Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Before I could call up enough sense to stop myself, I ran down the road and over to where I knew she'd be. My mouth opened and the words spilled out of me like one of those angry rains. They was hard and fast, the words that spewed from me:

  Who you think you is comin' back here like you some movie Star? With no shame whatsoever. How dare you? And now our chirrun actin' up. Our husbands. Stealin' our seeds, makin' it so all we can talk about or think about is Miss Ebbie Pinder, hauntin' me so's I can't even sleep at night—why you have to come back here remindin' us of what we done tried so hard to forget?

  When I was done, I fell to my knees in the grass beside her, my chest heavin', too empty to cry. My words had been the tears, and the prayers, my mournin' song, and in the tellin', they had become hers, too.

  When I looked up, she was already standing over me as if she wanted to strike me. Her hands were clenched in fists so tight they shook. Even in the moonlight, her eyes looked like pools of glittering black glass. I sat, too stunned to move, while her words fell over me and pierced my skin in accusation, until I realized she wasn't talking about me at all. Then I watched as her words became snow that tumbled from her trembling lips onto the grass and dissolved into the earth, feeding the rich brown soil while the air between us grew heavy with pain and loneliness and fear. When she was done, all I could do was lay my hand on her bowed head and whisper over and over, “I know, I know.”

  Now we meet almost every night, meander through the orchards in silence. Or sit and talk. Mostly we talk, comment on how two women so different could be so much alike, inside where eyes don't go. How one could leave this place, the other one stay put. And we realize the reasons were the same: fear. One afraid she would turn out like everyone else, the other scared to death she wouldn't.

  We share secrets denied us in our youths. The truth about who we are. The stuff no one wanted us to know. We share the story about the women called maniacs. Women who lived a long time ago. They were just country women, really, who got tired of cookin' and cleanin', takin' care of the husband and chirrun. Got tired of everybody else usin' up what was supposed to be their lives. So they met in the woods one night and had this dance. When the men found out, they got angry and tried to put an end to their women's foolishness. But they couldn't. The women rebelled. Started gatherin' every night. Before long the men started callin' the women crazy, and started treatin' them like they was, until the women began to believe it.

  Why is it when a man wants to be free, he's just being a man, but when a woman wants to live life from the position of the birds, the first thing folks say is that she's crazy?

  That's what we ask ourselves.

  We shake our heads as if unsure of the answer. But we know. It's because they know what'll happen if we ever really do get free. They scared.

  Ebbie say God must be a woman. That we was made in Her image, though she whispers it like she's afraid He may hear her talkin' about Him thataway. I tell her she's blasphemin'. Ebbie say she been blasphemed against all her life. That I been blasphemed against, too. Just because we womenfolk. She asked me to think over how many times someone spoke to me, to my womanness, with irreverence. Me. A sacred bein' like them stars, only Ebbie say more so 'cause I was fashioned in God's likeness. And me not ever knowin' it. I laugh at her, but that night when I creep back home and let myself in the screen door, real quiet so's not to wake Leonard, somethin' deep down in my belly tingles at the idea of God with Her nappy hair, coffee-and-cream skin, and lips thick as plums. Lookin' like me.

  Ruthie craves a child of her own the same way I once ached to leave Grandville. So I tell her about when I was pregnant with Pontella, when she first fluttered. And the women who already had children—how they told me it would feel like I had a belly full of butterflies. Only it wasn't like that at all. I'd felt butterflies before; they came with the fear.

  This was something else. More like dove wings, bringing me peace for the first time in my life. And for a while I thought I was having a bird, until I saw the coal-black coils of hair peeking out from between my thighs. When the midwife turned Pontella's head in order to sweep her mouth, seeing her face, that ancient face, I realized for the first time that a whole being had lived in me. The awe made it so I could barely breathe or move.

