Stormwitch

by Susan Vaught

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  Historical Notes

  For the real Gisele

  5 August 1969

  Dearest Ba,

  Three weeks have passed since I saw your smile, since I had your guidance. It feels like three years. I’m practicing my letters and my writing, do you see? Just like you always wanted me to do. I’m writing in English so I practice the language. Are you proud? You always tried so hard to teach me.

  It may be cheating, to write instead of speaking out loud. Writing makes it easier to find the words. The words sound too harsh, though. I can’t imagine our African foremothers singing of great battles in English. French, maybe. But never English.

  It’s been another long day, and Grandmother Jones seems no happier with me. She called the islands “backward,” and when she caught me dancing the way you taught me, she swore I was Satan’s tool. I’ve never known a woman—or a place—so far from Haiti.

  I thought Mississippi would be like Haiti. Like home. But, Ba. These waters are brown, not blue. The beaches are straight and blank, and the sand feels filthy with hate and anger. This place might as well be a broken shell lost in the waves. Without love. Without magic. Magic means a fast trip to hell here, and Grandmother Jones seems certain I’ve booked my passage.

  Why did I have to come here? Why did she have to be my closest relative? Is living in Mississippi my punishment for being too weak to save you from the storm witch?

  It’s shameful, but last night I actually wished for the storm witch to send another spirit, and I hoped that spirit would eat Grandmother Jones. But I’d be alone, then.

  How can I think such things? She’s my father’s mother. I should respect her. She took me in, and I’m sure she’s doing her best. I must respect her, even though she’s not a warrior like you were. I can’t speak back to her even when she makes me so angry I want to use my battle training against her.

  And if the storm witch does send another spirit, I must protect Grandmother Jones. She would never trust me that much, though. Even if she did, I don’t know if I would be strong enough to fight the witch’s magic alone.

  I dreamed again last night, of there. Of them, of the past. Our ancestors in Africa, the Fon people from Dahomey. Africa crouched like a cat, dark and burning with the fire of a thousand souls. Night spices hung heavy, and clouds raised fists to the moon. I heard Dahomey drums, and they thundered so loud I thought my heart might wing to the stars. Thump and pound, and pound and pound, until they pulled my spirit down and into the celebration.

  The war women of Dahomey had won a great battle for their king. What you taught me—I remembered it all, and when I danced with the war women, I named Dahomey’s kings back to the time before memory. I named my foremothers, too, and the war women said they were great soldiers. Their eyes were bright and happy, Ba. The same brightness I used to see in your eyes when we danced on the beaches in Haiti. Those women were so tall! Just like you. Tall and strong, and they fired their muskets straight, and all their arrows hit their marks.

  Will I ever be so strong, so skilled, without you to help me learn?

  The winds are changing here in Mississippi, Ba. The seasons are moving onward, and I’m afraid even though I know you wouldn’t approve.

  What if the storm witch does send a spirit to find me?

  What will happen to my new home—my only home and the only people I’ve got left—if I don’t stop her?

  Chapter One

  Friday, 8 August 1969: Morning

  “Ruba. Ruba! Up, child. You need to get your nights and days straightened out before school starts. You’ve only got a week or two.”

  I squeeze the worn leather journal curled in my hands, open my eyes, and stare into those of Grandmother Jones. Her skin lies coffee to my ink, rough to my smooth. My hair hangs black and strong while hers curls thin and white above her wrinkled brow. For a moment, I’m amused by how small she is, shorter than me, like the little people in American fairy stories.

  “You awake?” Her gaze seems soft. Almost kind.

  Warmth floods my chest. “Oui, Grand-mère.”

  The soft-kind eyes turn to obsidian. Black glass, shining from bloodshot fields. “I told you, quit that French talk. Nobody in Pass Christian will know what you’re saying, and besides, it’ll make folks nervous. This isn’t Haiti.”

  “Oui—I mean, yes, Grandmother.” Warmth gives way to cold rain inside me. I slide to my feet still squeezing my journal, wishing I could have stayed in my dreams. Wishing my day would hurry by so I can write to Ba again, even about the stormwitch and other dark thoughts. Somehow they scare me less than this woman.

  Grandmother Jones hands me a white cloth dress. “Here. I finally got this made so we can put away those loud African robes. All that color draws attention—and not the good kind. Try it on.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I hesitate, then carefully tuck my journal beneath my pillow before accepting the unexpected gift. Part of me feels joy that she made something for me, and part of me feels horror that she took my real clothes. I rub the cotton between my thumb and forefinger, and I can’t help a single hot tear.

  Grandmother Jones makes a lemon face and pats my shoulder. “I know I’m not what you’re used to, and this place—it’s new. But you’ve got to get to know it. And me. We’re all you’ve got left now. It’s time you started letting go of what’s lost before it pulls you down. Got to live on that high plane, march ahead, like Dr. King talked about.”

  She stands like a shadow over the sun, casting her small but stern presence through my room. I swallow to keep from crying harder. I didn’t need reminding of my troubles so early this day. Her words bring my old life and my new life fresh to my mind, and I can’t stand to see them next to each other.

