One Dark Body
A NOVEL
Charlotte Watson Sherman
What other readers are saying about One Dark Body:
"The spiritual holds as much shape as the physical in this book... Mystical and poetic, this follows in footsteps of Zora Neale Hurston."
Heidi, goodreads.com
One Dark Body
Copyright 1993, 2012 by Charlotte Watson Sherman
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Cover art, “My Spirit Dances Prayer,” copyright 1993, 2012 by Jody Kim
ISBN: 978-0-9847098-1-9
One Dark
Body
CONTENTS
The Space Between Words Where People Live
Many people have influenced and helped this novel find its finished form: my editor, Stephanie Gunning, my agent, Beth Vesel, my attorney and friend, Keven Davis, Nancy Rawles, Tina Hoggatt, Lenore Norrgard, and especially my spirit guides, Brenda Peterson, Perry Ulander, and David Sherman.
I am grateful for the support and friendship of Carletta Wilson, Barbara Henderson, Faith Davis, JoAnn Moton, Julia Boyd, Jody Kim, Rick Simonson, and Barbara Thomas; Colleen McElroy and Calyx Books Collective; Blackbird Books; and Red and Black Books Collective.
I’d like to thank my family: Charles Watson, Dorothy and Harold Glass, Alton Sherman, Josh and Kitty Gardner, Erika Sherman, Richard Glass, Michael Glass, and Lois Sherman for being there for my daughters when I could not.
For their patience and love, I am eternally grateful to David, Aisha, and Zahida Sherman.
And for the music: Sweet Honey in the Rock, Esther “Little-dove” John, Miriam Makeba, Bobby McFerrin, SunRa and his Intergalactic Orkestra, and Miles Davis.
One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tom asunder.
—W. E. B. DuBois,
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Wasn’t nobody near the hushed water that time of night to see or hear the body move itself up from the hole in the bottom of the lake, through the opaque water, and past the lake’s upside where it floated dark and fluid as the little sea itself.
The dark body moved silkily on the water, a shadowy milk, growing, moving simply, offering no resistance, but easing on, gracefully riding the waves.
Old and new ribbons of algae twisted about the torso like banners, waving surely, softly too, toward the edge of the lake that rose from the water itself darker even than this moonless night.
SECTION 1
I
Raisin 1963
This a funny place. Maybe cause of the mountain standing up behind our town watching like a big old eye. Or maybe it’s that lake stretching way out, reaching black to black, pushing its way cross the earth like it’s in a hurry to run away from here. Or maybe it's that twisted-trunk, yellow-leaf tree next to Blue-the-wanga-man’s house, with the leaves that shine like gold lamps through the trees, day or night.
But some folks say no, it’s not. that mountain sitting back watching over us, and it’s not that black lake reaching, and it’s not that old white-trunked, yellow-tipped tree next to Blue’s that Reverend Daniles swears covers a hole leading from this world to the next. The thing that makes Pearl a funny kind of place is all that whispering we hear coming up from the ground.
I first heard it one day when I was walking with Miss Marius from her house to town.
Even though the only place I ever lived was in her house, I never thought of her house as mine. And don’t nobody else think no different from me.
My mama left Pearl soon as I was born, years before the last coal mine closed down and lots of colored folks left town. Folks from Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama. Come all the way to Washington to shake that red dirt off their feet, get those red fingers off their souls. Miss Marius always say, “You can run to the new South, but you can’t hide from the old South, not even way out here.”
But I remember when I was back in my mama’s stomach, floating like a pickle in a jar. I remember what was said, the bargains struck.
I could hear them talking while I was floating, sitting in all that water.
A high dark sound, my mama’s laughing and crying and a long, sharp tone, smooth as the knife Miss Marius used to cut meat from bone. I remember Miss Marius talking, talking, saying the same words over and over till my mama’s cry turned into a stretched-out moan.
And Miss Marius going around in the water with me. Going around in the tart, dark liquid. The low sound of her voice stroking me inside that bag, inside that wineskin where I floated in a dream.
“What did you take, Nola? What did you put up inside yourself, child? Tell me. I’m gonna help you and I’m gonna help this baby, too, but you got to tell me what you put into yourself. I got most of the okra out, but what else? What was it, Nola? Was it something from inside the house, something from the woods?”
And Miss Marius and my mama went around, circling till my mama, exhausted, let the words fall from her lips like some hard, funny-shaped stones. “Blue told me to use cedar berries and camphor,” she said, and that's all I remember from when I was in my mama’s stomach. But folks don’t know I even remember that, not even Miss Marius, cause them first years Miss Marius’s deep voice and big-knuckled hands was all the mama I thought I’d need.
“Hush that foolishness, child,” Miss Marius always say. “Everybody needs they mama and you got one just like everybody else. She’ll be back when she gets a notion.”
But it scared me when Miss Marius talk like that. I don’t know if I like my mama’s notions. The very first one she ever took about me left me shriveled up and gasping inside her womb.
That’s why I come out looking so old and wrinkled everybody took to calling me Raisin. But I don’t think it’s the wrinkles that make me look old. I think it’s like Miss Marius says, I’m an old old soul.
We live out on the edge of town on the east side, where all the colored people live. Miss Marius’s house is the last one you come to fore you hit all them trees and marsh at the edge of the lake, out where old Blue lives.
