Sudden electricity buzzed through the musty locker room air. The other boys nearby immediately sensed a fight brewing, and gathered around us in a loose circle.
“I don’t have a problem with you, man,” I said, my voice a little shaky as I reached for my shirt inside the locker. “It was only a game. Who cares?”
“I care!” Bruno hammered his big fist against my locker door, slamming it shut in my face. “I fuckin’ care, you fuckin’ cheater.”
Don’t take the bait, I thought. Walk away, and go to your next class. It’s not worth a suspension.
But this was a matter of respect, and in school, respect was worth more than money. I saw what happened to the kids who’d failed to take a stand for their own dignity. They scurried like field mice through the hallways, unable to garner respect from even the teachers.
“I didn’t cheat, ” I said.
“Bullshit! You were takin’ off before the goddamn ball was hiked! That’s the only reason you kept gettin’ past me, man.”
Everyone, of course, knew Bruno was lying. They knew he was strong as hell, but brick-footed. The only way he could salvage a shred of self-respect was to make up a story about why he’d failed to catch me.
“You can say whatever you want,” I said, wondering where I was getting the balls to talk back like this, “but I wasn’t cheating, and you know it.”
I think I felt the punch coming the instant that Bruno had made up his mind to unleash it. I often had a feeling for things like that, almost a sixth sense for what would happen, and I never doubted it—my need to listen to it was hardwired into me, as primal as the need to breathe.
I dipped sideways. Bruno’s fist sailed through emptiness. He lost his balance and tumbled across the bench in the middle of the aisle.
The crowd around us exploded in shouts of, “Damn!” and “Oh, shit!”
“You fuckin’ tripped me!” Bruno roared, leaping to his feet. Blood leaked from one nostril. He blinked, dazed.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I said.
He charged me. I nimbly slipped aside again. He smashed like a tank into the lockers.
I took a step backward. Screaming, he swung a wild fist at me.
And missed. He spun off balance, drunkenly.
I easily captured his hand. I got a grip on his middle finger, and bent it back. He yelped like a child and sank to his knees on the concrete floor.
“Don’t ever bother me again,” I whispered.
“All right!” Fat tears spilled down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, man! Fuckin’ let me go!”
I relinquished his finger. He cradled his hand against his chest, wincing in pain, and scooted away.
I realized the room had fallen silent. The faces in the crowd regarded me with something approaching awe, and maybe a measure of fear, too.
I wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve those looks from them. It wasn’t as though I was a karate expert. I’d done only what had come naturally to me to defend myself.
“What are you guys looking at?” I asked. “Leave me alone, okay?”
They promptly scattered.
I turned back to my locker, finished dressing, and left for my next class.
For the rest of my high school career, Bruno Jackson never bothered me again . . . and neither did anyone else.
Chapter Ten
Aunt Lillie spoke for over two hours. She recounted her childhood growing up on the home place, back in the days of Jim Crow segregation. She spoke of running off as a hot-tailed teenager and marrying a man who dragged her to Chicago, gave her five kids, and then went off and died on foreign soil in World War II, a tragedy that brought her back to the home place to raise her children, in the warm, protective circle of family and friends.
She spoke of her parents, and how they’d also lived there on the home place; and her grandparents, too. Although many of the children produced by each generation had migrated from Mississippi to other parts of the country, several always remained behind to raise their respective families. The family’s property had never been abandoned.
In her narrative, Aunt Lillie echoed something remarkable that my grandma had told me, too. Unlike many other black folks in the pre-Civil Rights South, they had somehow avoided falling victim to the notoriously unfair sharecropper economy: an arrangement where farmers, usually former slaves, were loaned a plot of land to work, and owed a hefty portion of their crop earnings to the landowner. It was a system that virtually guaranteed blacks would never accumulate significant property, would forever be steeped in debt.
“We done always owned this land outright, and everything we grew on it,” Aunt Lillie said. “All three hundred acres here. Belongs to our people, and always will, God willing.”