  The house seems suddenly closed and still around me, all clapboard and flaked paint. It smells of flour and fresh grease. Of starch and old chocolate. No sage. No clove. Dull green beans and dull green peppers dry on strings in the kitchen instead of fruit or cowry shells.

  All that color draws attention.…

  Ba kept her home true to Dahomey tradition. Simple and colorful, and full of life. We lived as our foremothers in Africa lived, and I always felt like I belonged. I didn’t know how much I loved that until I came here.

  In Pass Christian, I’m nothing but a tall oddity to be stared at and “brought up all over again,” to hear Grandmother Jones talk. She keeps her home clean and pressed, like her white aprons. For her white job. Working for white men and their white wives. Even their white children. Between them and church, her cooking, her cleaning, and her sewing, I feel like she has no time for me. And I feel like she has no idea what I lost, or what I’ve got left.

  I sniff and wipe my nose, and pull the dress she made me over my head. I’m careful to keep my right side covered so she won’t see the blue crocodile tattoo covering my lower belly, hip, and thigh. This she would never understand. It would be something else to upset her. The mark of Dahomey’s war women comforts me, though, with its fierce teeth and bright colors. My tears dry themselves, and I rub the ivory bracelet on my left wrist. Another mark of my past. All war women—Dahomey’s Amazons—wore the bracelet. I think of my dream, of the tall, strong soldiers, and I find it hard to believe they were destroyed. All but one
.

  “Ah! You’re a vision, Ruba.” Grandmother Jones offers me a rare smile. Rarer still, a look of approval. “Proper clothes do you wonders. I wish James Howard could see you now!”

  I nod and try not to frown. My father never saw me before, so I can’t understand why he would care to see me now. He died in Vietnam after he met my mother at Tougaloo College, and she died from fever before I celebrated my first birthday. I never knew her, and I never knew him. Ba was my mother, my father, my sister—and my friend. The first I saw of Grandmother Jones was the day she came to Haiti to claim me.

  Why she did that, I will never know, especially since she thinks me so dirty. Stained, like her old rags, because I believe in magic and spirits and many gods. I would have stayed in Haiti, but I had no one left. Grandmother Jones forced me to come with her to Les États-Unis, the United States. To Mississippi. To Pass Christian, where whites own the earth and the sand and the waves, and “colored” find no welcome, even on the beach.

  I feel like a fool in my white cotton dress, and I think Grandmother Jones knows this. She probably believes it’s good for me and thinks it will teach me humility. Just what I need to bring me down a peg.

  We need to bring you down a peg, Ruba.

  She says that often, along with, This isn’t Haiti, and we don’t do those things in America.

  What does she really think of me, past the fact I’m a heathen because I haven’t been to proper school and I don’t believe in her one god? When I look into Grandmother Jones’s endless black eyes, I can’t tell.

  “You were yelling in your sleep again, child,” she says, smoothing my dress and picking off a few loose threads. “Something about a ‘stomwish.’”

  I shiver. “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “Stomwish. Is that somebody you knew in Haiti?”

  According to my beliefs and everything Ba taught me, if I lie to my elder, I’m cursed. But according to Grandmother Jones’s beliefs about gods and magic, if I speak the truth, I’m condemned to a fiery hell.

  But truth sits better on my stomach, hell or no hell.

  “Not stomwish. StormWitch.”

  Grandmother Jones’s face twists. “I thought we had an understanding about talk like that in my house. Witches and all such nonsense—from hell, going to hell. And all who believe in them, too. But not you, not yet. God gives some grace time for learning. ‘Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’ Dr. King said that, you know.”

  “Beg pardon,” I say quickly, hoping to cool her anger. “Ba taught me that the women of Dahomey, Africa, the ones who served the king, sometimes made spells—thought they made spells—to control the winds and the waves. They thought it would help the Fon people win wars. People called the women stormwitches, and there’s a story about a cruel stormwitch named Zashar—sometimes I have bad dreams about her.”

  Grandmother Jones goes quiet. Her thundercloud look worsens, then passes. “My great-grandmothers probably knew about such, but we’re long past that now. You young folks, always studying Africa like it’s some sort of heaven.” She waves a hand by her cheek, as if swatting gnats. “Maybe when you introduce yourself at church, you should tell some about Haiti and Dahomey. But no talk of witches or conjuring. I won’t have juju under this roof, or in God’s house.”

  “Yes, Grandmother.” I fidget, thinking about her church.

  Introduce yourself. That’s a step in joining, and I’m not sure if I want to take it. More than that, I dread standing up and facing all those blank eyes and stiff smiles. Most of those people don’t know me, and I don’t know if I want to know them. The very thought makes my stomach hurt. My eyes drift to the corner of my journal sticking out from under my pillow

  I need to take it and get away from here for a time. I need to write.

  Grandmother Jones is talking, and I have to make myself listen as she prattles about the day’s plans. “Now, you got grits and bacon on the stove for breakfast—oh, and some biscuits, and I left beans and ham in the icebox for later. And—”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I can’t stand to hear this next part again, so I say it for her. “The number for the Richelieu Apartments is on the wall by the telephone. I’m not supposed to leave our road or the part of beach straight across the highway from us. I’m supposed to say ma’am and sir to white folks I meet, and keep my eyes on the ground when I say it.”

