Bleek Blackmon’s Woman?

The Blackmons

By: Angelia Vernon Menchan

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

Bleek Blackmon III, stood at the window of the home he grew up in, staring out over the expansive property, property he owned.

His grandfather built the structure with his own hands more than eighty years earlier when he was a forty year old husband and father with an infant son. In those days it was a rare thing to see a Black man with his own ranch, a ranch with acres of land, horses, cattle and a field of vegetables as far as the eye could see. The first Bleek had worked twenty years and saved every penny to purchase the land and the livestock, forgoing love and a social life to have his dream. For a man born in 1900 it was a dream come true. Four years earlier he met and married thirty year old school teacher Alicia when he was thirty-six and she was thirty. His intention was to fill her up with sons but they were blessed with one son, Bleek Jr. who followed his father’s path, down to marrying later than most at forty and getting his first and only son at age forty-one. Everything for them was about the land and legacy. Now it was all owned by Bleek III, who at forty had never married and honestly wasn’t looking for a wife though his mother, Marie at age seventy-seven wanted a grandchild. Bleek recalled their conversation months ago after Bleek Jr. died at eighty.

Bleek, you won’t live forever son. You need a wife and children. Otherwise what did your grandfather and father work for? All of this will get sucked up by sharks—the same sharks who would have, if they could have, stopped them from owning this land. Not only that, a woman, a good woman who loves you and can handle what you bring will bring joy to your life. You have everything else, son.

Bleek hadn’t responded but he heard her.

What would that be like? Bleek wondered. To have a woman of my own, a wife. Someone who could put up with what being a Black Rancher, a cowboy’s wife in the twenty-first century.