11.20 PM
12.25
Napoleonville
10.55
1.00
Webber Junction
10.20
2.00
Jericho
9.20
2.20
Ilia
9.00
3.15
Braunstown
8.05
3.50
Henwen
7.30
5.00 PM
Tullulah Acres
6.20 PM
Hymnal
Yonder Come Day. Mama’s made of cotton trailing in the pricker bush and mud. Knees—pink. Eyes—too tall for me. I stick my hand in the apron pocket. Nothing. My eyes hurt. My mouth wails. My eyes are wet.
Wanhope. Hush up. Yonder come day.
The bottom of her hand is made of white people skin and spider webs to hold her together. No sweets in the apron pocket. Prickers on her knees. Thorns grow from her thumbs—Mama, up—the thorns are in my scalp.
Your feet dirty. Don’t touch me wit ’em.
Mama, down. I’m back down to mud and grab the speckled skirt.
Don’t ask me to pick you up again, Bit. Yonder come day. Day done broke.
We leave the river. We leave the trees too—Mama and me. Hair’s wild and the dress slips off brown me.
What color? I pointed to me. Brown. Mama looked down with her tall eyes. Mama’s eyes got wet.
She’s a shepherd like Jesus. What’s a shepherd? Why is Jesus one? Why is he a good one? Mama, why Jesus good?
She smiles. She shows teeth. He’s so good, Bit, cause he God. Day done broke. Oh my soul. Yonder come day.
After the river and trees comes the street. Eyes look at me. They are so tall. Mama’s sad. My hand’s in her big one. Eyes look away. She sings louder.
Yonder come day. Yonder come day. Day done broke.
The people are all brown here on the street. By the river, they’re white too. Some of the doggies are white. But their eyes aren’t too tall. Just right. Mama’s made of apron made of feedsack—smells like chickenbirds. Chickenbirds are scary. Chickenbirds with eggs are mean. Chickenbirds got thorns on their feet. Mama?
Hmm?
I want to say chickenbirds are mean but I remember they taste good. Chickenbirds taste mean.
Mama spills laughter from her mouth. I feel my tongue. Mama is shimmery in the sun. I want to love her forever. I want her to never stop shimmering.
She had soaked in the washtub. She had smelled like roses. She put my hand in her big one when she wore blue.
What color, Mama?
Baby, baby blue, Bit. She spilled a laugh. I loved her.
It was a dress. She took me to the street. Took me to the sagging place. Took me up the stairs. And then the door open. There were other women—they were naked mostly.
Mama, they naked.
Hush up, Bit!
Then there was a man. He was brown. But he was black too, black from his belly. I smelled salt. I smelled black.
Wanhope—you wait here. I gotta talk with the Barghest.
I put a mouse’s hand in mine. I sat near the door. Mama disappeared behind it. I was hearing them. The mouse and I were hearing.
What’s wrong with you girl?
Found God.
You got religion?
Don’t.
I know what a revival looks like. You found God the way I found a hundred dollar this morning. You might’ve needed it but you didn’t find it.
You know my Bit? I need you to take her.
How I know she’s mine?
If she ain’t yours, she’s your fault.
You were a whore what got pregnant.
I was a good one for you, you know. I did what you asked. Sexed ’em and cooked ’em, too, and didn’t tell nobody.
You won’t neither. You’re rotted out. Gone bad as can be.
Who made me that way?
We all make ourselves. You liked dancing and sexing. You came to me for the work. You ain’t gonna peg me for that. And you ain’t gonna leave your Bit in a whorehouse.
Mama came back.
Bit, get off that nasty floor.
We left the sagging place. We walk past it now.
Yonder come day. Day done broke. Sun is arising. Oh my soul. Yonder come day.
Mama smells like what the river hides.
Mama what’s the river hiding? I looked down.
Flathead catfish and Negroes.
I looked up. What’s Negroes?
Mama’s eyes got wet. You, Bit. And me. And all the folks in the Bramble Patch. All the brown folk. Not all of you. But enough.
There’s King and Ma Lyons and Dinah and Lazarus and them others. Mama never says them’s names, but I know my numbers to ten. There are four thems. Them are wild.
