This Day's Madness

The small circus stops to read the sign: "Granston: A Grand Place for Grand People." The right place, but Petrine the gypsy has a premonition. "Let's go back. This place is evil." But it is the Depression, 1937, and the circus can't afford breaking a contract. Their hopes and dreams are pinned on their emerging star Frankie, a twelve-year-old African American girl whose parents died in a trapeze accident. Since the age of five, the circus is the only family Frankie knows. As she stared at the sign, Frankie feels misgivings took but she had never been in the South before, so her sense of adventure overtakes her fear. Later as the hired locals help erect the tents, Frankie becomes friendly with one of the black men who tells her "you don't look white to me." Frankie lets her "secret" out. The town is outraged. Frankie is soon secluded in an orphanage, then in a reformatory before she is "adopted" by a school teacher. She is destined to learn the proper behavior of a "colored" girl in the South. Granston is a world Frankie voluntarily enters, but is unable to leave until six years later, after she learns the town's teachings and accepts she is no longer Frankie, but Thomasena, the name her "foster" mother calls her.Bowen, Sandra E. is the author of 'This Day's Madness', published 0016 under ISBN 9780595141029 and ISBN 0595141021.