Excerpts from Chapter 1
For the next thirty minutes the cousins sat inside separate cubicles. Each gave their
interviewers an earful of what happened when they worked at the precinct and their hopes
for any future employment.
In the beginning, they revealed, they’d taken whatever tests came their way in their efforts
to obtain their ultimate dream job. Both wanted to become detectives. “If our godson Percy
LaPierre can become a superstar detective, so can we. After all, snooping is in our blood,”
they’d each told their interviewers.
They also conceded that their dream had never happened.
Five of their ten years at the precinct they’d spent taking and passing written police tests,
scoring higher than most. Unfortunately for them, their dismal failures at the physicals
brought the test scores down to almost zero.
Joy’s problem: too short, too overweight, and too knock-kneed. Co-workers talked about
Joy behind her back, calling her “Joy the neat-freak, who can’t run fast enough to clean up
crime.”
Patience also suffered physical setbacks. Skinny Minnie weighed more, and Patience
couldn’t see two inches without her glasses, let alone see a crime.
Finally, the head of the Pelzer Police Department’s Human Resource’s told the cousins to
throw in the towel. “Y’all might as well stop taking and failing these physicals. Y’all need to
stick to cleaning toilets and typing reports. Leave the crime-solving to the professionals.”
The interviewers each told Joy and Patience they’d hear from unemployment within two
weeks and wished them good luck.
“I don’t need luck,” Joy replied. “I ain’t worried. God’s got this all under control.”
Patience told her interviewer the same.
“We know that faith without work is dead,” Joy later told Patience. “No matter what we
told those interviewers, we need jobs.”
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