Will Do Magic for Small Change

by Andrea Hairston

  “For eighteen seasons, visions and ghosts have haunted me. I’ve been running in snow drifts, over green sprouts, through the first breeze of summer, across fallen leaves. Running from myself, for four years, four months. No more running.” Joe touched the brush strokes on a rainbow-Wanderer bursting from the spaces between things. Sekou had titled this Adumbration. “Translation?”

  “It means shadow,” Marie said.

  “Foreshadow,” Klaus added.

  “Images that talk to tomorrow,” Cinnamon said.

  “A good word.” Joe chuckled.

  “Piss on good words!” Marie was still mad.

  “We thought we could make it right.” Cinnamon hugged her from behind.

  Joe pulled the foil cape on. The crow jumped to his shoulders. “Reversing entropy, putting broken pieces back together, a challenge, so much energy.” The crow pecked Joe’s head as they headed for the back door. “Scattering is mostly in my mind, how can you fix that?”

  “We don’t want you scattering into nothing.” Marie’s voice quivered.

  Klaus took her hand. “Promise not to jump off any bridges going nowhere!”

  “I am grateful to you.” Joe stepped onto the porch

  “Wait.” Cinnamon rushed him. “I hoped we could, not just fix your…”

  Joe waited. The crow jumped from his shoulder and flew into the cart’s purse perch. Joe stroked a shiny wing. “This bird healed a long time ago, but won’t fly far.”

  Klaus and Marie leaned into Cinnamon. She closed her eyes. “I wished you and Kehinde dead, or in a coma, instead of my dad, and Kehinde turned out to be dead.”

  “Not from your wishing,” Joe replied.

  “I had a fantasy that if you were the whole Wanderer,” Cinnamon said, “aje, Ariel, and whoever — you could help Daddy come back to himself, using weird science and the power of the spaces between things.”

  “Bring Raven back?” Joe glanced at Melinga, clapping her hands by an open gate on a light bridge. “I’d like to believe that story too, but, I’m tired. I must go. The bird of my head is famished. I can’t wait for Lexy’s truck.”

  Marie and Klaus poked Cinnamon. Her mouth was desert dry.

  Klaus spoke up. “We’re doing a celebration for Mr. Cooper at the nursing home tomorrow.”

  “Two o’clock, during visiting hours,” Marie said. “It’s his birthday.”

  They should cancel the party. It was a stupid optimist thing.

  “Come if you can,” Klaus and Marie said.

  Joe refused help and wrestled the cart down the back way. Rain barked like a fiend as he coasted around the hairpin turn and zoomed out of sight.

  Cinnamon clutched Klaus and Marie.

  “You’re not mad at us anymore…” Klaus said, a question and a statement.

  “She’s still mad,” Marie said.

  “Give me some time.” Cinnamon darted inside. They followed.

  “Joe will come.” Klaus and Marie talking together gave her goose bumps.

  Light leaked from The Chronicles. Marie opened to new words flooding onto the page. Klaus pointed at Cinnamon.

  “Me?” After swallowing the bitter spit in her mouth, Cinnamon read softly.

  CHRONICLES 26: Final Entry —

  Defying Gravity

  Dear Guardians, thanks to your generosity, memory is conjured.

  December 27, 1982, was bright and dazzling, a voluptuous day. Raven Cooper had finished most of his paintings for The Chronicles of the Warrior Woman and Great Wanderer. The few he still fussed over were hidden somewhere. This night was the opening of an exhibition at Raven’s favorite watering hole. The owners had agreed to hang his thirty-piece series during January. They offered a slow Monday, after the Jesus festivals, for a party. Dr. Bug-Man would deejay. Sekou lined up a world music band, and Star Deer rehearsed a contact dance. Poets prepared praise songs. Sekou asked us to dress up and tell tall tales. He planned to create a book to go with the paintings.

  It was a warm day for December in Pittsburgh. I still shivered in layers of clothing. Kehinde loved winter — the challenge of cold and snow, the clarity in the sky. As the home star set, a cloud burst and turned to slush, coating the sidewalks and roads with glittery water crystal. We lived by one of three rivers. A bridge was right outside our window. It disappeared in a snow squall.

