“All right,” I nod, and tip my hat. A young couple, no kids yet. The man has always been the one to speak; I catch him some mornings selling fish from an ice chest. The girl just drags behind him like a dog enduring a bad foot. As we talk, guests from the wedding ride by on the winding gravel. Oaks flank the lane, which is just wide enough for one mule at a time. I know the full names of everybody who passes. They wave at me, then shoot one quick glance at the neighbors and speed off.
“We didn’t want to interrupt. We heard the noise out front. Sounds like you had a party.” This from the man of course.
“My son got married.”
“Married, huh? Well, congratulations. Who’s the lucky girl?”
I nod behind me though I know they can’t see that far back. “Gal in the white.”
“Well, I’ll be. We didn’t formally meet, but my name is Vern; this is my wife, Charlotte.”
“How do you do?”
They reach their hands out, but I know better than to take them. Most of their kind live closer to town and for that very reason, we try to stay put. Link’s nephew is the one to stuff mattresses and weave baskets; Isaiah’s cousins sell charcoal and animal traps; we run our own syrup mills, break our own horses, carve our own tables, cut our own hair, and aside from selling cotton or trading in the store, our paths and white people’s do not converge.
“Well, it’s been a long day,” I say. “I’ll be heading back in.”
“Of course, of course. We’ll be seeing you around then. Say, my wife could use some company during the day. I notice you’re home—”
I turn back to him. I would have been more surprised if Jesus had turned up at the front door and asked me for a cup of sugar. Not but one hundred feet apart in residence but this white man has his well and I have mine. Yes, our clotheslines only hang a few feet apart, but as soon as my items dry, I fold them into my drawer. It’s the white folks whose underthings swing in the night breeze.
“Listen, I got children and grandchildren who need me. Clients too.” I don’t deliver as many babies as I had in my youth, but some mothers still call. “I cook three meals and take in some laundry.” I raise my hands. I’m more than a little surprised at how my words have streamed out like they’d been waiting for him. “I’m still wondering when the Lord is going to add more hours to the day, but until he hears me . . .” I trail off. They laugh at the joke about God, and I close the door and click the bolt behind me.
I DON’T NORMALLY LOCK UP. IN FACT YOU CAN FIND ME rocking on my porch most nights until the wind cuts through my shawl. The Klan isn’t deep here like they used to be in Link’s sister’s side of town. Not only that, I’m still marveling at the change: down the hill, the houses were so close to the marsh mosquitos ate us for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert; either that, or we closed the windows and suffocated in the heat. Here the night air feels like God close up, whispering his secrets, and I’m liable to stare at the butter beans and mustard greens my husband laid the groundwork for like it’s the seventh day.
Today is different though. Aside from the wedding, which was of course a joyous occasion, it seems like those neighbors got something sticky about themselves they were trying to pass off, press inside me, and I need more of a barrier than normal. I collapse on my bed before I even take off my shoes. I don’t know how long I am out, but when I hear the knock it’s clear it’s been sounding for some time. I jerk up, reach for my kerosene lamp and light it. Like I said, there isn’t any Klan, not yet, but Link talked about them like they were supernatural, an army of ghosts riding around with bullets peppered through them. Not only that, there was burning and looting, lynching too. Link’s kin had to stay by me for two weeks last winter after those devils shot a man for standing in front of a white woman at the general store. The memory of it sits low in my mind today, and for that reason I look through the hole my son drilled through the door before I answer. Oh. It is only Jericho.
I open up fast, set a pot of milk on the wood stove to boil; there are always roasted peanuts and he grabs a handful and tosses them back.
He sits down at the table. I had heard Eliza tell Link that today was the best day of her life. She would never forget it, but Jericho looks like he won’t forget it either, only for opposite reasons.
“What is it? You look like somebody been hainted.” The fireplace is out but I reignite it, add a couple pieces of lumber to the pit.
He shakes his head but he doesn’t say a word.
