“Elijah,” she said, “you didn’t nearly kill me when you came into this world. I was just so happy bout you bein here that your daddy thought I was dyin. You know how I am. I don’t talk as much as he do, but that don’t mean I ain’t got somethin to say.
“Elijah Yancy, I’m happy you leavin us now, cause it means you won’t die, at least not here. And it won’t kill me, you leavin. I’m happy cause you got a chance to be you, the you God meant you to be and not half a man like you’d end up here in Spartanburg. And I ain’t sayin your daddy is half a man, cause he always standin up for this or that, likely to get himself killed. He just lucky so far, and so am I. I won’t say don’t worry bout us cause it’s only human if you do, but I’m goin to smile a long time, knowin that you round somewhere in this world causin trouble!”
Then Mama put her hands on my head and softly rubbed it, like she used to when I was a little boy.
“Elijah,” she said, “your brother Oliver—” she paused, “my son, he was a good boy like you, always smilin and laughin,” and Mama smiled too, and then she was looking at me no more but at someone else. “But when he got older, he didn’t laugh so much and then he hardly spoke, and when he did, it was always questions bout . . .”
She stopped, like there was something she hadn’t thought about in a long time. “Bout why things was the way they was, and I could never give him an answer that satisfied him. Such a pretty smile on that boy, but he stopped smilin and acted angry at everyone and everything and started talkin foolishness. We tried to talk to him, but nothin we said seem to do any good, and one day he was gone.”
Mama held one hand balled up in the palm of the other, squeezing her fingers and hand, massaging them like they’d been in the cold too long and had lost all feeling.
“He was gone,” she whispered. “My baby . . .”
She started to cry and her body got all slack, like a rag draped over a hook. Daddy just looked at her, and Grandma Sara had her eyes closed off from something she didn’t want to see. I couldn’t tell what it was cause my eyes weren’t working too well either.
By then we were all crying, talking or trying to talk through something that was too strong for words, even Mama and Daddy’s words. I remember us standing and holding on to each other, holding each other up, and Grandma Sara was in the middle cause she couldn’t move much.
She looked at me and winked. I ain’t ever seen her do that before, and it was kind of scary. She pulled me closer and whispered in my ears, whispered something she said one time when I was younger.
“Remember this, Elijah. Hands don’t lie!” Her hands gripped me with a strength that pushed all the air out of my body, and I had to stop crying cause you need air to make tears.
I left a few days later, but Daddy was wrong about one thing. He thought me leaving was about catching up with myself someplace else, but part of me could never leave that cabin. Hell, I’m there right now, where and when I used to be a little boy named Elijah Yancy.
I left when I became a man.
To Accustom Horses to Military Noises and Firing
The horse, broken to obedience to the hand and legs can be brought
to face most things with little trouble. Encouraged gradually to
approach anything which he fears, as a drum being beaten, until he
feels it with his lip, he will then cease to be alarmed. The field music
should be practiced at the exercise grounds or riding house.
from Cavalry Tactics
blood memory
I had a dream the night before I left home, before all that walking, before the road began to eat into me with every step, and me becoming just like those roads out of the South, dry or muddy, hot or cold, always empty of something gone so long you couldn’t even remember what name it had.
What I dreamed was my mama’s doing. I remember her telling me about the slave ships that brought her people to this place, and how so many of them never even made it to America, how they was lucky to never know nothing but Africa. Remembering the sadness in Mama’s eyes when she was talking about my brother and saying good-bye made me think about those mothers and fathers she spoke about when I was barely a child, women and men whose brothers and sisters and children did not walk away and become lost, but were stolen.
Before I went to bed the night before leaving, I started thinking about the last night of those colored people from Africa, my people, their last night before they were caught and taken and put deep into the stink of a slave ship, no more sunrise ever again for those who went down into that hold, no more moonlight ever, no more wind, no more anything that was Africa. I was thinking about all that as I fell asleep and woke, or thought I was waking, by the edge of the sea.
I knew it was the Atlantic Ocean without anyone saying, just knew it. It was angry, full of noise, and there was foam coming up from the waves like the water was heaving up something it didn’t want no more, like the ocean giving birth to something that didn’t want to get born.
And then I saw them, just their heads first, a few here and there and then hundreds, thousands, bobbing up and down, and their bodies beginning to push them up into air, into sound. It was people, colored people, all of them naked and crying. I could hear no sound come out of their lips, but they were yelling plenty cause I could see it in the veins in their necks and the jut of their jaws, how skin hung tight to the bones of their faces. They were crying, all right, or screaming.
They were coming back. They were being born right in front of me. They were walking out of the Atlantic up onto the beach where I was standing. And they were so silent, thousands of them coming out of the water, walking up on the beach dripping with salt and tears, pulling themselves free from what had killed them or was keeping them quiet.
Still I couldn’t hear them. Thousands and thousands of men who were boys and women who were girls, all slowly getting free of whatever it was that held them down, that was keeping them back, and it looked like water and sounded like water, and there was salt in the air and black clouds heaving over like an ocean wave in the dead of night.