We live in what used to be an old rooming house. We got a downstairs and a front room and a kitchen with a big black stove.
Upstairs is where we all sleep. Miss Marius and Nathan in the big room at the front of the house with that window letting in all the light from the world.
Miss Marius and Nathan got no children of they own, but Lucille and Lucinda are sisters and they act like they the ones come outta Miss Marius’s body, even though Miss Marius say we all her children. Since they been here the longest, longer than my twelve years, they both get to sleep in that room big enough to be a playyard, with all them goop-de-goos they got spread out all around the floor. They both got white-painted beds with flowers all scrolled around they heads so when they laying in em, it’s like they laying inside a wreath, kind of like a halo around their heads.
I sleep with MC and Wilhelmina and Douglass in the back bedroom, in that big old brown bed that we climb up onto with a stool. It be tight sometimes with all us squeezed up in it, but I’m just glad I don’t have to share the bed with Lucille.
Lucille gonna be big, just like Miss Marius. She got a thick-waisted body and short, strong legs. Her neck’s thick too, and strong enough for all the yelling she think she gotta do. She like to drop her head back and yell loud as she can.
Her hair ain’t black and thick like mine, it’s the color of a tree trunk and her eyes the color of moonstone.
One time at supper, I made the mistake of trying to tell her how pretty I thought her eyes was, but she raised herself up like a rattler in her chair and hissed, “Shut your mouth, you old wrinkled-up raisin, fore I put you in a box and sell you to Miss Lomax to eat.”
Everybody at the table laugh when she say that, they scared not to. But Miss Marius and Nathan never crack a smile.
I didn’t mind. Whenever they start talking about how wrinkled up and black I am, I just close my eyes and think of a warm soft place like a tub of hot water I can lay my body down in, or a nice dark space like a womb.
Lucille say don’t nobody love MC, Wilhelmina, Douglass, and me, and that’s how come we living with Miss Marius and Nathan. MC ain’t nuthin but a baby, so it always make him cry when she say that, but Wilhelmina, Douglass and me all about the same size, so we don’t cry, we just look at her.
"Your mamas left you on Miss Marius’s porch like a sack of bad-luck pennies. Ain’t nobody ever gonna love you,” she liked to say, knowing nobody try to talk about how her own mama left her and Lucinda.
When she say that I think of the time Douglass stuck his hand in a bucket of snakes and pull out three so I won’t have to, like Lucille was trying to make me do. And Douglass about as scared of snakes as me.
Douglass’s mama took all her children but him back to Memphis a while after the mine closed. She left him with Miss Marius so he’d be in good hands.
“That boy slow, Miss Marius. Look at the way that eye jumps, the way he rocks on his feet. He can’t make it on this long trip. Can he stay with you till I get settled? I’ll send for him soon as I do.”
Miss Marius say, “I’ll keep him till you ready, Louisa. Y’all go on and make your home.”
Wilhelmina’s mama did her about the same as mine did me, cept she use a wire to try to get Wilhelmina out, but it didn’t work.
“She a special child, Leona, that’s why she here. Leave her with me. I’ll take care of her,” Miss Marius say.
Wilhelmina got a mark, look like a blue moon setting on her face. I think about how she sit with MC, humming soft as water in his ear the times he sound like there’s a hole in him so deep nuthin but water could fill it up.
I think about the way we sleep, four brown spoons with our arms around each other. And I look at Lucille when she say don’t nobody love us.
I look at her mean as that goat Miss Marius call Moses on account of his white beard hanging down to the ground. I look at her mean as Moses look at us and I say, “No, you lying, Lucille. Somebody do love us.”
And I don’t even flinch when she grab me by the two plaits Miss Marius wove into my head, I don’t even yell when she pull out the weave and swing me by my plaits to the ground.
I only remember the time I was over to Miss Lomax’s house when she first got her new TV and out of the blue glowing in the screen I saw a cowboy jump out of a box and dig his heels into a horse’s sides. The man jumped off the horse and grabbed a cow by the horns and tried to drag the cow down to the ground.
And when Lucille swung me down by my plaits into the dirt, just like that cowboy roped that cow, I jumped up with a wild look still in my eyes and say, “You’re still lying.” But my legs were turning like wheels on the road.
II
This my secret place. My green, green holy place, inside this circle of red cedar trees, next to that big-leaf maple with moss that clings to it like smooth green skin.
Even the ground is green and covered with leaves, leaves my teacher Miss Dubois say is called oxalis. I put one of the leaves in my mouth and taste its juicy sour, then rub the green softness into my wrinkled skin.
“One day these wrinkles be gone and my skin be smooth and soft as these leaves. One day it will,” I sing into the ears of licorice ferns and salmonberry. Then I lay down to dream on a wild ginger blanket, my smooth, soft second green skin.
A woman comes down the road toward me, a small black bag in one hand. Her eyes are knives and she is not smiling. Behind her is a bright gray cloud. It is raining white balls, but she is not wet. The woman’s arms reach for me, brown and unwrinkled. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. I turn from her and run toward the black lake. The woman is behind me, running. She is fast, almost faster than me. I run to the edge of the lake, look back at her reaching hands, her mouth opened like an O. I jump.
