Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  “Now don’t go giving me the evil eye, chérie. Family is what you make it, and like it or not you’ve got me now.” He planted the wettest of smooches right on her cheek. “It’s a ‘thick and thin’ type thing.”

  And then he tickled her, roaming his hands up inside her fishtail wedding dress so that they had to tell the driver to circle the hall one, two, four times so a shirttail could get tucked in, that garter put to rights, but where were her—never mind, we’re late enough, let’s just go in.

  The entire reception, while Nala danced and twirled under the glow of Baccarat chandeliers, Byron smiled and grinned wide and every once in a while had a hearty belly chuckle as he flicked his fingertips along the lacy frill of his wife’s silk panties, balled to a nubbin in his right front pocket.

  • • •

  Dawns at sea on the Stillwater family boats were Nala’s favorite— quixotic, mystical. Byron was born to a seafaring clan that had made their living harvesting shrimp and oysters and all manner of water creatures in the Gulf for generations on end. He had grown up fishing with his father on weekends and summers. And when her schedule swim-coaching Ninth Ward youth and his busy maritime law practice allowed it, they still went down together for two of four weekends each month.

  She was a quick-study deckhand: listening keenly for the hollow echo a dead oyster made when she tap-tap tested its shell with the blunt end of her hatchet. Spot-on in sorting out spat—oyster younglings—to rebed for future harvests. On the docks, she was schooled by O.G. skippers. Grizzled and gray men who taught her how to shuck an oyster, seed its beds, build a reef, work a dredge, and the dying skill of weaving its intricate nets by hand—knitting even-steven squares at just the width of her ring and middle fingers twined together.

  On all of her husband’s boats—the trawler, the lugger, even the wooden skiff she’d painted a Day-Glo green mimicking the bioluminescent kelp of her home waters—she scribed poetry, or runes, or nautical quotes, or rough translations of the clicking dolphin-speak passed down from her mother. KK-kkkk-KKKKKKKK-kk—you are my heart song.

  She wished her sister-cousins could see these shimmering waters at dawn, hear the kazoo chortles of its gulls, inhale the rich ambrosia of her husband’s piping-hot coffee, hot-water cornbread, and hominy grits cut with honey. Wished they could release their tight clutch on the old ways and try to fathom the truth of her union. But they distrusted man as a rule and men particularly on principle. Men carried harpoons. Men hunted your sisters to adorn the palaces of their capricious kings. Men offered shiny baubles if only you’d cut your fins. That she had married one. A fishmonger? A fisherman, she’d corrected, then corrected herself: a maritime attorney. A what? A lawyer for the sea. Hmph—what do fish need man’s law for? If there’s trouble, we take to the tides.

  And such had been her own life for more than a hundred years— beached on the shores of foremothers who took to the sea soon after their girl-children grew breasts—no longer their babes but newborn Mami Watas. Her clan were nomads, explorers, sea gypsies. They settled on no land. They took a man for the pleasure of it and for the gris-gris it gave—longevity, strength, youth. They had no need of life mates. They made friends with sharks.

  • • •

  A Mami Wata’s essence is moonlight and desire melded to one. Nala knows this in her marrow, in her fins. Lasirèn, Yemanja, Oxum, Erzulie, Jine-Faro, Santa Marta. Their bloodline flowed through miles of sandy lagoons and tidal estuaries along Africa’s coastline. In her homeland, Nala’s clanswomen are worshipped as goddesses till this day, queen of queens reigning on high in a pantheon of miengu, wanton water deities. They are the descendants of Mojili, a spirit-ruler hailing from a time before man, her name so powerful, so revered, it could not be uttered before small children lest they perish. Mothers plunged ailing pickin into the miengu’s healing waters, would-be mothers bathed in their streams, cupping mystic pools in their palms, hoping one day to conceive. Fleets of supplicant fishermen in dugout canoes prayed for a good catch overflowing with ghost shrimp or pygmy herring or butter catfish. They made offerings of things that tinkled and the shiny trifles miengu adored: jeweled hairpins, shine-shine looking glasses, even impudent timepieces daring to measure the long spell of their lives.

