“So, old Aunty Talking to the Dead has finally passed on,” one of them, whom I recognized as the Dancing School Teacher, said. She was with Pearlie Mukai, an old classmate of mine from high school. Pearlie had gone years ago to live in the city, but still returned to the village to visit her mother.
I was having difficulty seeing—it was getting dark, and my head was spinning so.
“How old do you suppose she was?” Pearlie asked.
“Gosh, even when we were kids it seemed like she was at least a hundred.”
“‘The Undead,’ my brother used to call her.”
Pearlie laughed. “When we misbehaved,” the Dancing School Teacher said, “my mother used to threaten to send us to Aunty Talking to the Dead. She’d be giving us the licking of our lives and hollering, ‘This is gonna seem like nothing, then!’”
Aunty had been laid out in one of the rooms along the side of the house. The heavy, wine-colored drapes had been drawn across the windows, and all the wall lamps turned very low, so it was darker in the room than it had been outside.
Pearlie and the Dancing School Teacher moved off into the front row. I headed for the back.
There were about thirty of us at the wake, mostly from the old days—those who had grown up on stories about Aunty, or who remembered her from before the Paradise Mortuary.
People were getting up and filing past the casket. For a moment, I felt faint again, but I remembered about Clinton (how self-assured and prosperous he looked standing at the door, accepting condolences!), and I got into line. The Dancing School Teacher and Pearlie slipped in front of me.
I drew nearer and nearer to the casket. I hugged my sweater close. The room was air-conditioned and smelled of floor disinfectant and roses. Soft music came from speakers mounted on the walls.
Now there were just four people ahead. Now three. I looked down on the floor, and I thought I would faint.
Then Pearlie Mukai shrieked, “Her eyes!”
People behind me began to murmur.
“What, whose eyes?” the Dancing School Teacher demanded.
Pearlie pointed to the body in the casket.
The Dancing School Teacher peered down and cried, “My God, they’re open!”
My heart turned to ice.
“What?” voices behind me were asking. “What about her eyes?”
“She said they’re open,” someone said.
“Aunty Talking to the Dead’s eyes are open,” someone else said.
Now Clinton was hurrying over.
“That’s because she’s not dead,” still another voice put in.
Clinton looked into the coffin, and his face turned white. He turned quickly around again, and waved to his assistants across the room.
“I’ve heard about cases like this,” someone was saying. “It’s because she’s looking for someone.”
“I’ve heard that, too! The old woman is trying to tell us something.”
I was the only one there who knew. Aunty was talking to me. I clasped my hands together, hard, but they wouldn’t stop shaking.
People began leaving the line. Others pressed in, trying to get a better look at the body, but a couple of Clinton’s assistants had stationed themselves in front of the coffin, preventing anyone from getting too close. They had shut the lid, and Chinky Malloy was directing people out of the room.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for coming here this evening,” Clinton was saying. “I hope you will join us at the reception down the hall.”
While everyone was eating, I stole back into the parlor and quietly—ever so quietly—went up to the casket, lifted the lid, and looked in.
At first, I thought they had switched bodies on me and exchanged Aunty for some powdered and painted old grandmother, all pink and white, in a pink dress, and clutching a white rose to her chest. But the pennies had fallen from her eyes—and there they were. Open. Aunty’s eyes staring up at me.
Then I knew. In that instant, I stopped trembling. This was it: my moment had arrived. Aunty Talking to the Dead had come awake to bear me witness.
I walked through the deserted front rooms of the mortuary and out the front door. It was night. I got the wheelbarrow, loaded it with one of the tarps covering the bags of cement, and wheeled it back to the room where Aunty was. It squeaked terribly, and I stopped often to make sure no one had heard me. From the back of the building came the clink of glassware and the buzz of voices. I had to work quickly—people would be leaving soon.
But this was the hardest part. Small as she was, it was very hard to lift her out of the coffin. She was horribly heavy, and unyielding as a bag of cement. It seemed like hours, but I finally got her out and wrapped her in the tarp. I loaded her in the tray of the wheelbarrow—most of her, anyway; there was nothing I could do about her feet sticking out the front end. Then, I wheeled her through the silent rooms of the mortuary, down the front lawn, across the village square, and up the road, home.
Now, in the dark, the old woman is singing.
I have washed her with my own hands and worked the salt into the hollows of her body. I have dressed her in white and laid her in flowers.
Aunty, here are the beads you like to wear. Your favorite cakes. A quilt to keep away the chill. Here is noui for the heart and awa for every kind of grief.
Down the road a dog howls, and the sound of hammering echoes through the still air. “Looks like a burying tomorrow,” the sleepers murmur, turning in their warm beds.
I bind the sandals to her feet and put the torch to the pyre.
The sky turns to light. The smoke climbs. Her ashes scatter, filling the wind.
