Ancient, Ancient

by Kiini Ibura Salaam

Mostly she resented the scaffolding for stealing her sunshine. The winter had been hell: the coats, struggling with layers, the flashes of sweat that engulfed her when she was finally all bundled up. When she started seeing the sun, and feeling warmth when she pressed her hand to the windowpane, all she wanted to do was go outside and let it soak into her skin. She would smile anticipating the flush of the sun’s rays on her cheeks as she leisurely strolled to her appointments. But the sunny meanderings she longed for would rarely materialize. She would waste time reorganizing her file cabinet, cleaning the edges of the kitchen hardware with a Q-tip, or shredding junk mail with a pair of scissors. By the time she left her apartment, strolling was not an option. She had to make a mad dash for a cab as soon as she made her way down her front steps. She would stand in the shadow of the scaffolding, hand raised to hail a cab, with an angry scowl on her face.

  Sunshine was not something Marie grew up chasing. Warmth came early in the bayou where Marie grew up, and hung around—thickly—for most of the year. But here, in New York, spring brought a giddy eagerness that Marie knew her brothers would have teased her for feeling. Their teasing, once the torturous backdrop of her childhood, had become the language of their newfound closeness as adults.

  Marie would be the first to admit that their closeness was metaphorical. It had been so long since her last trip home, she might as well have been estranged from her family. The irony of her absences was not lost on her. During her first months in New York, she had held on to her memories of home, feverishly, desperately, as if she would wash away on a sea of the city’s dirty grays and browns if she didn’t hold on to her birthplace as her anchor.

  Her perpetual longing for home had been so acute that it had taken on a sound—a staticky buzzing that had followed her around like a smog. In her earliest experiences with subway stations, she’d found that no matter where she stood on the subway platform or in the subway car, she heard a hum and a crackle overhead. She had at first blamed it on the ancientness of the subway system. After some weeks, she came to think of it as her grief and imagined everyone could see a dark melancholy bleeding from her skin.

  To make matters worse, her homesickness was tinged by her unshakable suspicion that there was something deeply and terribly wrong with New York City. It wasn’t until Joe Jr. sent her a picture of him and Daddy that everything clicked for her. In the photo they were just back from a fishing trip. Fishing gear peeked out from the back of her father’s pickup truck, and both father and son triumphantly hoisted thick clusters of glistening fish. Eyeing the curve of oak branch arcing just behind Joe Jr.’s head, she realized what had been nagging her about New York City. “Trees,” she whispered to herself. “There are no trees here.”

  There were, of course, trees in New York. Slim little decorative things grotesquely outmatched by steel and glass. There were more substantial trees in parks and gardens, but their constrained presence had no strength, could not compare to majestic oaks whose powerful roots ripped up sidewalks, shaded porches, and gifted the earth with a bounty of acorns.

  Whenever she mourned the loss of trees, she found herself on a slippery slope to misery. She would leap from missing the old quiet of ancient trees and the drape of Spanish moss hanging from their branches, to remembering the smell of shrimp shells cooking down to make stock and the tangy musk of flour darkening into a roux. Before she knew it, she’d be aching for a steaming paper bag bulging with crawfish, the grainy sweetness of homemade pralines, and salty mouthfuls of gas-station po’boys, especially hot sausage po’boys with their supernaturally red juices soaking into a white pillow of French bread.

  The first February was torture. She’d felt like she was trapped on an alien planet. At home there were parties and parades; people went about masked and glittered. But New York had no carnival season—no Professor Longhair on the radio banging out the familiar chords that told the whole city that it was Mardi Gras time, no ragtag neighborhood parades, no liquor in plastic cups. She was disappointed in everyone around her, disgusted at their lack of imagination, angry that no one came to work with a king cake in tow.

  In the following years, as her longing for home loosened, up blossomed nostalgia, choking out old hatreds. The first time she wished for a second line to parade across her path, she shocked herself. At home, street revelers had been nothing but an inconvenience and an annoyance. She’d hated the way they backed up traffic as they bounced, dipped, and sauntered down the middle of the street. Yet now she found herself cocking her ear every once in a while, listening hopefully for the guttural vibrato of a roving trumpet player’s instrument.

