DUTTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2019 by Junauda Petrus.
This page: “Prayer Severing the Cycle” © 2019 by Donte Collins. Used with permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Petrus, Junauda, author.
Title: The stars and the blackness between them / by Junauda Petrus.
Description: New York : Dutton Books for Young Readers, 2019. | Summary: Told in two voices, sixteen-year-old Audre and Mabel, both young women of color from different backgrounds, fall in love and figure out how to care for each other as one of them faces a fatal illness.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019003294 (print) | LCCN 2019006934 (ebook) | ISBN
9780525555506 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525555483 (hardback)
Subjects: | CYAC: African Americans—Fiction. | Blacks—Trinidad—Fiction. |
Trinidad—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P474 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.P474 St 2019 (print) | DDC
[E]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003294
Ebook ISBN 9780525555506
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket art © 2019 by Charles Chaisson
Jacket design by Samira Iravani
Version_1
I dedicate this book to the constellation of queer ancestors who have loved and healed through space and eternity, regardless. And to Pearl and Kelvin. I love you sweet dreamers so much.
And to Ngopti for being the mountain to my hurricane. You really love me for my wild, sweet self, and your love is king!
And lastly, to Mom for pinning the balloons on my tight winter coat when I was seven, when I needed to fly to space. I will always love you for your sweetness and your limitless belief in my magic.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Cancer Season
Audre
Mabel
Audre
Audre
Leo Season
Mabel
Mabel
Audre
Mabel
Audre
Virgo Season
Mabel
Mabel
Audre
Mabel
Audre
Mabel
Libra Season
Mabel
Afua
Audre
Audre
Mabel
Mabel
Mabel
Scorpio Season
Afua
Mabel
Mabel
Sagittarius Season
Mabel
Mabel
Audre
Mabel
Mabel
Mabel
Audre
Capricorn Season
Afua
Mabel
Aquarius Season
Audre
Mabel
Pisces Season
Audre
Audre
Aries Season
Mabel
Audre
Taurus Season
Mabel
Mabel
Audre
Audre
Gemini Season
Mabel
Audre
Acknowledgments
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them: A Playlist
About the Author
PROLOGUE
We outsmarted oblivion seven times in a row
and made it look like jazz with no chains,
like shaking our butt with no shame.
We moonwalked past the ghosts of this living world.
We decided.
To free ourselves out of the estranged,
strangling of this reality.
We swan-dived and centered in our magic.
We found an eternal life that couldn’t understand prisons or any other enslavement.
We was not at the frequency that could catch or contort our souls.
It wasn’t easy, but destiny is destiny.
Our bodies
levitated by the stardust of the ancestors in our bones.
Our ecstasy
got divined in limitless existence.
This is how we figured it out.
—Heard on an echo of a breeze, in a playground somewhere in the future, where kids is feeling free and they are double-dutching, singing, gardening, and twerking in the radiance of their ancestors’ laughter.
CANCER SEASON
season of Yemeya
our bottomless dark
deep wet healer
warrior of our waters
and conductor of our tides
the moon shines on you
you are floating on her waters
she is pleasure immersive and she soaks you to heal
and rocks you to sleep
she is the constellation
of the armored warrior
of water and sand
she protects softness
she a shelled thing that scamper away
and hide and protect
protecting the pearl of sacred sensuality
a mango seed, an intuitive lover
the heavy and healing waters
of your motherlands
and eternal shades of the moon
AUDRE
“YUH FAS’ AND ARROW AND SENSUAL AND MANGO,” Queenie tells me, “so, Audre, please put some molasses in yuh feet for dis walk, it ain’t supposed to go fas’,” she says, as we walk through the woods. I is crying so hard, my body is shudder and breath and wet with tears. My glasses fog up and I wipe them with my shirt so I can see through them and see the back of my grandma, my guide. My heart feeling like it get bus’ up for calling somebody mother a jagabat.
Queenie is pure light and sweetness and obsidian skin. She smell like spicy earth things, like sandalwood and cinnamon and dirt itself. She is strong and warrior, moving through the trees like a river, carving her way through mud, elegant, dark and slow like the molasses she say we should invoke for this journey. She have on a long white dress, with a white scarf wrap around she short white hair and shoulders like a woman in prayer. The woods are a green and quiet bush between her house and ocea
n that I know very well. Too well. I have cover every part of them bush, with the bottom of my feet and the eyes of my soul since I young.
Queenie got silver bangles ’round she wrist like broken Saturn rings, jingling each of her movements through the forest. She moves with her walking stick made of bamboo and mahogany and wrapped tight in thin copper, rose quartz, and citrine, so it could be strong and light and absorb power. She takes the lead on our journey and let me cry in her wake.
