Read Into the Free for Free Online

dress between my legs, drop my hands, and hang upside down from my branch.
    The gypsies’ laughter reaches me right away. It rises up above Iti Taloa’s everyday sounds: train sirens, mill whistles, and streetcar squeals. It floats across the ticking clock tower and the tall white steeples with their hollow hourly bells. Out past the two-story red brick library where sweet Miss Harper sits reading God’s Little Acre from the banned book box. Their laughter rolls beyond the matching red brick corner bank, where men in ties count crisp green bills and starched rich ladies pull tight gloves over small, soft hands.
    Their laughter rises all the way up to the clouds of my Mississippi town and reaches out to my family’s little rental cabin perched on the back side of Mr. Sutton’s plantation. It finds me, two days after my tenth birthday, in the limbs of my sweet gum tree. It rolls across her branches and whispers in my ear. “Come find us, Millie. This is where you belong.”
    I climb down from Sweetie’s branches and follow the gypsy laughter. With bare feet and black braids, I follow it all the way across the hard dirt patches of our yard and down the gravel lane that leads me off the Sutton plantation, away from Jack’s fire and Mama’s valley and Sloth’s empty house.
    I follow it all the way to the paved streets, the swept sidewalks, and hot-pink azaleas. Past the rodeo arena, the courthouse, and the carousel. Past the turn that would take me to my grandparents’ house, a house where their mixed-blood granddaughter would never be welcome.
    I follow that laughter all the way to the stiff iron fence that surrounds Hope Hill, where the gypsies gather each spring.
    I squeeze through the green gate, past statues of angels. I follow the sound of laughter to the graves of the gypsy queen and king.
    Then, I slide behind a poplar trunk to watch a woman, barely taller than me, pour purple juice over the grave of her queen. A younger girl, wearing red, lights a tall white candle and places it at the foot of a gray cross. Two tweed-capped boys sprinkle coins over a second stone, covering the king’s tomb in silver and gold. More than twenty gypsies have circled the graves to pluck strings and sing in an unknown tongue, and as much as I want to sing along with them, I can only listen as they tell stories I barely understand.
    Behind the poplar, I am invisible, a good spy, until an old gypsy woman smiles at me. She reaches her arm out to draw me in, but I step back, behind the safety of the tree.
    The wrinkled woman winks and pulls a blue silk scarf to cover her silver hair. She turns back to the group, motioning for them to sit and rest. They fall at her feet like bees at a hive, as if they, too, can sense this woman’s sweetness.
    “Be here today with us, you be blessed,” she begins, and the crowd grows silent. Her accent is strange and deep, but it reminds me of a thick-waisted grandmother. “You be blessed here. With tribe. Your people. This, this what you know, here in heart, how it feel to belong.”
    The circle of dark-skinned travelers clasp their hands together and smile. All I can do is stay tucked behind the poplar and wish that I am a gypsy and that I have a tribe.

     
    I hurry back through a shortcut in the woods and hope Mama doesn’t find out I’ve been watching the gypsies. Jack doesn’t like them. Claims they cheated Mr. Cauy Tucker out of a fine stallion, traded him a sickly bunch of colts in exchange.
    I don’t get far before I have the feeling I’m being followed, and twice I catch sight of a scrawny boy, one of the two I’d seen throwing coins on the graves. He is wearing a brown tweed hat, a loose-fitting shirt, and dirty trousers that are too short for his toothpick legs. He dashes for cover when I turn my head. I shout at him, “Come out,” but only silence answers.
    I scramble up a steep hill, pulling my weight by clutching weaves of ivy. Just as I reach the top, I see a woman more than a