by David Payne
“That must have oxidized,” Ran said. “I don’t think it was there before. What is it?”
“It’s a firma,” Shanté said. “In vodou, they’re called veves. In other traditions, sygills. This one’s Cuban, specific to Palo Mayombe, but in Zaire I’ve seen BaKongo cosmograms quite similar.”
She retrieved her Chardonnay and took a sip as Claire and Marcel filed to look.
“What’s it for?” asked Claire.
“It’s a religious pictograph. The circle represents the world. In the cross, the horizontal line is the threshold between the living and the dead. The vertical line shows energy rising from their realm into ours. It’s the sign of Zarabanda.”
“What’s that?” asked Claire.
“Who. He’s one of the nkisi, a spirit in the Palo pantheon. Honestly, Ran, that was my first thought when you said the pot was wrapped in chains. Zarabanda’s cauldrons often are. What I don’t get, though, is how a prenda could have gotten here.”
“Couldn’t the slaves have made it?” Marcel asked.
She shook her head. “What I’d expect to have been practiced here, Cell, as I told Ran, was Conjure. It’s Congo, too, but instead of prendas, they’d have made these little flannel sacks called mojo hands or tobies. In Zaire today, priests use something called a futu, which is similar. To anyone familiar with Congo traditions, the technology is more or less the same, meaning a futu or a mojo hand is essentially a miniature prenda, and a prenda is a larger mojo hand. There are differences, but the process that occurs in them is basically the same.”
“And what process is that?” Claire demanded soberly.
“Basically, it’s a recipe, Claire. There’s a list of ingredients—‘palos,’ sticks from certain sacred trees—palo hueso, malambo, quiebra hacha, and so forth; different earths: from the cemetery, the crossroads, from beneath the jailhouse and the court, river and ocean sand; different minerals, stones, roots, insect and animal remains. You put these all together in the pot and you create an environment—a kind of magical terrarium—into which a muerto, a disincarnate spirit, can materialize, which becomes the Palero’s ally and then can be sent out to do his bidding. ‘Una Prenda es como el mundo entero en chiquito y con el que usted domina.’…That’s what Cabrera says: ‘A prenda is like the whole world in miniature—in microcosm—which you use to dominate.’”
“To dominate what?” said Claire.
“Whatever you want or need to dominate,” said Shan. “In the first instance, whatever’s dominating you. Slaves used them for help and protection from their masters. Basically, anything a Christian might pray to God for, a Palero can ask of the nfumbi and nkisi.”
“And this is real?” Claire said. “You’re telling us you believe all this?”
“Absolutely.” Shanté took a heavy sip of wine. “I’ve been in ceremonies where people are mounted by these spirits, Claire—possessed by them. Someone will say, ‘Pruébalo’—‘Prove it’—and hand the caballo, the medium, a machete or a knife. I’ve seen them slice their arms until the blood just pours. I’ve seen them cut their tongues and eat glass and fire. I’ve seen them press burning cigars into their cheeks. And I’ve seen it faked, too. Even in big celebrations in New York, I’ve seen fake possessions, prendas that aren’t alive, just big, ugly, smelly messes someone made out of a book or bought from some fraudulent online Palero. But when the spirits are there, there’s no mistaking it.”
“So how did this thing get here?” Ransom asked.
“I seriously doubt it was brought over in a boat,” she said, “so someone with the knowledge probably made it on the place. Someone Cuban, I’d bet. Someone black—a slave. Probably a man.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Claire’s sharp tone made everybody look. She traded looks with Cell, then turned to Ran. “Tildy told us something last night after you left, Ran….”
“‘Us’?” he repeated, wretchedly.
“Do you remember Ben Jessup’s story?” she said, ignoring this. “The little boy they found after Harlan and Adelaide disappeared?”
“He wasn’t Harlan’s child, was he?” said Ran, who’d long since arrived. “Addie had the child by someone else.”
Claire pressed her lips and shook her head. “It wasn’t Addie’s child at all.”
“What!”
