by David Payne
“Damn, I never knew this. How do they know?”
“Genetic markers in the blood of populations on the old migration routes. Everyone alive on earth today has the same piece of mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the same woman.”
“The same woman?”
“The same black woman, actually. They call her ‘Mitochondrial Eve.’ She lived two hundred thousand years ago.”
He took this in. “So it’s all kind of silly, isn’t it, this whole racial business?”
Shanté just looked at him and shook her head and laughed, and it was different now, it was her old, rich, easy laugh with all its different colors, all its different notes.
Ran turned on his side and propped his head. “So, tell the truth, Shanté, this hoodoo stuff, this Congo stuff you’re into—is it really real?”
“Naw,” she said, reverting to the Killdeer accent now herself. “I left singing, spent five years in Africa, gave up sex for something unreal—is that what you think?” Her smile was more incredulous than fazed.
Ransom blinked. “What did your mother think of it?”
“Oh, you know, Ran, Mama had no truck with roots. She and Reverend Satterwhite—you remember Reverend Satterwhite?”
“Sure, I do.”
“To them, roots were devil’s work, but those ladies in our church, the ones in the big feathered hats? When they got worked up on Sunday morning and fell down in the aisles and spoke in tongues, they were doing exactly what I saw the ngangas in Boma do, only, in Zaire, they were channeling the nkisis, the ancestors; here, it’s the Holy Ghost. It’s a newer variation on an old theme, though. Forty percent of the slaves who came through Charleston and New Orleans were Congolese. They brought their knowledge and traditions with them, and they spread all over the Americas and the Caribbean. In Jamaica, it turned into Obeah; in Brazil, Umbanda; in Cuba, Palo Monte and Mayombe. Here, in the U.S., it turned into Conjure, and another branch runs straight into the black Spiritual and Pentecostal churches, and Mama was part of that, whether she understood or liked the fact or no, and she passed it to me.”
“I wonder why I dreamed of her.”
“I’ll tell you why. She was telling you to get your shit together.”
He lay back down. “It’s funny, Shan, when I crashed, I thought I was going to die. It didn’t hurt, though. It didn’t feel the least bit strange. I used to be afraid of dying; now I’m not. What do you suppose that means?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“It’s good, though, right?”
Shanté didn’t answer, and Ran was careful not to look at her, but he could feel her lingering study, a warmth against his face.
“They got your car out of the ditch,” she said after a silence. “It’s pretty banged up, but it runs. They don’t think the frame is bent.”
“You know I only bought it yesterday? I sold Daddy’s Thunderbird to get the goddamn thing for Claire.”
“I called her, Ran.”
He let a beat elapse. “And…?”
“She’s relieved you’re okay.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Meaning what?”
“Meaning, frankly, Shan, I have a hard time imagining Claire losing sleep worrying how or where I am.”
“She said you took a gun out of the house.”
Ran pondered this remark. “So, what, she’s scared? Is that what she said?”
“Why would Claire be scared?” Shanté’s expression challenged him, direct, severe, but Ransom didn’t answer. “Truthfully, Ran, I think Claire’s more concerned about you doing something to yourself. Is that something you’re considering?”
“No.” He clenched his jaw and looked away.
“You’re sure?”
“I don’t have the gun, Shanté.”
She held his stare, not cowed, not reassured.
“Sounds like Claire told you quite a bit,” he said. “Did she mention she’s having an affair?”
“With who?”
“I’ll give you three guesses. One should do.”
Shanté took this in. “You’re sure?”
“Pretty goddamn much.”
“And you’ve asked her?”
“Gee,” he said, “I didn’t think of that….”
“You have to ask her, Ran.”
“I think, under Robert’s Rules, the burden of disclosure falls to the deceiver in the case.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Shanté said. “If that’s true, I’m very, very sorry for you.”
“Fuck it, Shan. Don’t be sorry for me. I’m a grown-up. I’ve had affairs. People do. You don’t end a twenty-goddamn-year marriage over them.”
“Sometimes people do.”
He turned to her and frowned. “What, exactly, did Claire tell you?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, Ransom. Only what I’ve said. Can I ask you something, though? How is your marriage anyway? Are you sure you aren’t just clinging to something that’s already dead? Because people do that, too.”
Ran felt something roiled and dark rise up in him. “I love her more now than when we met.”
“And Claire?”
“You’ll have to ask her that.”
“You’re the one who has to ask. That’s what you need to do, and the sooner the better.”
“I can’t go back right now.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t, okay? I need to get my thinking straight. I was hoping maybe I could stay here for a while.”
“Here?” The suggestion seemed to take her by surprise.
“Just until the Odyssey is fixed,” he said, backpedaling.
“I don’t think so, Ran.”
“Why not? Because I’m white?”
“That’s one reason. This isn’t someplace where unhappy white guys get to come and sleep in a grass hut and get some R and R.”
“So what about the family tree?” he asked her, with a bitter note.
She just stared at him the way her mother had through the screen that night so long before, with an expression in which sorrow and pity had made peace with something else resigned and hard.