And she sings, she sings, she sings.
Contributors
Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene from Wellpinit, Washington. He is the author of two novels, Indian Killer and Reservation Blues. He adapted his story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into the 1998 Miramax film Smoke Signals. He is at work on The Bones of Al Capone, a novel.
Laura Boss is founder and editor of LIPS. She was a first-place winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Award and a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. Her books include the Alta Award-winning On the Edge of the Hudson and Reports from the Front.
Mary Bucci Bush is an associate professor of creative writing at California State University Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, and Missouri Review. William Morrow & Co. published her story collection, A Place of Light, in 1990.
Bebe Moore Campbell is the best-selling author of Singing in the Comeback Choir, Brothers and Sisters, and Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, which won the NAACP Image Award for fiction. Her memoir is entitled Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad.
Nash Candelaria is the author of a collection of short stories, The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne. He won an American Book Award for his novel Not by the Sword. His other novels include Memories of the Alhambra and Inheritance of Strangers.
Veronica Chambers, the author of Mama’s Girl, is a former editor at The New York Times Magazine and Premiere. Currently she is a contributing editor at Glamour. She is coauthor with John Singleton of the film Poetic Justice.
Frank Chin is the author of two plays, Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon. He has also written a book of short stories, The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R. R. Co. and two novels, Donald Duk and Gunga-Din Highway.
Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954 in Chicago. In 1985, her first work of fiction, The House on Mango Street, was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Her other books include Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories and My Wicked Wicked Ways, poems.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. Her books include The Latin Deli: Prose & Poetry, The Line of the Sun (a novel), and several volumes of poetry. Her collection of personal essays is entitled Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.
Enid Dame’s fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Fiction, and Sing Heavenly Muse!, among other journals. She received a grant from the Puffin Foundation in 1997 to work on a novel. She is coeditor of Home Planet News.
Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. An important writer of the Beat movement, she has lived in California for the past thirty years. She is the author of thirty-four books of poetry and prose. Her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, is forthcoming from Viking.
E. L. Doctorow was born in the Bronx during the Depression and now lives in a suburbs of New York City. He is the author of a collection of stories, Lives of the Poets, and several novels, including The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and World’s Fair.
Louise Erdrich was born in Minnesota and is of German-American and Chippewa descent. She has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire. Her first novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other novels include The Bingo Palace and Tracks.
Fred L. Gardaphé is the author of Moustache Pete Is Dead! and Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer, and the editor of Italian-American Ways. His critical study Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative was published in Duke University’s New Americanists series in 1996.
Joseph Geha is the author of Through and Through: Toledo Stories and has been awarded the Pushcart Prize. His fiction appears widely in literary publications and was selected for inclusion in the Permanent Collection, Arab American Archive, of the Smithsonian Institution. He teaches at Iowa State University.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, born in Paterson, New Jersey, is director of the Poetry Center, Passaic County Community College, and editor of Paterson Literary Review. Her seven poetry books include Things My Mother Said, Where I Come From: Selected Poems, and The Weather of Old Seasons. She is at work on a memoir, My Mother’s Stoop.
Diane Glancy was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to German-English and Cherokee parents. She is an associate professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of several volumes of poetry and prose. Her historical novel about the 1838 Trail of Tears, Pushing the Bear, was published in 1996.
Bruce A. Jacobs‘s first book of poems, Speaking Through My Skin, won the 1996 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. His poems and prose have appeared in African American Review and American Writing. His nonfiction book, Race Manners, was published in 1999.
Gish Jen is the author of two novels, Mona in the Promised Land and Typical American. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Best American Short Stories, in 1998 and 1995.
Beena Kamlani works as an editor at a New York publishing house. She won a fiction grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts for her novel Carry-On Luggage, excerpts of which appear in this anthology and in Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American. She is at work on Desertion, a new novel.
Tiffany Midge is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux. She is the author of Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed, the winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford during the Depression in Lorain, Ohio. Her 1987 novel, Beloved, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and in 1998 was adapted into a film. Her other novels include Paradise, Song of Solomon, Sula, and The Bluest Eye. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
Kathryn Nocerino is a poet, short story writer, and critic whose work has appeared in the United States and England. Her books of poetry include Wax Lips and Death of the Plankton Bar & Grill.
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis of a Palestinian father and an American mother. Her poetry collections include Yellow Glove and Hugging the Jukebox, winner of the National Poetry Series Award. She is the coeditor of I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs.
Simon J. Ortiz is the author of several volumes of poetry and Fightin’: New & Collected Stories. He wrote the narrative for Surviving Columbus, a PBS documentary about the Pueblo people. He was born in 1941 at the Indian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in McCartys, a small village of Acoma Pueblo.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of High Cotton, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared in Granta and the New York Review of Books.
