The old people were always happy that I’d come. That made me feel special. But, the burden of it. Like Jesus. My parents wanted a child like Jesus.
Sometimes the people we visited would simply let me stand in Mama and Granny’s shadows. Other times they wouldn’t. “Lord, Lord, now which boy is this, Jean? It’s so nice that you’ve come.” Someone would answer, “Yes, Lord” or “Ummm huh, it sure is. To see a young person taking interest today.” “Well, thank the Lord.” Sometimes they would rub my head or cup my small hands in their wrinkled and firm ones and look into my eyes. There’d be a little small talk. Granny or Mama would ask, “How are you feeling?” and they would answer slowly, “Well, you know this old body ain’t what it once was” or “Clara, I’m just hanging on by the grace of the Lord.” Granny would stand with both of her hands holding her purse in front of her, her body still, and great expression in her face. Mama’s feelings came out in her body, her hands touching different parts of herself: her hips, her chin, her cheek, the other hand. She’d touch the wooden end of the bed, the bedspread, a glass of water; she’d touch the words as they came out of her mouth.
During some of those visits, I saw weakened spirits beginning to detach themselves from bodies, and I saw struggles to hold on. I saw terror in people’s faces. I saw pain in their bones and in the tunnels inside their marrow. I saw overwhelming longings. I heard the sounds of butterfly wings brushing against each other, the noise of ripping, like the tearing of cloth. Butterflies spread out in my mind like dark flocks of sparrows when light is slowly leaving dark-blue skies. I whispered to them, as their wings reached out to touch me—me, a child. As their fragile weights pressed against me to save them, to forgive them, to take and keep some private part of them, breathing. All I could ever do was whisper. I felt guilty that I couldn’t do more. Couldn’t save them. And I felt angry that I had been asked to. I wanted to go back home.
Once, Granny took me to Baltimore to Cousin Molly’s funeral. I’m not even sure if she was really my cousin. People were called “Uncle” something, or “Aunt” something, or “Cousin” or “Grandpa” or “Grandma” or “Sis” or “Bro.” But the children seldom knew what they were to us. Everybody called someone Cousin. But whose cousin were they, really?
Cousin Molly was one of the old people who took a special shine to me. Like Unc’ Tommy. When she appeared from Baltimore, she used to hold me and make pretty sounds and smile and treat me like a little king. The birds sang when she held me. She smelled like perfume and potatoes. She whispered and breathed sweet blue seeds in my ear. I rested my head on her and sighed, and rested with the sunlight on maple leaves for what felt like forever, and then I let go. Mama hated when Cousin Molly left to go back to Baltimore, because I was so inconsolable. I thought that I was dying. My body convulsed. My head grew so heavy that my neck couldn’t hold it up. Cousin Molly had spoiled me, they said. Being spoiled meant someone treated you so special that you started to expect it. After Cousin Molly left, if no one held me I cried so hard that someone would have to pick me up. But even in their arms I protested. I held my body straight as long as I could, looking at them, mooing like our cow and sucking slobber on my thumb.
When Cousin Molly died, I was about seven, and Granny took me on a train to Baltimore. At the funeral I rode in a long black car beside Granny and almost fell asleep. All the old people rubbed my head and pressed their hearts on me. They wore long wool coats and their hats were a sea of flower blossoms and feather-adorned saucers. Granny cried and closed her eyes and sang, “Couldn’t hear nobody pray / couldn’t hear nobody pray / down in the valley by myself / couldn’t hear nobody pray.” After the funeral we went to somebody’s house and ate greens and corn bread and chicken. We rode home on the train carrying a big, warm Mason jar that held inside it the pieces of somebody’s soul.
My sisters and brothers couldn’t see the spirits, but I could see them. The spirits I loved the most were Jeremiah and Beulah and Lizzy. They were all slave children who often played with me. They looked like shadows, except they were closer to light, a different shade of light.
