The Year the Lights Came On

by Terry Kay

  Wesley stepped into the clearing and began to cross toward the tree. Alvin followed. Then R. J. and Otis and Paul. I did not want to go, but I did not want to stay behind, alone. “Wait a minute,” I yelled. “Wesley. You better wait, or I’ll tell Mama.”

  Wesley stopped. He was angry. “Well, c’mon, if you’re goin’.” I raced to him, beside him, close to him, our arms touching as we walked.

  The clearing was a courtyard for Freeman’s King Beech. Visitors were announced by the trumpets of crickets and sparrows. Wildflowers waved like banners. Near the tree, in a slight curving terrace, two lines of scrub ash bowed in eternal servitude, their curtsying limbs bent toward the ground.

  We stopped fifteen yards away from the tree.

  “See anything?” whispered Otis.

  “Nothin’,” answered Paul, also whispering.

  “Wesley?”

  “Nothin’, Otis. Nothin’. No need to be afraid.”

  “What’s that, Wesley?”

  “What’s what? You don’t stop it, Paul, you’ll scare Colin to death.”

  “That,” Paul replied in a quivering voice. “That.” He lifted his arm in a point. He added, “Hangin’ there. On that limb. Right there.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Wesley said.

  Paul took two steps closer to the tree and cupped his hand over his eyes. “There,” he repeated. He pointed to a limb of the tree.

  We saw it at one time, in the exact, precise moment, as though our eyes were one with one vision seeing one thing.

  Three snakes. Three snakes grotesquely slaughtered, their skins peeled away at half-body, peeled back to their tails, with the skins looped over the limb and tied in a bow like a ribbon. The exposed flesh of the snakes from half-body to their tails had bulged and ruptured in the heat and had soured to a deep purple color. The heads of the snakes had been smashed into a pulp of bone and muscle and the half-body still covered with skin had dried to a brittle grayish brown.

  The stench gagged us. Gnats swirled around each snake, like hundreds of tiny vultures.

  “Oh, Lord,” R. J. gasped. His face paled. He clutched his throat with both hands and turned away.

  “It’s the Snake Spell,” whispered Otis.

  Alvin moaned.

  The Snake Spell. Yes. It had to be. Three half-skinned snakes hanging from a limb. The Snake Spell. Voodoo. Dark, secret, African magic.

  “Wesley…?”

  “Shuttup, Colin. I see it.”

  The Snake Spell. They had told us of the Snake Spell when we were babies, each of us. It was a spell of ultimate horror to keep restless boys quiet and obedient. (“You behave, or that old witch woman’s liable to put the Snake Spell on you. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll be sorry.”)

  “Let’s go find Daddy, Wesley…”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t go thinkin’ about them stories,” snapped Wesley.

  Stories?

  The Snake Spell was more than stories. It was real. People said so, so it was. It was real.

  People said it had been used against one of the Pretlows, a child-beater, and he had fallen dead in the snap of a finger.

  People said it had been used to cripple Hugh Shivers’ father after he had spit on an old black man for sport, when the old black man refused to hambone.

  People said it had been used to produce boils and warts on the bodies of dozens of hard, selfish rich people who delighted in mistreating poor blacks and whites.

  The Snake Spell was real.

  People said so.

  “Wesley, maybe we won’t get hit by it,” whimpered Paul. “Let’s back off, easylike.”

  Wesley was irritated by Paul’s trembling. “Paul, I’ve done nothin’ to be afraid of,” he said, convincing himself. “Now, you can walk or run or do whatever you want to, but I’m stayin’ here. Anyway, maybe it’s meant for helpin’ somebody. Maybe Freeman. If there’s a place where somebody made a fire, that means it’s a helping spell.”

  “I never heard tell of that,” Paul begged.

  It was true. The Snake Spell could be for Good or Evil. People said so. It depended on secret incantations and secret gestures, and the presence of a ritual fire. If the spell was intended for Good, there would be a ritual fire. Always, always, the Good spell demanded a ritual fire. The fire produced ashes and ashes were used to rub on whoever needed help, and that person magically acquired the power of the wood that had been burned.