The water’s coolness soothes me, then starts to bum. I call for help, but she is the only one there, standing, waiting at the edge. My head slips below the surface. I scream as I go down.
“Wake up, girl. What’s wrong with you?”
I open my eyes and see Sin-Sin standing over me. He’s the color of that stone Miss Dubois got on her desk, Brazilian agate. His skin so bright it shines.
“What are you doing in my secret place, Sin-Sin?”
“This ain’t your secret place,” Sin-Sin say. “It ain’t nobody’s secret place cause it ain’t even no secret. I walk around back here all the time. So does Blue.”
“I never saw neither one of you down here before and I always come down here.”
“Well, so do we. What you doing falling asleep out in the woods, girl? Don’t you know all kinds of things be out here waiting on somebody like you?”
Sin-Sin ain’t but fourteen, so I know he don’t have to talk like I ain’t got good sense.
“Ain’t nuthin out here waiting on me no more than it waiting on you. How come you walking around down here?” I ask.
“To get away from my mama,” he say.
“What you want to get away from Miss Dubois for? She nice.”
“That’s cause she ain’t your mama. She was, you’d be running down here hiding, too.”
“I wish my mama was a schoolteacher,” I say.
“That’s cause you ain’t never lived with a schoolteacher mama before, that’s all. Once you get a taste of ail the books she make you read, you be glad you got the mama you got.”
“Miss Marius my mama,”
“That right? I thought she Lucille and Lucinda’s mama.”
“She is, sort of. She our mama, too: me and Wilhelmina and MC and Douglass, she our mama, too.”
“Your mamas left all of you for Miss Marius to keep?” he ask.
“Uh huh,” I say back.
“You’re lucky. Mamas are hard on you, making you work all the time around the house, and read all the time and study figures and wash your hands fore you come in the kitchen and always wanting you to clean your ears. And they don’t want you to talk like you want to talk. I wish mine would leave me with Miss Marius.”
“Miss Marius alright. I can’t stand Lucille. Always act like a razor in her mouth,” I say.
“She’s big. Don’t nobody mess with Lucille.”
“I told her she a lie, right to her face,” I say.
“You did?”
“Yep.”
“That must be why you hiding in the woods. Lucille gonna get you good for saying that.’’
"She ain’t gonna get me cause I ain't going back there. I’m gonna stay here and live in these woods,” I tell him.
“How you gonna eat and get clean clothes?”
“I’m gonna eat salmonberries and mushrooms. And I’ll make some dresses and pants out of leaves.”
“What about school? My mama's gonna want you to do your homework. She don’t care where you live.”
“You could bring my books to me out here. And I could give you my schoolwork for Miss Dubois,” I say.
“My mama don’t want me mixed up in no trouble. She say plenty trouble waiting in the world for me later on.”
“I ain’t talking about getting in no trouble. Miss Marius say never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, but she usually be talking about white folks,” I say. I look in Sin-Sin's face, see the sticks and dirt clotted in his hair, the long red scratch reaching cross one cheek like a streak of lightning, the dry white mud on his blue pants.
“You going around looking like that and you worried about getting in trouble for taking my schoolwork to your mama?” I ask. He duck his head.
“I ain't never known you to be scared of no trouble before, Sin-Sin.”
“You don’t know nuthin about me, girl,” he say.
Sin-Sin wrong. I know some things. Heard Miss Marius grumbling, “Ain't nuthin worse than a mind sitting still. Ain’t nuthin left for a empty mind to do but worry about other folks’ business. Miss Dubois a fine woman. Just what this town needs, and some folks still want to worry over how she got that baby."
Once I hear Miss Lomax say Sin-Sin was the devil’s baby. When I ask what she mean, she say on account of his color, that orange-burning red.
“It ain’t natural,” she say. “What colored folks you know walk around glowing like that?”
I look in Sin-Sin’s face now and touch it one time. That soft burning skin. He don't like folks to make much of it, though.
I tell him, ‘You’re used to living inside all that shine. All I got is these old wrinkles.”
“They don’t look no worse than nuthin else to me. Besides, I like old folks,” he say, walking backwards from my secret place, into the fading dark, into the trees.
I go back to Miss Marius’s that night. Walk straight up to Lucille and wait. Close my eyes though. I’m too scairt to look death straight in the face.
“Where you been, honey? We already ate, but there’s a plate on the stove you can warm," Miss Marius call out from the front room where she sit with her eyes closed, letting the day settle in her bones.
I open one of my eyes and look at Lucille. She look at me so long I open my other eye.
“You ain’t got no sense,” was all she say before walking into the front room to sit with Miss Marius,
Then it seem like every time I go to my secret place, Sin-Sin there. We run through the trees and play explore, picking up leaves and bugs and mushrooms.
We pull some big sticks and leaves together into something looking like a shack, but Sin-Sin say it gonna be a tree house like he read about in a book his mama give him.
“We can’t call it that, cause I ain’t climbing up in them trees,” I tell him so he can hurry and get that thought out of his head. These trees around here big and tall, go back a long, long way, clear back to what Miss Dubois call Lewis and Clark. He poke out his lips a bit, but we still don’t put that house up in them trees.
We find two big rocks for chairs and a piece of log for a table. Most times we just sit inside and tell stories.