  While Nala fully embraced her new existence, her true nature was never quelled. She and her clanswomen were jealous ones. Oft demanding adoration, quick to dole out stern correction to a foolishly fickle man who might be shown the error of his ways when his home burned to ashes, as his business loans went forfeit, or when a walk in tall grass sliced through skin and tendon like a verdant scalpel. Her kin ridiculed sisters in distant climes, ones whose harum-scarum hearts had swept them off course. Ones who let themselves be bogged down by litters of leaky-nosed mouth breathers. Captives in nets of their own design.

  • • •

  “Another man?” Nala took a deep breath she had no need of. It was a mirroring of her landlocked tribesmen she had first begun long ago to blend in. To express emotions as they. Like sorrow. It was second nature now. Another breath.

  “Another man?” she said, repeating her husband’s words in the dark. He was stroking her hair. Fanning it across the bed pillow, strands gilded silver in the moonlight. There was a sadness about his eyes. She had never before been with a man long enough to see it. Worry.

  “Trust me. I am more than satisfied,” she assured him.

  He gave a deep chuckle. Pushed his swelling hardness against her thigh. “Oh, I know. But you need more than good dick, chérie. You need magic.”

  He buried his face in her hair. Breathing deep.

  And though what he was saying was true. Though she had probably cut her lifespan by more than a century just to be loyal to him. She stroked his hair and told him another kind of truth. “You and I, my love. We make our own juju.”

  “You sure?” he asked, voice muffled in her hair.

  Was she? What did she know of the human heart? She knew she had surprised him at the office for lunch one day. Had seen a redheaded paralegal temp perched atop his desk, her skirt riding skyward. She knew she had cornered the woman in the executive bathroom. Had ever so sweetly suggested she find new employ. Then not so sweetly rewarded the woman’s backtalk by slamming her against a tiled wall. The sudden roar and heat of a hand dryer had startled them both. Love was a thing with claws. This she knew.

  He lifted his head. She swiped moisture from his lashes.

  “I’m sure,” she told him.

  • • •

  In her true form, Nala races fleet-finned marlins and wins. She could hold her breath for up to an hour—awing pearl hunters free-diving bare-skinned like the Ama women in Wajima City and the Haenyo ladies on Jeju Island. Few things scared her. Some troubled waters haunted her. On their jubilee anniversary, a celebratory transatlantic cruise was cut short because her nightly swim left her in tears, triggered nightmares of chains and people screaming in tongues from back home.

  But the time she was truly fearful was on their first night together, when she let Byron see her truly naked. Her final test.

  “Close your eyes,” she told him, as she rose up from the bed, draping its sheet around her. Byron lay there, stretched out and unabashedly nude.

  He tugged the trailing hem of the sheet.

  “Little too late for that. Don’t you think?” He ducked the tissue box she halfheartedly threw. “I’ve already seen all the goods.”

  “No. You haven’t—”

  “Well, unless I missed something in health class—”

  “It’s no sickness. I want you to see me. Fermez tes yeux.”

  “You want to play, ma chérie?” He chuckled darkly, then placed a hand over his eyes. “Let’s play.”

  “No peeking,” she said, letting the change ripple through her.

  She drew nearer, put her hand over his own, then let the sheet drop. She placed his other hand on her transformed thigh, moving his fingertips along its scales.

  “What do you feel?
”

  “Something hard but supple. Like a shell, with a heartbeat. What is that?”

  “Wait,” she said, as he made to uncover his eyes. “And this?”

  She ran his fingers along the tiny fins that covered her forearms like fine down.

  He pushed her hand away. “It’s you. All you.”

  “It’s me.”

  She stood silent as the deep. Letting him look over her. Watched his eyes coast over the indigo-trellised gold scales plating her hips and thighs, glimmering like blue-ray limpets in strong flows. Taking his sweet, molasses-drip time to take it all in—from her feather-fine fins to the gills at her breastbone. She knew this might be too much to absorb, even with her full form yet unveiled. But still.

  She thought she knew what forever felt like.

  “Well, say something, idiot!” She couldn’t cry, but her eyes were near to changing and giving this man one more reason to run just as she was telling herself to let him run, I don’t care.

  “So you’re a Maman Dlo.” He smiled. “Goddamn, I must be a lucky man!”