  “Good girl. I’ll be home around five.” Grandmother Jones kisses my cheek and I can’t help going stiff like her starched cotton blouse and apron. She keeps telling me this is the way of things in America, and I mustn’t speak against it no matter how the television blares of change and revolution. She tells me black people don’t have many businesses to hire other black people, that working for white people puts food in our mouths and shoes on our feet.

  Me, I could do without the shoes.

  I see Grandmother Jones to the door.

  One breath of Mississippi brine makes my heart pound in my throat. The breeze smells of salt and wind and storms, with the slightest hint of spice.

  Is there a storm coming?

  Is Zashar the old Amazon stormwitch sending a spirit across the sea?

  No. No! Not yet. I can’t face her!

  “You okay, Ruba?” Grandmother Jones asks as she walks past me and outside, heading for her old yellow and black car.

  “Y-yes, Grandmother,” I manage.

  Chapter Two

  Friday, 8 August 1969: Noon

  Before Grandmother Jones has been gone an hour, I’ve retrieved my journal from beneath my pillow, fastened on my cloth belt and pouch to store shells and herbs, and walked miles from home despite the fact Grandmother Jones wants me to stay in my yard. I can’t help it. I feel too trapped, staying on our dead-end street or the little patch of beach Grandmother Jones says is “safe.” Still, to please her in some small way, I stick to places where I see black people.

  One part of the endless Gulf shore has the whelk I collect to paint. The shelling beach is far down the coast from our street, near a long wharf where shrimp boats come and go. The part nearest the wharf is used mostly by blacks, and I’ve visited often enough that people have stopped staring at my height and how I sift sand to search for shells.

  Ignoring the handful of swimmers, I hunt until I find a few small whelks. Then I settle on a drift of sand to write. Soon, my neighbor Clay and my distant cousin Gisele might come, since their families don’t keep them prisoners around their yard like Grandmother Jones would like me to be. Clay and Gisele were born here. They know the rules, and how to take care of themselves. According to Grandmother Jones, I don’t know these important things, and I’m having trouble learning.

  Clay and Gisele think I’m figuring things out fine. So do I. If they find me, we’ll go shelling together before walking home. For now, though, I write, using a small piece of pencil I keep tucked in the book.

  Dear Ba:

  Grandmother Jones mentioned me introducing myself at her church again. She said I should talk about Haiti. Maybe even about Dahomey. But those people at her church don’t really know me, and I don’t know them. What if I make them angry? Grandmother Jones gets angry so often when I bring up things from the past, about the way I say things and what I’ve been taught to believe. Would her church members be any different? I don’t know if I want to find out.

  I’m on the beach again today. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is plain. When I face west along the single ribbon of beach hugging the road—a road that seems to run forever—I see nothing but ocean on my left. No trees, no plants, nothing but sand. On my right, I find the opposite. Almost no sand, all trees and vines and grass with houses, stores, and a few hotels crammed in like mistakes of nature. If I face east, I see the same thing, only with right and left reversed.

  I know from driving back and forth to the store with Grandmother Jones that all the Mississippi towns run together, from the Alabama line to the Louisiana border. I couldn’t tell where one
stopped and another began—and I can’t now as I squint into the distance. Thickets of pines and palms divide the land on the far side of the road, and they separate houses grander than sugar plantation mansions. Did you ever see the houses white people live in around here, Ba? Did my mother tell you about them when she came home from college?

  Behind those big houses, less than half a mile from the ocean and still within sight of the waves, shacks like ours hide in little clumps and groups. Our clump, six houses in all, sits at the back side of a dead-end street. The street used to run somewhere, but Grandmother Jones said a hurricane tore it up and the city never built it back. The cars take other roads now, mostly the one highway that separates the beaches from everything else.

  I pause and chew my pencil. In Haiti, cars were few and mansions fewer. Back in Haiti, I walked hours every day, hunting shells and collecting herbs for Ba to make conjure. Few herbs grow wild in Pass Christian, and white people make the evil eye at me if I come too near the places where the plants might be.

  Of course, Grandmother Jones would give me an eviler eye if she found my shells and herbs anywhere around her house. The thought makes me laugh, and then it makes me frown. I tuck my pencil in my journal and stare out at Mississippi’s brown ocean. It’s not always brown. Tides and storms darken it, with sea plants and silt. Sometimes it turns blue, but never clear, and to me it never seems bright.

  I want to go home to Haiti so badly my chest aches. The only cure I know is walking, so I get up, slide my journal into one of the two dress pockets, and get moving again. There’s no sign of Clay or Gisele, so I head back home.

  On the way toward our road, I pass long, clean beaches full of white people sunning themselves, playing radios, throwing beach balls, and riding the waves on floats. They never look in my direction. It’s as if I’m invisible because I’m black.

  I wouldn’t be invisible if I marched out on their sand and caught their ball, would I? And what if I splashed into the ocean beside them? Would they all come running out like I’m a shark?