“I asked Miss Marius where the Night People come from and she say they always been here. She say one time she saw the Night People down here,” I say.
“What she say they look like?” Sin-Sin ask.
“Just like everybody say, tall as some of these trees, snake-haired and yellow-eyed,” I say. “That’s how she saw one cause its eyes was glowing in the dark and she thought it was a cat way up in the branches, but when she heard it whistle, she knew it wasn’t no kind of cat.”
“What was Miss Marius doing out in the woods at night? You can’t see no Night People unless you out here at night,” Sin-Sin say. “She out in the woods looking for Blue? My mama said Miss Marius and Blue was friends when they was young.”
“No. She wasn’t looking for no wanga-man. She out here looking for Miss Buchanan.”
“That lady walk around all the time talking to herself and stay out by the dump?”
“Miss Marius say that how she got like she got. When they was girls they was friends and Miss Buchanan was alright then.
“But one day she got it in her head to run off to the woods cause her mama had died and her daddy wouldn’t stop acting like he was crying all the time, even after her mama had been dead for a long time, and Miss Buchanan couldn’t take it no more cause she thought her daddy would’ve liked it better if she was the one to go, which wasn’t true, Miss Marius say, but the girl wasn’t thinking right by then, so she took off.
“Miss Marius thought she knew about where Miss Buchanan had hid herself, so she set off to go get her. Well, after she walked way up in here, she thought she’d gotten lost, which was funny for her cause she thought she knew these woods like the back of her hand, even in the dark.
“It was about then she looked up and seen them two shining yellow eyes in a tree. She thought it was a cat, but then she saw it shake its head side to side real slow and she saw them snakey ropes swing around. She couldn’t make out no arms or legs, so she thought it must be sitting up in the tree.
“Then it turned them yellow eyes on a spot back of Miss Marius and start whistling. She say it don’t sound like nuthin from this world. She still don’t move a muscle, cause she think it might suck her up in them trees or something. So she stay still while she look in them eyes.
“She say it seem like something was being passed on to her while she was looking in them eyes, seem like she feel a humming in her body.
“Then she heard a moan coming from somewhere behind her. She turn her head to try to see exactly where the moan was coming from and then she hear a whining sound and turn her head back to them eyes, but they was gone.
“She move over to the moaning and find Miss Buchanan laying on some moss. She didn’t never say nuthin that made sense no more,”
“I bet they put a spell on her. That’s what they supposed to do if they catch you out in they woods at night,” Sin-Sin say.
“Miss Marius say she never did go back in them woods at night no more and she told us we better do the same.”
“Well, all I know is, I’m not scared of no Night People whistling and carrying on,” Sin-Sin say.
“What you gonna do if one sees you? Them people carry spears and can fly. What you gonna do if you come up against one of them?” I ask.
“Blue say Night People only bother people who bother them or theirs. He say they ain’t nuthin but old ones who’ve gone before us.” “What he mean?”
“He mean Night People ain’t nuthin but spirits.”
“Spirits ... like ghosts?”
“Yeah. People that are there, but we just can’t see them. Blue say spirits around us all the time.”
I look outside our house into the listening trees. I hear birds talking, leaves brushing against each other. I look at Sin-Sin’s eyes shining in the light and I know I ain’t gonna tell no more stories about Night People.
One time, after I tell all the stories for about a week and Sin-Sin don’t say too much of anything one way or the other, I decide I ain’t gonna tell another story till he take his turn. So we pick more leaves and grass for our roof for a while and then come inside our house and sit down. Sin-Sin wiggle for a while on his chair, but I still don’t say a mumbling word. He finally sit still and look at me with a face that older than mine.
“The Night People come for me one time,” he say and wrap his skinny arms around hisself and start to rock his body side to side like Douglass do to calm hisself.
“What you say?” I ask.
He close his eyes and I lean up close to his face to hear.
“They come for me once and say they gonna come back.”
Sin-Sin look like I feel thinking about the Night People coming anywhere for me.
"They come to your house?” I ask.
Sin-Sin nod his head, slow-like.
“Come right inside and got in my bed, climbed right inside my head.”
"Huh?”
“I was dreaming. I was standing near the edge of the lake. Could hear the sound of water licking the rocks. Could hold out my hand and touch the lumps on a white stick laying on the bank like a long broken arm. The air smelled like mud.
“It wasn’t real. The waves was moving like a million mouths opening their lips and talking. Talking to me.
“I stepped up, close to the edge as I could get without putting my feet in the water. The black water in that lake turned orange as a tangerine.
“I felt my daddy in there.
“I put one foot in the water and the talking mouths pulled me in and I fell inside that water and floated in the dream. Didn’t hear nuthin but whispers. The shushing of the waves.
“Saw a shape drift by. Something tell me, that’s him. That’s my daddy. I follow the shape. Move my body in the water like it do. Something hold me. Something grab my arm, turn me round. Push something solid in my mouth. I swallow. My mouth taste like rock.
“I turn my head toward the shape I think is my daddy, but he gone. The mouths, the waves tell me to hush. They hold me by my arms and rock me. Sing me a song but I can’t understand the words.
“I try to say, I want my daddy. I want to go with him, but they say no. I get mad. I say no and try to get away, but red wings fly toward me in the water. I feel a huge bird grab hold of my shoulders and lift me. Then I am leaving the lake, the dark orange water, the place where I felt my daddy.