“Three hundred acres?” Asha whistled. “That’s incredible.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I didn’t know we owned that much land back here.”
“Done had plenty offers to sell out,” Aunt Lillie said. She laughed. “Shiny-head white man came through here ’bout a month ago, wanted to mow down all God’s green beauty and build some new houses. Ha, I ’bout to laughed him outta the door! Told that man he ain’t gonna never have enough money to buy this from us.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Good for us.”
“I needs to stretch these old legs of mine now.” Aunt Lillie got to her feet and smoothed down the front of her dress. “Come on out back, y’all.”
We followed Aunt Lillie into the kitchen and through the back door, onto a large pinewood deck that looked newly built. At midday, it was hot and sticky outdoors, the air a fragrant haze.
“I don’t know how you can stand this heat, Aunt Lillie,” Asha said. She blotted perspiration from her brow with a napkin. “It makes me want to faint.”
“You get used to it, child,” Aunt Lillie said.
The grassy yard beyond the deck was flat as a football field, and about as long as one, extending to an immense cathedral of pines, oaks, and maples that seemed to go on for infinity.
Perhaps it was imagination, but when I looked toward those woods, and the impenetrable shadows within, the buzzing I’d been hearing got louder. I flashed back to my dream: a shotgun house with a blood-red door nestled deep in the forest . . .
I pointed. “What’s back there in the woods?”
“That back there is ancestor land,” Aunt Lillie said softly, eyes glimmering.
“Ancestor land?” Asha asked.
But the grumble of approaching car engines drew Aunt Lillie’s attention away. “Sound like more kinfolk comin’. Come on, y’all. Everyone wanna see you.”
I gazed into the forest for a moment, the buzz in my ears and that red door in my mind, and reluctantly turned away.
Chapter Eleven
That night, Asha and I lodged in a guest bedroom at the back of the house. It had two neatly made twin beds placed on opposite sides, and I figured that Cousin Tee’s sons often slept there when they spent the night with Aunt Lillie.
There was another room that had a queen-size bed, but Aunt Lillie said she couldn’t sanction me and Asha sharing the same bed in her house since we weren’t yet married. It was such an old-fashioned notion that I could only chuckle.
Freshly showered, Asha came in from the adjoining bath, a bright orange towel wrapped around her. She stood in front of me—I was sitting on the bed in my boxers, reviewing the genealogy notes I’d written that day—and snatched the towel away from her body with a dramatic flourish.
Desire rippled through me. I set aside my pencil and pad and reached for her. She eased onto my lap, kissed me tenderly, and then got up and moved away.
“Not tonight, baby,” she said. “You know what Aunt Lillie said. We can’t disrespect the house rules.”
“You know you’re wrong,” I said.
“Sorry, rules are rules.” Bending over in front of me, she took a tube of lotion out of her suitcase. She glanced at me over her shoulder with a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “Mind lathering som
e on my back?”
“You’re such a tease.” I took the lotion from her, squeezed some into my palm, and began to rub it across her shoulders, trying and completely failing to keep my gaze off her lovely derriere. “You must not want me to get any sleep tonight.”
“You might get lucky,” she said with a giggle. “On a serious note, though, we learned a lot today, don’t you think?”
A virtual caravan of relatives had stopped by that afternoon. Aunts, uncles, and cousins. Everyone was eager to meet us and tell their stories. I’d compiled so much information in my notebook and recorder that it would take me weeks to sort through it all.
“I’d sure like to learn about Grandpa Orin, though,” I said. I slid my hands down to Asha’s hips, though I had run out of lotion.
She lightly swatted my hands away and stretched across the bed. “I was thinking about that, too. You look so much like him it’s amazing.”
“It’s in the blood, I guess.”
“But Aunt Lillie was vague about where he fits into the family tree. Maybe he was the black sheep of the clan. Every family has someone like that, you know.”
