“Thought I’d make ya one a your favorites. Mother.”
Of course, Grammie Atti knew exactly what it was before she asked. She knew before we came inside. Now she watches Mama with a little smirk on her face. Yes. Mama made one of her favorites: pigs’ feet. Disgusting. Stank up our whole house. That’s how you know we really need help.
“How thoughtful,” Grammie Atti says. Sarcasm in every syllable.
“It’s good to see you, Mama.”
“Is it now?”
Mama purses her lips and closes her eyes for a second. She’s tryin’ her best to be patient and civil with my grandmother, which ain’t easy.
“All right. I know it’s been a while—”
“Three years, it’s been. Almost four! My grandbabies must be runnin’ around and talkin’ in full sentences by now.” For a moment her fury is interrupted by confusion as she glances behind us. “Where they at? You bet’ not tell me you left them babies home alone.”
Mama tries to smile. It doesn’t take.
“No. They’re spendin’ the day with their father.”
Grammie Atti explodes in loud, spiteful laughter.
“You might as well’ve left ’em alone if he’s what you call a babysitter!”
“He’s not babysitting. He’s fathering,” Mama says sternly. This shuts down my grandmother’s laughter.
“If you say so.”
“I said it, didn’t I?”
“You ain’t even been here two minutes, and you already sassin’ me!”
Mama nods to herself. She seems to be thinkin’ something that she won’t say aloud.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“He’s a drunk, Indigo.”
“No, he’s not, but that ain’t why we’re here,” Mama says as evenly as she can. For the first time, I feel real sympathy for her. I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be raised by Grammie Atti. When you think about it, it’s amazing that Mama’s as kind to me and the twins as she is. Considering the model she had.
“We don’t mean to bother you, but we’re here cuz—”
“I know why you’re here,” she cuts Mama off. She likes to do that. “I knew you’d be over here before you did.”
Finally, she offers us some seats. A wooden stool and metal folding chair. Clients she takes through the beaded curtain into the nicer room. The one with the cushioned wicker furniture. We don’t rate that high.
“So? You jubin’ like a wild woman, aintcha?” she asks me.
“I don’t mean to,” I mutter. “It useta not be a big deal, but lately, it’s gotten worse.”
“It’s serious,” Mama adds.
“Of course it’s worse. Of course it’s serious. You growin’ into a woman and—” She stops for a second, leans forward in her chair, and glances at me below the navel area.
“And as I thought, you been fuckin’.”
“Mama!” My mother is scandalized, and I want to slither under this cheap card table and die.
“Evvie is a good girl. A decent girl. Don’t put that on her,” my mother argues on my behalf. If an asteroid hit this shack at this second, that would be fine with me.
“Oh please! Be offended all you want, you know it’s true. And you know you were doin’ the same thing at sixteen and so was I. She ain’t special,” Grammie Atti retorts.
My mother looks like she’s finna pass out.
“That’s us. Don’t have to be Evvie,” she says, barely audible, and it feels like years have just fallen offa her and she’s about my age!
“Oh, yeah, you right. Evvie’s different from us,” my grandmother concedes right before winking at my mother with her whole face. Mama leans her elbows on the table and rubs her forehead.
“So what d’ya want from me?” Grammie Atti asks.
“Mother,” Mama starts. She takes a pause to reset. “Mama? You and me don’t get along and we probably never will, but—”
“Wouldn’t be that way at all if you didn’t insist on believin’ in White Jesus.”
Here we go.
“That’s not what he’s called, and you know that.”
“That’s what he is. That’s what your church is about. Pleasin’ the white man. You pray to White Jesus.”
“And who do you pray to? Nobody.”
“Don’t need to.”
“No, you got it all figured out, right? Fifty-two-years-old livin’ alone in a shack tellin’ fortunes like the warm-up act at a freak show. What a sweet life you lead!” Mama shakes her head and sighs. She doesn’t usually go off like that.
Grammie Atti says nothing. She fills her pipe with tobacco. I wait for her to retaliate somehow, but she stays quiet for longer than I expect. It don’t make her less scary, though.