“What is it? I thought you was sleeping over by them tonight.”
He shakes his head again.
I stand all of a sudden, and the pine floor seems to bend with my weight. The sadness is too much for me to bear. I only met his mama a few times, but I’d been shocked when she up and left a three-month-old in my arms. A baby who had gotten used to the breast, and I had to drip milk from my cows onto his tongue with a medicine dropper. I shudder each time I remember the nights: he’d rumble awake at the sound of my breath shifting and it would start up again, that interminable wail that I’d take to my grave. My life had not been easy by any account, and I was surprised to realize, old as I was, finished as I thought I was, that that wail would be the hardest thing I’d endure.
I reach for my coat. “Where is she? I told her it was your house. I told her if she couldn’t abide that, we wouldn’t abide her. In so many words, I told her that.” I can hear myself huffing. I have always been a little too quick to anger; anybody who knows me knows you never have to wonder what I am thinking, but that trait looks different on me now. I don’t have to see a reflection to know it can read as sad. I can’t always keep my footing these days.
“She told me I could stay there, Mama,” he says, reaching for my hand.
It takes a while for his words to hold; I had become so worked up.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Then why are you here?”
“I wanted to be here, Mama. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.”
“Oh,” I sit down. The milk is bubbling, but I’d get it in a second. “Oh,” I repeat. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” I say. Him staying is more than okay. “I got some pig lips I set aside for us this morning,” I say.
He nods. “I didn’t have much of an appetite earlier.”
“That’s understandable.”
THOUGH HE IS TWELVE WE STILL SLEEP IN THE SAME room, and when I am done with the dishes, I lie down on the bed opposite him. I close my eyes, a drift away from that other world, unrecognizable faces and names already pulsing inside my mind, when he pats my arm.
“Mama?”
“Yes, son?”
“Can you tell me the story again?”
“It’s too late,” I say. I don’t remember what I just gave up but it was sweet, I know that, as sweet as anything I can dredge up from my own, real life.
“Please,” he whispers.
I prop up on one arm. Maybe I spoil him.
“He’s a black man in this world,” Major has scolded me. “You got him used to sweetness when life gon’ be tart.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” I always shout back. “Doesn’t make it any more tart because you have known sweetness. If anything, the sweetness levels it out for you.” That’s what I’d say, but I have no way of knowing.
Of course Major isn’t only protecting Jericho. He resents me. I didn’t tell my own children stories, didn’t have the time to, and if I had the time, I certainly didn’t have the breath. I was still a child crafting jump ropes from vines when I was ripped off that plantation, and it took me past adulthood to see straight again, to be inside my body when I was hauling the plow, hammering nails on the fences, planting the cotton, cutting the onions, thickening the roux, marching through the streets with the stink from white people’s dirty clothes wafting off my head, balancing water from the wells, washing and boiling the clothes. I used lye to make soap and wheat bran for starch. I’d hang skirts and short pants on plum bushes. Then I’d heat the iron on the stove, cover it with bees
wax, clear it, wet the garments, and run that iron back and forth. At least once a month, a bell would ring for me and I’d carry my sassafras and castor oil to a screaming woman’s house to thin the time between her contractions. I soaked beans and braided hair and sewed dresses for my children, but I didn’t bother to tell them I loved them.
“Okay,” I say now. “What story should it be?”
“The one where you died and came back to life.”
I nod. That is his favorite, and as far as memories go, it is harmless.
“You not sick of that one?” I ask, buying time.
He shakes his head.
“All right then.”
I clear my throat and lean my head against the pillow. It is hard looking back. As close as I have to be to dying it is easier to look forward than to look back.