Daniel Asa Rose is the O. Henry prize—winning author of Flipping For It (a novel) and Small Family with Rooster (stories). His essays, stories, reviews, and travel and humor pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair, among others. He is working on Hiding Places, a memoir forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
Liz Rosenberg is the author of two books of poetry, The Fire Music and Children of Paradise, and a novel. She has published more than a dozen picture books for children, and edited two anthologies of poetry for young readers, The Invisible Ladder and Earth-Shattering Poems. She teaches at State University of New York at Binghamton.
Roshni Rustomji has lived, studied, and worked in India, Pakistan, Lebanon, the United States, and Mexico. She is the coeditor of Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War and the editor of Living in America: Poetry and Fiction by South Asian American Writers.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of two story collections and a nonfiction book, Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books. Her five novels include The Fatigue Artist, Disturbances in the Field, and Leaving Brooklyn. She lives in New York City.
Gary Soto was born and raised in Fresno, California. He is a prizewinning poet and essayist as well as a children’s book author and producer of short films for Spanish-speaking children. His 1990 collection, Baseball in April and Other Stories, was named as the American Library Association’s Best Book for Young Adults.
Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1952, two and a half years after her parents immigrated to the United States. She is the author of The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Joy Luck Club, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and which was made into a film in 1993.
Helena María Viramontes was born in East Los Angeles in 1954 to a family of eleven. She is the author of The Moths and Other Stories. She lives and teaches in Irvine, California, and is the coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association.
Sylvia A. Watanabe was born in Hawaii on the island of Maui. She is the author of a collection of stories, Talking to the Dead, and coeditor with Carol Bruchac of Home to Stay: An Anthology of Asian American Women’s Fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Afaa Michael Weaver (formerly Michael S. Weaver) worked for fifteen years as a blue-collar factory worker in his native Baltimore, Maryland. His sixth book of poetry is Talisman and his new play is Candy Lips & Hallelujah. The recipient of a 1998 Pew fellowship for his poetry, he holds an endowed chair at Simmons College.
Index
Alexie, Sherman, 287–301
Boss, Laura, 197–99
Bush, Mary Bucci, 136–48
Campbell, Bebe Moore, 39–44
Candelaria, Nash, 45–63
Chambers, Veronica, 302–6
Chin, Frank, 83–90
Cisneros, Sandra, 169–72
Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 93–102
Dame, Enid, 227–37
di Prima, Diane, 307–11
Doctorow, E. L., 3–17
Erdrich, Louise, 103–14
Gardaphé, Fred L., 320–25
Geha, Joseph, 242–59
Gillan, Maria Mazziotti, 260–267
Glancy, Diane, 238–41
Jacobs, Bruce A., 200–204
Jen, Gish, 175–96
Kamlani, Beena, 205–26
Midge, Tiffany, 68–75
Morrison, Toni, 115–21
Nocerino, Kathryn, 76–82
Nye, Naomi Shihab, 312–19
Ortiz, Simon J., 342–48
Pinckney, Darryl, 64–67
&nbs
p; Rose, Daniel Asa, 156–68
Rosenberg, Liz, 149–55
Rustomji, Roshni, 326–41
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, 122–35
Soto, Gary, 32–38
Tan, Amy, 18–31
Viramontes, Helena María, 349–55
Watanabe, Sylvia A., 356–68
Weaver, Afaa Michael, 268–84
“Americanism” Copyright © Kathryn Nocerino, 1999
“Magic” Copyright © Liz Rosenberg, 1999
“Brandy Cake” Copyright © Beena Kamlani, 1999
“Honey Boy” Copyright © Afaa Michael Weaver, 1999
Selection from Recollections of My Life as a Woman (to be published by Viking Penguin), Copyright © Diane di Prima, 1999. By permisison of the publisher.
“Red Velvet Dress” Copyright © Naomi Shihab Nye, 1999
“Thanksgiving in a Monsoonless Land” Copyright © Roshni Rustomji, 1999
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:
“The Writer in the Family” from Lives of the Poets by E. L. Doctorow. Copyright © 1984 by E. L. Doctorow. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
“Rules of the Game” from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. Copyright © Amy Tan, 1989. Used by permission of Putnam Berkley, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
“Looking for Work” from Living Up the Street by Gary Soto (Strawberry Hill Press). © 1985 by Gary Soto. Used by permission of the author.
“The Best Deal in America” by Bebe Moore Campbell. Published in USA Weekend, July 29–31, 1994. By permission of the author.
“The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne” from The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne by Nash Candelaria (1988). By permission of the publisher, Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
“The New Negro” from High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney. Copyright © 1992 by Darryl Pinckney. Reprinted by permisison of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
“A Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation” by Tiffany Midge. © 1994 by Tiffany Midge. Published in Blue Mesa Review, Spring 1994, Creative Writing Center of the University of New Mexico. By permission of the author.
Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American Page 35