  All thundered-up, a spectacle worthy of a Paris Museum, we scrambled up and down treacherous Pittsburgh hills heading for the Rain Forest Lounge. Houses clung to the cliffs and grinned in the darkness at us, Jack o’ Lanterns up to no good. Stripped of leaves, swaying in the wind, the trees were giant brooms sweeping sleet from the sky. Steep shortcuts from one cobblestone street to the next winded Kehinde. She didn’t complain. Walking was her idea. She hated riding stinky, lumbering buses.

  “The more you sit down, the harder it will be to stand up,” she said.

  A good pair of boots was her favorite winter transport. Sneaking through inky woods, Kehinde held on to me. Aje eyes worked well in twilight. Kehinde told stories, adventures from last week and last century, practicing for the celebration. It was slow-going; she stopped often to marvel at a memory. We’d given ourselves plenty of time.

  You never have as much time as you think.

  “That clerk looked like Melinga, grown into herself.” Kehinde smiled. “All these children, they belong to us… Stretch your hands out as far as they reach.”

  “Here? Now?” I said. We teetered at the edge of a steep drop.

  “You must be willing to die in order to live.” When Kehinde was happy, she talked like this, full of old wisdom, still teaching me to be human. “Aren’t I your stillpoint?”

  We reached our hands into sheets of hard water, balancing with one another. It was thrilling.

  “Are you going to do magic tricks tonight?” She kissed my cheek. “Everyone always went wild for that.”

  “I don’t remember this.”

  “Disappearing. Breathing fire. Flying.”

  “I never flew.”

  “You called it defying gravity. Would I make this up?”

  I laughed. “We both defied gravity.”

  “Don’t swallow lightning. That’s too dangerous.”

  “We need a thunder storm for that.” I shivered. “How do you remember all this?”

  “We paid our passage through the Great Depression with your magic. Nobody believed their eyes. They begged me to divulge your secret. I wouldn’t. Fellows calling themselves magickers offered to make me a rich woman for a hint.”

  “That greasy fellow chased us. You sliced his belt, and he tripped on his pants — in the desert. You left him his head.”

  “I’m a good keeper of secrets, yours and Brother-Taiwo’s.”

  “You never told me what he said, the day we met.”

  “No.” She sucked a cold breath. The wind whistled about us, a melody of hills, ravines, bridges, and rivers. “We must go down to come back up?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “In a minute. Hold me.”

  I gathered her close.

  “Do we still have sand from the desert windstorm that tried to kill us?”

  “It was a flash flood.” I held up Bob’s blue mojo bag. I had added eight things from New World adventures to the Jumbo hair. Kehinde gripped it.

  “You haven’t forgotten everything.” She scattered a pinch of sand. “I dreamt that Opal and Raven were our grandchildren — Melinga’s children who found us in the desert and saved us from choking in a dirt storm.”

  “It was a flash flood,” I said. “I’ve had the same dream.”

  “Flood, sand storm, no matter.” She flicked her fingers. “We share dreams. We’re twins, sharing a destiny.”

  “I never got you or Somso to explain twins.”

  “I carry my brother’s spirit.” Kehinde returned the mojo and leaned against me. “What is lost or cannot be found can be conjured. Change is always possible.”

  “You believe that still?” I was amaze
d.

  “Now more than ever.” She traced my face with her palm. “The Igbo believe twins are abominations. The Yoruba revere them. One twin is mortal, material, one spiritual, but they share a soul.” Kehinde squeezed me. “I’m careful and reflective, a stillpoint. You’re bold and adventurous, a Wanderer. Together we are balance.”

  No one was nearby, only desperate squirrels and sleepy pigeons. I drew her into the circle of my being. I whispered, “My head belongs to you.”

  Crows chattered at us. We tasted tongues. The surge of blood, the rush of sweet electricity across skin and through muscles was the best carnival of sensations I could remember. It was too cold to make a braid of our bodies. We would do that later. To arrive on time, we had to keep moving. When we finally reached the Rain Forest Lounge, Kehinde was sweaty and wheezing. She paused under a street light to struggle for breath. She was frail, despite what the aje did to hold her to life.

  “Coming from another century is a greater distance than traveling the ocean between continents,” she said. “We’re too old for the Rain Forest crowd.”