  Wesley moved away from us cautiously. He circled under the snakes, dangling like chopped fox-grape vines. A few feet from the trunk of the tree, he stopped. “It’s here,” he called quietly.

  We were suddenly released from the paralysis of fear. We moved quickly, in a lump, to Wesley. On the ground was a ring of rocks, carefully stacked. The inside of the rocks was charred. Three small pyramids of ashes were formed in the exact center of where the fire had been.

  We were very still, commanded to be still by a phantom force that seemed centered in the three small pyramids of ashes.

  “I thought that old witch woman was dead,” Otis whispered.

  “No,” Wesley answered softly. “No, Granny Woman’s still alive. But she didn’t do this. She’s too old to be walkin’ around in the woods. That woman’s more’n a hundred.”

  “Who done it, Wesley?”

  “I don’t know, Otis. Maybe Freeman. Maybe he’s just bein’ Freeman and trying to scare us, or something.”

  Alvin squatted and pushed in the peak of one of the pyramids. “But nobody’s used these ashes,” he observed. “Whoever set it up didn’t get the chance. Maybe they’ll be comin’ back.”

  “Maybe,” Wesley said.

  “I’ll bet that’s right,” R. J. added.

  Alvin carefully rebuilt the pyramid, pinching the top and smoothing the sides. “We better tell about this,” he advised.

  “No,” answered Wesley. “No, let’s keep it quiet right now. For a time, at least.”

  “Why?”

  “Everybody knows the Snake Spell comes from Granny Woman,” explained Wesley. “Everybody. If we told about findin’ this, half those men out kickin’ around this swamp would go stormin’ over to Granny Woman’s house and cause all kinds of trouble.”

  “Yeah, you right about that,” R. J. agreed.

  “But if Freeman put up this spell, he’ll be comin’ back,” Wesley continued. “And it’d be a lot better if we could find him here, than havin’ people go crazy trying to get answers from Granny Woman.”

  Wesley was remembering Willie Lee and Baptist, and his promise not to involve them. He also knew every black in Emery would be committed to Granny Woman’s defense if anyone threatened her.

  “All right,” Otis said, “what’re we sayin’?”

  Wesley looked at the snakes, then at Alvin. “What’d you think, Alvin?”

  “Seems to me we ought to camp out somewhere close by and take turns watchin’ for Freeman,” Alvin suggested. “If he’s comin’ back, it won’t be before night.”

  “That’s a good idea,” agreed Wesley.

  “We can say we’re goin’ to Wind’s Mill in case Freeman shows up there,” Alvin added.

  “Better have Dover with us,” Paul suggested. “Havin’ him along will make it easier to get out.”

  “Yeah,” R. J. said. “Wes, do we tell Dover about this?”

  “Yeah,” answered Wesley. “Paul’s right. We need Dover. But let’s don’t tell anybody else.”

  “We better take a vow,” counseled Otis.

  Paul agreed. “Yeah, we need a vow.”

  “We don’t need to do that,” Wesley said.

  “Wesley, we always take a vow.”

  “Yeah,” argued R. J.

  “Let’s swear,” I said, pulling at Wesley’s arm.

  “Well, all right, get it done with,” replied Wesley.

  Above our heads were three half-skinned snakes. A ritual fire, with ritual ashes, was at our feet.

  We crossed our hearts and hoped to die.

&nbs
p; 15

  IT DID NOT SEEM REASONABLE that Freeman would mock the Snake Spell. He believed more firmly than any of us in the ancient heritage of Granny Woman Jordan. But Freeman did not think of her as an “old witch woman.” She had The Power, and The Power was more than witchery.

  Granny Woman Jordan had been a slave girl in the Civil War. In the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, she had suffered shell shock and when she again woke to reality, she discovered she was in an orphans’ home in Charleston, caring for wiggling white babies. The proprietor of the orphanage referred to her as “a perfect granny woman,” and that is why she adopted the name. In those years when her body was commanded to sleep-walk and sleep-work and sleep-live by another shadowy person, Granny Woman misplaced fragments of her past; her real name was one of those fragments.