Josephine
1855
MY MAMA HAD TWO BABIES BEFORE ME. A SISTER AND A brother too, but I never met them. Mama said they had more sense than I did, that they only needed to smell the world to know there was nothing inside it for them. So she was relieved when I came out, when I breathed. She didn’t get close to me anyway, assuming I would catch on too, that I’d be gone any minute, but I stuck around. I held my head up, I sat, I stood, I fed myself cut-up swamp rabbits or fish, I spoke. I ran. And she wiped my mouth and hemmed my skirts; she taught me how to make beds out of dry grass and talk to white folks with my head down and my words dull. But she held on to her heart too; she didn’t let it lead her.
Then one morning she was boiling clothes outside the cabins, and Vera screamed for her to come quick. My mama dropped a wet shirt on her foot and didn’t flinch at the burn. She raced up to the cabin where Vera nursed all the babies too young to hold their heads up. Mama realized then that she was wrong—all the hope she thought she had buried with the other children had been there all along, snaking its way through her. She reached me, and it was too late, I was gone.
Vera closed my eyes, clutched my mama to her, and let her wail.
Still there was no use. Vera alerted Tom and Missus, and they told my daddy to carve a pine box, and Mama said the worst part was that she had let herself be fooled again.
They let her hold the body one night. She had to burn sage to keep the gnats and wasps off me, and she did the only thing she could do: she slept beside me on a pallet on the dirt floor. She was awakened sometime before dusk. She stood, but she said it wasn’t her feet she stood on. They were heavier with calluses and age, the feet of a woman who had worked in fields. She said too that she carried a weight on her she wasn’t accustomed to, and even climbing off her pallet was strenuous. The biggest change was in her mind: it had emptied out and narrowed in a way that relieved her. She knew to make haste for the swamplands. Don’t let the sun rise before you’re back, her mother’s voice sounded in her own mind, the same way she had taught her to stitch moccasins, or cut the watermelon for its rind to rinse her face. That voice was gentle but firm, not like hers, which was heavy as a man’s people said, and she knew.
She reached back just as the night sky was fading. She said a pigeon followed her all the way home. She didn’t have to run. She carried a skirt full of green berries, and she built a fire to boil a tea. I still wasn’t breathing, but she tilted my head and watched the liquid stream down my chin. Call those things which be not as though they were. She could hear her mama’s voice but it was her own trembling fingers that lifted the kettle, tilted the cup. It wasn’t until Vera walked in that I sat up and asked for water. They didn’t give me too much; they were nervous at first, but after I finished drinking, I wanted grits and they boiled them over the fireplace, ladled them with fatback, and let me eat bowl after bowl.
After that, Vera gave me the biggest piece of ham at dinner. I stayed out the fields and just played with Miss Sally all day long; she was the one taught me to read. I started seeing that woman then too, that long brown trail of a woman. She was from another world, but she felt like me; I mean, when she spoke, it felt like the words came out my own mind. Most important though, I got to sit with the Revisioners, sing with them, pray with them. Foresee with them.
Ava
2017
THE NEXT DAY, I RUN SOME LAST-MINUTE ERRANDS, GO back to the block for that old photograph of Mama Josephine, alert the power company, pay the balance on my storage, and then there is something that I’ve been putting off long enough. I need to see my mother. I’m always nervous to make that ride, and today is no different. I’ve never lived farther than twenty minutes away from her, but I still don’t visit more than once a quarter. Even then it’s out of obligation, not desire. I’ve been slow to get on my feet. Married the wrong man, majored in the wrong subject. I have a chemistry degree but can’t translate that into a job paying more than $40k, and that seemed like a lot when I was in my twenties and still married, but every time I looked up, there was another girl texting Byron, simple girls who spelled love luv, who sent half-naked pictures of themselves, their titties sky-high. I worked up the courage to put him out, I loved myself enough to risk it, but not three months after he was gone, I’d drained my savings flat. And that’s all right, I guess. I stopped ordering takeout from Martin’s Wine Cellar, started working weekends at Vincent’s. There was a balance scale set up in Mr. Jeff’s office, but he filled only the left side of it, so it drooped. I used to think that was how my life was, that the filled section was the reality and the empty one was my dreams, and I just had to come to terms with it. But whenever I’m about to see my mother, my self-acceptance begins to wobble.