Queenie stops quick and backs me up with her forearm. She looks up and reads the air. She smiles. She points and I see leaves whisper at us, shimmying with breeze and speaking Spirit. She looks at me to see if I am reading the signs. I barely able to lift my head, so soaked am I in my own river and ocean, my eyes cloudy. And to be real, I ain’t want to see the full story yet.
I’m already feeling a change. I’ve been soaked in the feeling of Spirit’s song since we started walking into the bush and up through the hills by Queenie’s house. When Spirit speak to Queenie, she says she sees it first, and it feel like life become a dream and has a whisper of iridescence, “like the world get soft before I get revelation.” For me, it is different. The only way I can say it feels is like a tingle, a feeling, from the earth through water, and I is surrounded in a power that’s bigger than me. Queenie can shape her magic like she feels, but I feel like mine shapes me, controls me. I can sometimes feel what anyone else feel, but I never know when or why I have to feel it.
I look at her, and my body still trembles. She pulls me up in her arm, while she holds us steady. She ain’t afraid of my bawling, and she kisses me on both my cheeks and forehead, blessing me with my own tears and her Queenie love. She turns forward and keeps walking. My sob follows us and is whisper, then wail. We move into the curve of the hill like we’re walking into heaven, then the path bends down and we are walking easier and I is feeling it, the pull of Our Water Mother, in my skin. I keep crying, following Queenie to the sea.
* * *
• • •
Queenie swing an orange blanket onto the ground. She grab dried cocos, big rocks, and shells to secure the blanket into the sand. I is numb and just looking at the ocean and feeling like I is going to fall over. Queenie sit me down and pull out her machete and start busting fresh cocos she bring.
“Drink dis, nuh. I sure you did dry yourself out, with all of that crying and grieving of love, my dahlin’,” she say, handing me a coco. “Your first tabanca is a heartbreak that feel like a bit of death, yes. It hurt me to see you going through all of this hurt for love and your mother is totally out of place—” She stop talking before she finish that thought and she look like she is hurting too.
“I know how it does feel, yes.” She sucks she teeth, and I find it hard to believe Queenie ever was hurt for love like I is now.
We is on sand between edge of water and forest, and she asks for me to pull out my pouch. I hesitate, hoping that I can deny what I already feeling is true by not doing a reading. Still, I pull up my skirt and untie the pouch from my thick and dark-brown thigh. This is where I hide it from my mother and the world when I is traveling. Queenie asks me to drop my shells. I take them from the pouch and hold them in my hand. I feel the smooth indigo shards until I hear their song in my marrow. When their pitch is ripe, I throw them on the mat of lavender silk, raffia, and leather we use for reading our castings. The shells tumble around and reveal their message. Queenie nods and then looks up at me with her blue-rimmed brown eyes. She smiles, showing her ivory teeth with a gap twice the size of mine, but her eyes are sad. We can both read the confirmation.
The pathway is open, and this journey across the ocean is anointed for me to take. She says that tonight we will prepare a new pouch for me for the States; my child one has dried up its purpose. I touch the soft, faded, light-blue leather pouch. The one my mother don’t know of. I sleep with it under my pillow at night, and it has held every dream I have had since I was nine.
Queenie pulls up her skirt to bring out her own pouch, deep-green-and-silver leather with a cowrie design. Whenever she does this, I feel like I looking up God’s skirt. She have the prettiest legs to me. She starts rolling a spliff of lavender, damiana, marshmallow, and fresh ganja and does a quiet prayer to the spirits of the herbs, asking that they honor her temple. Queenie is beautiful and still look like she did in the pictures in her house from when she was a professional dancer. On our walks in the hills and the country, she moves like a gray-haired teenager, her legs are muscular and smooth with scars and dents that I have memorized and made her tell me each of their origin stories. My favorite scar, though, is the one she got on her cheek when she was being initiated as a young woman. That is all I know about it, but I love it ’cause it make she look real gangsta.
My grandma does only sometimes let me smoke with her after ritual. She says don’t smoke with my Rasta cousins, Episode and them. “Just us old ladies know how to do everything right with ritual and sweetness,” she say with a wink and smile, revealing her back four teeth, which are dipped in gold. Queenie can roll a spliff faster than it take to light the flame. When we first started to take our walks together, I was nine and I used to love to just watch the smoke push wild from her mouth and circle her head into a cloud. Now I is sixteen, and she passes the fire my way and lets the news of my imminent trip sink in.
“I always barefoot and I ain’t wan’ lose my roots. I know I go miss the ancestors. I Aquarian and Oya.” I crying all of these things, and Queenie corrects me.