  Wesley and I knew many tales of Granny Woman because we were privileged to hear them from Annie. Annie was one of twenty children born to Granny Woman, and she was the mother of Little Annie, Willie Lee’s wife. When I was very small, Annie worked with my mother during weeks of canning and harvesting. Annie had a special regard for me and I knew that I was treated in a spoiling manner by her. She had a gentle face and her eyes carried a star burning in the dark, liquid heavens of her pupils. Her fingers were long and slender and she knew how to bend and shape them in dozens of caricatures for playing animal shadows on the wall. She cooked cakes for me. Chocolate marble cakes. She would say, “My boy, he wants a cake. What color cake you want?” And I would answer, “Cake the color of you, Annie.” Mother tried often to discourage Annie from indulging me with chocolate marble cakes, but Annie ignored her. Once, in desperation, Mother hid the sugar and Annie walked two miles to Hixon’s General Store, where she charged five pounds to my father’s account. “That baby’s my baby, too,” declared Annie. “He wants cake, Annie’s gonna cook him cakes.”

  Yet, my memories of Annie were baby memories, though my mother visited her often and Annie made an annual pilgrimage to spend an entire day with Mother. On those days (always with an air of holiday), Annie would embrace me with laughter and tell again an old story of the day I became angry and, in temper, ran away from home, only to return at sundown, declaring I would give my family one last chance before seeking a better residence. But I did remember the Snake Spell, first told by my mother and repeated with marvelous dramatics by Annie. And I remembered specks and flashes of Annie’s gleaming face as she spoke in a trembling voice about voodoo, and I had believed Granny Woman was blessed with knowing secrets no one else knew, secrets that reached back, back, back, forever back, back to Africa and a tribe of godlike magicians, fierce and mighty and proud.

  In the late thirties, Granny Woman had become a character in harmless stories, a myth. During World War II, she emerged as a symbol of hope, an emissary between the Unknown and the Frightened. There were stories of sorrowful white women applying to Granny Woman for supernatural assistance. Their husbands, or sons, were missing in action. They had prayed, yes, but God, through the U.S. Army, had not answered their petitions and they had surrendered to this last possibility, this mystery of Granny Woman Jordan. For a time, Granny Woman accepted them, offered audience, and read for them messages of terrible truths. But it was not truth the women wanted; they wanted pain-killing fantasies, cool breezes of assurance. And Granny Woman stopped seeing them, refused to hear their squalling hysterics. She was very old, nearing one hundred years, and she became more and more an unseen person. After the war, she disappeared into the back bedroom of Annie’s home, into a room that squeezed over her like a womb, and she curled into the fetal position on a feather mattress. To my knowledge, she was seen by only three white people during those years of solitude: Tommy Holcomb, the debit man, who saw her by accident, and Wesley and me.

  On Granny Woman’s one-hundredth birthday in 1946 (her age was estimated; she was, perhaps, even older), Mother had dispatched Wesley and me to Annie’s, bearing a gift of a hand-knitted shawl. The occasion was most memorable.

  Annie and her husband, Claude Miles, lived in a small house, a toy house with unpainted clapboards darkened by exposure and years. The roof had overlapping wood shingles, and the shingles had been patched in mole dots of tin cans hammered flat and covered with tar. A front porch, broken and limp on one corner, extended the length of the house. The damaged front porch made the house suffer, piteously suffer, like a man who has the half-face of a stroke. There were two front windows peering out from the lid of the porch. The windows were small, weak eyes, diseased by the cataracts of old screens turned brown and bubbled inward. The front screen door had lost its bottom hinge and hung like a scab on a healing sore. Wads of dead grass lodged in the porch planking. Islands of broom sage grew tall in the white sand ocean of the unkempt front yard.

  Behind the house the skeleton of a large barn leaned awkwardly, tilting forward on one corner like some great stubby-winged bird wanting to fly. Rot-black hay—grass and grain stems not fit to eat—was shoved against the barn door. Corrugated tin flapped on the roof—metal feathers on the great stubby-winged bird. A well shelter, between the barn and house, had a broken back from a fallen limb that had been cut and rolled away. Mulberry bushes and chinaberry trees grew in dwarfed clusters at the back of the house. A fig bush, the only tended tree in the yard, grew alone in the edge of the pasture.

  “Don’t nobody keep this place up,” I whispered to Wesley as we entered the yard on Granny Woman’s one-hundredth birthday.