Mama, what’s wild?
Them Lyons children. Them wild. But so’s the trees at the river. They just grow and grow. No one touches them. Untouched. That’s wild.
Them, they hang on the porch and smell like pressing comb oil.
Ma’am. Mama calls Ma ma’am. Where’s Esther? I wanna see her.
Ma Lyons looks with tall eyes but she’s sitting in a rocker.
She’s working for the white folk today.
King smiles and shows his teeth to me. King is a Papa. King is good, too, so he loves Jesus and Ma Lyons and Esther and Dinah and Lazarus and Them. But the teeth in his smile look sad.
Where’s her stuff? Ma looks at me.
At my place, still. You can get it from Honey.
Didn’t you hear the bells? I reckon Honey gonna be gone all day.
Mama’s tall eyes look down to the mud. I still gotta pack mine.
Them go to scare some chickenbirds. Them aren’t touched. Them scatter into the four thems. Them get loud. Lazarus follows. He’s brown now but all of him is gonna be black. Black and blue. Black and red.
You ain’t got to, Jess. It don’t have to be this way.
I got God now. Mama gets into the apron pocket. It’s a paper. And I got someone too. Preacher’s wife can’t have other kids. What’ll they say?
God knows, though, Jess.
King, you take Bit’s hand.
Ma Lyons’s eyes go to Mama again. They get taller. He knows you. He knows what you been. Who you are. Who you birthed, too.
Mama turns her eyes to me. Her lips are in my braids. Wanhope, you better be good. You better. I’m going to write you. And maybe in time. Maybe in time. I love you.
Mama looks leaky. Mama looks down with her tall eyes but now they seem so small, so black like the man in the sagging place. King puts my hand in his. His makes mine small, but Mama’s eyes are still smaller. I want to swallow up the mud at the back of Mama’s skirt. I want Mama. My eyes are wet and I want Mama.
Hush up, Bit!
She know you leaving. You think she don’t but she do.
Bit! Quit crying!
I want Mama but her eyes are only ants, black and wriggly. And they are going down away from King and Ma Lyons and Dinah and Lazarus and Them. And me. Brown me sees brown Mama turn black along the drive, back to the road. But I can see the bottoms of her hands and feet still. I see the sun burn a hole inside of forever and the wild of trees and Them. That’s what Mama’s made of.
All
M’Dear had never cried at one of her funerals. But M’Dear was still cleaning ’Livia’s body, cleaning
the crusties from her eyes and spittle from her lips. Nell and Honey were cooking in the back room. M’Dear was cleaning the body in the front parlor; Silas had long since lost his stomach for death but his name was still on the funeral parlor sign, which read “Silas and Sons” even though they only had one son. She was rubbing the sweet wrinkly forehead, smoothing it over and over and over and over with anointing oil, hoping to erase the spots of age. A hint of pepper hid in the decomposition of the body, now. Maybe stories would spill from the creases in her forehead: the Duncan Brothers’ secrets, tales of the Barghest’s youth, the War, how to make that butter cake, the winter that the cow got froze to the barn, the lyrics to half the hymnal, how to get prickers out of the kinks of a baby’s hair, the last traces of the mother tongue that the Bramble Patch ever knew. M’Dear was old enough to remember when she was Olivia Marvell, when there was no such place for Negroes called the Bramble Patch, and the woman called Olivia could speak some tongues and would say they came from Africa; she tried to teach them but they wouldn’t listen. Then her tongue twisted over the words in exhaustion so she kept silent. M’Dear was also too old to remember much else about those days except that they seemed stitched of vibrant hues of purple and blue and the brown of the people. M’Dear felt torn, as usual these days, hovering between the nostalgia of a time before the Bramble Patch and wondering if such a time had ever been.
