’Deed I Know It, Sister
Jesus curse a fig tree, I curse a bramble bush. I curse the first and last of us, from ’Livia Marvell to Nell, I curse us. I curse us no more than we already been cursed. Cursed are these holy orphans who sprung fully formed from the mouth of the Sandstone River but blessed are their children who will not inherit the Bramble Patch, the river, Napoleonville, Lazarus’s stuffed remains, Tempess’s bloated drowned body, my lobotomized mind split into half-spheres with an icepick while I looked my brother’s murderer in the eye. The icepick tore the curtain, tore away the feeble little bits of Esther Lyons, crazy witch of the Bramble Patch. They all thought the tar babies would go away when they turned my brain into two but they were tar babies all along, too. When you split an atom, the world explodes, so too when you split the brain, Dr. Peter. But now he laid up in this hospital, too, tongue gone and mind as well, locked up where he locked us. Now there isn’t a ward for one or the other type of person, but all persons. He will die of Negro diseases and I will die of white ones.
Bessie stood in the river’s cold. She stood ten paces or so away from her baby’s grave. He was breech blue at birth and death, a moment enfolded as one, but expanded to an eternity of possibilities. Bessie was the river’s cold before she knew it, dangling her own chattering teeth from her mouth. But she liked it that way. Lazarus told her once that a river winds through hell, her delta at the mouth, and twists and bends and thrusts into the cave walls of hell. Here the fire and water cannot kill each other; here they are not quenched. And where Lyman’s twin lies, ten paces from the river in a hole covered by a gray, gray, gray rock, there was also hell. She was river-cold and probably river-mad, too. Marion was sweeping the store, Lyman was playing hopscotch with Snow-baby, Luella was asleep in the crib, milkdrunk. Bessie was the cold. She beat her hands against the stones and felt nothing. Bessie was eroding the Bramble Patch and turning fire and water into hell. Bessie was drowning. “I could wash away the entire Bramble Patch. Dig it up from root to root to root.” She held the bones of her baby to her chest. Bessie drug her body onto the shore, where her lungs were filled with air and she was made of flesh and not water. Nothing drowned her here. But had she dared look into the water, she’d have seen her cursed self in the river, a river-mad reflection. She cursed us, and we cursed her back and the river, too.
That baby, he was one of the tar babies, too, and Laz and Jessup and ’Livia, and all the way back to the first one, her belly busted in pregnant meditation, singing dese bones g’wine rise again.
Selah! In holy meditation, I could see them all and everything they touched turned tar, too, and withered at the vine. The girl—no more a woman than I was, and more of a child, even—she was first death the Barghest caused, his own crude matter who was called mother but never got to hold her child. She died as he cannibalized her and then the whole Bramble Patch. I know it! ’Deed I know it, Sister. I know it! Dese bones g’wine rise again.
I am Black. Comely. Golden fleece woven. Started from behind. Brain split in two. That part’s not new, I was always half here and half in the future, looking at Danuel’s son drooling out in the future and in my present at the dinner table, unable to lift a fork to his mouth. I got my faculties. When Mister Croswell was a young’un, he and I talk this talk:
“How come Samuel can go to the Bramble Patch?”
“Because he’s a grownup, I suppose he can do what he wants to.”
“But you’re older than Samuel and you can’t do what you want to.”
“That’s different.”
“How come?”
“It has been made that way.”
“What do you suppose he does over there?”
“He does bad things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Things you don’t have to worry about.”
“What sort of things happen down there? ...You’re taking too long.”
“Give me a moment.”
“Well?”
“Fragile things happen there.”
Somehow, I got out into the darkness and out the hospital. “Folks say somehow they did something. But Somehow always means God,” Ma Lyons used to say to me. Lord, lead my hemispheres into the dark places, where the pieces of cold, cold winter cannot shrivel me up. The tar babies follow me. We are going to Death’s door.
He watched pebbles scatter before the wind. He watched fallow, flood, and famine. He watched men grow from boys in the curled tendrils of euphoria. He watched a habanera dance a thousand times. He was an observer of life rather than its own participant. And while ’Livia Marvell swore he sold his soul to the devil until she was so senile as to believe it to be true, the truth was he might not have had enough of a soul to sell in the first place. Where he went, only death followed, and with him, the tar babies came.
Down to the river, when they baptized Wanhope just before she left for school, a butterfly landed on the crown of her head. And she beat her wings against Wanhope’s braids and laid her dust across each of the kinks in her hair. Wanhope had not gotten in the water yet, but she suddenly did not want to go in. She stood toe deep with the butterfly adorning her. Wanhope looked at me and I understood. She had been baptized already; “Somehow” had come and kissed her forehead with His anointing. The water would wash the butterfly dust from her soul, when she was already cleansed in His glory. She ran from the water, barefoot, like her mother walking along the river’s edge to leave her. The way Jessup’s ma’am danced upon the floorboards when she spoke the word hope into the dust. Bit ran into the dust of Hope and leapt towards the sagging house where the Barghest traded flesh. She knelt into the paved road, and her tears became a baptism of a sort as well. She would not be touched, from that day on. She would leave and be something other than a child of prickers and briars. She belonged to “Somehow.”