Beulah was a bittersweet, sassy presence who seldom talked. She had a sadness. She had a kindness in her heart that eclipsed her pain. She was always praying, even when she played. Sometimes I would look at her, sitting under the locust tree in summer heat or standing with me under the holly in winter, the silence of the snow deepening, widening, and for seconds she would almost disappear. And because she didn’t always talk, I sometimes had to see her to know where she was, even when I could feel her. I liked to touch her arm and bump her shoulder with mine. I liked to keep her in my sight so I could see the dark glowing complexion of her skin. It wasn’t really brown or really black. They don’t have words for some of our colors yet, however beautiful we may be. If she stood behind me, I could feel her, but barely, like the end of a wind.
Lizzy was the orange of autumn leaves. The orange fire of maples. The orange light the leaves cast beneath cities of trees in the field, in the woods, at dusk, in the second orange of sunset. She was the smile of having gone beyond flesh and still holding, still being, still filled with heart. When she walked into the room, I couldn’t help but smile. She was what I could never be—she never fell apart. She never seemed confused about who she was. She just went into the day with her arms open. It never seemed to occur to her to be afraid or worried. Her voice was like the water inside laughter. The shhhhhh that kept going after the laughter stopped. Her voice wrapped around my skin like cotton and made me feel safe.
Jeremiah looked like the light under a damson plum on the evening of a sunny hot day on the first of August. Purple swirled inside him like the pink does in clouds in the western sky when the sun is setting. He was the sweetness of the hour before the dawn in broad daylight, the heart of my heart, the song of my songs. Oh, I reveled in him. His blue-black like blackberries. When I woke up, I often looked into his eyes and smiled. I laughed just to see him. I would kick my legs in the air and dance on my back. Joy would break me apart at the seams.
Whenever I was sick, Jeremiah was always with me, in the corner of the room when others were present and right beside the bed when others were gone. He sang to me and told me stories. He often played jokes. When I wondered about things, I could always ask Jeremiah, and if he didn’t know the answer he’d make one up. He’d start talking with an impish smile on his face, and then I’d know a story was coming. The spirits’ talking wasn’t like people’s. It was quiet, like smoke.
I asked Jeremiah once who the wind was, and where it came from. How could it suddenly appear and disappear? Was the wind a woman or a man? How could it stay invisible? He said he didn’t know—he wondered the same thing. “But the night is something you can walk on,” he said. “Like a road.” And if you followed it to the end, the invisible things would lose their cloaks. “Let’s walk on the night,” he said. And I would try it for a while, but always I would get frightened and turn back.
The darkness outside where I was born was so unbroken you could walk on it. You could swim in it. You could open your mouth and feel it pouring down your throat, filling up your belly. There were no artificial lights nearby. No canopy of effervescence like the ones that hover over cities. It was solid and pure and alive with the distant brightness of the moon and stars. It was one of the last spots like it, I suppose, on the slowly brightening planet.
I learned not to ask Jeremiah about some things, though, because they made him sad. One time when Mama and Daddy were not getting along, I asked him what I could do, if I was doing something wrong that caused them to be upset. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never had a mama and daddy the way you do. They was sold off. There was a woman who was like a mama, though. They called her Aunt Rachel. She looked out for me in the tobacco fields. The leaves would sometimes cut my arms and hands.”
That night when we went to bed, Mama thought I was crying because of something she said. But I was thinking about Jeremiah. “And Lord bless Jeremi
ah,” I added to my prayers. I cried myself to sleep.
My granny and my mama and my daddy taught me so many things. I learned them like I was one of the old people, struck with amnesia, slowly remembering. There were many lessons about the nature of plants and our connections to them, about how they feed us something more than vegetables and fruit, more than the nutrients the physical body drinks. I clung to Mama and Daddy in the gardens and orchard, in the barns and henhouses and fields. We always raised a garden, with staples of corn, string beans, butterbeans, peas, beets, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, squash, carrots, watermelons, lettuce, and greens. We also had fruit trees: plums, apples, peaches, and cherries, as well as strawberries, raspberries, grapes, and blackberry vines. Each summer, we’d can vegetables and make jams and jellies.
