This Ain’t Mississippi

 

2024-07-04 “This Ain’t Mississippi” by Emma 

Emma Knox saw a car pull up at the motel. Car… motel… both new words for her. 

Welling up inside her was a feeling that she had to go meet the man and woman getting out of the car. She was already walking toward them before she had time to think about what she was doing.

The last twenty hours of her life had been utterly unthinkable. It started when her daddy told her he had dowried her off to a man named Shamus Jefferson. Emma was 19. He was 30, and he wasn’t much easy to look at. To believe the tales, he wasn’t much easy to be around either, but Emma’s daddy thought he’d be a good provider, what that he he owned a dry goods store in Vicksburg.

After finding out what her daddy and mamma had planned, Emma decided she’d take her chances and go it on her own. She grabbed up a few things, shoved them into a little satchel, then made for the curve where the freight trains had to slow down to near about a stop on account of some bad rails. She hopped a train going north, thinking she’d find something to do in Memphis.

She fell asleep and when she woke up… everything was different. Emma thought she was in the engine or something, but it didn’t look like any train she’d ever seen. There was a nice woman operating it like some train engineer, and she said it was a truck.

“Honey, you okay? Did you sleep too hard?”

Emma played along. “Yes’m, I reckon I did.”

Emma’s clothes… her satchel… Everything was different, but  Emma just played along.

The woman smiled. “I don’t usually pick up htich-hikers, but you looked desperate. A lot of bad can happen to a desperate young girl hitch-hiking.”

The truck came to the end of its route in Omaha, Nebraska,  and Emma told the woman she would be fine.

“Listen, Emma, don’t hitch-hike. You’re lucky it was me that picked you up.”

“Yes ma’am, I’m grateful.”

Emma’s feet had carried her so close to the man and woman and their red car that they noticed her. A look washed over their eyes like they knew her or something.

They turned to each other and shook their heads, and the man said to the woman, “Do you feel it?”

The woman nodded. “She's one of us, too.”