Truth follows the lies. I sniff for the Barghest.
Everything they touch turns to tar. Even me over time. I am turning to tar, every day, slowly, and I stick to the walls, ash, and silk. I remember the skirts trailing the ground and I remember standing on Mercer Street telling everyone to repent. But now Babylon is dismantled; New Jerusalem is coming. Someone Negro is living in the old Keith house, someone Negro is living in the old Kincaid house, and someone Negro is living in the Ailey house. And when the last house came down on Nell’s head, it was finished.
I am Black. Comely. Satisfied by eating at the same table as Danuel’s son and Dr. Peter. Don’t twist my words, though. Satisfied ain’t happy. Satisfied ain’t free. “Somehow” is watching over me. He’s got me nestled in a huddle by His breast. He leads me to the apartment building in the city. I cling to the bus, and in the city, I am unknowable. I eat at a Kresge’s counter, thinking of Marion’s body hung up from the rafters of his store and Luella and Lyman crying but Bessie too struck by the thunder. It was the second time a man she had children with died with a noose around his neck. She had grown numb to it all. The lady who served my tomato soup spat in it and stirred it with her acrylic nail to hide her sin, but I taste her in every bite. I don’t mind, because I am hungry and I need to be nourished.
I am Black. Comely. Followed by a brood of tar babies. They followed me all of my life, and that’s why Dr. Peter and Penelope sent me to be locked up in his hospital. To be given insulin to set me into dreamless sleeps for days. To be electrocuted in searing hot mind storms until I was almost docile enough to be tortured again. But I never had a knack for listening. To watch my Bramble Patch neighbor, shellshocked still after the War, have his brain carved up like the Easter ham. To have them try the same on me. Penelope came for my lobotomy. She came to watch me, smiled and called me a bitch. I just laughed at her. Cause I knew what she had done, I knew why she watched the Bramble Patch every day, waiting to find the woman who saw her kill her father. But I never told her that Rhea and her folks are long, long gone. Except Selene. I never told Penelope that her sister
-in-law was a mulatto either. It cut too deep to hear that; she’d have gone mad herself and killed Mister JJ and Selene and their daughter. Misters JJ and Croswell, they are fine for what they are. They had me, and the tar babies never touched them.
In Foxe’s Book of Martyrs my name would not appear, because I tread lightly on this earth.
“Somehow” guides me to the apartment, which is old enough that the windows have cataracts. The brick crumbles, the mortar is keloided. Every inch of me now feels the stitches in my clothes wrap around my muscles. I have been around the sun enough times to recognize the taste in my mouth is my own bleeding gums. This is the road that don’t lead back to alive.
His nurse is old, dressed in white; she spoons jello into his mouth. It turns his tongue red.
“You know I’m over a hundred. I been on this earth so long I remember when Lincoln ran it.”
“Is that right?”
“I used to run a girly show. That was my trade. I traded in dances and sex.”
The nurse blushes pink under brown. I am at the window, sitting at the balcony, peeking my eyes to see them; I cling to the wall. She turns on the television and adjusts the rabbit ears. In the dim blue glow, I can see the Barghest, a crinkled old man, sprouting hair and sagging jowls but still smug.
His hands grab the nurse’s wrist. “You’d have been good on my stage. Sweet as you is.” Her heart is humming, and his eyes catch hers. Then he lets her go and laughs. “Git!” The woman scurries out of the room. His dull eyes roll up towards his brows.
“No need to sit out in the cold,” he says. “Come on in here.”
I am looking into his face and he sees nothing. There are ballet dancers on the television; strains of melodies sing above the slight hum of the static incoming. Their backs are straight and narrow, flexing at the shoulder joint, locked in the moment.
Out of my bones comes the knelling of bells and the deferred dreams of all my little tar babies. I don’t think I can kill him, but I don’t have to. “You remember me?” I ask.
“Only by reputation.”
“Good.” I look at his drooping lips and place mine on his. They still taste of blood after years and years. “You are Death.”
“And you Black. Comely. I don’t need to tell you the obvious, so don’t you do it to me. Shit, woman.”
“Then you know why I’m here?”
He laughs like dusty bellows stoking the fire to life. “You can’t kill me. You’re a loony that they tossed away. Bramble Patch is gone. They all started moving up the hill. We’re relics to them. You know what a relic is?”
“You tell me.”
“It’s something so damn old and dusty that it’s got to be locked away.”
“And holy.”
“What?” he says. The growl in his voice returns.