My parents and Granny were always talking to the plants. Touching them. Exchanging cells. Some summer evenings I would stay behind in the garden with them while my brothers and sisters ran off to play. They’d walk along the rows of corn stalks, beans and tomatoes, stopping occasionally. Mama in the snap peas. Daddy in the corn. Bats filled the sky, their rubbery wings flapping, dipping erratically for insects. The speckled light of lightning bugs slowly surrounded us. Whippoorwills called. Mama and Daddy stood quietly, hands on the leaves, eyes closed, turning green, still as stalks.
We also shared blood with animals. We had pigs, chickens, cows, a horse, ducks, dogs, and lots of cats, and I heard stories about the guinea hens, peacocks, and goats that were there before I was born. I especially loved the chickens. They were so pretty, and each one had its own personality. Personalities with feathers, wings, clawed feet, sharp yellow beaks, hisses, squaws, and clucks. They looked at you sideways, as if you were from another planet. They strutted and scratched and skittered across mounds of dirt, into the bosom of hedges and underbrush, knowing something we didn’t—we needed them more than they needed us; they were here first, and they would be here when we were long gone.
Granny once told me it had always hurt her to kill chickens, even though our family chose what they considered the most humane way. “It just didn’t seem right,” she said. “I told my mama that once. I remember it like it was yesterday. She was working in Wickham’s house and it was coming on Christmas. They always killed a lot of chickens and ducks around Christmas. And we always had to pluck ’em and clean ’em. I would hate to see the chickens and geese killed. They were always around the yard, and I guess if you’re a child you get to know them. Then you have to put their heads on the block and chop it off. Mama said, ‘I understand how you feel, Clara, but we have to kill ’em. It’s just their time.’”
Our family held the chickens by the feet, stretched them out, head down on a wooden stump, and brought the hatchet down with one swift stroke across their necks. Then we’d pitch them into the yard to dance around headless, wings flapping, like firecrackers, until the life finally went out. My own body heaved, watching them, listening to the sounds of their weight thumping against the ground, their chests swelling and deflating long after their feathers came to rest. Something scary opened up and part of me came alive in the opening, and I could not stop watching. The top of the chopping stump, with its inlays of hatchet marks rubbed smooth with dark stains of blood, was a touchstone in the middle of the yard.
The hatchet we used was the same one Cousin Betty hid in her apron the day the big freedom bell rang. That day, Granny told me, the slaves were all out working in the field, and the big freedom bell rang. Grant had taken Richmond. They all threw their hoes and axes and pots down and started jumping up and shouting and crying. The sky got brighter. Screams rose from the plums, and shouts of joy rose from the corn and tobacco and wheat sheaves and apples. A dam burst, and red clay bled. Some of them just stood in the field and in the yard, crying like babies. So glad, so glad to be free, so glad to be free.
While this was happening, Cousin Betty had taken the hatchet and set out for the big house, going to cut up ol masser. Uncle Prophet caught up with her, though, and pleaded with her not to do it. She finally handed him the hatchet, and he held her in that field until the burden of her tears flooded the creek, and it rose, and the screams from the scars on her back subsided. He held her until the mules brayed and the spirits beneath the wheat got up and walked. He held her until she broke down and cried just like a baby. Then he lifted her up and carried her back to the quarters and laid her in the bed.
We also butchered hogs and sometimes cows. The whole community came. It was one of my favorite but dreaded times. There were so many people, many of whom we seldom saw. Boundaries marked by rivalries or airs that dictated our usual day-to-day social life seemed to dissipate. People came together as they had since slavery when there was work to be done. These were the last days when we would celebrate a collective survival, before the embarrassments of things that had happened to us years ago, things we had done or had not done would stand up like walls between us. Before the will of the outside world pried us further apart.
