Stormwitch (6 page)

As usual, Gisele walks by my side holding my arm at the wrist. She looks straight ahead, eyes flashing, as we stroll up and back, and up again. White mothers grab their children and glare. Some people point and stare. Some smile, nervous-like. Shy and unsure. A few—three, perhaps four—nod, as if to welcome us.

We cast shadows on the Gulf of Mexico as we pass. Sun beats my skin like hot golden hammers, but what strikes me the most are the people who don’t react at all. Seem to see nothing. Watch the air as we walk by, expressionless, as if we are haunts or sea-shines. Blank-facers bother me more than the haters and smiler-nodders. Rocks. Like Grandmother Jones, except these rocks are white.

Who are they? What do they feel?

Do they feel?

A radio spits and fuzzles on a woman’s towel.

“… tropical disturbance, still more than five hundred miles east of the northern Leewards …”

The woman sees me listening and snaps off the power. Then she makes a gesture I’m sure her fellow church members would gasp about.

Clay’s version of chanting trips through my mind.

What do you want? Black Power
.

All the wide eyes and gaping mouths make me think the people on this beach can’t imagine
black
and
power
joined in the same sentence. Pass Christian reminds me of towns I saw in my father’s photos of Vietnam, the few he sent home to my mother. Ba kept them in an album, so I would have them. That album was full of wide eyes and gaping mouths—empty expressions, tense brows, smiles that pointed to nowhere … people at war. Only the people in Pass Christian aren’t fighting an army. Mississippi’s whites are fighting other Mississippians, black ones—and according to Grandmother Jones, and Clay, and all the books I’ve read, they’ve already lost the war. Twice now.

Why don’t they know that?

“Bitch,” whispers Clay, staring at the woman with the radio.

“Mm-hmm,” Gisele says. “Big ole behind, too.”

“You don’t have to call names,” I mutter, though I’m not sure why. It just seems wrong. “That woman is who she is, who her mother raised her to be.”

“You really sixteen years old?” Clay shakes his head. “You sound like my great-grandmother.”

“In Haiti, we had no time to be young. And back in Africa, people had even less time to grow up. Most war women went to training as soon as they could eat for themselves.”

“I eat for myself.” Gisele swings my hand. “I want to be a Da-Homely war woman.”

Clay groans. “What have you been telling her, Ruba? Living on that island cooked your brains like mackerel. Never mind. Don’t even want to know. Let’s go down to the wharf instead.”

“No,” I say. “I need to go to the campground, near the covered gardens.”

“You going to pick plants again?” he asks, and I hear another groan coming.

I stroke the soft cloth bag hidden in my pocket beneath my journal. “Grandmother Jones cleaned house again last night. She took all my special herbs, all the ones I need to fight the storm.”

“There won’t be a storm,” Clay mutters. “Hurricanes, they usually swing wide of us. Head for Texas. You and that Dahomey storm magic stuff—when are you going to get over it?”

I refuse to answer him.

Gisele speaks for me. “Be quiet, you ole dummy. She ain’t getting over it. She’s going to teach me. Starting with which plants we need to chase away the evil in the wind.”

“Well, go ahead if you have to, but I’m swimming.” Clay runs off toward the water. “Meet you by the campground!”

Gisele and I climb the bank and cross the two-lane, moving away from the beach and toward all the houses
and green. Wordless, we head into a thick stand of pines and begin our search. Her hands are nimble, and her eyes sharp as I teach her to seek tiny flowers and roots, shifting sand for shells as she goes.

My bag grows heavy, and heavier still. Gisele drops leaves and little frogs into her pockets when she thinks I’m not looking. And a lizard. And one lost hermit crab. I watch as she giggles and crams her hands through moss, under rocks, behind anthills, never minding the bugs. Scaring snakes to death.

Was I like this when Ba taught me? In a big hurry, taking no time to think or be careful?

Surely not.

Minutes pass. Maybe hours. Time moves in strange ways when you gather plants for conjuring. And the light helps. If you stare at it long enough, it filters through to touch what you need.

Gisele sees this. Her eyes widen as she follows soft rays to a patch of white-yellow mushrooms.

Just then, a terrible racket plagues the bushes behind us. We both startle.

Voices slither through scrub pine and palm. “Know I saw them come in here. Y’all go that way.”

Ray-boy.

