Last Thursday, I'd sat in the pew next to the confessional as Mama spilled away the sins she'd racked up for a week, since she last time brought me and my stupid brother Sylv to St. Augustine's to get our souls right and sort out our sassy mouths. At least, that's what she called it.
She and her good friend Lulu Davenport made the hooch from an old recipe some crop sharer woman had given Bastie when they still lived back in Atlanta. That crop sharer lady had gotten the recipe from her daddy, a poor hillbilly who died in the middle of a gunfight somewhere up in the Appalachian Mountains. Bastie fed the woman, gave her a place to stay in Atlanta because she'd married Bastie's cousin, and family was family, after all, at least to Bastie's folk. That share cropper lady'd been a redneck's daughter and married to a black man which was two strikes against her so no white people in Atlanta would lift a finger for her. So to thank Bastie, she gave my Mimi the only thing in her power to give-the recipe to make good, strong hooch.
Bastie wouldn't help my mama with making it, not with the policemen greedy to do anything bad to folk who they thought wouldn't hand out that 'hush now' money, but she gave Mama the recipe and now Mama and Lulu paid Ripper Dell to keep them safe and paid the white policemen to look the other way.
No one was supposed to drink hooch. So said the law. But that didn't stop a damn person from doing it. Not in New Orleans. Sure not on Rampart Street.
"Sookie! Get your skinny backside over to Miss Matthews. She's waiting."
Mama was in a bad way today. It was only the end of March and already hotter than the devil's tongue and the humidity around the city, seem like around the world, was like taking a big ole breath, holding inside your lungs right before you jump into the cold, deep water. It felt like something was coming and it was something nobody wanted showing up.
"Sookie, right damn now!" Her voice was loud, mean as all get out and I moved through the back kitchen of my mama's small bakery, pushing the Johnson kids out my way as Esther and Robbie, who cleaned the building for food, fussed at the boys throwing rocks inside the little shop.
Mama's bakery was just inside the Quarter, away from the fine businesses rich white ladies shopped in. There weren't customers coming in to nibble on Mama's cookies and breads during the day, but she had a bargain with the hairdressers in the Quarter, keeping them and those rich lady types in sweets they pretended they didn't eat while they got their hair set and the fingernails painted and trimmed.
"I'm moving right now, Mama."
But brownies and cookies and rich little cakes weren't the only things my mama cooked up in that tiny kitchen just big enough for her and, if they were really busy, just the right side of Lulu's thin body.
"You stay to the tree line and keep out of Ripper's sight."
"Yes, ma'am. I will."
She'd pulled one of Lulu's old scarves from the drawer in the back of the broom closet and tied two bottles of her 'special' hooch together. These bottles were of a stronger vintage, meant to give someone ailing a little relief, not get nobody drunk for fun. She put the bottles at the bottom of the basket and fitted a thin piece of pine on top, filling up the rest of the basket with some bread and corn biscuits and lots of pralines wrapped in wax paper before handing it to me. "Disguise," she called it, a while back when the policemen started messing with me and my brother Sylv just to see what we carried past the Square and through the crowds of farmers and performers and ladies whose business mama wouldn't talk about. Mama was good at tricking those white men and I was glad for it. It was too hot to go running away from them if they got too nosy over what I carried in that basket.
Congo Square was more crowded than it had been all summer. The street performers danced and sang louder and longer than they had the days before and I guessed that was because of the busload of Yankees in from up north somewhere that I heard Lulu telling Mama about while they poured the ready-hooch into clean bottles this morning.
"Yankees from Boston," Lulu had said, drawing out the last work like it pained her. Lulu had met a man from New Jersey once, broke her heart clean in two and I reckoned Jersey was just too damn close to Boston for Lulu's liking.
The crowd was heavy with curious white folks-all manner of rich people, the women in their fine, fitted dropped waist dresses and sweet little T-strapped patent leather shoes; the men in straw hats they waved in front their faces, complaining like a preacher in the middle of Mardi Gras about the heat and humidity and smell of the city.