  I could hardly hear the midwife telling me to push one more time, the shoulders. And me taking the deepest breath I could, so deep my chest burned, hunching my back and pushing with all of my might. I felt in my soul more than in my body the ripping, like the ripping of the veil. Shaking, I fell backward onto the bed, my eyes rolled up into my head. It was like I'd fallen into the bluest of oceans, sinking, sinking into the warm, rushing waters of life. I had fallen into myself. I had become the world, my womb the center of the universe. I had become one with God, one who knew what it meant to be creator. Life-giver.

  That's how I know God is a woman.

  Ebbie gives me permission. That's all, permission. Like someone sayin' it's all right to just be. And whatever all I was meant to be in the first place. Before they told me that girls couldn't chew gum or climb trees or wear jeans. That a woman's value counted on how well she fed her husband and children and the way she kept up her home. Before they told me a girlchild was what you wanted only after findin' out you couldn't have anythin' at all. I believed 'em, every one of those baldfaced lies. And them some powerful lies, too, anytime they can talk a person out of bein' what God made her to be. Talk a person right out of her soul. But Ebbie come along and tell me the truth of the matter. Truth always burn away anything that ain't like it.

  Selfishly, I tell Ebbie that I could go on like this forever. As soon as I say it, I see somethin' in her eyes shrink from my words. At that moment, I know it's only a matter of time before she leaves again. I tell her how it gets harder for me to fit myself into a life that someone else created for me. Never understood that it wasn't even supposed to be thataway. And when I leave her, I'm scared and angry all at the same time. Scared to think of what I have to go back to if she ever leaves me, angry at the ones who made it so.

  Tired of bein' treated like a fall hog.

  Ruthie comes to me after two days, her eyes hidden, black ice cupped by purple moons. I look at her bruised face with both anger and guilt. Someone else's desecration making me feel responsible, and her ashamed of her womanhood, her vulnerability. She says Leonard beat her because she refused to cook and clean. I don't tell her he beat her because she stopped making him believe that he was the only reason she ever existed at all. Like the husbands of the maniacs, he knows that the young girl he married is already a memory.

  When we go to leave the orchards that night, a chill invading the air, disturbing the illusion given by our Indian summer, I know I have to go. For a brief moment it's been enough to know that someone else is as I am. To find myself in someone else. So I won't have to feel so very alone. But I'm the one who made it that way, forcing my own nature on her and maybe even on Pontella if I were to stay.

  I say it's getting too cold for us to meet. I promise I'll see her in the spring. I hold her close, inhale the nutty scent of wet earth from her hair, holding back the pain of unshed tears in my chest, knowing it will be the last time. Winter will come and I will settle in with the child I created, make memories of my own.

  Ruthie talks about forever as if there really is such a thing. When even our future is already our past. But for a time our souls met, and danced, and soared. We were able to live like the maniacs, and we were comforted by that knowledge.

  It's not until spring I learn Ebbie has left me and Pontella. Left before I could tell her she gave me back my seed. Now I walk through my life like one who goes by a familiar place that has been torn to rubble, one who can't quite remember what once stood.

  I feel the months slide by and I watch my skin stretch taut over the swell of promise. I could almost pretend like this never happened at all, except for the movement in my belly, like dove wings, remindin' me of my nights with Ebbie and what it
felt like to be really free, pullin' me from Leonard's side each night. I sleep beneath maples cast in shadows, lettin' tears fall warm and without excuse. Folks talk so, but to Leonard's face they tell him it's my bein' pregnant. That I'll return to normal once I have the baby. While every night I lie on a bed of grass-covered earth, fall into a sleep filled with dreams more real than this world, where I am a fish the color of rainbows, a bird that soars to the depths of the ocean. They say when a woman is full with life, she dreams strange dreams.

  Fire: An Origin Tale

  BY FAITH ADIELE

  I'm nearly sixteen years old before I learn the true story of my birth. It is the spring of 1979, fifteen months before snowcapped Mount Saint Helens will wake up a few hundred miles away and create a new country; seventeen years after my teenage mother lay down on the floor of her father's house and contemplated suicide. I can picture her in 1962 with her apple cheeks and light brown ponytail, lying flat against the gray carpet, looking too brunette to be Scandinavian and much younger than her nineteen years. She might have been wearing a sleeveless blue cotton smock, the patch pockets stuffed with half-used tissues, and a mannish pair of black glasses. Those droopy blue eyes of hers, so deceptively sleepy, would have been wide open for once. Seventeen years later, except the short bowl haircut swirled with cowlicks, she looks exactly the same.

