Stormwitch

by Susan Vaught

  Don’t think about things like that, child. Grandmother Jones’s voice slips through my mind, unwelcome but forceful. Laws might keep some people from hurting you, like Dr. King said, but laws won’t make them love you.

  In Haiti, all beaches are black beaches. And if Ba had come here to this place years ago when she was still strong and healthy, she would have walked where she chose, when she chose, and dared anyone to stop her. I know in my heart I’ll never be the warrior she was, Dahomey Amazon blood or no. I can’t bring myself to stroll out on that beach alone.

  Grandmother Jones is so different from Ba. She would have me be peaceful all the time, no matter what’s done to me. She would have me never give thought to stirring up trouble by invading the white beach. Live and let live, leave well enough alone—those are her Christian ways. I don’t think I can follow in her footsteps, either. My thoughts and wishes come as they will, and I know one day soon I’ll do … something outside what she considers peaceful. I just don’t know what that something will be.

  My stomach twists and starts to burn. I can’t be as good a warrior as Ba, and I can’t be as peaceful as Grandmother Jones. When real troubles come—like the storms Ba and I used to fight—what will I do then? Scream and run away? Battle and lose? I feel like a failure before I even try.

  Long minutes later, I turn onto another “colored” strip of beach full of dark skin and big, welcoming smiles. Black people.

  Colored people. The word still sounds odd to me. As if I might be purple or green. Colored. Grandmother Jones uses it. Drills me on it. Insists I say colored to refer to my skin when I speak of it out loud. Some people around here say Negro. Pronounced Nee-grow, or Nih-grah. Some even use another word. A hard, ugly-sounding word, nothing like the way we mention our color in Haiti. There, Negro was said with a roll of the tongue. Neh-gro. Black. Beautiful. The word and our skin.

  Nearby, a transistor crackles. When I glance up, I see it’s the property of a fat-cheeked boy with skin almost as dark as mine. He holds the radio out as I approach, and I stop to listen to it for a moment.

  “Not a cloud on the horizon, folks,” the radio announcer says as I hold it to my ear. “Y’all ordered sun, and sun y’all got!”

  Music follows, and it has a beat. I kick sand and dip my hips and think of Haiti. The boy giggles, but a thin, harsh voice makes him jump.

  “Well, look here. It’s the juju girl. Where’d you learn to dance like that, coon?”

  I hand the radio back to the fat-cheeked child. He tucks it under his arm and runs, kicking wet sand into the dirty ocean.

  When I turn back toward the beach and the road, three white boys are slouching toward me. I’ve seen them along the road before, at a distance. Two of them stand square against the sky, as big as me—bigger, and built heavy. I see sunburn lacing through their freckles. These two have passed by this beach before, and hooted and jeered at me when I wore my golden print dashiki—Ba’s beautiful African robe.

  As for the third, the smaller white boy who called me juju girl and coon, I’ve not heard from him before, nor seen him up close. He wears blue shorts frayed to his grubby knees, and his face and his yellow shirt have purple streaks from a grape soda he’s drinking. Even his teeth are purple. He looks younger than me, maybe by several years. I figure him for twelve, or maybe thirteen, but he acts like I should think he’s older.

  “Answer me.” The boy’s ice-blue eyes blink beneath hair so blond it shines. “Look at them beads. That bracelet. You straight from A-freek-ah?”

  Around me, colored people scatter like ants. I’m suddenly alone in a crowd as people open a wider and wider circle. I clench my fists. This little boy, he spits cruel words like poison, like they give him some special power.

  If I were Ba, I would draw my couteau—my knife—and cut him some manners. If I were Ba, I would hex his fortune ruined—and maybe still I would cut him. If I were with Ba in Haiti, I might slap him. But I’m alone, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and this piece of nothing thinks he’s my master.

  With the training I’ve had from Ba in fighting, I could hurt him. I probably could kill him, and I might not be sorry. But Grandmother Jones would never forgive it. I’d lose my home again. I’d be arrested and even more lost, so I don’t. Instead, I grind my teeth, lower my eyes, and force myself to answer in the way I’ve been taught.

  “I’m from the West Indies, sir.”

