Weapon of Choice by Patricia Gussin

Author:Patricia Gussin [Gussin, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2012-01-12T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29

On one hand, Emma Goode was honored—who wouldn’t be?—the newspaper had planned an extravagant party in her name in the grand ballroom of the Palace Hotel. On the other hand, she felt a bit used. The sixty-nine-year-old black woman, born in the Deep South in 1916, picked up the cream-colored, engraved vellum invitation, still not quite believing that she was the honoree. Tomorrow night. The Atlanta Daily Reporter, the newspaper founded by her father, was making her their poster child. The society section of the Atlanta Constitution, the mainstream Atlanta newspaper, lay on the table, her photo on the front page. Medium-brown skin, nose sprinkled with freckles, hair streaked with gray and pulled back in a bun. In the photo, she stood at the door of the Reporter’s new building, in the trim, coral silk business suit that accentuated the slim figure, hardly changed since her wedding day forty-three years ago.

Emma and her husband, Edward, each had put in almost fifty years at the Atlanta Daily Reporter. As it turned out, each would retire at the same age. But for Edward, seventy had come twelve years ago. Emma could have chosen to retire with him, but she’d been only fifty-seven then, and at the peak of her journalism career. The city was a hotbed of racial tension and the Atlanta Daily Reporter was the voice of the Negro—about Negroes for Negroes.

For the first nine years of his retirement, Edward puttered cheerfully around their large house in an upscale, but segregated neighborhood. He’d busied himself with the grandchildren and taken up household chores. He looked after their finances, even became a gourmet cook. Then gradually he had started to slide—but she’d missed the clues. He just seemed more and more listless, and then one day, three years ago, he simply did not wake up in the morning. He’d been seventy-nine years old. She remembered both of her sisters advising her way back when, not to marry a man twelve years older—she’d just end up a widow. They were right, but she would not have missed a day with Edward. Life without him would have been no life at all.

Emma had not succumbed to depression, but Edward’s loss did seem to sap her physical energy and drain her emotional reserve. Their seven children helped sustain her, along with the challenges of her job and her pride, always, in her family’s newspaper.

The party tomorrow night may be in her name, but it really was the celebration of her beloved newspaper. And that was fine. She was turning seventy—after fifty years, she could retire gracefully. She couldn’t really remember not working at the paper. She’d started during high school, spending summers in the Circulation Department. During college she worked evenings and summers in Accounting. Then with a journalism degree from Atlanta University, she launched into reporting, and finally, editing, the news. First her mother, and then one of her sisters, cared for her children when she went back to work after each of seven pregnancies.

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