Ran gazed down at the medallion in his hand. He pressed his thumb over the incising, hard. “You know,” he said, “those old bastards at the mill, my dad and them…In that bathroom I used to clean, they pissed all over the floor and walls.”
“Why did they do that?”
“To show how mad they were, I guess.”
“You think your dad did it against you?”
Ran stared at the medallion, uncertain of the answer. It didn’t take him long to find it, though. “No,” he said. “No, actually I don’t. I think he did it to get back at Kincannon. And do you think Big Herbert ever set foot in that place? Probably not one time in his whole life. Daddy knew that, too. He knew who was going to have to clean up after him and still pissed on the walls. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be that mad, Shanté, so mad you’ll hurt yourself and make a cesspool of your head—a place you and your buddies use a dozen times a shift—all in order to inflict a meaningless revenge on a man who’ll never even notice? That’s what Daddy did. He made it worse on me, on him, on everyone. Because that’s all he had to strike: himself. If you understand that, you understand a lot about my dad.”
“Is that how mad you are?” she asked.
He gazed at her with burning eyes. “We aren’t talking about me.”
Shanté held his stare and just said, “Oh…”
“You shat on me,” he said, sitting up. “You and Delores both.”
“How, Ran? Because I didn’t run away to Neverland with you? I wanted to explain. You never returned my calls.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Go ahead. Put the blame on me because I didn’t stay in touch. You think I don’t know the reason why you didn’t come? You were the closest thing I ever had to family, and you shut…” He looked away. “You shut the door in my fucking face, Shanté…. Because I wasn’t good enough.”
&n
bsp; She shook her head. “That wasn’t why.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” he said. “You were middle-class and I was poor white trash. I wasn’t good enough then, and now I can’t even spend the night down here because I’m white? Where am I supposed to go, Shanté? I can’t go home; I’m not good enough for Claire. Her aunt Tildy informed me yesterday I’m not good enough for my own kids. You want to know why I came here? Because there’s no place left. I don’t have anybody else. You were the last card in my deck.”
He tried to hand her the Saint Christopher, but she closed his hand back over it. “It was a sweet dream, Ran. It was the sort you’re supposed to have at seventeen. I wouldn’t trade it, but it was never going to come to pass.”
“Why not, Shan? Why the fuck—”
She put a finger on his lips. “Shut up now and listen. I’m going to tell you what I think. I think you’re running away. I think you always do. You say Mama and I shut the door, but you’re the one who ran. Just like your name. What are you doing here, Ransom? What is this, road trip? Is this your ‘Freebird’ thing again?”
He put his hand over his heart. “Ouch, Shan, Lynyrd Skynyrd? That really cuts.”
“Fuck you,” she said, dead sober now. “If you’re on vacation from adulthood, Ran, do it someplace else, on someone else’s dime. Don’t waste my time.”
He started to get up, but Shanté pulled him back. “Listen to me, you son of a bitch. Among Simon’s people, there’s a saying: ‘Ku Mpemba kwatekila wa waku ukudila mvutu.’ It means, ‘In Mpemba, the land of the good Dead, there is one of yours who will assist you in your hour of need.’ If you dreamed of Mama, Ransom, that’s the reason why. White or not, you were one of hers, and she was one of yours, and so am I, goddamn it. So am I, Ransom.” She took his face between her hands. “I’m here for you, right now, today. If you’re having problems, spiritual problems, and they’re real, I’ll help you any way I can. But only if you mean to face them. If you’re going to run, the gate’s right there. Get the fuck out of my house.”
“I can’t go home, Shanté,” he said, and Ran was weeping now. “I can’t.”
She put her arms around him. “Why not?”
“Because,” he said, “a long time ago, this unhappy white guy just like me came back from the war and caught his wife having an affair with a black man, Shan…just like Claire and Cell, you see? And he killed them, Shan, he shot them in cold blood, and their bodies turned up with this pot. And if I go back now…”
“You’re telling me you’re going to hurt Marcel and Claire?”
“I’m telling you, what if it’s not me? What if the goddamn pot is causing this, leading me where they all went?”
“Is that what you believe?”
“It is.” Ransom didn’t hesitate. “It really is.”
Shanté took an appraising beat. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Ran, listen. There’s evil in the world. I’ve seen it. In the Congo, there are witches called ‘kindoki.’ Everybody there believes in them. It’s usually someone in the village, next door, down the street, even a member of your family, who flies out at night in dreams and eats your soul. The people that happens to? They die, unless they’re helped. Helping them is part of what I learned to do. And there are worse things than witches, Ran, deep-level demonic forces that prey on certain individuals, and I’m here to tell you, there are outcomes far more undesirable than death. In Conjure, people in that state are considered crossed. Crossing is real, but it’s also rare. Many people who think they’re crossed are really just dealing with garden-variety mental illness, unhappiness, bad luck. There’s a chance that’s all this is with you. That’s clearly what Claire thinks. But the one thing you’ve said that gives me pause…really, there are two. First, what you say you found inside this pot is pretty much what I’d expect to find inside a prenda. It’s called the ‘carga.’ It’s what makes it live and work. But let me tell you what a prenda is….”