  The boy snickers. “Why’d you come here? Got all the darkies we need in Mississippi.”

  His friends laugh as I shrug and study my toes. My muscles tense and my fingers flex, itching to teach these three what it means to disrespect a descendant of Dahomey’s war women.

  “What’s that in your dress pocket? A book?” The boy points a purple-stained finger at my journal, and I put my hand over it before I can stop myself.

  “Why don’t you read it to us? You can read, can’t you?”

  He reaches toward my journal, and I look up, glaring straight into his eyes.

  Daring him to touch it.

  The blond boy’s sneer doesn’t falter, but he puts his hand down. His cheeks turn pink beneath the purple stains of his drink, and his smile turns frozen.

  “She’s gonna mess with you, Ray-boy,” one of his friends says.

  The boy’s temper is instant. “Shut up, Dave Allen.” To me he says, “Give me that book.”

  I don’t answer, but I keep my hand where it is.

  Ray-boy sticks out his hand again. “Give it here before I hurt you, girl.”

  Slowly, carefully, I shake my head no.

  As much whining as growling, he shouts, “Give me that stupid book!”

  I’m ready to fight to keep my journal, but a man interrupts us.

  “Ray-boy!” he calls from the sidewalk.

  For a moment, I hope the man will force the boy to apologize, or at least shame him for trying to steal my journal. As he strolls up behind these large-eared monsters, I give up that hope. His face swells red beneath scraggly stubble, and his eyes are flat and mean. The stench of sour beer and sweat surrounds him as he claps his hand on purple-tooth’s shoulder. “This gal givin’ you some lip, son?”

  The boy hesitates, seems to weigh telling on me against the fact that he still doesn’t have the book he demanded.

  “Naw, Daddy,” he says. “We’s just funnin’ her.”

  The man grunts. He eyes me for a second, long enough to make my heart beat faster with worrying about what he’ll do. Then he grunts again.

  “It’s time for the meeting. You can have your fun later.”

  And with that, they leave me standing, my hands still in fists. I shake from my chin to my toes, grateful for the precious weight of my journal in my pocket.

  You will die, I think at the man’s back as he walks away, once for each time you insult me.

  But I regret the death-wishing before the thought finishes. I’ve never been comfortable wishing death on anyone even though my foremothers made many such curses. If an Amazon of Dahomey fell in battle and couldn’t be retrieved by her fellow soldiers, she would lie bleeding and screaming and cursing, and kill any enemy who tried to give her aid. If she had no weapon, she’d use her brine-hardened fingernails and filed teeth to tear out throats and gouge eyes.

  Such fierceness was admired. Ba would have been that fierce. She wanted me to fight like that, too. I tried, but in Haiti, I was too happy to get that angry. Now, I understand better.

  I start to walk after the man and the boys, but a small woman with hair as white as Grandmother Jones’s grabs my elbow. “Be still. Don’t you say a word, girl. That’s Leroy Frye. He’s Grand Wizard in these parts.”

  “Grand Wizard?” The phrase sounds ridiculous to me. “What kind of wizard is he?”

  “Sheets, girl! The Knights! Ain’t you ever heard of the Ku Klux Klan?”

  Chapter Three

  Friday, 8 August 1969: Afternoon

  “I keep telling you the beaches are open now, Ruba.” Clay Potts, my nei
ghbor, shakes his head not five minutes after they meet me. We’re still close to the spot where I saw the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but we’re moving away quickly as Clay lectures. He’s seventeen, a year older than me, and he thinks he knows everything. “You don’t have to stay on that nasty piece of sand just because it used to be the colored section.”

  “Nasty sand,” Gisele agrees. My cousin is only seven, but she has metal in her eyes. She’s been without a mother since she was a baby, according to the stories I’ve heard. Her mother was killed in the Civil Rights marches. But Gisele has her mother’s eyes, everyone says. The metal sparks when her temper flares.

  Gisele walks beside me, holding my arm with her strong little fingers. The three of us have walked together like this almost every day, since I first came to Pass Christian. Besides chores and swimming, there is nothing else to do.

  “Grandmother Jones wants me to keep to the beach in front of our house,” I remind Clay. “She doesn’t want trouble at work.”