“We’ve got a couple more days here, so maybe she’ll open up, or maybe we’ll get the scoop from someone else.”
“Maybe we can find out about ancestor land, too,” she said.
I thought about the forest, and how the buzzing had grown louder when I’d peered into its depths. “I hope so.”
On the bed, Asha turned onto her back, her smooth brown skin oiled and smelling sweetly of strawberry-scented lotion. She extended one delicate foot toward me and rubbed it gently across my crotch, where things immediately perked up nicely.
“What about the house rules?” I asked.
She smiled. “What about turning off the lights, Babyface?”
I cut off the lamp sitting on the nightstand between the beds. She reached out in the darkness and grabbed my hand, pulled me onto the narrow mattress with her.
“You’re being disrespectful,” I said.
She responded by smothering my face with feather-light kisses.
Back in Atlanta, though we made love frequently and passionately, since we’d been in Mississippi it seemed we were hornier than usual, as if the fresh country air were an aphrodisiac.
“Aunt Lillie might hear,” I whispered. “You know old folks sleep light.”
“Then you better keep it down,” she said, her minty breath hot against my face. “I know how you like to shout . . .”
Afterward, I dragged myself to my own bed, and collapsed atop the sheets.
I dreamed, again, of the shotgun shack with the red door. The buzzing coming from inside. Candlelight flickering in the windows, shadows writhing on the grass. Climbing the steps, pushing open the door, stepping inside . . . and falling into unimaginable black depths...
I came awake with a gasp, cold sweat saturating my face. In her bed, Asha snored softly.
I pushed out of bed and padded to the window on the other side of the room. I parted the curtains.
The window faced the woods, but I couldn’t make out the trees at all. In the inky-black night, the forest was only a hulking blur.
On impulse, I dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and slipped on my sneakers. I quietly left the bedroom.
The house was dark, the only sound the hum of the air conditioner. Aunt Lillie’s room was on the other side of the hall, and the door was shut.
I left the house through the back door. I thought of looking for a flashlight to take with me, and decided against it. I felt strangely confident here, as if I’d spent all my life on this land. No harm could befall me while I was here.
I walked off the deck and into the warm night. Toward the woods.
Chapter Twelve
Walking toward the forest, I encountered the most perfect darkness that I had ever seen in my life. There were no bright city lights to alleviate the blackness, no streetlamps. No silver moon.
This was pure night, fathoms deep, and in it, I felt at home.
Swishing through the crisp grass, I became aware of three dark shapes converging around me, and I heard soft panting. The nameless family dogs. One dog took the lead; the other two flanked me on opposite sides.
It was as though they were escorting me.
I’ve gotta be dreaming. Ordinary dogs don’t behave like this.
But I knew I was wide awake. The warm air against my skin, the crunch of the grass beneath my shoes, and the buzzing in my ears were all too real to be just another dream.
We reached the forest wall. The point dog plunged ahead, breaking through shrubs and branches, and I followed, twigs skidding across my arms and legs and leaves caressing my face.
The buzzing grew louder, and with it, so did my pounding heartbeat. Was I really going to find the shotgun house nestled in here? On ancestor land?
The trees around me were as thick and tall as steel columns that might have been erected by some ancient master race. The woods had a heady, primeval smell, and I wondered how long it had been since anyone had ventured back here. My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, and I didn’t see any signs of human habitation: no worn trails, no discarded wrappers, no forgotten soda cans or beer bottles. The land was pristine.
I pushed ahead. I saw a glimmer of light through the dense undergrowth, and tightness gripped my chest.
Trailing the lead canine, I stepped through a grove of trees, and emerged in a clearing.
“My God,” I said in a whisper.
The shotgun house was ahead, just as I had seen it in my dream: the blood-red door, white shingles, dark shutters. Candlelight danced in the front windows, and shadows wriggled on the grass.