“How’s ’at sayin’ go? Somethin’ about people in glass houses,” she says softly.
“You’re right, Mama,” my mother says. “I shouldn’t have said that, and I’m sorry.”
Grammie Atti nods, the closest she can come to reconciling. She lights her pipe and inhales. The orange glow briefly illuminates the tiny tobacco leaves. Mama starts to say something else, but Grammie Atti raises a finger to stop her. She exhales blue-gray smoke and regards me.
I try to concentrate for a second. Try to read her thoughts. It ain’t that hard to crawl into somebody’s head and read their thoughts if you really want to. I’ve done it, but not much, cuz if I wanna know what somebody’s thinkin’, I usually just ask. I can almost see into her mind when a spark pops from her pipe, flies through the air and lands on my cheek.
I squeal and swat it off me. Mama jumps up to wet a dishcloth and tells me to hold it on the spot so it don’t turn into a burn. She glares at Grammie Atti, who just smiles.
“That’s whatcha git. Don’t be sneakin’ into my thoughts less’n you’s invited. And you will never be invited. Ya hear me?”
I nod, holding the rag. I feel a li’l bad for trespassin’, but also annoyed. She is always at least five steps ahead of everyone else in the world.
To avoid any further calamities, Mama quickly tells Grammie Atti about what happened when we visited Daddy. At first, the idea of attempting to strangle a white man—a white man in law enforcement at that—even gives my grandmother a momentary scare. It’s subtle and it’s fast, but I see it. But then she laughs so hard, tears roll.
“It ain’t funny,” Mama warns her.
“The hell it ain’t,” she argues, instantly snapping back to a scowl. “We was trained to be all polite and deferential with it, but that’s a load a shit! Jube ain’t polite. Jube ain’t deferential. Jube ain’t a goddamn ice cream social! It’s our survival!” she bellows. The walls tremble. I bet they’re afraid of her too. But Mama doesn’t back down.
“We don’t need to rely on our magic to survive no more,” she argues. “Progress is slow, but times have changed.”
“Oh, have they? Wonchu go tell that to Mamie Till1? Bet she coulda used some magic.” Grammie Atti stares my mother down, and Mama shrinks in her seat. I’m floored by this. I never imagined that that was what Grammie Atti meant by “survival.”
“Regardless,” she begins again, softening her tone ever so slightly, “the girl needs to learn control. Discipline. The rest is up to her.”
“I agree,” Mama sighs.
“Why not teach her yourself? Afraid White Jesus won’t be your friend no more?” Grammie Atti asks her.
“I’m too long outta practice,” Mama mutters.
“Right,” Grammie Atti says with more than a little acrimony.
“How comes I can’t jube when I’m scared?” I ask. They both look at me as though they forgot I could speak.
“You can. You just don’t know how to yet,” Grammie Atti says.
“Can you show me that first?”
“Hush,” they both say.
“Your impatience will be your ruin, you ain’t careful. One thing at a time,” Grammie Atti lectures.
Inside I’m mad and cussin’, but on the outsid
e, I simply nod and stare straight ahead. My eyes land on a gris-gris bag adorned with a tiny silver skull. I wonder what it’s like to have a regular grandmother, who bakes cookies and sews quilts and indulges her grandkids with presents. I will never know.
* * *
“Okay. I got it,” I say. I’m in a chair, blindfolded, and my grandmother is makin’ me find things and touch them with my mind.
“No, you don’t. Do it again,” she commands.
She wants me to “see” her ugly cuckoo clock on the wall behind me, and I do. They built it wrong: the bird’s facin’ backward, and his feet are goin’ forward. It looks ridiculous. It’s one of them things that you see once and you can’t ever unsee.
“I see it.”
“No. You don’t. You see your memory of it. Quit bein’ lazy! See it. Right now.”
Of all the ways I could be spendin’ a Saturday afternoon, this has to be the worst. I’d rather be in school. I’d rather be at the damn doctor! She sent Mama home a while ago. Said she could get more done if she was alone with me. I feel like Helen Keller.