  And then he was hugging her close and telling her of his people, of Orisha water deities—spirits that kept them safe, that blessed them with a bountiful catch.

  And that was that.

  • • •

  She had always believed that water would be the death of him. Through the years, she gave him as much of her gris-gris as she could, to keep him strong, to keep him safe. FUN FACT: According to the CDC, commercial fishing consistently ranks as one of the most dangerous occupations in America.

  “Gray hairs! See this? You’re giving me gray hairs!” She was letting herself age so they could grow old together, staring incredulously at her fresh-faced husband as she grabbed his unlined visage between her cool palms, swiveling his head to and fro. “So you want to drive me to a nursing home while you visit me with your new wife? Which kind juju this?”

  “It’s that old black magic,” he said. “We humans of a darker hue like to say ‘Black don’t crack.’” He laughed. “We say it’s the melanin but it’s really something else. We got that soul glow-up,” and with this he burst into a ditty from Coming to America, “Just let your soul glow!” Drawing out the soul into ten falsetto syllables, drawing his wife to him till she grumpily unfolded the arms locked over her chest and let him hug the ever-loving life out of her, saying, “I’ll get you some Clairol for them grays, ma chouchoute.”

  “Gray hairs!” she screeched whenever he crewed with friends on a strange boat whose seaworthiness was unknown to her. She would leave clipped Times-Picayune articles on fishing-related accidents and stats on crewmen who fell overboard around their home.

  But he always came home safe and sound.

  Then came Hurricane Katrina. Disruption. Destruction. Despair.

  The Big Easy took a bruising.

  What else can be said that is not already known? The Superdome. The rooftop riders. The floating bodies. The hopelessness. The relief then shame at the snatch of joy when your own high-ground home was spared. The homes of others, in fact their very lives, seemingly so expendable. When water bloat burst the levees, they had been relatively safe. The week prior, Byron had stocked their pantry with emergency supplies—fresh water, batteries, frozen food, and garbage pails of water. The generator was operational. Her saltwater ground pool was level.

  They watched the news as water came pouring through the Seventeenth Street Canal, Lake Pontchartrain rushing into the bell jar of the city. At home, their windows rattled, driving rain shook the trees like frenzied pompoms. The streets went slick with wet.

  Tens upon tens of thousands trapped. Drowning in their very homes.

  They took Byron’s boat out to help. The water she loved a cauchemar, a brackish gumbo of human remains and soggy belongings. She dove deep, again and again, swimming into homes submerged like so much sunken treasure. Searching and searching for the most elusive of treasures: survivors. They spied a teddy bear floating near a treetop, were in tears when they found its owner, lil’ bit that she was, clinging somehow to a branch. Trip after trip, picking up the stranded, listening as shell-shocked voices told them of evacuation, of bridge crossings on foot, of warning shots to turn back. So many missing. So much sorrow. It seemed second nature to humans.

  Nala took a deep breath.

  Later, they would rebuild. So too, the city. Albeit slowly.

  But then a Deepwater Horizon oil rig on the BP-owned pipeline in the Macondo Prospect (imagine that, named for Gabo’s benighted town) exploded and spent eighty-seven days gushing 210 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Nala cried for days. Sickened by the sight of gulls covered in its slick, of fish choking on tar balls. Always oil, always wahala! When oil was found along her old home shores, nations had nearly gone to war to claim the area, ousting Bakassi villagers from their homes, from ancestral fishing grounds. Now her husband was making himself heartsick (high blood pressure ran in his family, so they missed the truth of it) with the number of civil cases he took on seeking restitution. Trying to right things that would never be the same again. Breathe, Nala. Breathe.

  But he took his heart pills and regained a little of his ceaseless hope when he won his clients some money against Big Oil. He prevailed.

  Water did get him in the end, though. At sixty-five, after sniffling and sneezing and nursing a cold for five days, Byron Thelonious Stillwater collapsed and was rushed to Tulane Medical Center where he died four days later of acute pneumonia complicated by pulmonary edema. Water in the lungs.

  “I am not calling this a home-going ceremony,” Nala shouted. “Not a ‘home going’ or a ‘send-off’ or any other bullshit. He’s not on vacation. My man is dead! He’s dead!”

