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Yesterday the early summer weather was so perfect I felt compelled to stretch out on the couch on my screened porch for as long as possible. To accompany me, I reached for a volume of short stories by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver. Once settled on the couch, I immediately turned in the book to “Rose-Johnny,” a short story I consider to be as perfect as any I’ve ever read. “Rose-Johnny” first appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, but I found it in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 1988. It has haunted me ever since.

Barbara Kingsolver
Photo by Annie Griffiths

The narrator, Georgeann Bowles, is a 10-year-old girl growing up on a farm near a small southern town called Walnut Knobs. Like other children in town, she’s curious about—and a little frightened by—Rose-Johnny, the shop-keeper at the local feed store. Rose-Johnny’s hair is cut like a man’s, and she wears Red Wing boots like Georgeann’s father, but the rest of her looks “exactly like anybody’s mother,” Georgeann says. The rumor among the children is that she’s half man, half woman. Georgeann knows the rumor isn’t true the first time she meets Rose-Johnny at the store, but she’s puzzled when a man standing outside the feed store tells her to make sure her daddy never sends her to the store alone again. She knows Rose-Johnny is the reason for the warning, but she’s not sure why. When she asks her Aunt Minnie why she shouldn’t go to the store, Aunt Minnie replies that Rose-Johnny is a Lebanese, which confuses Georgeann even more.

Despite the warning, Georgeann wants to see Rose-Johnny again, so she invents her first “important lie.” She tells her parents that old Mr. Wall, who owns the feed store, wants her to come by after school and help out because Rose-Johnny is sick. Her parents give their consent, and Georgeann’s afternoons at the store become regular events. She learns to feed and water the chicks and to weigh out packages of seed, and as she does, she and Rose-Johnny become friends.

But then Georgeann’s lie becomes truth. Rose-Johnny falls suddenly ill and spends her days on the bed in the apartment behind the store. Sure that her lie has caused Rose-Johnny to be sick, Georgeann takes on more responsibility in the store as Mr. Wall shows he’s too old to manage everything himself. Whispers about Rose-Johnny’s illness join the many other rumors about her that continually circulate around town.

Georgeann has heard these rumors all her life, and the one that concerns her most is that Rose-Johnny’s father is a black man. One afternoon, as she’s visiting with her friend lying on her sick bed, she mentions the rumor about the black man. “Is that what they say?” Rose-Johnny asks. “Does no harm to me. Every man is some color. My daddy was white. After he died my mama loved another man and he was brown.”

Then, maybe because she’s weak from illness or maybe because she’s treating her illness with liquor or maybe because she just wants Georgeann to know the truth, Rose-Johnny tells her the horrifying story of what happened to the black man and Rose-Johnny’s mother and her baby half-brother, Johnny. At last Georgeann understands Rose-Johnny’s haircut and her name.

That’s the last time Georgeann sees Rose-Johnny. The store is sold and Rose-Johnny and Mr. Wall, who’s her grandfather, disappear. But that’s not the end of the story. The night that Rose-Johnny tells Georgeann about her family, Georgeann’s sister, Mary-Etta, is attacked by a group of men who keep asking, “Are you the Bowles girl?”  Racked with guilt because she’s certain that she’s the one they were looking for, Georgeann cuts off her hair and the hair of her favorite doll, Miss Regina. Then she takes to her bed and insists her name is not Georgeann, but George-Etta. “My convalescence,” she says, “was longer than Mary-Etta’s.”

I’ve given the essence of the story, but to fully appreciate its emotional depth, you have to immerse yourself in the complexity of the characters and the atmosphere of Walnut Knobs, which Kingsolver creates so skillfully. There’s Aunt Minnie with her little purple hat and nearly new Dodge, who tells Georgeann she’ll understand about Rose-Johnny when she’s older. And there’s Roy Mattox, who calls Rose-Johnny a pervert, for which Georgeann bites his arm. And there are Georgeann’s parents, plain-spoken, hard-working people who live by simple rules, so you have to wonder why they let Georgeann work at the feed store in the afternoons, when Kingsolver makes it clear they have doubts about her “important lie.” I like to think they want her to know who Rose-Johnny really is beyond the rumors.

The impact on Georgeann of her friendship with Rose-Johnny is profound, and Kingsolver makes it memorable with a single sentence. She explains that by the end of the summer Georgeann’s hair has grown out enough that she can return to school with no explanations. Now comes the zinger: “Miss Regina’s hair, of course, never grew back.”

“Rose-Johnny” is available in Kingsolver’s Homeland and Other Stories.