Mumbles and stomps come next—from his square, stupid friends, I assume.

Ba’s teaching overtakes me, and I grab Gisele. She holds me tight, and we join bark and branches without a sound.

“Here, Juju,” Ray-boy calls like he’s coaxing a dog. “Got something for you. C’mere.”

He passes us without a clue.

“Hey, Poke. You see them?”

“Naw.”

“Dave Allen?”

“Nah, Ray-boy. They ain’t over here.”

More footsteps, and then a whirlwind of shouts and bellows.

“Hey!”

“Let me go!”

“Over here, y’all!”

“No! Over here!”

I watch without breathing as Ray-boy Frye and his friends haul Clay toward our tree. Clay fights and swings, but his toothpick fists make no match for the two big white boys.

Ray-boy steps up and puts his face almost nose to nose with Clay. Clay stops fighting and stands still.

“Give me a belt, Poke,” says Ray-boy. “We’ll do him here, right now.”

Gisele shudders. I squeeze her so hard she wheezes, but she holds her noise.

“Your daddy said to wait about this one.” The one Ray-boy called Poke stands as large as a man, but he sounds like he has the mind of a toddler.

“Yeah,” the other boy, the one who must be Dave Allen, says. “He told us to get that juju girl.”

“Daddy won’t care. The only good darkie’s a dead darkie, right?”

Chills fan my neck and I struggle not to cry out.

Ray-boy takes Poke’s belt and cinches it around Clay’s neck. I hear him choking, and I can’t stand it. Gisele offers no protest as I shift her around my hip. Shield her with my body and outstretched arms.

In my war voice, I shout, “Let him go!”

One heartbeat passes. Two heartbeats. Three.

Gisele’s fast breathing is the only sound I hear.

Ray-boy makes a gesture and his friends throw Clay on the ground. Ray-boy puts his foot on Clay’s back. “Come on out! Welcome to the party.”

I do come out, but in my own time, at my own pace. Ray-boy and his friends stand over Clay and snigger, even as I raise my hands and start a chant. They snigger as I call on Circe and call on Ba, and as I call on my grandmother’s mother, and hers before that. My voice takes a rhythm of its own, reaching back. Picking up the rhythm of Dahomey’s drums.

Ray-boy finally stops laughing. His lips twitch. “What
are you doing?”

The minute he speaks, Clay scrambles out from under his foot, crawling for shelter behind me. The belt Ray-boy tightened around his neck dangles like a leash.

“Hey, Ray-boy,” mumbles Poke. “Is she really a juju girl?”

Gisele takes up my rhythm, humming with no words. Her voice makes mine louder. We’re like two drums now.

“Sali and Aja,” I sing. “Hwanji and Tata.”

When I reach Tata’s name, more power rises to my call. Leaves on the trees shake from a strong, sudden wind. They blow and rustle. Rustle and blow.

“I don’t like this, y’all.” Dave Allen steps backward and trips into the fangs of a yucca bush. “Ow!”

I hold up my hands, stirring the wind as I feel it. My feet do the drumming now.

“Help me, Circe. Help me, Ba. Help me, all the war women who fought for their kings. Help me, Africa’s woman heart!”

Wind howls over me now. Whips across my skin. Slams into the white boys like a wall of rage.

Poke stumbles backward, then breaks and runs. Dave Allen curses and fights his way out of the shivering yucca. He crawls away, trailing blood from where the yucca’s sharp tips stuck him.

Gisele hums without breathing, without breaking the
beat, as the wind comes again.

“Be gone with you, boy,” I hiss to Ray-boy as I dance.

“You calling
me
boy?” he says, half tough. Half scared.

I thrust one hand into my pocket, find my bag, and open it with quick fingers. Inside, I feel shells, a few stones, and pieces of pine bark. They will have to do. I pull them out and fling them into the air.

The wind sweeps up the offering, and thunder bursts over my head.

Gisele screams, but not from fear. Her fierce sound welcomes the weather. Seems to dare it to come again—and thunder booms through the woods.

Rain falls on Ray-boy Frye, harder and harder.

He glares at me.

I glare at him and laugh.

He turns and stumbles away.

I close up my bag and laugh and laugh until I run out of breath.

Gisele laughs, too. A high sound. Thrilled and splendid. She whirls circles in the spot where Ray-boy stood.