“The bird take me up in the woods to a circle of tall, snake-haired trees.
"The trees whistle and open they arms. The bird drop me in the middle of the circle and fly away, red wings glowing in the dark.
“In they whistle-talk they tell me to climb inside the trunk of the oldest tree, say I should wait inside there.
“I climb inside the white-walled hole and look out into the yellow-eyed night. I call on my daddy cause I feel scared.
“The trees keep whistling as they cover the hole and seal me inside the darkness.”
Sin-Sin crying when he finish his story, long salty tears that move down his face leaving slug trails. The only boy I ever seen cry was MC and he ain’t nuthin but a baby.
I don’t know what to do with Sin-Sin’s tears. So I pick up a leaf and smooth it on his face.
“It ain’t nuthin but a dreamstory, Sin-Sin. Nuthin but a dream,” I say while I smooth the salt into his orange skin.
“I ain’t never gonna know nuthin about my daddy,” he whisper.
He turn his head and look at me close.
“You ain’t never gonna tell nobody about the dream, is you?”
“What I want to tell that for?” I ask back.
“You gotta promise,” he say.
“Alright.”
“No, I mean you really gotta promise. We gotta seal it with blood.”
I look at him close and say, “I ain’t sealing nuthin with no blood.”
“Alright. A kiss then. A soul-kiss,” he say.
“What a soul-kiss?" I ask.
"Here. I’ll show you,” he say.
Sin-Sin lean up against my face and put his lips against mine. I smell the green from the leaf in his face. It smell like green water. He push his tongue in my mouth. I start to bite, but don’t. Sin-Sin taste like salt. He pull his tongue out like a snake sucking in.
“That’s a soul-kiss,” he say, not looking old no more. “That’s as good as a bloodseal.”
I ain’t thinking about Sin-Sin and his crazy story. All I think about is telling Lucille I got something she say I ain’t never gonna get.
“Whatcha’ll doing in there?”
We jump back in our seats at the sound of Blue’s voice. Sin- Sin know him, I don’t. All I know is stories I been told.
“Blue a wanga man,” Lucille told me one time. “You know what that is?”
“No,” I say as she pinch my arm.
“It’s a man can turn hisself into a snake or a lizard or a goat. Anything he want, he can change into.”
“How you know?” I ask.
“I heard some of the grown folks talking,” Lucille say. “They say didn’t nobody know nuthin about Blue, he just up and was one day. Miss Lomax’s brother say he saw him coming up from the lake, no boat, no car, no nuthin. He just come walking into town from the lake. And you know there’s only marsh and trees by the lake. I bet he turned hisself into a fish, got tired of the water, and then turned hisself into a man and come up on land to walk like the rest of us.”
I didn’t believe her then. Now, I don’t say nuthin. Just look at the beads and shells around Blue’s neck. He got a piece of glass hanging on a neck rope, shining. When I look inside the glass, everything new and shaped funny.
I wonder if that’s how he do his changing. Stretch out and fall deep inside his bones. Blood shifting around like sand till he’s new.
He twist his head in my direction, then turn his long neck to Sin-Sin.
“You remember what I told you, boy?” he ask.
Sin-Sin nod his head, but don’t look in Blue’s eyes.
“Soon as you ready, you come see me. You hear?” he say.
Sin-Sin don’t say nuthin. He keep his eyes on the floor of our treehouse-on-the-ground.
Blue grunt, then he gone.
“What he talking about, Sin-Sin? You fooling around with a wanga man?”
"You believe whatever folks tell you, don’t you?” he ask.
“Don’t you?”
“No. I like to find things out for myself. Plenty of times grown folks are wrong about things,” he say.
“They wrong about Blue?” I ask. “He ain’t no wanga?”
“He’s a man that knows some things, things most folks are bound to forget.”
“He don’t open up a chicken’s neck and drink its blood?” I ask. “He can’t turn into a snake and make your mama’s heart stop beating if you look at him crosseyes?”
‘Your mama’s heart need to stop if you walking around looking at folks crosseyes. Blue ain’t no fool.”
“What you doing messing around with him? I bet Miss Dubois don’t like that!” I say.
“He say he can teach me things, things I won’t learn in no books.”
“What kind of things?” I ask.
“Things he say’ll help me grow into a man, things my mama don’t know nuthin about.”
"He seem alright,” I say.
“He is alright. He serious is all.”
“Is that why he don’t smile at folks in town?” I ask.
"He thinks that’s shining, shining for white folk, and he ain’t never gonna do that. Blue say he stopped smiling the day they run his daddy into the river cause his daddy hurt the white man who hurt Blue’s mama. And down in Mississippi, they was like most of the colored people up here. Couldn’t none of em swim. They never found his daddy’s body.
“Blue say he keeps that picture in the front of his mind: his daddy running out of the house and down the road, the high round behinds of the horses chasing him, running him down to the river and in.
“Blue followed the trail of red dust the horses left behind. Then he hid in some bushes by the river and watched. He watched his daddy fall in the fast white water. Then he saw him stand with his legs shaking, but his back straight as he walked farther into the water, till all Blue could see was bubbles where his daddy’s head had been. Blue stopped talking then. He didn’t talk for five or six years.”