  “Daddy says trouble finds you when it wants you,” Gisele mutters. “Ain’t no sense dodging it.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Clay agrees as we pass the Richelieu Apartments. “Can’t spend your life stepping aside to let trouble pass.”

  Somewhere on the third floor of that building behind him, my grandmother cleans and cleans and hopes trouble will pass. I don’t agree with that choice. Ba wouldn’t have either. Amazons led attacks in battles. They didn’t wait for the war to come to them. I slip my free hand in my pocket and touch the spine of my journal. I’ve written much of what Ba taught me about Dahomey and the war women between the scarred flaps—part to honor her, and part so I won’t forget.

  Clay flicks a stone toward the sand. “Woman as smart as Mrs. Jones, tending Whitey’s house, minding Whitey’s business. Damn shame. She ought to own the Richelieu, hard as she works.”

  “I tell her that,” I say. “But she gets ill with me.”

  “She probably doesn’t mean any harm when she gets mad, you know.” Clay grins as he gazes off in the distance, like he’s remembering something funny, or maybe he knows something I don’t. “It’s just her way. Is she still on you to speak up in church?”

  The muscles in my neck go tight. “She mentioned it this morning. I don’t think she’ll give up.”

  “Probably not. She’s like Mama.” Clay keeps on grinning in his know-it-all way. “Wants you to mind and act right, won’t take any lip, and church, church, church. Hard to believe they were ever loud enough and wild-minded enough to march for Civil Rights.”

  An image of Grandmother Jones, decked in her Sunday-flower finest and walking for freedom, flickers across my mind.

  I reject it.

  Civil rights—the more I learn of that struggle, the more I respect any man, woman, or child who took part. But Grandmother Jones? If I had not seen a newspaper photo from Clay’s scrapbook, a picture of her stony face in a crowd back in 1963, I wouldn’t have believed she had lifted finger or foot for the Movement.

  Clay’s mother, Miss Hattie—now, she has a face like an Amazon, hard and strong and unforgiving. She has an Amazon mouth, too. That woman’s tongue could shell a crab and have words left over. I could imagine her marching. I could see her leading the way and daring anyone to stop her. But Grandmother Jones … no.

  Does her blood really run in my veins?

  Clay takes us toward Blankenship’s Drugs. “Black Power’s where it’s at,” he says. “That’s what’s happening now. We should go right in that drugstore and eat at the counter. What good are the new laws if we don’t exercise our rights?”

  Gisele and I don’t answer. We know better.

  “‘We must make our own world, man.’” Clay’s making-a-stand voice sounds loud in the hot, damp air. “That’s what Amiri Baraka says.”

  I know from previous conversations that Amiri Baraka is a poet who once was called LeRoi Jones. Clay thinks the African name the poet chose is more beautiful than the name his family gave him. After Leroy Frye on the beach, I don’t like the sound of LeRoi. And I hate Jones. So I agree. Amiri Baraka is a fine name.

  “Baraka,” I say, letting the syllables sing in my mouth. Perhaps I will change my own name.

  “‘And now, each night I count the stars,’” Gisele murmurs. Perfect. Doesn’t sound like a little girl. Barely even a southern accent, as if speaking a dream. “‘And each night I get the same number. And when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.’”

  We stop and stare at her.

  “That’s part of Baraka’s ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,’” Clay says. “How do you know that?”

  Gisele shrugs. “Daddy likes it. He says it to me every night, ‘cause of the last part about a little girl talking to her hands. I like the part about stars and holes. You believe stars leave holes if they don’t come out, Ruba?”

  I think about Ba and I nod. A hole where a star should be.

  Clay looks mad because Gisele knows something he doesn’t know about his favorite poet. “One day, the Black Panthers’ll come down here and leave some holes. And we are going to sit at Blankenship’s main counter, the one that used to be ‘white-only.’”

  “Daddy says they’re violent,” Gisele mutters. “The Panthers.”

  “So?” Clay shrugs. “Sometimes that’s what it takes. Besides, I don’t think they’re violent. Just … loud. And proud. They don’t lie down when somebody tries to step on them. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Grandmother Jones doesn’t like the Panthers,” I say.