’Livia’s daughter Mizzy’s folk all the way from Ilia had arrived by wagon and mule already. Mizzy’s sister and brother-in-law and nephews and her Aunt Fortuna and Cousin Miles, carving their way across the backroad stretches between here and there. Cousin Miles was cracking his knuckle bones while he and Mizzy’s brother-in-law broke out a game of bonesticks at her table. Aunt Fortuna was his grandma, but she was smaller than his own children back in Ilia. Miles could have pulled the wagon hisself, thought Mizzy, and she laughed for the first time that day. Mizzy’s sister and brother-in-law and nephews and Miles all laughed for no reason but that it kind of ran out of their mouths, too. Aunt Fortuna was quiet, remembered when Miles was so small he couldn’t pull the wagon and they came to visit. Aunt Fortuna told him what the river hid: mudcats, Negroes, the tears of their mothers. She asked Mizzy where Jessup was now and Mizzy was mostly unsure. Only mostly, though.
There was such a time as before the Bramble Patch, Grandma Ady recalled. But it was mostly before her time. ’Cause her voice sounded like rain on hammered tin, most people wouldn’t listen to her too well. Grandma Ady was nearly blind but she could still darn socks with wild bucking stitches. She could remember the stitch just as she could trace her fingers across the ugly swath of earth and remember that this home was once a neglected plantation. She was listening to hurried footsteps outside and recalling the world from before. She didn’t know it well, but ’Livia had. And she was gone now. Grandma Ady’s hand tremored suddenly. That was the thing about ’Livia and her people: they were too melancholic and too long-seeing, could remember the times before and after and all the things that were in between. ’Livia’s fingertips and DNA remembered the seasonings of Port-Au-Prince, from a time when she was yet to be born. Her body remembered the malarial visions of her ancestors, passing between dream and reality as you might pass from the door to the porch back and forth on a hot June evening.
When the Reverend Jonah Kincaid packed up the Model T with his wife and eldest son, heading down a little bit west for the tent revival that weekend, he felt a strangeness under his tongue. Not in his gums or jawbone but on the lingual frenulum, which had been cross-cut with his own knife years before. He was trying to prove a point– God as healer, Jehovah Rapha. God will heal me, he shouted to the group of boys. He fell to his knees and put the knife to his tongue. God would give him speech again. Mouth bleeding rivers, he cried himself into tear blindness. A shadow loomed into scales over his eyes. And wrinkled hands grabbed the hinges of his jaws. She was black as black had been to a little boy. She cradled him close and lifted him into her arms. She prayed over his tongue. He spoke again. Jehovah Rapha.
First thing the morning he left for the revival, he went to his office at the church to pin the news clipping to the wall. He hated himself for loving the devil’s music. He hated himself for pressing his ear to hear the music from Mercy City. One of the Duncan boys knocked on the door—Miller or Georgie; he couldn’t tell them apart—and came in saying that ’Livia Marvell had died. The Reverend had only ever known two Negroes that he had liked and ’Livia was the first and better. The news didn’t make him sad per se. But that night, as he watched his eldest son Samuel dig his fingernails into his own shoulders, praying over and over and over again for forgiveness—“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah! Deliver me from my lusts”—he almost felt a little sorry that ’Livia was gone. No better Negro would he ever know.
All along the thoroughfare of Mercy City, evening had settled into the back of everyone’s throats; it had cut a swath into the back fields at the Duncan Farm. No one meant to get bluesy in the Barghest’s beds. Blackness settled on the Bramble Patch. Not the star-studded velvety cool of night but the limp blackness of mourning. It hung upon everyone’s shoulders. Except the Barghest; he just kept grinning too big.
Jacob Jonah “JJ” Kincaid leaned his forehead against the glass of the bedroom window. The cool of it made him choke back tears. Or maybe it was the way his darkie sang “Catch the Ten Fifty-Five to My Henrietta Love.” Cousin Whit Croswell had sold that song to a Remick’s a couple years back. Mother played it at the piano, and the darkie liked the song, and he liked his darkie. He knew it in his bones, sickly and sweet. And when Penelope said the other darkies said she was a witch, he wondered if she could weave him a spell. And if, once woven, the spell would travel from her lips to the ears of the devil and make it real. If she was a magic woman, why wouldn’t she use magic to make herself white?