  Time has stopped in the living room of our tiny house. It's as if my mother's silence, has cast a spell that descends over us like the ash when Mount Saint Helens erupts, turning cars and flowerbeds silver. We will have to wear surgical masks outside, just like at the Annual Portland Rose Festival to the south, thousands of spectators and beauty queens waving to each other from behind white paper cones. But for now, my mother contemplates the ceiling, and the cats on the roof fall asleep, whiskered chins upturned in the shade of the honeysuckle vine.

  Bound by the spill of her silence, no one on Gregory Avenue moves. Next door, Mr. Graham turns to stone in the midst of his prized hybrid teas and floribunda. Across the street, Tommy the Plumber stalls, tattoos motionless in the hairy forests of his arms and legs and chest. At the end of the street, the boys on the high school wrestling team—state champions for three years straight—slump, drooling, onto gym mats, while next door at my mother's junior high, three kids smoking joints topple over on the football field.

  The entire town of Sunnyside, Washington—where according to the Chamber of Commerce, the sun shines 360 days a year—holds its breath. At the feedlot near the sign welcoming visitors to SUNNYSIDE—HOME OF ASTRONANT BONNIE DUNBAR, the milk-faced Herefords and polled Angus stand vacant-eyed and slack-jawed, just like when the volcano blows. In the tiny business district, the Rotarians and Kiwanis and Elks and Eagles stop singing in mid-song; the neon warrior on the awning of the Safari Lounge watches his spear and shield blink and fizzle out; and the Golden Pheasant Chinese restaurant actually closes.

  The blond kids up on Harrison Hill drift in their blue swimming pools, while Mexican workers doze on ladders in the sooty fruit orchards, their burlap bags slipping to the ground. Nothing much was happening to start with at the big Catholic and Mormon and Episcopalian and Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian churches, but in the tiny new churches that are continually forming and separating at any time of day—so many that Sunnyside is in the Guinness Book of World Records—the congregations begin to snore in their folding chairs.

  This hush, while I wait for my mother to call the true tale of my origins up from hibernation, carries out of town, past Old Doc Querin's big animal practice, past the huge Dutch dairies with their tin-roofed barns, past fields strung high and beaded with hops. It wafts along the restricted road to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which did the plutonium finishing for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and where people say that strange, new insects breed in the chalky limestone. It floats by the Moore farm with its collapsing barn and twelve kids, the Kludas farm with its narrow lambing shed and single giant son, and my grandparents' farm wedged in between. For once the woodpecker attacking their trees is quiet, enjoying the bright pink blossoms on the thorny Hawthorn, the heart-shaped leaves of the Catalpa, the drooping Weeping Willow. The silence winds along the irrigation ditch to the asparagus fields at the tiny airport, the same fields where my mother walked barefoot in 1962, the soil damp between her toes, and considered killing herself and her unborn child.

  “I need the form that shows you have custody of me,” I repeat, in case my mother didn't hear me. A permission slip for a study program in Mexico rests on the sofa cushion between us.

  A few minutes ago, when I announced that the study program required the signatures of both parents—unless one can prove sole custody—my mother grunted, setting the spell. Now her eyes contemplate the ceiling, blue specks beneath a field of gently waving cowlicks.

  I wait. It is 1979, my sophomore year of high school, the moment for which I have been raised. From our monthly United Nations Day dinners where my mother and I dress in makeshift rebosas and saris and dashikis and make optimistic stabs at crêpes and piroshki and kimchee from the Time Life international cookbooks series, to the home curriculum she designs for me from her college anthropology textbooks, to our mispronounced mutterings over the kinara (“Umoja means ‘unity' . . .”) and the Haggadah (“We were slaves of Pharaoh . . .”) and the shahãda (“There is no god but God . . .”), my mother has been preparing me for this. It is to be my first trip out of North America—the escape from Sunnyside she never quite managed herself. The only thing standing in the way is my father's signature.

