Clemmy Sue's Narrative-Ancestorm

Clemmy Sue Jarvis, fifteen inches taller than a doorknob, weighs less than a hummingbird, recently retired, at sixty-three, from a mundane minimum wage job. For seventeen generations her family has lived on the eastern shores, of Virginia, in the rural hamlet of Wrongberight. Recently, four intermittent summer rainstorms, have transformed the community’s roadways into a never-ending slip and slide. Late Saturday afternoon Clemmy Sue cautiously pulls out of her driveway, and slowly turns south onto Flat Bottom Road. Carefully, she maneuvers down the

road in her rusty Chevy pickup that she has kept mobile with hairpins, bubble gum, and duct tape. Nevertheless, fifty yards from her dearest friend Estelle Louise’s dirt driveway, the truck’s bald tires skidded across a massive oil slick. As a result, the pickup spins uncontrollably in loose circles as it continues down the middle of the narrow country road, before it finally slithers sideways and abruptly stops. She guffaws when she realized the Chevy had

When she finally climbs into the cab of the pickup, copious amounts of mud cover her shoeless feet, her red crepe blouse had bled onto her white, flowing, ankle length skirt, and her long, wavy, grayish blonde hair is a mess of sopping tangles. She shuts the door then turns to her friend and says, “That me funnier than those fancy rides at the County Fair. Lord have mercy, Estelle Louis, I wants to be thanking you a heap for fixing that there window. I was gonna have it fixed buts never gots around to it.” “I be fixing it or I be drowning, ain’t no two ways about it. Clemmy Sue, imma thinking, maybe we ought not be going to Ruby’s tonight. Cause, we be looking mighty poorly,” “Oh! Hells bells, imma sure Ruby ain’t gonna care what we be looking like, as long as we gots money,” answers Clemmy Sue as she turns on the headlights and windshield wipers and heads