JJ was the one who caught Samuel in the twisted sheets of orgasm, who ran to Mother in disgust, who asked Samuel why he kept having vile thoughts, whom Samuel slapped bloody, whom the darkie bandaged and cooed over, who wanted to know why those other ones thought her a witch. He growled Penelope’s name as the cool window throbbed pain through his head. She didn’t want to be called Penny anymore but Sistie only. He wanted to know why the darkies thought his darkie was a witch when she seemed to be etched from fine black marble, and though she was nearly twenty, older even than Samuel, he wished she had been etched from white marble instead. He wanted to have those same vile thoughts that Samuel did and the same twisted sheets, and he wanted to tell Penelope that Peter Ailey was practically married and that she should—
At that moment, the 10:55 train to Henrietta failed to make it over the bridge.
The whole town shook as the train tumbled and crumpled into the river. The engine leaked. The river was on fire.
Autopsy
The tongue is too black. The heart is too silent. The meat is boneless, the mind is scrambled, and blood pools up nearest to the kicks of flame.
The wrought iron is curved and twisted like the spine of the little blond boy splayed against what used to be the caboose. The miracles outpace the discoveries of finality—a scream, but she’s alive; foot mangled, but he’s still breathing. The stars blink slowly, the skin roasts evenly, the blood drains into crepe de chine and linen. Seersucker. Straw from hats. It’s summer, after all. A dying hand trembles. A dead tongue lolls. A train’s whistles lilts and then screams. The remains of an eye are smashed in the gravel. The iris is frighteningly gold. No one will remember who in town had golden eyes.
Splashed against coal was a Negro woman. Or rather both halves of her. The difference between the two halves of her body, hemorrhaging in convulsive bursts, marrow oozing out from her severed ribs, was the difference between New Amsterdam and New York, between Constantinople and Istanbul, between the Bramble Patch and an overgrown plantation.
From The Autobiography of Rhythm and Blues by Clio Cook (1972)
Chapter 8: �
��Black Magic Woman”
I turned the Nova down along a dirt road that twisted like the metal frame of a car wreck. The radio was hovering over words and snippets of music and then would return to the crackle of the static. It was good for my headache. The night before, I had ended up at a pool hall. Folks’d see me and say, “You’re not from these parts.” I’d tell them about my little book, the men I’d interviewed, all the places I’d stopped. A couple of the old-timers told me I needed to go to this place called The Crooked Nailhead and talk to a man named Bobwhite Teller. My heart raced at the name; I remembered it from the faded blue label on my dad’s record. I told them thanks, and then I slammed back a few bourbon rickeys, ’cause it’s hot down here.
In the back of the station wagon, I caught a glimpse of my favorite pair of boots, the vinyl crinkled up and more than a little sweaty on the inside. The shoes reminded me of last night’s mistakes. A blister grew under the canvas of my Chucks, and the remnants of my hangover drummed inside my skull.
As darkness fell, gravel kicked up and flipped at the windshield. Fireflies lit strips along the highway like I was landing a plane. A couple of times, I stopped for the haunted, hollow eyes of deer galloping ahead of me. The disc jockey turned on “Black Magic Woman,” my ex’s favorite song. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel and there it was: a shack pulsating with light and music.
The Crooked Nailhead was the kind of roadhouse where they still throw peanut shells on the floor and you can get cheap beer in a frosty glass and a cup of ice chips to throw down your back. As I dragged my recorder into the place, I saw I was the only white face in the sea of black ones. The blue plate special for the night was fried catfish, cornbread, and greens. All the tables had been moved to one side to make way for the dancing—there wasn’t much of it, though. There I was, with my tape recorder and my pen and paper, looking like a schmuck.
Up on a set of risers was Tommy “Bobwhite” Teller, whose frail body seemed to barely hold up his Dobro as he played “Let’s Get Drunk Again.” I muttered to myself, “Let’s not.” The old man wore a bowler. He would tell me later: “There was an old pimp back home who wore one of these. When we were kids, we used to want to go to his place to buy a night with one of his girls. Got it in my head that’s what you wear when you’re rich. I never got rich, but I still dress like it.”
These Bones Page 4