  “I'll get the custody agreement.” I offer, holding out a pen. Program enrollment to Mexico is on a first come–first served basis. “Where is it?”

  Anything having to do with my father, who lives overseas, is a bit of a mystery. He and my mother divorced when I was still a baby, and in time she returned to her hometown and he to his. His photograph—a college man with close-cropped curls, thick glasses matching hers, and a green wool overcoat—hangs above my bed. Occasionally I write to him, and his affectionate replies drag themselves in months later. I know what he looks like and I know his handwriting. I know that he loves me very much. I just can't remember ever having seen him.

  If I think about this, I'm a bit bewildered. I believe that, no matter how young I was when he left, I should remember my father. At least the sharp bouquet of Lux soap, the scratch of green wool against my cheek, the rich bass of his full-throated laugh, the lush Rs of his accent. He is, after all, the only one in the family like me. The only one who is black.

  Being black matters. It was the reason for the trouble. Though my mother's story is sparse, always the same information presented in the exact same words, she has always been forthcoming about the trouble. For years I've watched her bee-stung lips twist into tight shapes as she describes how my grandfather demanded that she stop seeing my father, a Nigerian graduate student. How, when she refused, he forced her to transfer to another college hundreds of miles away.

  It was 1961, a moment of firsts. My father was the first in his family to come to the West; my mother was the first in her family of Scandinavian immigrants to go to college. “I was wild about it,” she confesses, eyes gleaming. “All those books—I thought I had died and gone to heaven!” Her freshman year she met my father, and they became the first interracial couple on campus. This among ten thousand college students.

  After my mother was sent away, my parents met in secret and were married at the Seattle courthouse one Saturday. “I wore a pale green princess-style dress with matching jacket like Jackie Kennedy might have worn—only much cheaper,” she says, smile firmly in place, “and your grandfather immediately disowned me.” Without his support, she was forced to drop out of college and banned from ever going home or seeing her mother and brother.

  The newlyweds were broke. The apartment swelled with international students who were also broke and who stopped by for dinners of vegetable curry and groundnut stew. I remember being poor—a cha
lky taste like scorched kidney beans—and I remember the stew, my mother's wooden spoon swirling peanut butter into tomato sauce—a vivid, oily spiral of red and brown. I remember murmured discussions about Cuba and Vietnam lasting late into the night, backed by Bob Dylan's whine or smooth African Highlife on the hi-fi. I remember the scent of vanilla drifting from the coffee table and the squish of warm wax between my fingertips as I caught candle drips before being chased off to bed. I don't remember my father.

  After politics, my parents' great loves were movies and dancing. I know little else. But if we are riding the bus and pass a former hangout of theirs, or if I come across a photograph of one of their friends, my mother dusts off a memory and presents it to me. “Your poppie used to like this place,” she might say, or “That girl was dating a West African too, and once we double-dated.” She chooses these anecdotes carefully, sparingly, as if we are still poor.

  I was born at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Spokane, Washington, in 1963. I don't know why Spokane, which is hundreds of miles from Seattle. I do know that my mother enjoyed being pregnant: sleepy, swollen, with a ready-made excuse to spend entire days reading. I can see her seventeen years ago, propped against the sofa bed of their tiny apartment, stacks of history textbooks and news magazines and dime-store mysteries covering every inch of the linoleum.

  “Tell me again what the nurses said when they saw me for the first time,” I demand.

  She laughs, dog-earing a page of The Guerrilla—And How to Fight Him and settling my head in her lap. On this last point she is always eloquent. The nurses had never seen a mixed baby before, she recounts, slim fingers working my curls. “They fussed over you for days. Everyone did. For years strangers stopped us in the street and gave you presents—pieces of candy, shiny dimes—old men who looked like they had nothing to give.”