Bring on the Blessings Read Online Free Page A

soft gray leather and the space was clean. It was a stereotype, of course, but she’d always associated pickups withempty beer cans, discarded jerky wrappers, and pork rind bags. This truck was nothing like that. The air-conditioning felt good too.
    The door to the driver’s side opened and Trent got in. “I put your bags in the bed.”
    With a smooth turn of the steering wheel, he guided the truck back into the traffic and drove away from the terminal.
    Although Trent didn’t express it aloud, to say that he was surprised by her race was an understatement. He naturally assumed she’d be White, and so did everyone else in town. It never occurred to anyone that B. E. Brown would turn out to be someone who looked like them, but here she was, dressed in a fancy designer suit and shoes, and sporting tasteful diamonds in her lobes and around her neck as if she were on her way to Paris or L.A. instead of a dusty little town in north-central Kansas. He just hoped she was ready.
    “How far are we going?” she asked.
    “About forty miles. Should be there in under an hour if we don’t get stuck behind a combine.”
    Bernadine knew what a combine was. She’d seen the huge farm machines on the Discovery Channel. It never occurred to her that one would be out on a road though. The TV always showed them working in some field. Not wanting to expose her ignorance she nodded her thanks and turned her attention to the countryside.
    They rode along in silence, and to her it seemed as if they’d left civilization behind. She couldn’t believe the sparseness of the land. Pancake-flat plains of green and goldshimmered unchecked to the horizon. The number of trees could be counted on one hand—the number of houses on the other. For the hundredth time that day, she wondered if maybe she had been crazy to take this all on. How in the world was she supposed to grow a community out here in the middle of nowhere? She had enough confidence in herself and her mission to know that everything would work out in the end, but getting there was going to be the problem. “Not many trees out here.”
    “Nope. Not enough rain.”
    “Must make it hard to farm.”
    “Sometimes. Some years are drier than others.”
    They left the interstate and were now on a bumpy dirt road traveling past fenced-in rolling fields that could only be described as amber waves of grain. “What’s that growing?”
    “Winter wheat.”
    “Is there spring wheat?”
    “Yeah,” he said smiling as he looked her way. “Winter type grows better around here. Mennonite immigrants brought it to this part of the country when they came from Europe.”
    She waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t it made her wonder if he was just not much of a talker or if he still felt guilty about his small faux pas at the airport. She hadn’t been offended. Out here on the plains of Kansas, she was sure the local population had never met a woman with her spending power, and especially not a Black women, but rather than press him, she sat back and watched the wheat.
    Now Bernadine appreciated silence and introspection, but after ten miles of it, she was ready to talk—about anything. “You must have some questions about why I’m doing this.”
    “I do, but thought I’d let my neighbors do all the asking. I’ve embarrassed myself enough for one day, I think.”
    Yep, she liked him a lot. “I bought Henry Adams for two reasons. One, it’s not often we Black folks get the opportunity to save our history. When I saw the piece on TV about the town going up for sale, I knew what I had to do.”
    “Not many people in the country know how famous Henry Adams was once upon a time.”
    “I didn’t either until I Googled it.” And she was astounded by what she found. “I’d never heard of the Dusters or the Great Exodus of 1879.” Tens of thousands of Black people fled the south after the Civil War and settled in places like Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado in order to escape the