I turn to Clay, who has pulled the belt off his neck. He flings it into the bushes, then meets my gaze, quivering and rubbing his throat.

“Trust me now?” I ask.

He nods.

“I trust you,” Gisele echoes, still not sounding all the
way like a little girl. Sounding a little old, a little strong with voices of time gone before.

“Come on,” Clay mutters where I can hardly hear him. “We need to get home before it’s time for morning service, or my mother and Mrs. Jones will skin us for sure.”

Chapter Six

Sunday, 10 August 1969: Late Afternoon

Pass Christian Missionary Baptist Church waits among scrub pines and knotted oaks at the end of a long dirt drive. It welcomes us for the second time this late Sunday afternoon with soft lights and a milling crowd. Morning service seems like it happened a year ago, and all I can remember of it is turning around about a hundred times to make sure Clay was all right.

He was, of course. But he rubbed his throat a lot.

For this evening service, I’m wearing another new cotton dress, this one yellow. Black shoes pinch my feet despite black stockings. The shoes and stockings are new, too. Grandmother Jones brought them home from work Saturday evening. She tried to make me wear a hat and gloves, but I refused those.

Politely.

As we walk toward the main steps, she holds my arm and beams. I feel like a scrawny giant next to her. She beams at her friends, because I’ve told her I will
introduce myself.

It’s a small thing
, I tell myself.

On the lawn around the church, women in hats and dresses wear white gloves and big smiles, laughing with the men. Men in suits and ties look shaved and scrubbed, fresh like little boys. Little boys hold up chins and act big—except when they rip off their coats and chase little girls. Little girls in dyed cotton and braids dodge the boys and tug ribbons that match their socks.

In Haiti, I worshipped with Ba at our chapel on the beach. Our temple was the ocean. The Catholics let us be, praying behind their mortar and stone, but for the bells that pealed each day to announce the time.

In Mississippi, black folks seem to live and breathe through the Baptist church. And Methodist, and Presbyterian. I suppose the Catholics are here, too, but I’ve not seen them or heard them singing. Only the single bell from this Baptist Church, where I’ve come some ten times in three weeks—every Sunday and Wednesday, and extra, when the preacher says to come.

“Every time the doors open,” Grandmother Jones likes to say.

I admit there is something of comfort in these worn white boards, in the rambling wraparound porch and smooth, brown pews. And when the people sing … when the people sing, I forget my starless heart for long
minutes at a time. The church breathes and sways. And I breathe and sway, and when I close my eyes, I can almost hear Dahomey’s drums. Sense the Creator on my very skin. In my skin. In the rocking of my heart and the pounding joy of voices around me.

For the singing, and for Grandmother Jones, I come.

For Grandmother Jones alone, I plan to speak. Only for a few minutes. And no mention of witches and conjure, as she wants. This may be my only chance before the stormwitch comes, and I don’t want to let her down by refusing, or by saying something that embarrasses her.

And yet I don’t want to dishonor Ba, either.

Worry buzzes in my belly, biting like mosquitoes. I remember Ba saying that Europeans visiting Africa had to take opium to sleep because of mosquitoes. Perhaps I should leave that out of my talk.

Grandmother Jones leaves me and heads over to talk with four visitors on the porch. They have to be visitors, because they aren’t familiar, and they don’t look like men I’ve seen around Pass Christian.

Two white men, two black men. No, I’ve not seen them before. Younger, maybe half Grandmother Jones’s age—but they seem important. Worry lines crease their brows. Drag their cheeks down, and down. These are men accustomed to frowning. Men who have known hardship. And yet, they smile with my grandmother. And laugh.

She laughs, too, and her eyes shine like Ba’s did when she was happy. I fight an urge to go stand beside her, just because I feel alone and out of place.

Would that help?

Instead, I linger near the door as the sun sets, watching people pass by into the long pew-filled sanctuary, with its floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows lining both walls. The congregation chats and whispers as people do when they have known each other a lifetime.

No one on earth has known me for a lifetime.

Maybe Clay will come soon with Miss Hattie. Or Gisele with Crazy Sardine, because even Crazy Sardine attends the Baptist Church.

Grandmother Jones leaves her companions and heads in through a side door near the front of the church, the altar, where the preacher will speak from his podium. Where the choir behind him will sing about Jesus and heaven.