Early that morning, the pigs would see the shadows of their deaths dancing and begin squealing and banging against the boards of the pen. The men would spill into our yard, and then the women. They would string rope around a pig’s feet and hoist it upside down on a scaffold. With one smooth stroke, someone slashed the pig’s throat, and a fountain of bright red gushed out. And then the air was red. The trees were red. The water in Mama’s glass was red. The men stood in reddened light, joking and laughing as they waited for the blood to drain, for the light inside the pig’s body to go out. The pig’s eyes lighted on me as he spun slowly, wiggling. At first I cringed with the brightness of his terror. And then I laughed and couldn’t stop laughing.
When the life had finally fled, the men built a fire, lowered the pig and singed the hair off, scraping and then cutting, and all the while so serious and austere but bantering, musical with their voices and their bodies. “Yeah, Richard, that’s it, that’s it. Now, over this way, a little bit farther.” “Oh man, don’t you know it!” I could hear back rooms and crap games, jail cells and juke joints and clubs filled with scents of piss and whiskey and perfume and other women’s scents. The women wore aprons and poured pans of scalding water into large porcelain tubs. Later, their fingers wove ground meat, fresh sage, pepper, and salt into sausages. Children ran and played while I stood watching, almost like stone. I broke through the red day now and then by sliding my right foot back and forth along the ground and laughing. When I dared look up, I could see the spirits of dead pigs, like red kites, hovering on the wind.
Everyone said that animals could see beyond our veils. Our cows, for example, spotted spirits. When we walked them back through the woods on paths or roads grown over with weeds, they’d often stop abruptly, staring at a spirit, refusing to go on. Those roads and paths passed by sites where old houses had once stood. The rubble of fallen brick chimneys was usually the only thing remaining. People had picked through the rubble long ago and taken whatever furniture, wood, glass, or iron might have been of value. Now and then we’d find an old tarnished or fire-blackened dish, bottle, or piece of broken metal. We’d hear the stories about the people who had lived there. Spirits often hovered near such sites, especially if they were around turns in the road where there were “caves” made by the curvatures of overhanging branches filled with still shadows and interplays of darkness and light.
In the space between shadow and light were doorways through which spirits came and went. A thin membrane between form and formless. Patches of light-green ground cover grew between random red bricks. Its leaves huddled close together, becoming one large, expansive organism teeming with a will, with audible breath. It called to me. “Stay in the woods. Stay with us. We’ll show you things.” I’d move closer to Mama then, holding on to her leg, peering into the thickets beyond the rubble, into dark spots where slave children looked out. They were in dingy white rags, their hair uncombed, their black, boney legs whitened ashy. I’d imagine the woods at night, filled
with spirits and plants reaching out, and I would scream silently.
These caves were not just in woods far from home. They were all around us. Often I’d be playing in our woods or under trees in the yard and I would pass through them. I’d feel ripples of air as solid as spring waters. Or a chill like winter that made me vomit and lose my orientation. Soon afterward, I’d be in bed, delirious with another unexplained illness. I’d lie in drenched sheets as sweat poured from my feverish body. My mama and granny knew that there were plants that could draw the illness out, but they didn’t know which ones. This knowledge had been lost with the deaths of the older people, leaving us stuck somewhere between a foreign world of white doctors and an absence tied to our ankles, filled with pain.
Sometimes in bed I left my body and looked down at it from far above. I floated. I flew. I pondered whether to return; at least, I imagined that I had a choice. But I did return, drawn back by the smells of Mama’s cooking, the clatter of pans in the kitchen, her voice, my granny singing, the chatter of my sisters and brothers, my daddy’s knee, the warmth of newly changed sheets on my skin. And because in the breezes that blew in the spring or summer window, spirits would caress my face and whisper, “You have to go back. Go back.”
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 4