“A relic is a holy thing, known to have power. You right about me, but you not right about you. They locked me away and vivisect my brain, and I’m still a holy thing.” The tar babies grow restless, each of them ones he stole life from.
He says, “You ain’t shit. You just a crazy.”
No. He’s not right. Because I picked peaches as a girl, then raised them white babies, then I was a crazy in the crazy house. But now, I’m a debt collector.
“’Deed I know, brother.”
In a procession, they emerge from my shadow, the dozen or so ravaged souls. They melt and sag and weather under the years but grow and grow and grow till the blue light of the television is extinct. We are all perfumed in their rage.
When he was a boy, the one they call the Barghest stepped into the river and saw a man, who ’Livia Marvell swore was the devil. She saw them talk and shake hands. And no matter the misfortune that befell him from that day on, he always managed to stay alive. When the flood waters came, he lassoed the folk of the Bramble Patch together and fashioned a raft. When the fires would rage, he hung their bodies as an asbestos curtain. He did this until the Bramble Patch began to turn into a mirage. When he was a child, he walked into the river and stained his soul with ink and blood, cursed us all with him. But I curse back; I curse us all. Myself, too. The fig tree withered under Christ’s words, and here the blackest berries in the Patch lift themselves out from the tangle of thorns.
They grab him, limbs in hand, tugging him apart. The one who was my brother reaches his hand through the Barghest’s belly. Death screams and Lazarus pulls out the guts which are swole up. He is swaddled in tar. The one who was Jessup rakes her fingernails against his radial artery; he does not bleed but the pain is real. The one that was Ida rips tufts of cotton hair from his scalp. The others dance around him singing that spiritual: “Lawd thought he’d make ’im a man. Made ’im outta mud and a han’fula san’.” Then the first one, belly full with pregnancy, looks her child in the eye and reaches her claw hands into his mouth and down his throat. His eyes get wide and wider still. She smiles like a mother at the sight of her child, reaches further down. He starts shaking, faster and worse until he’s ’bout rattling. Suddenly his eyes burst white and he screams with no sound but the echo of horror. He collapses, slack, ragdoll-like. His mother’s hand retreats from his mouth, where she holds his still-fluttering heart.
She throw it to the ground and it hits with a sploosh. She sticks out her tongue and laughs and laughs and laughs. Her body, tar body, is iridescent, or maybe it’s the glow of the television behind her. She and I look each other in the face; we’ve known each other over fifty years, and I laugh, too. We little girls again. But I think I laugh too loud, because his nurse’s voice catches my mind. All my tar babies, long as I carried them with me, are gone.
I run back to the balcony and leap into the darkness. And fall. And drown in nighttime. And there is no bottom to the fall. Nothing but black. I am baptized into the night and I know what the river hides. They will not find what they seek, only an old man whose heart stopped beating. The Bramble Patch, turned to star thistles.
The wind tumbles in the high grass and skips over the Sandstone River. I hit the pavement and all caves in—my skull included. “Somehow” is watching over me from above. And I watch him too. My eyes are festooned with stars. Holy water flows from my nose and ears. But ’deed, I know it, sister. Dese bones g’wine rise again.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank everyone who helped me create These Bones. From inception to publication, so many people have been there. It really takes a village to raise a novella. My undying gratitude first goes to the team at Lanternfish Press—Christine Neulieb, Feliza Casano, and Amanda Thomas—who have been absolutely phenomenal in guiding me through the process of publication.
Thank you to Professor Matt Kirkpatrick at Eastern Michigan University, who acted as the advisor for the project that eventually became These Bones and who, from the word “jump,” had absolute faith in the project.
I’m thankful for my personal village, too. Thank you to my family—especially my parents, Cheryl and Jonathan Shumake and the late Richard Chenault—for your love of stories, your encouragement to forge my own path, and your excitement for me whenever I came to you with new ideas I had written, especially all the ones I wrote about dogs when I was seven. Of which there were many. To my friends, colleagues, and classmates who have constantly read my work and hyped me up, even if it meant being subjected to a thirty-minute lecture about the history of American music that you never asked for. Specifically, I would like to shout out Daniel Wiland and Bethany Metivier for acting as friend-editors and beta readers as I worked on These Bones.
Lastly, I would be remiss without acknowledging the works I read while working on These Bones. I have been very fortunate to read some amazing books that helped shape me. So, though they will never see this, thank you to Fran Ross, Alan Lomax, Toni Morrison, Anna-Marie McLemore, and Ishmael Reed for the words you put out into the universe.
About the Author
KAYLA CH
ENAULT is a practitioner of Black Girl Magic and holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. When she is not writing, Kayla is found at the museums where she works or telling everybody about the history of popular music and social dance. She is a former line editor and contributing writer for Cecile’s Writers. Her previous work can be found in The Blue Pages Journal and Honey and Lime literary magazine.
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