Claire shook her head and slid a photograph across the table, a tintype of a dark-eyed habanera seated in a chair with a closed fan pressed against the breast of her black dress. “Her name was Clarisse. She was the daughter of Percival DeLay and a slave—a Cuban slave—named Paloma.” Claire pointed to the young man with muttonchops and a cigar, standing behind Clarisse’s chair. “That’s Harlan. This is an engagement photograph.”
Ran blinked and blinked again. Then he looked up. “His own sister?”
“Half. They didn’t know. They met in Cuba as adults and fell in love. Clarisse came here with him. Tildy doesn’t know how they found out, but somehow they did, and the wedding was called off.”
“And he married Addie.”
“He married Addie.”
“And the little boy…?”
“Clive and Tildy’s grandfather. In his final illness, he told his son that his mother’s name was Clarisse.”
“And Tildy knew this?”
“Tildy knew,” Claire said.
“Goddamn.” Ran sat back in his chair, letting it sink in. “Goddamn.” He slapped the table with his palm. “I knew she was holding out on me. That old bitch! After all these years, all the social agony your people put me through…” He got up and started pacing. “Do you see what this means? She’s passing, Claire. Miss Tildy I’m-better-than-you-are-it-takes-twelve-generations DeLay is passing. Clive was passing. Hell, Claire, you’re passing! Holy shit!” He slapped his forehead. “Holy, holy shit!”
“If I’m passing, Ran,” she replied, “then so are those two children up those stairs.”
Ran blinked again. “You’re right, they are! It’s unbelievable! Am I the only honky in the house? I am! Goddamn. Ransom Hill, come on down! And after all Tildy’s social airs and lectures…”
“I fail to see how having an African bloodline should affect her pride in who she is in any way,” Claire said.
“Yeah, right,” Ran said. “That’s why they hushed this up for the last hundred and forty years. In Charleston, Claire? Get real! I mean, you know, don’t you, in the big scheme of things, this doesn’t matter to me in the least?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, Ran. What I find hard to stomach, though, is all this glee.”
“Come on, babe,” he said, “after you and yours have used me as your social whipping boy for nineteen years, you can at least allow me to gloat for thirty seconds, can’t you, before you sic the thought police?”
Her stony face was her reply.
“Sistah!”
Ignoring him, Claire turned to Shanté. “Clarisse was Cuban. She was black.”
“She fits the bill,” Shanté agreed, “except one thing. No woman would have had licencia—permission—to make a prenda. Not even in Cuba today, much less in the nineteenth century.”
“Do witches ask permission?” Ransom asked.
“Why do you need witchcraft to account for any of this?” Claire asked.
“She wanted to get rid of Addie,” he replied. “Don’t you see? She wanted to get rid of the white wife.”
“How do you know that it was Addie in that hole?” Claire asked.
“She was having an affair,” he said. “Harlan came home and caught her.”
“And?” Claire challenged.
Ran met her stare and then Marcel’s, and for a moment—only one—they were together in a different, darker room, and it had ceased to be entirely clear that the subject was the past.
Ran broke eye contact first.
“Even if they were,” Claire said, “what makes you think they just lay down for it? How do you know the bodies out there weren’t Harlan’s and Clarisse’s instead of
Jarry’s and Addie’s?”
This notion bollixed him. Ran had simply never thought of it.
“And, I repeat,” Claire continued, on a roll, “why do you need witchcraft to account for any of this? I mean, whoever the murderer was, he—or she—used a shotgun, right? I don’t mean to be obtuse, but spirits don’t use shotguns, do they?”
“My answer to that,” said Shanté, “is that when spirits get involved, it increases the likelihood of shotguns being used. It increases the chance of people getting hit by buses, falling off cliffs, committing suicide, having aneurysms, and the like.”
“And maybe by Occam’s razor,” Claire replied, “whoever committed the murder was simply a murderer and responsible for his acts like every human being is, like everybody in this room. Why throw the blame on spirits?”
