The Soul Has Seeped From Bessie Beep

Bessy sighed as she looked out over the city, running her fingers through her once-fiery-red hair, the cayenne now joined with pepper, the flame diminished to the mixed red and faded black color of the last smouldering coal. The urban lights twinkled on her wide, aged but still pretty face, reflecting back at the moon from her two huge expressive eyes. She sighed again and sat in the armchair she had placed by the window specifically for such melancholy moments to bask in the light of the town that had once loved her.

The city gleaming in her eyes was officially known as Toontopia but with the passage of time and the fading of the original era of toons, it had become colloquially known as Celblock City, both a prison and a retirement home for now mostly forgotten toons as the new generation took over in other studios in other cities around the world. There was no community anymore.

As if to illustrate her thoughts on the decline and decentralization of toonkind, her wide anime eyes settled and narrowed on the dark and abandoned Warner Asylum at the edge of the city. Those damn so-called Looney Tunes inmates started her downfall. Well, them and…

With that thought, her gaze shifted to her other most-hated spot in the city. Maxxy Mutt’s circus-like Hut of the Mutt. Between the two, she never stood a chance. There was a reason it was so often said “old toons don’t die, they just fade away.”

She sunk deeper into the rich plushness of the chair and sipped her drink. It hadn’t always been this way. Like steam from a manhole cover, the past rose before her eyes, obscuring her view of the metropolis.

Though far away, both geographically, philosophically, and culturally, from the cities she eventually ran away to, she had nothing but good feelings about the poor Appalachian mining town she grew up in near the turn of the century, Swallow Hollow. It was there her love affair with black music started, listening to the bluegrass and proto-soul drifting through the warm Summer night’s air with the coal dust that was the inevitable output and often cause of death of the surrounding miners. Her older, now estranged, step-sister Tess Trueblue at her side, with her blueberry hair dancing in the wind and light of the bonfire, both mouths agape with the at times joyful, at times mournful music flowing into their ears like clear bubbling water the same shade of Tess’ last name.

Of course, it had it’s dark side as well. Her father, in a rarity among the white folk of the town, always liked to say to the point of eyerolling annoyance: at the end of a day in the mines, we all have black faces. The truth was, though, that aside from working together and the occasional campfire jamborees, the white and black folks of Swallow Hollow kept separate, with the blacks even having their own neighborhood, almost a second town, really, called Negroes Nest. It was there she met Jimbo.