“He tell you that?” I ask.
“How else I’m gonna know?”
"What he want with you?”
Sin-Sin duck his head like he do when Blue come. He sit still for a while with his forehead wrinkled bad as mine, then his skin smooth out and he shake his shoulders like he coming out of a dream.
“He’s gonna cut me,” he say.
"What?”
"He’s gonna give me a man-cut, cut me like they used to do to make you into a man.”
“You crazy?” I ask. “What you wanna let him cut on you for? Your mama know about him cutting on you? I bet she don’t. I bet this something you and Blue made up.”
“No, it’s real. He showed me a picture of it in a book he got.”
"Blue cutting on you is gonna be your behind, I bet.”
“My mama ain’t never gonna know,” he say.
“What?” I ask.
"I ain't gonna tell her. This something women don’t know nuthin about. He’s gonna ask my mama to let me spend some time with him and that’s when he’s gonna do it. He’s been telling me things I’m gonna need to know so I can be ready.”
“How come you can’t just be a man like everybody else? How come you gotta get cut?”
“So I can leave childish things behind and be a grown man, Blue say.”
“Is that all you think about, being a grown man?” I ask him, frowning.
“What else I’m gonna think about?” he ask, frowning too. “You better think about that cutting some more. And do some thinking about your mama. I know Miss Dubois ain’t gonna stand for nuthin like this,” I say.
All he say is, “She can’t make me into a man. Blue can.”
III
That the last time I see Sin-Sin in our treehouse for a while. I see him in school some time, but he turn his head like he don’t wanna see me.
I try to tell him one more time I won’t tell Miss Dubois or nobody else. We could make a soul-kiss if he want. But he turn from me whenever he see me coming, like he turning from something evil in a dream.
I don’t mind. I keep on going to my secret place, sitting inside the treehouse and telling stories to myself.
After a while, I stop worrying about Sin-Sin and his secrets cause Miss Marius got a note from a woman saying she my mama.
I bring it out here and puzzle over it sometime. Feel the loop-de-loop of Miss Marius’s name on the paper and the other strange, dangerous name.
Dear Miss Marius,
Things sure do change, so do people. What goes around comes around in a hurry they say. I'm coming around there for my child.
Please accept these few dollars as my thanks. The words’ll have to wait till I come.
Nola Barnett
1653 Cottage Grove South
Chicago, Illinois
Miss Marius say this my mama. And Nola Barnett say she coming here to get me.
That’s when I first heard the whispers, the ones coming up from the ground. Heard a man voice and a woman, too. The man keep calling me, calling me his baby girl.
Me and Miss Marius was walking to the depot for the woman that say she my mama. We pass by Miss Lomax’s and see her husband Mr. Lomax sitting with his fiddle between his knees on his porch.
“How y’all doing," he ask.
“Fine, Mir. Lomax,” we say. “How you?”
Even Miss Marius call him Mr. Lomax. He long and skinny and like to fuss with Reverend Daniles. Like to call him a jackleg preacher that keep messing with people’s minds. When I ask Miss Marius what he talking about, she tell me to stay out of grown folks’ foolishness.
“Don’t neither one of em know what they talking about,” she always say and keep on doing what she be doing.
Miss Lomax say that fiddling belong to the devil, so she get a brand new TV to run so Mr. Lomax won’t play. But he still do. Sit right up in the room and fiddle like it the end of the world, Miss Marius say. Even with that TV set on.
Miss Lomax act like she don’t hear him, keep right on watching that blue light in the TV. Some nights you can hear them both, the TV and the fiddle going on into the night.
"I gots my fiddle back, so I’m alright,” Mr. Lomax say as we pass.
“Somebody took your fiddle, Mr. Lomax?” Miss Marius ask.
“Somebody tried to take it, but I’m too old and smart for that,” he laugh as we walk on down the road.
When we on the stretch of road between Miss Lomax’s and Miss Dubois’s, I hear them.
"What’s that?” I ask Miss Marius, who keep on walking down the road.
“What’s what?” she ask, still walking.
I stop dead in the middle of the road and listen. "You hear that?”
“I don’t hear nuthin but my heart beating in my ears from all this walking,” she say. “You better hurry. We don’t want to keep your mama waiting.”
I don’t tell her I wait. All my life and I don’t even know I’m waiting. Don’t say, let her wait, let her sit there and think about things like I do.
But I keep hearing the voices, they start to build in my ears till I almost scream, but I don’t. Miss Marius’d think I don’t want to go see Miss Nola that say she my mama.
I don’t want to go see her, but it’s the whispers that stop me from moving.
The whispers jump up from the ground and settle in my bones till my body gets heavy like a big piece of wood and I’m stuck. A man voice calling, “Baby girl... Baby girl, I’m here now, watching over you.” My legs take root and I stand in the road with my arms stuck out.
The whispers move through my body, a humming in my bones that circles round my waist tight as a belt and I can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t even open my mouth to call out to Miss Marius.
“Baby girl. Baby girl,” voices say under the whispers. The whispers sound like white-capped water swirling round inside my head till I think I’m gonna fall from the weight, but I don’t.