“Now?”
“Don’t sound too sure a yourself,” she taunts.
“Now. I see it now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
This crazy old woman! One of these days, I swear to Christ Jesus, Imma—
I jump when I hear a metallic sound like a spring bein’ stretched past its limit and then a dull thud. And then nothin’.
“Grammie? Grammie Atti?”
“Take it off,” she says quietly.
I remove the blindfold.
“Turn around and look at my clock.”
When I see it, I think I’m halluncinatin’. The cuckoo is gone. Like he done flew away. And the spring he was attached to is stretched and stickin’ straight out in the air, ready to impale somebody. I open my mouth to speak but can’t think of any words.
“Now turn back around,” she tells me. So I do that, too. I look up, and there he is. The backward cuckoo bird’s smashed into the wall with both his face and his ass stickin’ out. Guess there was too much friction for him to keep flyin’.
“Um…”
“Yes. That is your doing.”
“Sorry.”
“You know what your problem is.”
“What?”
“No, I’m tellin’ ya. You know what your problem is. So you know you got work to do.”
I scratch my head and gaze up at the bird’s ass. I have no idea what my problem is, but I ain’t foolish enough to tell Grammie Atti that.
“Fix it.”
“Huh?”
“Fix my clock. You broke it. You fix it.”
Great. Like I know how to fix a daggone cuckoo clock! I try to stand, but she stops me. Literally. I can’t move.
“Stay there,” she says. “Fix my clock.” This time it sounds like a threat.
I don’t know what to do, and she won’t help me. My eyes move all over the room while I ponder what I should do. I find myself looking again at one of her shelves of whosie-whatsits—more gris-gris bags, candles, poppets, spooky dolls—wishing I knew how to make some a this junk work for me.
“You might as well settle in, cuz you ain’t goin’ nowhere till you do it,” she informs me. This makes me mad as hell. This makes me wanna break things. But I know that when I get angry, bad shit happens.
So what’s that mean? I can never be angry? That’s impossible.
“Don’t be a dummy,” she grunts. She’s starin’ out the window. Maybe she’s wonderin’ if she got enough garbage decoratin’ her yard yet.
“Ain’t about stoppin’ up your emotions. It’s about how you use ’em.”
I wish she’d stop readin’ my thoughts.
“Wish in one hand, piss in the other. See which one gets filled up the fastest,” she says, not missing a beat.
Damn. How I use ’em. Shit. All right then. I give more thought to the clock and the wall and how it got to be that way. I resign myself to the obvious fact that this ain’t gonna be easy, and that actually allows me to relax. I’m still angry. I can feel it. I can feel it in different parts of my body, but mostly my stomach. My abdomen, I think.
As an experiment, I mentally collect all the pieces of my anger from all of its hiding places inside me and move them all to my abdomen. Treatin’ it like a home base. Now I look at it all down there, the pieces scatter, and I concentrate on them. Focus as hard as I can. They scramble for another minute or two until they form a solid band.
Whoa. It’s a pulsing red-orange glowing thing that enwraps me, but it doesn’t hurt. It feels weird, but not painful. It wants to move so badly, I’m vibrating. I nearly fly off the chair, but I clamp myself down.
I can do this.
I aim the vibrations up to the wall behind me. Up to the clock. As if on a rope and pulley, the clock smoothly disengages from the wall, slides downward, and lands itself in front of me on the table. Instinctually I start to grab it with my hands.
“No,” she says suddenly. “Put your hands down. Now.”
I do as I’m told. I’m gettin’ tired, but I go back into the anger band I’ve just made and let it do what it needs to. I watch the clock wind itself up again, and it starts ticking. It works fine. It’s the bird who’s suffered the most. I point my band toward him, pull him from the wall, and slip him back onto his spring. The spring recoils itself and screws the cuckoo back into his place. This takes a few tries, but I manage to get it in there. The last piece is his left eyeball. The tiny thing snapped off and now sits on the table, mocking me. I honestly don’t know how to fix this part without an adhesive. I can only do so much.
