Chapter 1 — The Tin We Couldn’t Touch

Mama’s pantry was barely bigger than a coat closet, but she kept it like a woman braced for a long emergency.

Cans of green beans stood in rows by date.

Sugar lived in the same glass jar it had lived in my whole life.

Coffee filters had ridden out three decades in a yellowed plastic container that had gone brittle at the corners.

And up on the highest shelf, above all of it, sat the one thing none of us were ever allowed to touch.

I could have drawn that pantry from memory with my eyes shut.

It was the most ordered place in a house that was not, otherwise, especially orderly — as if all of Mama’s need for control in a life where she controlled very little had been poured into those few square feet of shelving.

She rotated the cans so the oldest got used first.

She wrote the year on the lids of things in grease pencil.

She knew, at any moment, exactly what she had and exactly what she was short of.

As a girl I found it a little funny, a little sad, this careful hoarding against hard times in a woman who never seemed to fight for anything larger.

I mistook her thrift for timidity.

I did not understand that a woman keeps that kind of careful inventory for the same reason she keeps a secret trust at a bank — because she has learned, the hard way, that no one is coming to save her or hers, and that whatever gets saved, she will have to save herself.

The flour tin.

White enamel, a faded blue design around the rim, chipped in a dozen places where the years had worn it.

Mama guarded that tin the way you’d guard something alive.

When I was twelve I reached for it once, wanting to make biscuits and coming up short on flour everywhere else, and before my fingers closed on it she smacked my hand away so fast it startled a cry out of me.