The buzzing was so loud that I felt it in my chest.
How can this place be real? Who the heck lives here?
A shadow as tall as a man floated past a window.
Terror exploded up my throat like hot oil. I spun around and ran pell-mell through the forest.
The dogs didn’t accompany me, and as I raced away, I wondered if they had remained behind, the hounds of whoever lived in that house.
Sprinting, I heard Asha calling for me in an anguished voice. In the humid air, it almost sounded as if she were underwater.
Legs pumping hard, I broke out of the forest, weeds snatching at my shoes. I saw Asha on the back deck. She had switched on the flood light, the yellow glow leaking across the yard.
When she saw me, I slowed to a brisk walk, not wanting to frighten her more than she already was. She ran off the deck and came to me.
“Baby, where were you?” she said. “I woke up and saw you’d left! I was so worried, I was thinking about the home invasions and thought something had happened to you!”
“I’m okay,” I said, breathing hard. “I . . . went for a walk.”
“At two o’clock in the morning? Why? It’s not safe out here.”
I couldn’t tell her why. Something told me not to mention what I had seen; something told me to keep it secret.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said, which was only half true. “I felt safe walking out here. It’s my family’s land, remember, and we’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Tell that to the old lady down the road who got pistol whipped and robbed the other night. Crime is here, too. You’ve got to be careful, Danny.”
“You’re right,” I said, just to end it. “I should be more careful. Won’t happen again.”
We went back inside. Aunt Lillie never came from her room to ask about all the commotion, and I wondered about that. I wondered if she knew that I’d gone to find the home in the forest—and was secretly pleased.
Lying in bed again, I crossed my hands behind my head and gazed at the dark ceiling. I couldn’t understand how I had initially dreamed of a house that I’d learned was actually real. I wasn’t psychic, had never received visions before, either in dreams or outside of them. How had that happened?
When I thought also about the buzzing that originated from insid
e my head, I began to think, irrationally, that whoever lived in the house was summoning me. But how could that be possible? I wasn’t telepathic, either.
I was angry at myself for running away. Temporary fear had taken hold of me, and to find the answers that I’d gone there for, I needed to be stronger.
Next time, I promised myself, I would not run away.
I would go inside.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, we went to church. Cousin Tee came by with her sons, all of them dressed in their Sunday best, and we followed her off the home place to a small, faded red brick church about three miles away called Evergreen First Baptist.
Tucked away from the road, it was a world removed from the Baptist church that Asha and I attended in Atlanta, a mega-sanctuary that routinely packed in three thousand worshippers on Sundays. I counted the grand total of sixty heads in the old oak pews.
The pastor was a graying, distinguished-looking man named Rev. James Booker, and I wondered if I was related to him. My question was answered when he asked for any visitors to rise.
Asha and I were the only ones to stand. Every head in the congregation swiveled to us.
“I sure thought that was you, Cousin Danny,” the pastor said. He flashed a grin. “Family, that there is Cousin Danny and his beautiful wife. They came all the way from Hotlanta to share in the Lord with us this morning. Won’t you please welcome them?”
“His beautiful wife,” Asha whispered in my ear, smirking, and then we were mobbed with handshakes and hugs. Everyone there, I realized, was a relative of mine. It was surreal, like discovering you’d been born into a tribe that you hadn’t known existed.
Amid the onslaught of warm greetings, I noticed that even the elderly kinfolk were spry and bright-eyed, like Aunt Lillie. None wore glasses or hearing aids, or used canes or walkers. They zipped about the pews as agilely as school children.
Once everyone was seated again and my head was full of more names and faces than I could possibly remember, the pastor launched into his sermon.
As I followed along with the cited scriptures in my Bible, I noticed that Rev. Booker wore a ruby ring. In fact, I had seen many of my relatives, mostly those who looked to be in their thirties and older, wearing the same piece of jewelry, just like Cousin Tee, Aunt Lillie, and my grandma.
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