I pull onto her block. She rented an apartment uptown after Katrina, then once she’d gutted all the walls, and replaced the roof on her old house in the Tremé, she insisted on going back. “Home,” she’d said. “Nothing like it,” though her block is all white now, mostly transplants. There’s still Miss Brown and Mr. Davilier on either side of her, but every other house is a short-term rental, and even Miss Brown is considering selling to developers.
I hear gospel music from the inside.
Give me You, everything else can wait
She doesn’t lock her door anymore, and instead of knocking, I open up. She is finishing one of her sessions. She’d owned her law firm for twenty years, ran it out of the Poydras Center, and she did well on divorces and slip-and-falls primarily, but when I went off to college, she closed up shop, decided to take classes to become a doula. That was around the time she stopped putting ham hocks and sausages in her red beans, started meditating each morning. I wasn’t surprised. My whole childhood, people would come from all over the city for her counsel. One day I leafed through the top drawer of her dresser and found, amid old obituaries and worn stones, scraps of paper asking for me to get the part in the play, for the client to win full custody. All those things had happened, and I was just then seeing her fingerprints.
She said working with the girls had changed her life, and I see the changes sometimes. She’s slower to anger, I confide in her more, matters I’d normally keep to myself, like how I felt when my divorce papers went through. Now her clients, about seven girls, circle around her with their eyes closed, their palms faceup on their thighs. My mother doesn’t look at me, just nods in the direction of the living room, and I know enough to remember what that means: sit down and shut up, and I oblige.
The girls start chanting as I sit, incoherent sounds but the blend of them together is like tasting my mama’s potato salad, the old version with the real mayonnaise. I close my eyes too. As much as it unnerves me to see her now, I miss this part, how sturdy she could be, how sturdy I was on account of growing up beside her. She would walk me to school every morning and tell me things with her hand in mine: three squeezes, for instance, stood for I love you. She taught me to visualize a white light encasing me, protecting me from harm. “Nobody evil can get through that light,” she’d say. “Nobody,” she’d repeat. And people tried. The kids always had a bone to pick with my color; my daddy didn’t come around but once every blue moon, but
I got by all that. It didn’t break me, because there was at least a small chance that that white light she mentioned was blooming from inside me.
“Just breathe,” she says to the girls now. “Just breathe. Whatever comes up through the breath is okay. We don’t have to turn our back on it, we don’t have to look away. No, sit with it, welcome it in, ask it what it has to say. Remember, Yemaya, the Virgin Mary, and your own divine mother sit right above you. They’re always there: they’re threaded in your heart, they’re woven in your words, they move through you, there is nowhere you can be where they are not steady, holding your hand.”
My mother stands up and walks the room, cutting between women whose bellies sit on their legs. One woman with yellow hair threaded through her braids is sobbing. My mother leans down and squeezes her shoulder.
“Ask her to take it, beg her to relieve you of it. You can’t get rid of it without her; ask her to weed out all the jealousy, the pain, the heartache.” She looks around. “Somebody in here got some grief as big as this room; ask her to dig it out of you right now, and she’ll do it. Ask her to lift it off your chest. You don’t need it anymore.” She shifts to a whisper. “Feel her release it from you, she loves it, you don’t have to be embarrassed to hand it off, it’s her joy to receive it, see her cradle it, see her rock it in her love, and watch it turn golden. Watch it turn golden,” she repeats. She stands there for a while in silence, then she walks back to the front of the room and sits again. She just turned fifty-eight, but she seems lovelier each year. She doesn’t do makeup, doesn’t need to. Her waist-length dredlocks are wrapped in a bright blue-and-pink patterned scarf, and she wears a long cotton black dress that hugs her soft curves when it sways. She has cancer though. Has for three years, and won’t get chemo for it.
The Revisioners Page 4