  “They’re all too old,” he said simply.

  The gift of the hand-knitted shawl deeply affected Annie. She decided to introduce us to Granny Woman.

  “Go down yonder and dig me up some red clay out of the gully,” Annie instructed, “while I tell Granny Woman somebody’s comin’.”

  We did not know why she wanted the red clay, but we did as we were told. Annie took the clay and some starch cubes and wrapped them in wax paper.

  “Give these to Granny Woman,” she told me.

  “Why, Annie?”

  “Granny Woman loves them things. Rather eat them things than table food,” explained Annie.

  “She eats red dirt?” I inquired, astonished.

  “Red dirt’s good for you, child.”

  We followed Annie into Granny Woman’s room. It was a half-size room with a half-size window. The window was covered with burlap sacks, sealing the light except for a straight, dusty, arrow-beam crossing over a bed and plunging into a table beside the top of the bed. The table was draped with a delicate lace cloth. A kerosene lamp was in the middle of the table, on a chipped plate, and a rocker was beside the bed. The back of the rocker was also dressed in the delicate lace cloth.

  Granny Woman was in the bed. She was older than any living creature I had ever seen. Her skin was drawn and parched and appeared coated with paraffin. Her lips were pale brown and cracked. Her sunken eyes were black caves. Her hair was thin, white, lifeless, a curled thread braided in rows across her skull. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, like the mouth of a lizard licking the air.

  Annie slipped a pinch of red dirt into Granny Woman’s opening and closing mouth and Granny Woman nodded childishly.

  Annie began to talk to Granny Woman in a shrill shout, waving her arms in exaggerated gestures, arranging her words like ABC blocks, to be somehow seen as well as heard. I wondered if Annie had become addicted to those hand signs through years of caring for her mother.

  We were introduced, but Granny Woman did not know we were there. Annie broke a starch cube in half and slipped it into Granny Woman’s mouth and Granny Woman lay back into her pillow, sucking on the starch. She seemed asleep in her mountain of pillows, lapsed into dream space, and I remembered what my mother had said about old people running away in memory, and how their minds lost control, confusing time and people and place. I wondered if Granny Woman had hurled herself, in one tremendous leap, across time, back to the Civil War, back to a day of killing when, in one breath, she had exhaled slavery and inhaled the poison of b
eing sentenced to years of mindless wandering, years when she knew nothing, felt nothing, remembered nothing.

  The white, chalky starch drooled from Granny Woman’s lips as she flew aimlessly about in her astral escape, swirling in worlds of half-images.

  Annie led us away, outside.

  We had not talked of seeing Granny Woman because Annie had pledged us to silence. She did not want curious spectators with carnival expectations spilling into her yard. Granny Woman was not a sideshow. Granny Woman was old and wanted to be alone. Let people think of her as a witch, “a conjurin’ woman,” and let them believe she could hex them and make them vanish from the face of Earth if they violated her privilege of age.

  *

  It had been that experience Wesley recalled when he saw the three half-skinned snakes. The Granny Woman we had seen was incapable of casting spells, even if she did have The Power.

  Someone else had staged the props of the Snake Spell.

  It could have been Freeman; Freeman knew what was required, but he also respected the solemnity of those rites. It could have been Annie, but Annie was also old and Annie vigorously denied inheriting any of Granny Woman’s gifts. It could have been Little Annie, who often behaved in a quietly removed and pensive manner, as though she anticipated experiences before they occurred. And, it could have been Willie Lee, warning Wesley and me to keep our promise—Willie Lee knowing we would, eventually, remember Freeman’s tree.

  But it could not have been Baptist. Baptist was more afraid of snakes than of the distinct, and oppressive, possibility of meeting the Soldier Ghost face to face. If the Soldier Ghost had a face.

  *

  Dover was weakened by our story of the Snake Spell. He had never been so impressed with any news, he said, and he proposed the theory that Granny Woman had called on the spirit world and the spirit world had lifted her, bodily, and transported her to Freeman’s tree, where she performed the Snake Spell on stroke of midnight. Dover was an absolute believer in “things greater than our thinkin’.” He had learned about such things in his palm-reading course, he said.