  “I’m here for the stories, for the people on fire for each other.”

  “Bob was on fire for you. He knew how to love.” Kehinde held me close. “I have a story for you.”

  “Later.”

  “Now.” She sounded urgent. “One I don’t want to tell.”

  “OK.” I could never resist her stories.

  “Before he disappeared, Bob told me his plan in French.” She paused as I absorbed this. “He begged Somso to let us take Melinga and disappear. She refused.”

  “No good solution.”

  “Bob offered to run away with Somso and Melinga and never search for us. Somso was moved by this sacrifice. She didn’t need our blood. Taking what we loved, as I had taken Brother-Taiwo, would suffice. Bob begged me to search for him and Melinga, but insisted I not tell you until —”

  “Until what? He didn’t trust me?”

  “I agreed too quickly. Perhaps I wanted you for myself.”

  “You were delirious.”

  “Bob wanted to save you from murder, to offer Melinga a good life. He wanted us to know love. He gave up one self to become another. If the road ends, fly.”

  My heart ached. Bob left us for love. “Such is life on Earth.” I danced with Kehinde into the middle of the street.

  “You’re not sad?”

  “I’ve already mourned losing Melinga and Bob. Now I find his love again and yours. Why be sad?”

  She shook her head. “I never feel worthy of your love.”

  “I hold all of you. You hold all of me.”

  “Yes.” Kehinde pushed the door open. “Let’s go in. Today we celebrate with Melinga’s children.”

  Incense, rum, oil paint, cigarette smoke, and sweaty humans welcomed us. Musicians pounded drums, plucked hunter’s harps, and several played balaphon — West African marimba. Lighting was dim except for glowing alcoves where the magic moments of our lives burst out of darkness. From Dahomey to the capitals of the Old World and across the land of the free, Raven had made sense of this world on his canvases. He said his mother could snatch a hurricane from the sky; his father could carve the wind. He was keeping company with them.

  “All we need is the poetry,” Sekou said. He had an arm around Lexy, the DJ who had captured his heart. They grinned at us. “Party time!” Sekou shouted.

  Raven wore a colorful patchwork coat and a knot of silver around his neck. He greeted us with his bear hug.

  “Where is Opal?” Kehinde looked around. The place was jammed.

  “We had an argument,” Raven said quickly. “Woman tried to break up with me tonight. Can you believe that? We’ll get it straightened out tomorrow.”

  “It’s a shame she couldn’t be here.” Kehinde sighed.

  “We’re not enough fun for you?” Sekou teased.

  “We wanted to see her and your little sister,” I said.

  “Moms would never bring Cinnamon to this den of iniquity,” Sekou muttered.

  “Opal’s trying to wrap her mind around a lot of hard things right now,” Raven said. “Don’t forget that when you’re mad at her.”

  “You choose to love her,” Sekou said. “I’m stuck with her.”

  “You don’t have to love anybody,” Raven said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  Sekou sulked a second. “It doesn’t work any way with Mom.”

  “She’ll come around,” Dr. Lexy said.

  “Give us a tour?” Kehinde squeezed Sekou’s arm, distracting him.

  In the first painting, Kehinde and I balanced on a log in a white-water stream.

  “What is Bascule?” Kehinde asked.

  The titles were Eshu words. Sekou had to crack open their secrets. “A device like a drawbridge, where one end counterbalances the other,” he said.

  Kehinde laughed. “Taiwo always loved bridges.”

  “The Brooklyn Bridge is my favorite,” I said. “A woman built that, did you know?”

  We circled the bar and exclaimed at what was more vivid on canvas than in our memories. A crowd trailed us. We ended on the dance floor. Star Deer swooped down from the balcony. Other dancers jumped out of nowhere. Musicians plucked melancholy strings. The dancers ended flat on the ground, looking up.

  I followed Star’s gaze to the ceiling. “What is this?”

  “You don’t remember?” Kehinde laughed.

  A water creature leapt from the waves. Electric bolts of hair glowed. A fat tale poked a hole in the sky and hooked a spiral galaxy. Eyes reflected an infinity of other eyes.

  “I painted the feeling I got from those wild stories.” Raven sounded uncertain.