  Her parlor room was filled with Byron’s many solicitous aunties. One held her now, rocking her and saying, “Yes, baby. Let it all out.”

  “I just couldn’t,” Nala kept on, gulping breaths she didn’t need, shedding tears she did, buoyed by the woman’s sturdy shoulder. “I couldn’t stick him in the ground neither!”

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Water—”

  “Yes, chile. Anything you want. Anything.” The aunty held a glass of water to Nala’s parched lips.

  “His life was the water,” said Nala, between reluctant sips. “That’s where he belongs for whatever comes next.”

  For days, she was dry-eyed. Waves of grief had swelled in and over her, receding just long enough for the odd phone call to be made arranging flowers and harpists. And for her family to be notified that their presence in Louisiana was, once again, being requested. A handful of its various members had maintained an anemic and desultory connection with her through the years by way of Facebook and the occasional bits of correspondence. But now, at least three of her twenty-three sister-cousins were present. They were open to change, these younglings, unfettered by the trawls of tradition.

  Byron’s acid-tongued centurion grand-mère, Maman Lulu, was grumbling under her breath in guttural Creole, making sure the whole room knew, in no uncertain terms, what she thought of these Janie-come-lately sisters and what they could go do with themselves. “Voilà merde! Nala! Di ‘kasse twah’ a ton salluh famille des cochons!”

  Family.

  Her sister-cousins: Marie-Francoise, a melusine living along the coast of France, was stretched out on a chaise eating bon-bons. Coira, a selkie who lived part of her life as a harp seal, looked jumpy and restless on a corner divan. Only Helena, a siren whose foremothers had taken a particular interest in luring men to their deaths, was able to say anything meaningful on the subject of last rites.

  “In the old countries, families would send the man they lost out to sea on his craft. Set aflame, so his ashes would become one with the ocean waves.”

  “I think ye’ll be needing permits for that in this country,” said Coira, pushing her slipping tortoiseshell glasses from the cliff of her nose.

  “Are there more bon-bons?” asked Marie-Francoise from her cushiony
velveteen swoon.

  Nala turned to her and hissed. “They’re in the cupboard, next to my dead husband’s ashes,” she spat out. “Ask me about bon-bons again. I dare you.”

  Just then Maman Lulu burst out into such a rib-tickled fit of laughter that soon the whole room was cackling along with her, clutching their sides and letting out the occasional toot, or two.

  • • •

  Family.

  The Stillwaters gone for the evening. Nala’s sistren gathered close.

  “Soit-pas malheureuse, grand-sœur,” Marie-Francoise chided. “You are a tough one. Not soft like me, eh?” She pushed Nala’s fingers into the dimpled flesh of her forearm, then handed her a packet. “Homemade truffles—avec chocolat. To remind you life will be sweet again.”

  Coira shuffled over with travel brochures, handing them to Nala with a plane ticket, babbling: “When ye’re lonesome, come visit Strandhill. My husband, Seamus, makes a mean bowl of poundies: the freshest potatoes, hot butter, all the fixings. We’ll eat it with cockles picked fresh off the beach, we will. Listen to me. Rabbiting on and on, amn’t I? My husbands always say—”

  “Husbands?” Helena asked, accustomed to keeping her own legions of men well accounted for.

  Coira breathily explained her land and sea marriages to two males: Ossian, selkie himself, and Seamus, a human. She was blushing all the while. More so when Helena exclaimed: “So the little seal has secrets. See, Nala, you see? There is always love to be had. When you are ready, you and I we will take my Adolpho’s yacht sailing. We will sample the malakas in Mykonos and Santorini and Crete.”

  “Putain!” Nala burst out laughing. “Helena, you are too much.”

  • • •

  In the end, Nala Wouri DeCamaroes Stillwater spread her dearheart Byron Thelonious Stillwater’s ashes on Barataria Bay, the waters of his forefathers down in Plaquemines Parish. The farewell service was officiated by Reverend Dr. Felix Tidwell IV of the Tremé, New Orleans. Of the sixty guests throwing magnolias over the boat railing, fifty-seven were friends and family of the Stillwaters. A harpist played in the background as each person read out quotes that Mrs. Stillwater had scribed on her dearly departed’s boats through the years.