Then I knew who they were and why there were so many. They were all the Africans who had been ambushed, caught, stolen, trapped, and robbed of those things that couldn’t be held in your hand but only in your heart. They were the ones tossed over when they were sick, the ones buried by water before they were even dead. They were the proud ones, the angry ones who spoke up, spit back, curled bones into fists. The ones who had fire for eyes, the ones who set ships ablaze with their tears, who didn’t survive the journey, warriors who jumped into the sea, who breathed deep the sweat of sharks that took them to the next world one by one.
Now the ocean was giving them back, whole and no mark on them I could see, nothing to make you think a shadow had ever fallen on them. Nothing but their eyes, which gave back the light of here but also the paleness of there, the there that had swallowed them up. Eyes that were too full to ever cry again cause no amount of crying could empty the pain, unless there was room for another ocean right here, pushing this one to the side of the sky.
They kept walking out of the ocean, freeing themselves from water, being born here on a different shore, on the other side of the loves they lost, that were taken from them, their families. Their families, my God, they could never let go of what was taken till the day they died, their fathers’ hands, mothers’ hands, brothers’ hands, sisters’ hands all straining to grip through the water, the tears, the blue.
And then it began to change. At first they all were alone, and then one saw a face it remembered, and then another and another. I saw hands grabbing hands, and people seeing people they didn’t expect to see ever again, people they hadn’t known were gone. It kept happening, and it was beginning to be a sound. That sound grew and grew till it overtook the booming of wave after wave hitting the shore, a sound high like a gull cry but easier to take, a sound like laughter but not laughter, cause it wasn’t an easy place for laughter to be.
But whatever it was, the sound started to break up the black clouds over the water. They began to loosen and squirm, and a brightness showed on the ragged edge of the dark. A flicker, a hole in a night barely big enough for a star, but any fool could see that day was coming, even the dead could see day breaking.
Wherever those people were walking to, it was better than the place they’d left behind. All that time walking on the bottom of the sea, through mountains we can’t see and canyons we can’t reach and flats we got no name for, such a long walk, and only now getting to the other side, rising up to a place without a name.
As I stood there staring out to sea, watching the slave-ship dead come ashore, I could feel something in the wind at my back, and I could see something ablaze in their faces. But when I turned round to see what they saw, what moved them to rise up out of death and cold water, that’s when I woke up, and I never had a view of the place they were heading, all those people Mama said were lost and gone. All I could see was them arriving and then passing by me.
I wanted to have that dream again, wanted to have it so I could turn round and see what was pulling them free, find the light that brought them to where they were meant to be, that made every slave, every human being, every mother, father, son, daughter that was thrown or jumped to the waves wake up and know where to go and begin that walk to freedom. But all I could ever dream again was just a dream of water, of a beach, and me all alone on it.
So the dead didn’t ever rise again from the sea.
Patrol report on Yosemite Park stationery, under “Remarks,” Wawona, Cal., July 16, 1903
A heard of Sheep abought 1½ mile from the Park line. Brand “P” Abought 1700.
Very Respectfully,
William Alexander,
Sgt. “L”, 9 Cavy.
Commanding Detachment
walking
It took me nearly two years to walk from South Carolina to Nebraska. Course I had no idea that a place called Nebraska was at the end of the road.
Most of what happened I don’t want to talk about, and the rest I’m working real hard on forgetting, but some things you can’t forget, like how fear and joy became more than just words. They became a place, all the places besides our cabin. They were all fear. They were all joy. I trusted nobody, cause they were all strangers. I didn’t even trust the sun cause the sun lights you up for all to see. But there was joy in moving, seeing a world I’d never seen before.
The moon’s a good thing because it lets you see where you’re going in the dark. I remember how the moon got broken up by branches and leaves overhead, but when I came out of the shadows, it almost hurt my eyes, the brightness whole and cool around me instead of torn apart by branches and wind.
I was cold plenty, but every step took me closer to the end of the road. I made fires at night where there were no eyes, and the fires kept me warm and spoke to me bout old things, but I’ve lost the memory of what they said. I was away from people in my head and in my heart because of fear, fear of being alone, of not having my family close by, but in the night when I was closed up in my blanket beside a tree or whatever the road had put before me, I could feel Mama’s hand on my head, and the wind on my forehead would be her breath, and the sighing in the branches would be her singing to me, no, I was never alone, so why be afraid?
Sometimes the road was like a river moving back on itself, then going forward, spinning me round. I wasn’t always sure which way was west till afternoon, when the sun fell from the sky, wasn’t always sure which way was north till the North Star shone above me. Other times, everything would be spinning round in my mind, the names of places and the places without names. Grandma Sara’d taught me you don’t need a map if you can read the sky.
The road I followed wasn’t plain to see but was plain to me. I felt I was being led, and most always seemed to know to turn here or turn there. Who took my hand in the dark and showed me the way? Something inside me I couldn’t name. I wasn’t following directions, I was being guided out of the South, west and north. It was as if the ground itself was showing me the way. Sometimes the forest closed in so I had to go round, but only because I wasn’t supposed to go in there.
