The Deed Book
My name is Elnora Ruthanne Whitsett, and I’m seventy-two years old.
I have cleaned houses since I was fourteen. I have scrubbed floors on my knees in Maury County, Tennessee, for fifty-eight years. I have raised a daughter, buried a husband, buried my mama, and buried more friends than I care to count.
And I have never in my life stood in a courthouse and read my own name in a book that big.
Rosella turned that book around to face me.
She put her finger on a line.
“Read it, honey,” she said. “Read it yourself.”
I put on my reading glasses. My hands were shaking so bad I nearly dropped them.
I looked down.
There it was. In type. In black ink. On thick, cream-colored paper that smelled like old dust and lemon oil.
My whole name.
ELNORA RUTHANNE WHITSETT.
And right under it…
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My mama always said you can’t understand the end of a story if you don’t know where it started. So let me start where it started.
On a porch.
I grew up on the Lockridge place.
It’s out on the Hampshire Pike, eight miles west of Columbia. Three hundred acres of rolling pasture and woods. A big white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch, sitting up on a little rise so you can see it from the road. Built in 1889.
And at the end of a gravel lane, down past the barn, past the pond, back where the land dips toward the creek, there’s a little white tenant house.
Four rooms. A tin roof. A porch with a swing hanging on chains. And behind it, a pecan grove. Forty-one trees. Big ones. Older than anybody living.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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