“Very true, Claire,” Shanté said, “but Occam’s razor, as I understand it, is the simplest way to account for all the observed facts, and your explanation doesn’t account for the fact that there’s a prenda sitting on your sideboard as we speak. You have two dead bodies in a hole. I don’t pretend to know who they were, but it does strike me as, at the very least, curious that you have title to a South Carolina rice plantation passing to a mixed-race child in, what—1865?—a time when such a thing was about as likely as a person of color being elected president or flying to the moon. Even if you dismiss that as fluke or happenstance, someone with knowledge made this prenda and drew a Palo firma in the bottom. Clarisse was Cuban, she was black; based on everything you’ve said, she certainly had motive. What I’m still hung up on, though, is why she would have made a cauldron of Zarabanda. Zarabanda is the god of justice. His energy doesn’t lend itself to evil acts. If this had been meant for witchcraft, what I’d expect to see is a nganga bomba or a sacu-sacu, a kind of prenda made in a burlap bag and hung in a tree. Instead, you have an iron cauldron with Zarabanda’s firma and the proper carga. Which inclines me back toward Claire’s opinion. Nothing about this really smacks of witchcraft. In Palo Nzambi—‘good’ or ‘legal’ Palo—the Palero and the spirit make a pact, a contract. The muerto goes into the pot and serves by choice. ‘Sometido por su voluntad.’ Remember, Ran? ‘Subject by its will’? I don’t see anything to indicate that it was any different here. What it looks more like to me is that something went wrong. Something led Clarisse—or someone—to bury her prenda in an anthill, upside down, which, for a Palera, would be like burying your mother on her head. Why would she destroy her pot? My guess is, she broke the pact. Whatever promise she made the muerto went unfulfilled. If the spirit is still here, that’s why. It wants something, and what it wants now is probably what it wanted and was promised then. I think we have to find out what that is. But, first, we have to find out who the muerto is.”
“Wait,” said Ran. “You’re saying a specific person was put into this pot?”
“Specific, yes,” she said. “A person, no. It was a person once upon a time, but who we are in life is not who we become after we die. According to Congo metaphysics, human beings are composed of three interwoven faculties: the nitu, the kini, and the mwela. The nitu is the physical body, or ‘death-body,’ which we leave behind. The kini and the mwela, together, are the ‘life-body.’ The kini, which is also called the energy body, looks exactly like the nitu, but it’s incorporeal. When you see a ghost, that’s what it is, the kini, hanging around. The mwela is the soul, which Africans identify with breath. The mwela is immortal. At death, it goes to Mpemba to live with the ancestors. It’s said that the mwela never divorces the kini, they’re married eternally, but the kini can be split off, and this is the part a brujo would be most likely to put into a pot. In fact, this part most often becomes the working spirit, the ndoki de la prenda, of any nganga, whether used for good or evil. The ndoki or kini preserves some aspects of its former personality and short-term human memory, but not the real character or soul. It’s equivalent to what Jungians call the shadow and is in fact identified with it. My best guess is, we’re dealing with the ndoki with whom Clarisse made the pact.”
“But if what it wants now is the same thing it wanted then…”
Everybody looked at Ran.
“Come on, people, you know what I’m saying….”
“No, Ran,” Claire replied. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying whatever it wanted then led to Addie and Jarry…or Harlan and Clarisse…or someone out there murdered and buried in a hole. What if history’s repeating?”
Claire stared him down. “You know what, Ran? You’re out of your mind. You’re in the middle of a full-blown episode, and I’m sorry, Shan, you’re my friend and I know you mean well—I have to believe that—but this vodou bullshit is just egging him on.”
“You’re my friend, too, Claire,” Shan replied evenly, “but this is very serious, and you don’t know the first thing about it.”
“And I don’t want to either.” She started to get up, but Marcel held her—not held, just lightly laid his hand across her arm. “What?” Claire said. “You’re buying this?”
“If Shanté says it’s real, I think we ought to listen.”
Claire gazed into his eyes, considering.
Watching this, Ran felt as though he’d been served his liver on a plate.
“So how do you propose to do this, Shan?” said Cell. “How do you propose to get the answers to these questions?”
Shanté shrugged. “I don’t have an instruction manual, Cell. Ask, would be my guess.”
“Ask who?” said Claire. “The spirit? How do you pose questions to a ghost?”
