A long black Bentley with tinted windows glided into the parking lot and stopped at the entrance of the club. The driver went around and opened the rear passenger door. Flash Daddy Jones, Atlanta’s most powerful music mogul, got out holding a phone to his ear as he went through the club’s front door. Jones lived in that world between worlds, where street met legit, where the search was always on for ways to wash dirty money. On paper he sometimes owned Magic Girls. If he needed something from the city or the city needed something from him, the mayor was the go-between. All that club money was rain that made rap music grow in Atlanta. And rap music was now giving birth to a fresh new industry in Atlanta—moviemaking.
“Whoa,” Salt exclaimed.
“I’ll say.”
“No wonder Man was anxious for us to leave.”
ORPHANS AND OUTLAWS
Salt drove through The Homes, just as she’d done when it was her beat, and went by Sister Connelly’s. She needed Sister’s understanding about Mary. Sister, out in the middle of her front-yard garden stooped over her plants, straightened and waved when she saw Salt drive by. Halfway down the block Salt stepped on the brake, backed up, stopped, got out, and went to Sister’s gate. “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”
Sister held a small pair of pruning shears. “Probably going to a cousin’s. Why?”
“Because I’d like to invite you to my place. We call it the Orphans and Outlaws Thanksgiving. Please. I’d love for you to come. I’ve told you about my old place and I’d like you to see it. And Mr. Gooden, my next-door neighbor, next field over, has the most amazing garden, not as pretty as yours, but he grows terrific vegetables. You and he are about the same age. Please say you will.”
Sister dropped the shears into a bucket and dusted her hands. She looked off into the distance as if considering Salt’s invitation.
Hopeful that Sister hadn’t immediately rejected the idea, Salt hurriedly said, “For once I’m off on a holiday, only the one day, but Detective Wills, you’ve met him, lives close to here and you’re on his way. I’d bring you home.”
“Who else will be there?” Sister tilted her head. “Would I be an orphan or an outlaw? Any other black folks coming?”
“Pepper and his family. You know Officer Greer. He’s a detective now. Ann, his boys.” Salt balanced on her toes. “I was afraid to ask. I didn’t think you would.”
“Only if I can bring something, something special,” Sister said.
• • •
“We love coming down to Salt’s, for a lot of reasons,” said Pepper’s wife, Ann, sitting across from Sister Connelly at the kitchen table. Salt and Wills came and went carrying dishes to the dining room, putting the finishing touches on the Thanksgiving table. “The boys love the sheep, the dogs, the trees, everything about this place.” Ann tilted her head toward the back door. “Listen to them.” Out back the dogs were barking, the boys whooping and laughing.
“All this space.” Sister lifted her eyes to the high ceiling where an ornate plaster medallion surrounded a single hanging bulb and over to the white cupboards and the wide window over the deep porcelain sink.
Wills peeled plastic wrap from the crystal bowl that Sister had brought. “What do we have here?”
“Needs to heat in a pan a few minutes right before we sit down,” Sister said.
Salt took the lid off the big cast-iron pot and emptied the bowl into it. “Greens?”
Sister opened the brown bag in her lap. “Can you fry this up quick?” She handed Salt wax-paper-wrapped sliced bacon. “I see you got a good skillet.”
“Both the skillet and the pot have been part of the kitchen since before I can remember,” Salt said.
“I’d never used cast iron before, but using Salt’s has made me a believer,” said Wills, taking the bacon and aligning the slices in the pan.
Sister turned back to Ann. “You don’t sound like you’re from here, either.”
“Just another transplant. My husband is the Southerner,” Ann said.
“Ann teaches fifth grade and she’s been reading up on Atlanta’s history. She probably knows more about the city than the rest of us natives put together.” Salt picked up a dish of green beans with one hand and a bowl of baked yams with the other. “Y’all grab something.” She nodded at the food-laden serving dishes and bowls that crowded the kitchen counter. The smell of bacon frying combined with the other Thanksgiving fragrances filling the house—sage, cinnamon, and baking turkey. Without being called, the men and boys came up on the porch, their voices boisterous, feet heavy on the board floors. Mr. Gooden took charge of the dogs, settling them on the porch. Pepper ordered the boys to quiet down and mind their manners.