When you’re afraid, everything is clear, too clear, and the fear seems like something living, the shadow of everything you’re seeing and feeling. I felt like a deer, like whatever gets hunted. When I was moving on the road, my heart was always beating hard, my breath came fast, and I’d be sweating even if it wasn’t hot. I got tired before I had a right to be tired, I stopped and looked hard before stepping out of the shade of trees, looking for something or someone that hadn’t come yet, listening for sounds that hadn’t been made yet. I was afraid of everything and nothing, especially the nothing that’s a hole inside when you got no one near who cares if you live or die.
But when you’re afraid, your eyes are open wide and you hear more, and you taste the wind for what might be around. Fear wakes you up to what’s around you. It can clear your mind so you see that squirrel in the elm overhead or hear a quail bolting out of the bushes, and I always kept Daddy’s Lefever ready to fire. Because I was afraid, it was harder to surprise me and easier to get food.
I remembered Grandma Sara saying, “Elijah, plants got homes just like you. Some live by a creek, some live in a meadow or a forest, but some like the edges of things, the space that ain’t meadow or forest. You gotta learn to see the line between where one kind of tree grows and another don’t. What I’m sayin, boy, is when you find where a plant lives, then you’ll find that plant. You do that, and you’ll never be hungry.”
What Grandma Sara said kept me alive. When I got past the places where there were orchards full of apples, peaches, pears, or plums, and I had to look elsewhere, well, I didn’t have to look all that hard to find wild carrots growing right at my feet or spot the wild sweet potatoes, with their heart-shaped leaves and big white flowers, by the edge of an abandoned field.
Because there were so many oaks, I got plenty of acorns in the fall. Other times I could find sour cranberries, wild currants, sweet blackberries or raspberries, mulberries, persimmons, or black walnuts. Another mile down the road would bring me sunflowers or wild lettuce or turnips. I found mushrooms too, under logs or on wet earth after it rained. Food was everywhere. Most of it I could just eat raw, but some I had to prepare, like the acorns.
If I caught cold, I made sassafras tea out of the roots and leaves, or chewed the bark of a holly root. I used flint and steel to start fires at night, and if I needed a fire during the day, I used a pair of eyeglasses I’d found in the woods near our cabin to focus the sun. But fire is a good way to get noticed, so I had to be careful. If I had a fever I’d look for thoroughwort or dogwood. If my stomach bothered me I’d find blackberry root and it would help me.
I made soap from myrtle berries and bathed as often as I could, because the water made me strong and washed a little of my scent away, which made it easier for me to hunt and actually catch something. The thunder of Daddy’s gun brought down squirrels, birds, and other small game. But I was careful not to use it too close to people. Eating plants and catching fish was a quieter way of getting food.
It didn’t matter that I was always in new country, cause I knew where different kinds of plants lived, knew if they liked running water, thickets or dry open groves or fir woods, wet meadows or farm fields. Everything’s got to live somewhere, and it lives there for a reason. You just got to know why.
On a day after days of walking, I was watching the sun lowering west behind the Smokies, and I walked right off the ridgeline path I was on. I dropped down with the sun, my feet sliding in muddy soil and through sweet grass, the smell of it in my head, my hands grasping at the trunks and roots of great trees as I slid by. I could feel the wet ground soak my pants, my legs, feel the plants tearing at my hands as they tried to hold on. I wondered if I’d ever find someplace flat again. But then some ground in a hollow that wanted my acquaintance rose up suddenly out of the woods and stung my
rear, while dust settled in a cold breeze about me.
I looked up to find a hole in the forest. I got up, found there was nothing broken, brushed the dirt off me, and walked deeper into that hollow of light and high branches. It was so pretty it made me forget how my hands still stung and my knees ached.
I’d fallen into a place where the ground was covered with tall grass that made the wind sing. I remember the mound there, making the ground look pregnant or swollen from a wound, and the quiet coldness made by a sky losing light. I rested there, lying in the grass by that high mound, and had a dream, or maybe I was awake and listening to a music that was trees and wind and grass.
and the singing coming out of the ground, soft at first, like birds at dawn, quiet but clearing the air of night, singing getting louder and the ground rising and falling as if God was under me breathing, pushing me up and dropping me again, and the song getting louder and louder.
I woke up, or thought I did, and felt the earth giving way beneath me, crumbling away into a hole that something was getting out of, and I was scared it was a bear clawing back to life right under me, but then I saw its hand, her hand, it had to be a woman’s hand cause the fingers were long, slender like a woman’s, and dusk colored like they held twilight once too often and could never fade like dusk was supposed to. Now there were two hands, and they held fists of dirt, and they opened pouring dirt onto the grass, the hands could never stop bringing out fists of dirt onto the grass.
It wasn’t like she was being born cause she was birthing herself, opening up herself so she could get out and be free, for the ground wasn’t any different from her. It was her and not her. I could see roots tangled round her calves, her thighs, tangled with blackness, some of it shadow, some not, so you couldn’t tell where she ended and the ground began. It was all moving round and round, heaving up and opening till she was mostly free, crawling out on her hands and knees, the dirt falling off of her, her skin like copper beaten to a softness that moved over bone, and her hair long black roots catching the ground. She was still bound to what she was working so hard to get clear of.
Gloryland Page 7