  “Your aje masquerade,” Kehinde whispered in Yoruba. “Raven paints your secrets without knowing it.”

  Enchanted, we tasted tongues. Kehinde bent me back for a moving-picture kiss. The crowd applauded and cheered us. A man yelled, “God hates you all.” He waved a gun. Under a hooded jacket, he had no eyes.

  Raven and Kehinde gave themselves away, and — my mind reeled with Igbo words — If you are running out of the way, whom do you want the bull to hit? — and Akan words — Don’t let me die at all, but let me die. Part of me ran away, part of me gave up, part of me held on. Too much space and not enough force to hold it together. I scattered.

  My crow companion finally lifts its wings and soars into a cloud of black feathers.

  Is this Earth journey a Good Mission?

  What Do We Do?

  Cinnamon was dazed and cold. Klaus put his hot cheek on her shoulder, and Marie curled in Cinnamon’s lap, her hair a warm blanket. When Lexy returned with the elders, they were disappointed to hear that Joe and Ariel had already left. Iris made tea and hot chocolate. Aidan took out his banjo, and the strings vibrated with edgy energy.

  Lexy strolled around the room, gazing at the paintings. Miz Redwood walked with him. The hot drinks cooled; the whipcream sagged. On their fifth round Sekou recited, Mallemaroking, Adumbration, Douroucouli, Magniloquent, Xenophilia…

  Cinnamon grinned at Lexy. “Remember you and Sekou behind the washing machine, like the best roller coaster ride at Kennywood, or crawling after ants on Fifth Avenue, or rapping together? Wow… Sekou loved you more than words.”

  “More than words?” Embarrassed, Lexy downed his cold tea. “That’s a lot of love.”

  “Maybe you could tell us about that night at the bar,” Redwood said.

  “I don’t, I haven’t, I can’t…” Lexy bit his cracked lip. It bled.

  Aidan played tender licks on the banjo and soothed everybody’s jagged nerves.

  “Back in Georgia, when I was a girl, I had big plans, don’t you know?” Redwood danced backcountry steps. “A singing and dancing sensation, I was goin’ take the whole world by storm. I had me a banjo-playing secret sweetheart.” Redwood halted. “A man caught me in the fog on a country road and took me against my will. I snatched the life right out of him.” She balled her storm hand. “Snatche
d the life right out of my own self too. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure I could have a child.” This was the past that Opal hoped they could all forget. Redwood opened her storm hand and patted Lexy’s arm. “It took me a long time to pick myself up off that road.”

  “Hmm hmm.” Iris could have been sitting in the Amen corner of church.

  “Aidan and I had a good life, a sensation on stage and screen. I turned forty-two, surprise! I had Raven. Crows squawking outside the window kept me company when he was born.” She was close to tears. “So, Dr. Lexy, if you can stand telling it, we could stand hearing what happened when my only son got shot in the head.”

  Aidan played softly, gently. Redwood sang a wordless harmony. The Squad joined in. Rustling and crackling, Sekou flickered in the gobos and hit the ghost backbeats. Lexy caught that rhythm and perked up. “The art show at the Rain Forest Lounge was Sekou’s big idea. He convinced the owners. He was always doing that. Nobody could out-talk Sekou. Nobody could keep up, except his baby sister. That’s what he said, always bragging on you.” Lexy scratched the rash on his neck.

  “Do you mind if I take notes?” Cinnamon tapped her magic words journal. Lexy nodded. “Wait.” She grabbed The Chronicles and one of Raven’s calligraphy pens from her orca knapsack. “I should write in here for the Wanderer.” She opened to a blank page, and, writing as fast as thought, dashed off what Lexy had already said. “Ready.”

  Lexy stood up straight and turned his cap to the side. Dr. Bug-Man was in the house. “Star brought her contact crew over for the opening. Sekou had a poetry-jam lined up. Everybody wanted to bust a few rhymes for the old folks. Raven Cooper was an art hero, old school. He’d die poor before he’d sell out. Stare at his paintings long enough, you start talking in tongues, so rhyming fierce words was easy. I was surprised Mr. Cooper was doing his show in a gay bar. People claimed he was AC-DC. I don’t know about that.