Mr. Gooden came in the dining room. “Table fits perfect.” He’d been storing the oak table in an outdoor shed and it was weathered and stained, but Salt had found several old lace and linen tablecloths, tattered and in different shades of white, stored in the same trunk where she’d found her father’s coat. The cloths lay nicely on the table, layered and soft. The chairs were mismatched, as were the plates and silverware Salt had picked up from time to time at flea markets and yard sales.
They came to the table, Sister last, bearing her crystal dish of greens garnished with crumbles of bacon. Mr. Gooden’s eyes widened as he leaned to the center of the table, sniffing Sister’s dish. “Is that what I think? Poke salad? How can that be?”
Sister Connelly pursed her lips, suppressing a smile. “I freeze some every spring so I have them for Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, Lord,” Mr. Gooden said. “I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. I haven’t had poke greens since before my wife passed.”
“I’ve never had them at all,” Salt said. “Heard all my life about poke salad, but this is a first for me.” Salt lifted a serving to her plate.
“Mama, is that the same as pokeberries?” Ten-year-old Miles’ eyes widened. “You said they were poison.”
“Your mother is right,” Mr. Gooden said, looking down to the boy beside him. “It is the same plant.” He forked a heap of the greens onto his plate. “But if you get the leaves young, in the spring like Sister Connelly said, and boil them three times, they aren’t poison and are some of the best eating ever.” He scooped a bite into his mouth, closing his eyes and chewing. “Umm, umm.”
“Compliments also to our head chef.” Salt lifted her glass, toasting Wills at the opposite end of the table. “Let’s hear it for turkey and tofurkey.”
“You forgot the blessing,” Theo, Pepper’s youngest, complained.
“Bow your heads, you heathens.” Pepper folded his hands for the prayer. “Lord, bring peace to our city. Comfort those in pain. Thank you for our blessings. Amen.”
“Amen,” echoed the guests.
• • •
Miles kept his fascination with the possibility that they were eating poisonous pokeberry. “How do you know the poison is gone?” He had put one little piece of the greens on his plate, staring at it.
“I learned from my mother,” Sister told him. “Our family ate poke greens every spring and as often as we could get them.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble to prepare,” Ann said. “I admit they are delicious.”
“Back in those days poor folks got food where they could. Sometimes the best food came from people who had to find ways to make what they had taste good.” Sister pushed back from the table.
“Were you poor?” Theo asked incredulously.
“My grandmother was born a slave. Yes, we were very poor.”
“A slave! No way!” Theo stiffened his arms, holding himself off his chair and swiveling his head to the others at the table.
“Settle down,” his mother admonished.
“Are you still poor?” he asked.
“That’s enough, young man.” Pepper frowned at his son.
“Oh, that’s all right.
I like to tell young people. They need to hear how it was.” Sister smiled at Theo. “It’s good to be curious. But listen to your parents. What they want you to learn is good manners. Sometimes people don’t want to talk about certain things and it’s not polite to ask them to. Your mother and father just want you to learn when to ask.”
“I grew up eating poke salad, too.” Mr. Gooden slid his empty plate toward the yams.
“Wasn’t just black folks poor in Georgia.” Sister nodded at him.
There was hardly a breath to catch between words and mouthfuls, much less lags in conversation. They kept to the unspoken rule of no talking about the job. The kids and the elders kept it lively until they were sated. They bused their own dishes to soak in the sudsy sink. Then while the others went for a walk in the orchard, Salt showed Sister the rest of the house.
“I might have been here before—when I was a real little girl, maybe Theo’s age,” Sister said as they walked down the hall.
“That’s right. I remember. You had family that lived in Cloud,” Salt said, standing in the hallway between the library and the living room.