  She even managed to miss the gory magic of caterpillar season. It was a mystery how the sight of dull green insects crawling over each other, coating the branches of trees had become something Marie cherished. Back home, she’d hated how they spilled over in excess, falling from overhead branches, crawling over benches, littering the sidewalk with their smashed, bloody bodies. But the relief of not having to dodge them underfoot was now dwarfed by her desire for a life governed by the unique seasons of home.

  The loss that pained Marie the most was intangible. It wasn’t in the holidays or the landscape, but in the people. New Yorkers weren’t particularly mean, nor were they as rude as they had been stereotyped to be, but they were too harried and driven to share intimacies with her. At home, every stranger was a friend—or at least a distant cousin—for the length of time you were in one another’s presence. At bus stops and convenience stores you learned about the private histories, recent disappointments, and crowning glories of someone you had never met.

  She couldn’t replicate bayou accents up North, but she tried to inspire Southern fellowship in the city of strangers. She wished random people “Good evening,” tossed a “How y’all doin?” to people sitting on stoops, and complimented subway performers on their singing. She had accepted the fact that nobody, not even the cashier at the grocery store, would call her baby anymore, but she found it trying to hold back the habits of home. Invariably her attempts at conversation were received with the silence of suspicion. She hated the way the lack of friendliness around her fed a stubborn funk that made her New York beginnings seem doomed.

  Breaking the back of the culture that reared you is a little like breaking in an animal, and Marie had no taste for it. Ever since she was a child, she hated to watch anyone working the wildness out of a horse. But little by little she did it. She stopped trading back-home stories with the janitor at work. She gave her neighbor’s children a tight smile and shut the door in their expectant faces rather than invite them in to play. She resisted the urge to get to know the bathroom attendants when she went out clubbing. Her friends, proud of her progress, congratulated her on becoming a real New Yorker. One winter, when she found herself pushing a slow pedestrian out of her way, she was horrified. Her friends, exultant, told her that her transformation was finally complete.

  Loss and gain are two sides of the same heavy coin. As Marie lost the behavioral habits of an outsider, she gained a painful estrangement she had not anticipated. Her hit-and-run intimacies had not only kept her in touch with home, they had given her an excuse to revel in the company of black people. Her friends found her interest in black people strange. They would question, as gracefully as they could, why she was always gabbing with them at security desks and on street corners. They noticed that she didn’t laugh at their black jokes and never echoed their sentiments when they complained about the blacks splattering their loud, rude behavior everywhere.

  Marie never let so much as a hint of anger show when her friends were stuffing black people into tight little boxes of distaste. Internally, she scoffed at their attempts to define blackness. Blackness was nothing like what they thought it was. It was more diverse, and less tragic, than they could imagine. She missed people who understood the nuances of the color line. As she solidified her identity as a New Yorker, she lusted for a cultural milieu that had a place for her, that recognized what it meant to be
Creole, and therefore Black. It was with sadness, rather than triumph, that she accepted the fact that no one in New York seemed to suspect she could be anything but white when they looked into her gray eyes.

  Turning her back on stranger-to-stranger intimacies meant severing her links with blackness in a way that rang with a finality Marie had never intended. Her brothers would never have found themselves in such a situation. Since their skin and hair didn’t advertise their blackness, they broadcasted their cultural allegiances with cornrows and cut-up eyebrows, clothing that aligned to black trends and postures adopted to interrupt assumptions of whiteness. Marie’s relationship to blackness was a little more complicated. She had no self-hatred and needed blackness in her life to feel whole, but she only needed it as part of her general ambiance rather than her inner circle.

  By the time Marie was an adult, her closest friends were white. In a way, choosing them as home had been all her doing. In another way, her closeness to them had been thrust upon her. What was she to do when her parents sent her to a prestigious boarding school on a riverbank in Nowhere, Louisiana? Between her and the five other black people in the school, there wasn’t much comfort to be had. How could she not convert?

