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"I have all this land Roy," she told hirow cotton or tobacco This isn't Tara" she joked

Froer to do it She had to get my father to talk hi to Mommy, stemmed from his stubborn pride Later I would learn there were other reasons, perhaps more important and deeper reasons, the sort that start somewhere near the bottom of your very soul and make themselves heard almost daily

Mommy loved to describe the dra her voice to ihed; sometimes I listened in coet ht before ious London school of drama and had almost become an actress

"Roy still wasn't going to build his house here" she had toldafraid to marry a white woman and live on the same estate with a white man who married an African American woman

"'You're half white' your uncle Roy reminded me

"Well,' I countered 'a hundred and fifty years ago I'd still be a slave Roy Arnold Don't try to make me feel any less or any better than you If Maood for it' I told hie He had to shake his head and laugh And then he had to give in and build the house," she told me

A year after he irl, whom they named Latisha after Uncle Roy's mother and Mommy's adopted mother She was a pretty child, but just after she had turned three, she developed leukemia; she went so fast, the doctors nearly didn't have time to tell them there was little hope

It almost destroyed Aunt Glenda She nearly lost her faith But then rather than hate God for it, she becaious Harley once told me his mother believed children were punished for the sins of their parents After little Latishas death Aunt Glenda believed if she didn't becohter would suffer evennow, and fro too, but not only for his sister He

edy and left his upbringing more or less to my uncle Roy

"You'd never know I'm an only child now," he told me "My mother acts as if Latisha is still with us, only out there, sleeping under the stars Sos out, even washes and irons her clothes It drives both me and Roy crazy"

The worst kind of sibling rivalry was being forced to compete with your dead sister for your ht

They buried Latisha on the grounds of the estate, close to their house Uncle Roy put up a pretty fence and gate around her grave and tombstone, Aunt Glenda had turned it into a sacred site and a day didn't pass when she wasn't over there praying at her lost little daughter's toht and often saw a lone candle burning Glenda's silhouette for under the stars or under an overcast sky Once I even saw her out there in the rain and lightning, holding her u around her

"A o," Mos Harley told h fire"

I was too young at the time of Latisha's death, but years later, I would hear Moht bad luck to someone

"I should have let Roy live far away from me, just as he had wanted" she moaned