“Maybe it was just a house like this.” Sister ran her hand over the oak trim of the library doors.
“You were kind to answer the kids’ questions.” Salt pushed back the pocket doors. “I don’t have a lot of furniture.” She went in and Sister followed.
“That’s cedar I smell.” Sister inhaled slowly.
“The shelves. You can smell them all through the house when there’s nothing to compete, like a turkey dinner.”
“What happened to the furniture? House like this probably was filled with antiques.”
“My mother took a lot of it when she remarried and went to live with her new husband in North Carolina. Come on, I’ll show you upstairs. I’ve made some changes.”
Sister stood in the center of the room, turning to take in the four walls of books.
Salt motioned her toward the living room and the stairs to the second floor. At the top of the landing Salt waited for the old woman. As Salt looked down the second-floor hall, the now-familiar blurred image edged into her vision. She touched the tip of the scar at her hairline, then sat down suddenly, her back against the wall. “Sorry. I lost my breath there for a second,” she told Sister when she got to the top step. Salt blinked several times, trying to clear the jagged crimson outlines. “Must have eaten too much.”
Sister sat down, leaning her back against the banister facing Salt. She just sat quietly without saying a word. Salt became hyperaware of the voices from out back, the dogs barking, the baas of the sheep. She smelled Sister’s tobacco and coconut aura. “Whew, it’s been a while since I had one of those. They pass pretty quick.” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “I’m fine.” She stood and offered her hand to help Sister stand.
Sister took up the conversation like there’d been nothing unusual. “Somehow I got the notion you didn’t have no mother.”
They went into the first bedroom on the right, through the bath between it and the second bedroom, then back out to the end of the hall, where Salt opened the door to the screened sleeping porch. She and Sister stood there looking down at the paddock and over the orchard, where the other guests were walking among the almost bare trees, the boys and dogs running ahead. “Come, let me show you the renovation.” Salt closed the door to the porch and led Sister to the dojo. She slipped off her shoes, put them on the little wooden rack, and opened the door.
Watching, Sister looked down at her low-heel strap shoes. “Why don’t I just peek in.”
Salt turned the warm recessed lights up and stepped onto the white floor mat. Daylight from the chest-high windows slanted across the room and up the bamboo and weathered-wood walls. Salt knelt before the low altar on the wall opposite the door. “We call it a ‘practice.’” Hands in prayer pose, she bowed to the altar.
“Feels like church almost.” Sister unstrapped her shoes and entered in stocking feet. “I’ve seen pictures of rooms like this. You fight in here.” Sister’s knobby feet, encased in opaque stockings, whispered as she walked over to one of the windows and turned to face Salt. “I’m too stiff to be kneelin’. I see you got your father on that altar.” She motioned to the shelf.
Salt sat seiza. “His picture is in the place where traditionally the picture of a sensei, a teacher, is placed. He died here, in this space. It was my parents’ bedroom before I redid it.”
“Why you want me to come here?” Sister turned her back to Salt and spoke while she looked out the window toward Mr. Gooden’s. “You don’t got some idea I’m one of them hoodoo Negroes, can weave some spell and make wishes come true or somethin’?”
“We’ve had some things in common. From all the talk at the table I’d say we have more, maybe.” Salt looked up at Sister’s back, stood and joined her at the window. They looked out at the field between Salt’s place and Mr. Gooden’s. “Poke salad, the history lessons.” She turned to Sister.
“What I think—your mama makes herself known by what’s not here and you got your daddy’s picture on a altar.” Sister pointed toward Mr. Gooden’s. “That ol’ man got chickens?”
• • •
“You feel like some jazz?” Wills sat on the living room sofa and sorted through the CDs he’d brought.
Salt, in the nearby armchair, said, “We should probably talk first.”
“Yeah?” He went to the CD player and put in three of the discs.
“I stopped in at the Blue Room today. I wanted to talk to Man about Mary.”
