Read Stormy Weather for Free Online Page A

theater and eat popcorn with its hands. She said it to be smart like Claudette Colbert. She really wanted to live in the country, married to a banker, where she could have Thoroughbreds and Airedales.
    He said, Well, that happens . He had come all the way from Abilene to East Texas to write down the names of famous winning racing quarter-mile horses in a notebook. They had to be stallions. He thought they ought to be a recognized breed, but some people regarded them as being in the same category as bathtub gin. He was off to Louisiana here in a minute to deal with the coonasses. Ross Everett smiled into the lens and sat on the running board and pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed out into the black-and-white world of the potential photograph. Mrs. Everett was very pretty. She stared down with deep concentration into the viewfinder to see that Jeanine had alsoappeared in one corner of it, looking back at her sister Mayme, her thin arms going in different directions and so she clicked it twice. She told Jeanine’s mother she would send her one of the pictures. In the background a train is taking on water.
    Jack Stoddard stands holding the halter of Smoky Joe Hancock, in a pressed shirt and khaki pants. The horse is blocky and ungraceful and no amount of blanket-flapping or umbrella-opening will make him look like he could cover 440 yards in twenty-four seconds. His forelock is short and frazzled, his ears flop each to one side. But Jack Stoddard has his hat brim snapped over his face and a cigar between his fingers.
    This is how people wanted to appear to the world and to later generations. It is how they wished to be remembered no matter how hard life might have become. They framed themselves in their best clothes and with their most valuable possessions and smiled. Hard times and collapsing marriages and heavy labor was nobody’s business but their own.
    Nobody’s business
    Nobody’s dirty business
    Nobody’s business but my own
    Nobody’s business, how my little baby treats me
    Nobody’s business but my own
    So Bukka White sang in the East Texas juke joints in Houston, Conroe, Corsicana. He held the neck of the Dobro guitar like a baseball bat and wrung blues from it, and after him came Ma Rainey’s Jazz Hounds. Her father lifted the dice in his fist and all eyes were on him alone until he threw and then the magical moment would be gone. The singer turned to the old 1920s song “Red Cap Porter” and the dice moved with infinite slowness around the circle from hand to hand, manic little creatures with dots for brains. He either bought or won Smoky Joe in 1935, when they moved to Conroe, north ofHouston. The Conroe field lay inside the skirts of drifting fog that came from the Gulf of Mexico. He drove up to the house shouting for them all to come out, they’d got their first real racehorse.
    Smoky Joe Hancock was an own son of Old Joe Hancock, a dark two-year-old stud with a savage temper and horizontal scars on his legs where he had fought his way out of a trailer. He had stubby ears and a head like a shoe box. His mane sprayed up from his stallion’s crest in short, wild tassels. He was known as a hard case. He threw his jockeys. The seller admitted he had once run off a railless brush track and tore through several barbecue tables and a line of people with plates in their hands like a boxy rocket before they could get him to the score line. It was why her father got him for a low price.
    Bea said, “He’s had a hard life.” Little Bea had been assigned the novel Black Beauty in her reading circle at the new Conroe Elementary and the book had taken a fixed grip on her imagination with its injustices and its defiantly happy ending. “He used to belong to a rich widow, and she had her coachman to beat him with a bumbershoot until he fell to his knees.” Bea paused and then said, in a low, dramatic voice, “On the hard cobblestones.”
    He turned the stallion into an abandoned brick yard down the