  After those first flushes of friendship all those years ago, it had become a lifelong habit—forming kinship with white people. At home there was no conflict. Her friends knew exactly what her lineage was. But in New York, she felt trapped. She’d had to work so hard at building intimacy, that when she finally made a friend, she was skittish. She would torture herself for hours waiting for the right moment to reveal her racial makeup, but no matter how many perfect moments she identified, her certainty dissolved the second she opened her mouth. She knew true intimacy would not come without complete honesty, but there was a stubborn hysteria within that refused to yield to truth; a fierce doubt that convinced her that the truth was not worth the risk.

  Before she became the New York Marie—the Marie who pressed her hair, wore stilettos, and favored taxi cabs—Marie had an encounter that would have destroyed her had she not packed it away in a tight compartment and left it suffocating in the dark crevices of forgetting. Had she been able to remember the incident, she would have convinced herself that it was nothing more than a hallucination induced by physical exhaustion and emotional fatigue. For when she was newly arrived, the city’s density had frazzled her. She was constantly falling asleep in taxi cabs, on friends’ couches, and frequently, on the subway. Whenever she awoke she always felt interrupted, disoriented, vulnerable.

  During the hour leading up to the encounter, she had fallen asleep on her way home from work. She woke with a start—irritated with herself for having fallen defenseless in public—and looked around the subway car. When she saw that she was completely alone, an electric bolt of fear jolted away all vestiges of sleep. She jumped to her feet and walked to one end of the subway car. She peered through the glass on the door. When she saw that the next car was full of people, she exhaled in relief.

  She stumbled back to her seat, looking around for a sign indicating what subway line she was on. All the spaces where there should have been signs were blank. She twisted around in her seat to peer through the windows. She could see the dark walls of the subway tunnel whizzing by, but there were no station names to orient her.

  When the subway car started to slow, Marie finally saw a station slide into view. She squinted, working to make out the station’s name. When she read the name of the station, she cursed. She didn’t know where she had been going, but she knew that she was far from home. She hurried over to the subway doors and prepared to exit. When the doors slid open, she could hear the tinkling of a musician plinking out notes on a steel pan. She saw people rushing across the platform and running up the stairs to the exits, but she could not move. Sweat began building under her palm as she gripped the pole. Her heart broke out into an irregular thudding, and her eyes darted around wildly. She tried to coax her legs to step off the train, but they would not obey.

  Marie was still staring out onto the platform when a tone, signaling that the doors were about to close, sounded. She didn’t see a hooded figure glide onto the subway car, but she felt a vague amorphous danger panting at her back. She was held immobilized and terrified until the doors closed. Then her legs buckled, the subway jerked forward, and she lost her balance. Marie careened into a row of seats, then caught herself. She gripped the edge of a seat and struggled to sit. Moisture seeped from under her arms and between her legs. She closed her eyes, gasping, trying to force air into her lungs.

  A whispering rushed past her ears and she opened her eyes. A hooded figure was sitting in front of her. She looked around at the rest of the subway car to confirm what she already knew: she was alone—locked in a speeding metal box with a stranger who radiated harm. Her body went numb as a deep chuckling rustled from the recesses of the stranger’s hood.

  “I hear you got something to discard,” the hooded figure said.

  It was a heavy voice, a voice that seemed to have been mangled by heavy smoking and drinking. A tingling crawled through Marie’s limbs as if they were waking from a long deep sleep.

  “What?” she asked, leaning away from the stranger.

  “I said I hear something’s weighing on you real heavy,” the stranger said. The stranger lifted a twisted, knobby hand and shakily pushed back the hood. It fell away to reveal old skin, gnarled with wrinkles and rough craters. There was a slash of a mouth that folded in on itself like the pleats of a discarded glove. There were two eyes: one radiating a piercing gleam, the other—midnight blue—absorbed all light. The eye with the gleam stabbed Marie with its brightness, holding her transfixed. The other eye softened the corners of Marie’s vision, turning everything but the stranger into a fuzzy haze.