The whispers hold me still and fill up my head with an old watery sound...WHOOSHBEE…WHOOSHBEE…
WHOOSHBEE...WHOOSHBEE…
SECTION 2
I
Nola
The whine of the train’s whistle reminded Nola of the red rooster’s muted scream so many hard mornings ago. Nola was fifteen when she left Pearl with the echo of that scream burning inside her mind. Fifteen, and sharply focused on a rooster’s call so she could forget the open wounds of other scars she was trying to leave behind.
Closing her eyes as the train carried her back to Pearl, Nola remembered how things were twelve years ago, before she had left.
“Nola! Nola! What you doing sleeping in the middle of the day, child? Don’t you know we got work to do? The Barneses and Duprees all gonna be coming round here for supper and look at this place! I didn’t ask you to help do none of the cooking, but I know you’re gonna get off your behind and help clean this house. Didn’t you hear that rooster out there? He’s been acting crazy all morning, crowing when he should be sleep and sleep when he should be crowing. He about as mixed up as you. Now get up out of that bed before I set it on fire!”
Nola pulled the covers close to her body to protect it from her mother’s raving. Her mother’s every word landed like a well-placed dart in her belly, growing like a soft dark balloon beneath the sheets.
She knew she was going to get up, but didn’t want to shift around too much yet. It would be bad enough when all those people came around. The thought of their probing eyes was enough to stir the queasiness awaiting to disrupt her stomach.
As she lay in bed breathing heavily, she heard the scratching of their red rooster in the dirt outside her window. Ari usually avoided this side of the house, and his aggravated movements were as disturbing to her now as they’d ever been.
CURKACURKACAWWW...
Ari’s sudden roar made her sit up. This roar did not carry the pride of his usual arrogant cry; this was the scream of an old, fading man.
CURKACURKACAWWW...
A rush of nausea forced her to lay down again, but only for a moment. The sound of her mother and the rooster squabbling outside made her get out of bed to watch them through the room’s one window.
“Get out of here with all that noise, you old raggedy bird you!” Nola’s mother screamed as she chased Ari around the yard, swinging her broom.
Nola knew the strength of her mother’s body as well as the swelling of her own. If her mother connected the broom with the bird, a lifetime of fury would put Ari to rest permanently.
Fortunately, Ari, though old, was quick enough to evade the controlled, purposeful blows of Ouida Barnett. Once Nola would have smiled at the picture her mother made meanly sweeping dust in the yard, but now every inch extending the boundary of her growing belly was mortar, cold angry mortar that sealed a wall of silence between her mother and herself. Now there were few smiles between them.
“I don’t know when that woman’s gonna sit herself down and rest. Look at her. I don’t care if she is my sister, she’s still a mess, even after all these years,” Bess muttered into Nola’s ear.
Nola smelled the cutting scent of mint and Jack Daniels. She cupped the bottom of her stomach. Bess rested her hands on the swollen belly too.
“She’s gonna come around. Watch and see. Don’t none of our people turn our backs on one of our own. She just don’t know what to do with herself is all, but she’s gonna come around.”
“I hope you’re right, Bessie. Y’all and this baby’s all I got in this world.”
“Well, when is El gonna get up his nerve and come on around here and talk to your mama?”
Nola shrugged. She hadn’t talked to El since she’d told him he was gonna have to go into Crescent and find a job in the coal mine, a job paying enough money so all three of them could live decent and have food to eat. Her mama had let her know they weren’t gonna live in her house.
“I ain’t the one told you to lay up and get no baby. If you and the baby need a place to stay, you got one. But I ain’t taking care of no grown man,” Ouida had told her when Nola first found out about the baby. Nola had listened to her mother with tears in her eyes.
“Well, he’s gonna have to find a way to make his feet walk over here. Your mama’s got a few things to say to him and she’s not wrong for wanting to say them. Is he going to Crescent?” “Don’t know. He didn’t like the idea of going in that coal mine at all.”
“No, the only idea he liked was the one got your belly stretched.”
“El’s not afraid of work. He say going in the mine is like being buried in a grave when you still living. He watched his daddy die from working in the mine, breathing that coal dust, breathing that death inside his chest every day.”
“I ain’t saying he’s scared of work. But I know it’s gonna take more than what he makes sitting on the lake waiting on fish to come to take care of a family.”
“He don’t have to take care of me. I’m gonna be working too, soon as the baby’s big enough for me to have somebody watch.”
“You two talk about all this?”
“We don’t have to talk about it, that’s just how it’s gonna be.” “Well, all I know is you better get El to get them old long lanky legs over here and talk to your mama.”
“She’s not gonna talk, she’s gonna scream. She’s not gonna listen to nuthin we have to say, she’s only gonna be listening to the thoughts she got running around in her head.”
“And you gonna be the same way. You watch.”
II
Nola moved slowly through the house, dusting shelves and polishing glass. She listened to the muttering of her mother and her aunt as if listening to people whispering in a dream. She hadn’t seen El in a week, and something inside the ground of herself shifted.
She was having trouble believing things were gonna be all right for her and the baby and El. “Sometimes believing is all you got,” Bess had told Nola as she held her whimpering niece.
The baby had kicked inside Nola’s belly two days ago. Before too long, it would be time. She knew her mother would not change her mind about El, not with this baby growing inside her.
Nola was afraid to have the baby, afraid to push the growing seed from the safety of her body into the chill of the awaiting world. Her mother’s cruelty would be nothing compared to the rancor of the skinny-minded people of Pearl.
