CHAPTER ONE
My mother woke me in the dead of night again. I felt her standing over my bed, the heat of a flashlight on my face. Why couldn’t she just turn on the lights like a normal person? After sundown, we lived in darkness. If the lamps were on, people could see inside, she said.
“Maddie, wake up. We’re going for a drive. Just put your coat on over your nightgown.” I tried to wake up, but stay asleep too, fighting with myself in some in-between place.
She paced back and forth, whispering under her breath like she was arguing with an imaginary someone.
I wondered what it was this time. But whatever she had planned, nothing could be worse than what had happened last Sunday.
On that terrible night, Momma pulled me from my bed at 4 a.m.
“Get up, and come with me,” she’d said, her green eyes wild. She rushed me onto my feet, the wood floor cool and in need of sweeping, gritty under my toes. "I need your help."
I still had a thumbprint bruise on my arm where she grabbed me in that moment, dragging me into the living room. I thought maybe I had left my sketches and dress patterns out again.
But it wasn’t my mess she wanted help with; she’d made one of her own. Momma had piled up clothes and furniture, books and Daddy’s model airplanes, framed paintings and pictures. They sat in a heap in the middle of the room, a teetering pile with chair legs sticking out, novels with their spines bent back, photographs ripped in little pieces and scattered all over.
"We have to get rid of everything that has anything to do with your father.”
She’d dragged the outdoor trashcan inside, the heavy metal one, leaving a wet, brown trail on the carpet.
"Why?" I asked. Tears had sprung from my eyes at the sight of Daddy’s belongings strewn around. "Why would we do that?"
I’d seen his white undershirts stacked on the worn cushion of his favorite wingback, his battered toolbox, and the wooden kit he propped his foot on to shine his shoes. I used to love the gasoline smell of his shoe polish and the brisk sound of the brush when he buffed his combat boots to a high gleam.
I reached out for the shoeshine kit, but she’d given my hand a little slap.
"I'm the mother and you do as I say. We have to get rid of everything and we have to do it now."
The mother. She always said it that way. Like she needed to remind me—or maybe herself—of her place.
She said that men from the government would come for us in a black sedan if we didn't torch Daddy’s left-behinds right away, that we had to hurry.
Momma had started saying all kinds of strange things over the last few months, mostly that people were spying on us. Our big transistor radio was listening to our conversations, she said, and we had to get rid of it. The portable radio in the car was safe for now, but it might have to go, too.
At first, I was terrified. She’d wake me at night, like the night of the fire — her captive audience of one — to tell me what danger would befall us next. She would bore through me with that longing look in her eyes, wanting me to be as concerned as she was about the white van following us or about the way the druggist had stared at her. I really believed her at first. How could I not believe my own mother? But as the weeks turned into months, something in me knew that it was all in her head.
I’d started hiding things from her after that, feelings and belongings, too. On that awful evening when Momma insisted we burn what was left of Daddy’s stuff, I was so glad that I’d hidden his pin and Grandpa Sykes’s pocket watch in my sewing satchel. I kept all my money hidden in the satchel, too: twenty-three dollars and change. On the nights when my mother passed out, I would often sneak a dollar out of her purse and press it down into the deep wells of my own precious bag.
My aunt had made the large navy carryall for me the previous summer when all the magazines were featuring it as a new design. A messenger bag, they called it. For ladies who had more to carry than a lipstick. I told Momma I would use my new bag for sewing tools so she wouldn’t be tempted to go snooping in it. She didn’t have any interest in sewing—and the bag did carry my sewing things, it was true. But my sewing satchel also held plenty of other little objects that were dear to me, tucked safely away in the concealed inner pockets.
"Your father left us, Maddie!” she had shouted at me the night of the fire, grabbing a framed wedding picture of her and Daddy. The edge of the metal frame caught her inner arm, causing a red line to bloom up through her skin.
“Momma, you cut yourself.”
She didn’t seem to hear me. When she got like this, there was no talking to her. She had tossed the picture in the trash with a clank.
"Your father abandoned us."
"He didn't want to!" I tried to pull things from the pile. "He can't help that his plane crashed. He didn't want to die."
She said that I was wrong, that he chose to go to Germany, that he chose to put his life at risk.
“He didn’t get called up, Maddie. He enlisted. I begged him not to go and he left us anyway.”
I didn't know about that, but I didn't believe he wanted to leave me. Maybe her, but never me.
Excerpted from The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers. Copyright © 2022 by Adele Myers. Reprinted courtesy of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
A Novel
Maddie Sykes is a burgeoning seamstress who’s just arrived in Bright Leaf, North Carolina—the tobacco capital of the South—where her aunt has a thriving sewing business. After years of war rations and shortages, Bright Leaf is a prosperous wonderland in full technicolor bloom, and Maddie is dazzled by the bustle of the crisply uniformed female factory workers, the palatial homes, and, most of all, her aunt’s glossiest clientele: the wives of the powerful tobacco executives.
But she soon learns that Bright Leaf isn’t quite the carefree paradise that it seems. A trail of misfortune follows many of the women, including substantial health problems, and although Maddie is quick to believe that this is a coincidence, she inadvertently uncovers evidence that suggests otherwise.
Maddie wants to report what she knows, but in a town where everyone depends on Big Tobacco to survive, she doesn’t know who she can trust—and fears that exposing the truth may destroy the lives of the proud, strong women with whom she has forged strong bonds.
Women's Fiction Historical | Fiction Family Life [William Morrow, On Sale: March 1, 2022, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063082939 / eISBN: 9780063082953]
Adele Myers grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and has a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently works in advertising and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, son and their rescue dog, Chipper.
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