  At the periphery of Marie’s vision, the plastic seats and metal poles began to melt away. Marie couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw trees sprouting on either side of her. She tried to look to her right, but she found that she could not turn her head—she could only make it twitch. She tried to look to her left, but she could not release herself from the gleam in the woman’s eye.

  In an instant, everything went dark. A cold breeze whipped up around her and pushed her to her feet. She crouched, shoulders hunched against an unknown danger that she could sense but could not see. She looked around her, but darkness rendered her vision useless. Slowly a soft glow began to illuminate the sky. Marie caught a glimmer reflecting off the silver hardware on her shoes. As the light grew stronger, Marie whipped her head around, scanning her environment. She saw dense bush, huge old trees with ridged bark, scraggly blades of grass growing at the edges of a dirt road. Overhead, a full moon burned dirty yellow. The hooded stranger was nowhere to be seen.

  Marie was attempting to calm the thicket of thoughts ricocheting in her head when she heard an animal wail. Whether it was a cry of warning, pain, or pleasure, she could not tell. Sound exploded somewhere to her left—something was crashing through the bushes, moving quickly toward her. All thought drained from her mind, and she ran, racing down a dirt road away from the sounds. She hadn’t run far when she reached a crossing. She hesitated, then changed directions, pitching herself down the road that had crossed her path. The sound receded, and Marie relaxed enough to observe her surroundings again. But, truth be told, there was nothing to see. All around her was thick foliage, darkened by night.

  Marie kept running, watching as the moon flashed in and out of view. A few feet in front of her, a groan rang out. She skidded to a stop. The groan sounded like an old tree branch cracking off its trunk, but then it tapered into a low bellow, like the moan of a large animal catching the lash. She stepped back a few paces and tried to calm her panting. When she looked down at her feet, she was surprised to find that she was standing on another crossing. She allowed herself the luxury of considering which road to take, but even as she weighed her options, she knew it didn’t matter which direction she chose. She could not walk, run, or c
rawl her way out of this forest—she was trapped.

  As soon as she had admitted to herself that she was ensnared, the hooded stranger appeared in the distance. Marie glanced over her shoulder as if checking to see if a magic escape hatch had sprung up behind her, but she knew exactly what she would see when she looked around: no lights, no houses, no people, just the shifting dark greens of dense bushes. She contemplated jumping off the path, but the rustling and grunts escaping the thick foliage were frightening. A memory flashed through her mind of tottering around the bayou with a tear-streaked face, certain a hawk would swoop down and carry her away. She had heard the story for years—how she had wandered out of the family yard when she was three and stumbled around the bayou alone for hours until she had been returned unscathed by a gator hunter who also happened to have an 8-foot gator in tow. She had memorized the details of the story from its multiple retellings, but had never had her own memory of being lost. But now, with fear fluttering in her chest, she remembered.

  Marie heard the echo of a cough reaching out to her from afar. By the time she had shaken off her memories, the hooded stranger was drifting toward her. The stranger’s cough—raspy, rattling—sounded like it was right in Marie’s ear. Marie ducked her head and stared at the ground, her shoulders drawn up—mid-flinch—as if waiting for a blade to fall across her neck. Seconds passed; nothing happened. In the silence, Marie straightened and looked up to see the stranger standing two feet away. The stranger’s eyes seemed to be looking at and through her at the same time. Marie wet her lips to speak, wavering on whether or not it was wiser to stay silent.

  “We’re at the crossroads, honey,” the woman said, answering Marie’s question before she had uttered a sound.

  Marie looked down at her feet. Her eyes grew wide. The crossing in the roads was following her. Suddenly she knew that two dirt roads would have crossed beneath her feet no matter where she had stopped. A racket of confusion broke out in Marie’s mind. When she looked up, an incredulous look had grabbed hold of her face. The stranger waved away Marie’s expression like she was swatting a fly.