  Clay laughs. “That’s because she’s old school. She worked with the Delta Ministry and all.”

  I fish through my memory for what I know about the Ministry and find nothing. I sigh. Who can remember all the American political groups? Grandmother Jones has tried to teach me all the important ones. Clay goes over them and over them, like they’re spells or holy words. It reminds me of those books in the Bible that talk about nothing but who begat whom. After a while, when Grandmother Jones reads those parts out loud, she sounds like a bee buzzing on about nothing.

  CORE sticks in my mind, because it’s a real word. The Congress of Racial Equality. Core means the center of a fruit to me, the truest, strongest part that stays when everything else gets eaten—and the part that usually holds the seeds. So I think of CORE as the group that stayed in Mississippi when everything else got eaten. SNCC is the only other one I remember most of the time—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Clay’s stories about Freedom Summer stick that student committee in my thoughts, especially how they walked right out into the fields to talk to workers, and how a lot of them got bombed and beaten up. He describes Freedom Summer in so much detail it’s hard for me to believe it happened five years ago. To listen to Clay, Freedom Summer was yesterday.

  The Black Panthers are much easier to think about, because they’re happening now and Grandmother Jones doesn’t much like the way they do things. Panther makes me think of the leopard, Dahomey’s royal symbol. War women in Dahomey were also called Wives of the Leopard—the king. It helps me when I’m angry or sad to see myself like that, as fierce enough to be a Wife of the Leopard.

  In Haiti, there weren’t any groups like the Black Panthers. We had only nationals and rebels. In the Africa I learned about, there were two groups as well—Dahomey’s Fon and their enemies. Black people fighting black people, so often and so hard they couldn’t even think about fighting white people if they needed to.

  When I first came to Mississippi, I thought it was different here, that black people fought white people instead of each other. Now I know that’s not true. Grandmother Jones and black people who think like her fight with black people who think like Clay.

  Like me?

  Clay is still talking. Clay is always talking. He says the time is now for black people in America, and he tries to get me to say black instead of colored. I do my best, but Grandmother Jones’s drills are hard to overcome. Even Crazy Sardine, Gi
sele’s daddy, who lives with her in the house beside us with his two-foot Afro and giant platform shoes, still says colored instead of black half the time.

  And he reads poem-songs to his little girl at night. That I did not expect, though I’ve gotten the feeling that Sardine and Gisele may know more than they show—about everything and everyone. Like Ba. Like other people who know about history and magic.

  My mind turns back to what I heard on the beach about Ray-boy Frye and his father. “What do you know about wizards in the Ku Klux Klan, Clay?”

  Clay stops dead in the road. I see tar bubbles snap near his worn white sneakers. “You know I hate talking about the Klan. Gisele’s not old enough—”

  “Shut up,” Gisele says angrily, eyes sparking. “I’m plenty old enough to hear anything you got to say, Clay Potts.”

  He shrugs. No intention of answering me, I can tell, but I keep talking. “This boy at the beach today, and his father, a Ray-boy and Leroy Frye—”

  “Man, Ruba.” Clay lifts his shoe and pops more tar bubbles. Snap. Snap. “They’re the worst trash in town.”

  “But what about these wizards?” I ask. “Grandmother Jones warned me about the Klan, and you told me a lot about them, but you never mentioned wizards. Are they powerful?”

  “It’s not what you think.” Snap. Snap!

  Gisele squeezes my arm hard because Clay’s angry. The fast kind of mad, like when your heat rises and your teeth clamp shut and you make fists without even meaning to.

  I know better than to say anything to somebody who looks like that, so I wait.

  “They don’t have any real wizards,” he says. “They just call themselves knights and dragons and other dumb stuff, to sound all righteous and scary. Bunch of crackers in sheets, burning crosses and acting big. Easy to string up a man when you got him outnumbered ten to one.”

  Gisele shudders but keeps her fire eyes on Clay’s face.

  My throat tightens and I rub it with my fingers.

  String up a man, he said. Like beans and peppers. Like fruit or shells. I see a horrid mind-picture of people hoisted by the neck and left to dry like spice or produce. Thrown to the gulls like scraps.