SOL Books Prose Series selection

“Grade-A reading for any reader seeking a story of rising up.”
— Midwest Book Review

“Raw. Passionate. Tender. Vulnerable. Carden slips you into the hidden and wonderfully personal stories of these women and those close to them.”
— Mari Ulmer, author of Midnight at the Camposanto and Cart of Death

Frank F. Carden has been interviewed on our blog, and you can read a sample from The Prostitutes of Post Office Street below.

              In Galveston, early fall of ’54, a Gulf breeze rippled the curtains in a house of prostitution at 2705 Post Office Street. A man in coat and tie sat at the long dark mahogany bar, and facing him on the opposite side was a black woman, Colby, the manager of the house. Tall, with slender waist, but well endowed, dressed in a dark blue dress, she looked very much the businesswoman.

              "Honey," Colby said, and after placing a shot glass she was polishing in a rack, she put her hand on the man's arm, "It’s not going to do you any good to sit there and get drunker. Nothing's going to change."

              "Connie's upstairs now, isn't she? With some guy."

              "You're making it worse on yourself." Colby frowned and stepped back, saying nothing else.

              "I can't help it, I'm in love with her," the man said.

              Colby looked at a woman at the other end of the bar for support. But Meg, reading the Lady’s Home Journal under a small lamp, paid her no attention, evidently uninterested in the conversation or the man’s problems. With dark hair and darker eyes, dressed in a light beige blouse, dark brown skirt, and white pumps, she seemed very much like an attractive housewife having a Coke at the local drug store while she waited on her husband. A glass of ice and water sat in front of her.

              Colby shrugged and picked up another drink glass from a small sink and started to polish it while she looked around the dimly lit room. An overhead fan, quietly, rhythmically, sliced through the reluctant air. A jukebox, with Ivory Joe Hunter singing, “I Quit My Pretty Mamma,” spun out blue, green, and yellow light that skipped across the dark spiraling crimson designs in the flocked wallpaper, and bounced off a small parquet dance floor. The smell of heavy perfume, flowery and musky, of incense, dusky and smoky, and of old and new liquor, sweetly sour, floated on the damp air. Against the back wall stood six slots. A lot of nickels had been dropped into the machines in the early evening, while customers drank, looking over the women, trying to decide which one they wanted, trying to decide it they really wanted to go upstairs.

              Connie, in crisp white shorts and blouse, escorted the john she had been with to the front door, and walked into the barroom with a slow swaying motion, which accentuated her hips and attractive long legs. When she saw the man at the bar, she stopped in the middle of the dance floor, placed her hands on her hips, and glared at him. "Go way. You're a pest."

              "I've got to see you." He stood, swaying. "I've got sixty bucks for all night."

              "Get him out of here," Connie said. It didn't matter if he had hundred-dollar bills stuffed in his underwear, she was not going upstairs with him again. There was nothing worse than having some john fall in love, sit around in the bar, moping every time she went with another man. It wasn't that there was something wrong with him, or that she didn't like him. The fact was she was disgusted with him for getting love and fucking mixed-up. . . .

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