“Audre, you are a wild nurturing. You are a complicated specialness. You are ancestral perseverance and sacred erotic,” she says, like she praying, holding me close to her. I cry louder.
“Gyal, you been in constant communication with Spirit your whole life and you been taught that Spirit speak loudest when we deep in the water, drowning in trouble and fear.” Queenie suddenly closes her eyes and is quiet and breathing, which I know means she is receiving messages. “And that is when you must let yourself get quiet and still. You must let yourself float above it until you are safe and levitating on the water and beneath the sky and just listen, Audre.” She opens her eyes and looks at me. “And, dahlin’, let me tell you something for truth: America have dey spirits too, believe me,” she say, and she puts out her spliff, rubs my back, and starts humming a song into my spine. It a quiet and low song, and I feel my heart inhale the love of it.
“Audre, I was at a ceremony in Brooklyn in ’84. The brothas and sistas in there, from everywhere—Cuba, Nigeria, Mississippi, Peru, and India—and they beatin’ them drums good, gyal.” I look from the ocean and up at my grandmother and her storytelling. “And I is with Auntie Mahal, who bring she cavaquinho and play it good right with them drums and she almost in a trance. You woulda think we was back in the motherland. But every land is a mother’s land, I discover.” She laughs at this thought. “And I is in there, winin’ and spinnin’ and slicin’ my arms in the air, gyal, ’cause the rhythm find me and hold me. They is in their singing. I swear I was going to disappear, but I can’t stop.” Queenie stands up and starts twirling and twisting she arms in the air with her barefoot drumming on the sand.
I can never cry when Queenie dances.
“And, Audre, somethin’ take over.” She starts to kneel down low, her movements flowing and soft. With each cypher she is lifting and ascending into the air. The sound of drums seems to be coming from my heartbeat. Her feet are flying sand all around her, until I see my grandma rising above me. She is in the rapture of her memory. I lie back and watch her flowy, all-white attire, a cloud of origami, fold and contain and blossom her from movement to movement as she hovers above me several feet in the air. I watch her embrace the sky and the sky lift she up like a child of feather. She whipping in the wind, living in the rhythm of the breeze she create. After she finishes her celestial windup, she starts to descend, stair-stepping on air. Once her feet touch the ground, she crouches down next to me. She is laughing
hard, and it rumble the ground beneath me. She fall back and lie on the sand, heart toward the sky.
“Crazy, nuh? I feel I is not in my body no more; I feel I is of some next world. I ain’t know I could do dat until dis day in the States of all places, I tellin’ ya. But, Audre, that is when I begin the journey to figure out my spirit, who I is, for real.” She gets up and moves to sit next to me, and we look on the water together. I lie into she shoulder, wanting to feel the wind and sky she pull down cool my chest and lift up the space my heart is crumpled in.
“Life is strange, and it will break you to help you heal ancient wounds, me dahlin’.” She rubs my back and my head fall into her lap.
My tears fall across her thighs. I really don’t want to leave. I don’t know if I ever going to see Neri again. I feel like I don’t exist if Neri don’t look at me. I miss the pulse of holding Neri’s hand and I caved in with suffering, missing Neri’s body next to mine.
MABEL
I’M TRYING TO SLEEP AND I CAN’T SLEEP. My belly hurts and my hips too. All I can do is lie in bed and think of young Whitney Houston from the eighties. I have her album Whitney next to my bed. I found it at the thrift store last week when I was there with my mama, and I been sleeping next to Whitney every night ever since. My mom thinks it’s cute since Whitney was her idol growing up, and she was inspired by her singing and style and stuff. But I feel like Whitney and I are connected in a special way for some reason. I have loved her since I was a kid, when my mom and I would play her greatest hits and dance to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” At the part when Whitney says, “Don’t you wanna dance? Say you wanna dance! Don’t you wanna dance?!” Mama would pull my dad in. He would do his reliable and raggedy two-step, thinking he is killing the game and she would be in her intricate Afro-modern-hip-hop choreography—which is a lot of shoulder-shimmying, lyric dancing, and old-lady twerking. My mom can dance though, for real, and she could always get my dad to just let go and be goofy.
Anyway, I’m up staring at my ceiling, in my memories and my feels as usual, listening to my “quiet storm” mix (as my dad calls it). It’s all emo and soft music. Soon, I’m thinking of Whitney and her fine self from back in the day again. She just had a lot of layers to her, which is a thing I think I like in people, like Ursa and Jazzy. Even Terrell has layers. I like that sometimes Whitney was graceful and poised like a church lady, but she was really kind of wild and cray, and straight hood, too.
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them Page 1