“And . . .” He sat down, leaned back, and used the remote to start the music at a low volume.
“He was his usual self—‘I’m movin’ on up’ and all that. But he also said Stone is out. They paroled him.”
Wills sat up, silenced the music, and turned to face her. “I knew it was coming, his release, but somehow I thought he would be in a halfway house or something. He’s been fixated on you in the past. He believed that you were a threat to Man and came after you. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have warned you and why they just let him out.”
“According to Man, he’s being monitored down at the mental health clinic on Hilltop. He’s on medication and Man says he’s okay.”
Wills listened, elbows on his knees, head hung between his shoulders, quiet. Then he sat back. “And now with Mary’s murder, you’ll be going back to The Homes, crossing his path, him crossing yours.”
“I’m sorry, Wills. It seems like all I do is cause you to worry. Felton and I already ran into Stone. He’s still very sick, even on the meds.”
He patted the sofa beside him, reached over, and pulled her next to him. “We’ll think of something.” He thumbed the volume up.
Miles Davis held a wavy note, echoing light, his longing horn calling across the ocher hills of Spain in Concierto de Aranjuez. Miles with his sneers and stares.
“Ha! Listen to that,” Wills exclaimed with a breathless whisper.
Salt had pulled to her lap an old earth-tone velvet quilt with red satin trim, and in the dim light any movement she made, even the slightest, made the lamplight catch the color differently, from crimson to dark scarlet.
“Last night I dreamed of an apartment building.” Salt spoke quietly below the music, between sections. “I wandered around, able to enter rooms with diaphanous walls. I could see into places. One of the apartment bedrooms had dark gray walls, a bed canopied with a sheer lavender drape, nothing else except opposite the bed there was some kind of wall sculpture, metal and light, distressed silver over black dull steel, backlit with a white and lavender glow. Drifting along halls, through walled rooms, I was trying to discover a way to rid myself of some feeling, to find a basket or a bowl to hold something sorrowful. Then I woke up this morning, sun filling the bedroom, the trees outside with a few small leaves left twirling in the wind, and I just let myself remembe
r.”
The tambourine rattled like the jangle of silver spurs, evoking horses, battle ready with beribboned reins. The drummer executed press rolls, building the tension. They listened to Miles until the track ended and went to the next CD.
“What were you remembering?” Wills asked. His old sweatshirt, freshly laundered, still smelled like him, like sautéing garlic and lead pencils, warm smells.
“Are you sniffing me?” He looked down at her face.
“You smell good, like you.”
As the next CD started, Wayne Shorter made music with sounds like plums and stars, blue notes out of a tunnel from Africa. A piano trickled notes, falling, looking for a place to rest, tinkling down keys. Salt imagined a bar before a fight is ready to break out, beer bottles, an old upright piano, pieces of ebony and ivory missing.
Wills leaned back on the armrest, facing her. “Any more discussions with Huff about a partner?”
They listened to the music. Salt held on to an image—a tan, barefoot woman, skin like new moist silk, wearing a brilliant grass-green and blue cotton blouse embroidered with red-thread vines and green roses, and a skirt the yellow and red of parrots, her gait in time with the music.
She leaned against the other end of the sofa. “Kinda obvious, don’t you think? Felton is the only other detective without a partner and he’s never partnered. If he wants to, he’ll have to be the one to ask. He’s senior. And don’t you go meddling.”
Miles was back on. Enormous strength holding the notes tenderly, respectful, the sounds of other cultures, other nations, nuanced and evocative of places and times. Blowing colors against the soft, high frequency sizzle of the brush circling the cymbals. Miles Davis played riffs that rained sheets of sound.
Salt got up and lit two candles. The sky was now all black. The candle near her chair flickered in a beaded glass, flame blinking in tempo, now a tango rhythm. The music seemed to embroider the room, trumpet a bright orange skein on a blue so blue, it seemed to expand and fill every space, under the rug, behind the mantel clock, up to the high ceiling.
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