She opened the volume she was holding, a slim white one, to the place her finger marked. “This book is by Lydia Cabrera. She was a Cuban ethnographer, a student of Ortiz. She’s dead now, but she’s still regarded as the preeminent academic authority on Palo.” She showed him the cover. La Regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje. “‘The Kimbisa Order of the Holy Christ of the Good Journey.’ It’s a study of a line of Palo called Kimbisa. This is what Cabrera says: ‘A prenda or nganga’—that’s the Bantu term—‘is the pot in which dwells…el alma de un muerto…the soul of a dead person…’”
She glanced at him over her rims. “‘…sometido por su voluntad y mediante un pacto con el individuo que le rinde culto’…subject by his will and by means of a pact with the individual who pays him homage…and whom the muerto helps…con su poder de ultratumba…with his supernatural—literally, ‘beyond-the-tomb’—power. So: An nganga is the pot in which dwells the soul of a muerto, subject by his will and by means of a pact with the individual who pays him homage—who ‘feeds him’—and whom the muerto helps with his supernatural power.”
“Wait,” said Ran. “‘Feeds’? Who feeds whom?”
“The Palero feeds the muerto.”
“Feeds it what?”
“Life-force offerings. Blood, primarily.”
The silence now resembled that which follows a hundred-year snowfall.
“What was the other?” Ransom finally said.
“The other what?”
“You said there were two things.”
“The one way to dissolve a prenda—the only way, so far as I’m aware—is to bury it in an anthill.”
“It’s real, isn’t it,” Ran said. “Holy shit.”
“Let me fetch some things out of the house, and we’ll go see.”
FORTY-FIVE
Once a fortnight…then once a week…then every second night Addie senses the presence in the house. She often lies awake in bed till dawn, then, in the fields, drives herself to exhaustion and far past, dreading the hour when she must return and light the lamp alone.
And the news is all so terrible…Tom Wagner, killed at Fort Moultrie, when one of his own cannon exploded during a routine inspection. The new battery on Morris Island, from which Harlan writes, is named for Tom. And Jimmy Pettigru, who had such a clear, fine face and ringing laugh, and Will Porcher, Addie’s cousin, with whom she danced the German at her first St. Cecelia’s, and Thad Middleton, for whom she never cared (but, oh, his mother, and his sister, Ann), and David Guinn, who had such pretty curls, such a fine seat on a horse (he made her heart beat once, if only for a week), and Mitchell Ball, that sad, soft something in his eye that always broke her heart…The roll is called, and those who answered, flushed and laughing, in the bosom of their families as recently as Christmastide—in the high mood after Fredericksburg, as the plowmen at Wando Passo broke the squares behind the oxen—are ghosts before the new rice pips in April, when they let the Sprout Flow off. There is hardly a house in Charleston without black crepe at the door.
When the Federal shells begin falling, her aunt’s house, which escaped the fire, takes two hits through the roof within a week. Blanche has gone to Addie’s cousin, Delphine, in Cheraw. “And you, my dearest child,” she writes, “should come here, too. You’re no longer safe, with Federal gunboats running up the river at their pleasure as they do. And the Negro troops, they say, under Higginson and Wentworth, these Boston men, are pitiless in their revenge against masters who put the very bread into their mouths and were their former friends. I fear for all of us, but mostly, Addie, you.”
There’s a day, and not just one, when Addie considers heeding this advice…. When the squares are “flowed,” as John, the minder, says, she’s careful not to look down, afraid of what she’ll see reflected back. Night, though, is the time she fears the most. When Addie hears the footsteps now, she tells herself to slay her foolish fear and check the hall, but she can only lie there, rigid, staring at the ceiling, thanking God the door is locked. And outside the cold wind blows, the old trees toss agains
t the moon. It’s hours before she sleeps, when Addie sleeps at all, and one night she dreams she’s swimming with her mother in the sea. Pulled down toward the black weeds, Addie starts awake to find she’s drowning still. There’s something in the bed with her, pressing down like cold, dark water. Addie fights, but she can’t move her arms or legs. When she tries opening her eyes, her lids flutter and won’t obey. Finally, after what seems hours, the thing abruptly leaves, and Addie sits upright in a full sweat. Steam is rising off her arms. She lights the lamp. There’s nothing here.
I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.
Yet he passed away and, lo, he was not; yea, I sought him, but he could not be found….
Seeking comfort, she turns to the Psalms, and at midnight, from her window, she perceives an orange glow on the horizon and stands outside for half an hour, not knowing if the Federals have invaded Charleston, if the slaves have risen up, watching the Great Fire move south from Hassell Street along East Bay, engulfing the market as it spreads west to Meeting Street, burning, eventually, all the way to the Ashley River along Tradd, leaving five hundred acres of the city a smoking ruin.
Back inside, she picks up Percival’s Wordsworth for the first time since Jarry left.
But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low;
To me that morning did it happen so;
And fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not, nor could name….
So what is it that turns the poet’s thoughts from “Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty”? Remembering Jarry’s question, Addie seeks the answer on the page tonight and cannot find it there.
In the morning, for the first time in months, she sends the crews to work alone and takes the path into the swamp.
