters. "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." He wiped the spit from his mouth with a handkerchief and motioned for the choir to hum the procession song. People lined up to look in the casket, like they were lining up for communion. There we all sat waiting, me, the littlest Blackburn. The church framed us, my two sisters and two brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, all the descendants of Grandeddy. A tall, sturdy woman walked by in the procession and looked into my eyes. She lifted me from Mama's side, just swooped down like a hawk. When Mama looked up and saw through tears and veil that this woman was tak