I hear Grammie Atti get up and start putterin’ around behind me. She opens a drawer and sets something down on a surface. Harder than necessary.
“There’s a tube a glue over here. Use it.”
I’m too tired to waste any energy bein’ annoyed so I reach around the kitchen behind me. First touchin’ a bottle a castor oil, then a tube of… paint? What is this?
“Keep movin’,” she orders.
Finally I come to it and bring it to the table in front of me. Opening it and applying it to the ceramic is tedious, but not too hard. I hold the eye to the bird’s head for a good thirty seconds or so, and when my thoughts release it, it stays in place.
I’m so relieved, I almost cry. Sometimes I try to fix somethin’ broke with my own two hands and it don’t seem to work this well. To finish, I glide it gently back up the wall behind me where it’s lived for as long as I can remember. Once it snaps back into place, the deformed cuckoo instantly pops out to announce that it’s now five o’clock.
“What about my wall?” She walks by me and indicates the small hole in the wall the bird created.
Dammit! Will this never end? I search the floor below the hole and gather up all the pieces of wall I can find. They’re too tiny and crumbly to glue.
This is an impossible task! But Grammie Atti won’t let me go unless I do something. I place all the pieces from the floor (including some dirt and shit that wasn’t part of the wall) and cram them into the hole so that it’s sealed, with me holding it all in place. It’s ugly, it’s temporary, but at least the wall is repaired. At this second.
“Good try, but you right. Fixin’ that hole is an impossible task. Let it go,” she says.
I exhale, and all the pieces fall outta the hole back down to the floor. The little hole is the perfect size for an enterprising mouse if she’s willing to climb up the six feet and change to get there.
I take another breath and discover that my red-orange band has faded and that I don’t feel angry anymore. I feel pretty good. Better than I did this morning. Though I’m tired as hell and not proud of how much I’m sweatin’. You’d think I just ran a marathon.
I turn to face Grammie Atti. I’m kinda proud a myself. If you don’t count the hole, the operation was a success.
“So? I did it.”
“Yeah. Good work. Now you just need to lea
rn how to do all that in the blink of an eye instead of a goddamn hour.”
1 Mother of Emmett Till, who was murdered by a lynch mob at age 14 in 1955. Photos of his horrifically disfigured body were famously published in Ebony and Jet magazines.
10 Girlfriend
MY MONTHLY VISITOR CAME THIS morning. I woke up to dried blood on my inner thighs and stains on the sheets. My monthly visitor loves to surprise me. I call her Ambushina.
I run down the hall to the bathroom, and then I get an idea. I reach down low inside me, and for a few glorious seconds… I stop the flow. I block its path as though I’ve done it tons of times before. For a second I’m drunk off the power, but it’s exhausting and I have to let it go.
However… I get another idea. What if I could expel five days worth of bleedin’ right now? I try it, and I start to fill the toilet, but as soon as I do, I feel really, really sick. I slow down the flow to its normal speed, but I collapse on the floor, too weak to pick myself up.
Why did I do that? I close my eyes and count to calm down, ease my breathin’, and keep myself from vomiting. I hear the door open and close, and I sit up so fast, I hit my head on the bottom of the sink.
“Ow!”
Mama starts laughin’ at me! Here I am, practically unconscious from blood loss, and now I might have a concussion, and she thinks this is hilarious!
“Why you laughin’?” I whine, rubbing the sore spot on my head.
She notices the streaks of red on the floor, glances at the toilet, and winces.
“Did you try to jube your monthly outta ya?”
“Uh-huh,” I admit.
She shakes her head. “Don’t get cocky,” she says. Then she hands me a giant maxi pad and a belt.
“This is not the way to use your abilities,” she says, all somber now.
She helps me stand and leaves me to tend to myself. So much for sendin’ Ambushina on her way with a single flush.
* * *
That afternoon, Anne Marie flips through the newest arrivals at Lowcountry Records, looking to buy a new one. She’s meticulous, inspecting every detail.
Every. Detail.
“Did ya see this one?” I say, handing her a record.
Daughters of Jubilation Page 8