“We go to the graveyard,” Shanté said. “We go to the graveyard in the morning, Claire, and cross our fingers, and hope like hell they’ll answer us.”
FIFTY-ONE
There are three bedsheets laid out on the forest floor—on the first, pine straw and cones and little ferns lifted, undisturbed, with squares of soil; on the second, paler subsoil; on the third, the grayish-yellow clay, some of which will not go back into the hole that Addie, with Old Peter’s help, digs to hide the silver chest. She’s meant to do this for some time, and why, suddenly, today? Who knows? Addie woke up to the honk of geese above the house, and it seemed important to delay no further. This is where they are—they’ve dragged the third sheet to the edge and thrown the clay into the pond (a single clod of this, a grain, can give it all away)—when they hear the low drone of an engine on the river. Sultan, Harlan’s hound, begins to bark. There’s a distant sound—tat…tat…ratah…tah…tat—so toylike, how could it portend anything of consequence?
When they come out on the road, there’s great activity in the barnyard. Addie, for a moment, can’t make heads or tails. There’s something off in the perspective—it’s as if she’s come to the wrong house—and then she realizes an enormous boat, a ship almost, is moored at her dock, eclipsing her accustomed view of riverfront. U.S.S. Mendota she reads across the bow, and now, for the first time, she’s afraid. There are men she doesn’t know—black men in blue coats, with bayoneted muskets—moving here and there, striding purposefully, while her people stand and watch with troubled eyes. A small bareheaded man with a revolver stops by the dairy yard and stares in at the bony cows. After a moment’s contemplation, he raises his gun and shoots Patch in the head. Patch, who calved last spring, goes down on her hocks and knees, and then he fires again, and she collapses like a sack of rocks.
“No,” Addie whispers. Her hand goes to her breast. Now he shoots another. “No!” she shouts, and starts to run. Hogs squealing, the sound of breaking glass…At the kitchen house, a man pulls Minda from the door and throws her to the ground. Black smoke billows from the window. They’re on the house porch, too. The scene is like an anthill that’s been overrun by a competing swarm.
“What are you doing?” Addie asks the little man, who stares at her with tranced bug eyes, red with sun and drink. “Those cows are for our children’s milk.”
As though he doesn’t hear, he puts the barrel to her head and
pulls the trigger. Click. Click, and click again.
“Goddamn,” he says. “Gotdamn.” He backhands her across the mouth and knocks her down, then, cursing all the while, reloads.
When he raises the gun to fire again, Peter steps between. “You,” he says, pointing his finger in the man’s face, his voice trembling with fear and outrage. “You, I know you. You Musta Aw’ston’s from Hasty Point. You let her ’lone, yeddy?”
“I ain’t no one’s, Daddy,” says the bug-eyed man. “I free. Free as a frog. Free till I fool. I belong to me.”
“Look here—”
Now the tat is close and loud and big. Blown back against the fence, Peter crumples like a paper thing. Addie sees brain spatter hit the rail and drip onto its owner’s cheek, the blood bright against the pale green lichen on the slat, like the scarlet berries on the partridgeberry vine. The little Negro stares at Peter, bug-eyed with wonder at his accomplishment, then, bug-eyed, at his gun, the smoking instrument. A half smile on his lips, he catches Addie’s eye as though inviting her to share in the exquisiteness of what he’s done, the wonder that he is. Somberly, she waits to die, but he’s lost interest, or rather thinks the cows are better sport. Turning to the dairy yard again, he resumes his work, shooting down the great, slow animals, who are lowing now in terror, methodically, one by one.
Addie, on her feet, runs toward the barn, and when she comes around the side, she finds Oliver and several others rolling tierces down the bank toward the boat. They’re being held at gunpoint by Federal Negro troops, while a white officer, a stooped man with a hook nose and a lined and whiskered face, looks on. When she appears before him, frantic and disheveled, he regards her with mild curiosity. There’s no surprise at all in his gray eyes. With no change of expression, he goes on observing, hands clasped behind his back as though attending a review.
“For the love of God, help me!” she cries. “Are you in charge?”