“You’d think they’d never seen a girl have a baby before, the way they blink their eyes and carry on,” she mumbled. “Just like mama. Walking around the house with her mouth poked out I know how she came up with me to take care of. She ain’t the holy woman she thinks she is.”
Nola stopped fussing when she came to the tarnished gold-plated frame holding their one picture of her father. She didn’t look anything like him. He was a round-headed, yellow-skinned man with big crackling black eyes.
“They were the first thing I saw on him,” her mother would sometimes say, laughing. “Big shiny fisheyes. That’s what I thought when I first saw him. And he was all eyes, seeing and wondering about everything; in the world.”
Her mother didn’t talk about him much around Nola or anybody else. She always said he was a piece of her life best forgotten unless she wanted to end up like Miss Buchanan and spend most of her time digging in the dump or out at the grave-yard, messing with dead folks’ dreams.
Nola could not remember the sound of her father’s voice, but she could recall the touch of his fingers brushing her cheeks. That touch, that one simple gesture belonging only to him, let her know how much he loved her. She longed for the gentleness that was his, now.
She quickly replaced the frame on the short table where it sat, an altarpiece. Raised voices in the kitchen made her hold herself still.
“Your hands are bloody as anybody’s, Ouida. Only yours are more bloody cause you're supposed to be her mama,” Nola heard Bess say.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“No, you’ve been out of your mind and I’m sick of it. That girl needs you now. You can’t use them no more, so you wanna act like the wronged mama, when you’re the one who’s wrong.” “Just cause you got that liquor in you, you think you can talk to me any way you want? You must be out of your mind. This is my house and if you don’t like what I say in my house, then I’ll tell you the same thing I told that girl, GET OUT!” Nola’s mother shouted.
“Running her away ain’t gonna change the fact you’re wrong and neither is running me off. In fact, that’s exactly what you don’t need, time to sit around here and think everything you’ve done in life is right, and we’re all wrong. Well, you’re wrong and I’m gonna keep on telling you you’re wrong till you do right by that girl in there, who’s carrying a baby. Your grandchild.”
“I know I raised her right. I know I raised her better than to lay up with some fool that ain't got nuthin in his future but catching some fish. ”
“This ain’t got nuthin to do with how you raised her. She just about raised now and it’s gonna be her turn soon to do the raising. Can’t you see that? This is what she wanted. It didn’t have nuthin to do with you.”
“She mine, ain’t she? What you mean it don’t have nuthin to do with me? Who looked after her all these years after her daddy got hisself killed?”
“The man’s dead and gone. Don’t bring him up in this conversation.”
“He was her daddy and my husband. I’ll bring him up, turn him over, dance with him round the room if I want to.”
“Ouida, what good is this? How’s it gonna help anybody? You can’t let that man rest after eight years?”
“If you settled down and stayed away from them whiskey bottles long enough to find you a man and get married, you could see what all this is about. If that man had stayed home instead of running behind that woman, I never would’ve had to shoot him and Nola would still have a father...”
“You didn’t own that man, Ouida. You don’t own Nola and you don’t own me. If Sanford wanted to run behind a hundred women, you couldn’t have stopped him, no matter what you did. You know why? Cause you can love them but you can’t own them. Don’t nobody own nobody else. And for you to sit up in here all these years shriveling up and trying to put your bitterness off on Nola is wrong. She has the right to try to make a life for herself the best way she knows how, just like you did. Didn’t nobody tell you to run all the way from Jackson, Mississippi to Pearl, Washington to marry that man. And didn’t nobody tell me to come out here with you. I came so you wouldn’t be here without no people. That was something you had to do, and I had to do, like Nola’s gonna do what she has to. The difference is, she don’t have to get cut out of your life like mama cut you out of hers.”
“You see all I gave up for him? You see?”
“All I see is a woman who’s done tasted some bitter water, and didn’t nobody tell her to go to the well and drink. You took a long enough swallow and now the bitterness left you so you thirsty still. And I don’t need to live with no man to know that.” Nola turned and walked back to her room. She didn’t want the women to know she had been listening to their angry exchange. For the last few months she had noticed the distance growing between her mother and her aunt. The rift between them was almost as great as the one between her mother and herself. Her mother’s sharp glances, deep sighs and wringing hands had all been signs of her growing discontent. And for all of her mother’s suppressed and expressed rage against her for the crime of her pregnancy, Bess had given her an equal dose of hugs, back rubs and foot massages. She saw her mother’s resentment bubbling like a blister festering on a lip.
Soon Bess strode angrily through Nola’s bedroom into her back room and slammed the door. Nola could hear her grumbling as she rustled through her drawers. A loud thump on the floor, and Nola knew she was packing the blue flowered suitcase she kept in her closet.
Before Nola could decide whether to go and soothe her aunt, her mother marched into the room.
“She in there?”
Nola nodded while her mother faced Bess’s closed door as if she were preparing to knock it from its hinges.
“And what you mean I’ve got blood on my hands?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You open this door and talk to me. We’re gonna settle this once and for all.”
“Not in front of Nola, we’re not. What I got to say is for your ears alone, and you know what I’m gonna say.”
“If you got anything that makes sense to say, you better say it now, Bess.”