Conceiving (Subdue Book 3)

by Thomas S. Flowers

  Memaw beamed, the way a parent patiently smiles while teaching their child some rudimentary albeit important skill or task, some life lesson, like going potty or tying a shoelace.

  “Lulu, there ain’t nothing in this world that can stop that now.” Memaw reached out and touched Luna’s arm, softly, patiently, full of warmth and tenderness.

  Luna looked away, her eyes burned. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Memaw answered. She was stoic, but still retained her tender, warm way of speaking.

  “Then why, why? If you knew and don’t care about dying, why did you send for me? Why did you ask for me to come all the way to the Delta? What, to watch you die?”

  Memaw didn’t answer right away. She sat, chewing on her gums, mulling over something, of what Luna could not be certain. The old woman sat, gaze focused outside the RAV4 front windshield, beyond even, making a strange ticking sound in her throat.

  Luna’s father had never told her much about his mother, her grandmother, the woman in the woods, as some called her, those who feared her as much as they respected her. Respected her power, or so they say. The word voodoo is seldom heard of these days. Her father certainly never mentioned such things. And perhaps that is why he left. Left Mississippi. Left Greenwood. Left the Delta woods. In less than a year, several months to be more precise, she’d tasted some of that strange ambient power in the Delta woods herself. Ethereal whispers of things that ought not to exist except in books. Books such as the ones passed down to her by her father, a postmortem legacy, the final act of a reluctant priest of old words. Books belonging to the Blanche ancestral line. Books that needed to be kept safe. And as far as Luna knew, books with summonings and musings as hypothetical as quantum physics. There but not there. Rational but wholly irrational. Formative, but physically impossible. And so on.

  Yet, Memaw doesn’t seem to care much for those books, does she. If she did, she might not have let her wayward son disappear with them. What had she said before, the other day, something about the woods, the raw naturalism emanating there. Protective…right? Is that why she stays, alone? Who is she needing protection from? Or what? Why is she sick, if she is as powerful as the rumors suggest? Has she grown weak? Too many questions. Not enough answers.

  Lost in her own thoughts, Luna glanced over at the passenger seat and found it empty.

  “Memaw?” Luna darted, looking this way and that.

  “Memaw?” she called again. Looking ahead, through the front windshield, she spotted the old woman crossing the parking lot, her gnarled cane clicking against the cement. Purple church dress flapping in the summer breeze.

  Growling again, Luna killed the engine and gave chase.

  “Memaw!”

  The old woman had gone in through the doors.

  Luna glanced around, a habit she’d developed during her stay in the Delta of Ole Miss. Her first month in, she’d stopped for gas in the northern section of Greenwood, near the old sharecropper farms. The looks the attendees and passersby gave her, the whispers, and sneers, and mouthed “niggers” was enough to know that, integration or not, 14th Constitutional Amendment or not, 24th Constitutional Amendment or not, 26th Constitutional Amendment or not, there were just some places you ought not to go. Even in what some have coined the free world, there are places caught in a time loop, stagnating in the hate and fear (mostly just fear) of the 1950s and ’60s and probably further back. Strangers are enemies. And coloreds are kin to being held back while your washing machine got a job outside the house and started voting in general elections.

  Luna glanced around, shivering against a cold chill seizing her spine. Pulling her heart down deep into her gut, knotting there and twisting. There was nothing but white folk around. She’d pulled over in the north section of Greenwood without realizing. And her grandmother was heading into the restaurant, the faded yellow Waffle House, and while the once ‘Whites Only’ signs have been long since pulled down, the sentiment, as far as she understood and seen with her own eyes, had not faded with the paint. If she was lucky, she’d be able to escort her grandmother back to the RAV4 and drive back across the train tracks before anyone batted an eye.

  Inside the Waffle House, there was all the appeal of an interstate truck stop. Linoleum tiled floors and vinyl seats and booths. The menus were no doubt laminated. Large with few options of food and drink. The waitresses were dressed in those dingy yellow aprons, the ones you’d think about in movies based in the ’50s. Frizzy ponytailed hair. Greasy looking cooks and Mexican teenaged busboys cleaning tables. The only nonwhite acceptable, so long as they worked cheap and hard and didn’t raise no fuss. Legally, they wouldn’t be able to force her and Memaw away, but God help them if they stayed.

  Imagine what they’d probably do to our food, Luna thought, groaning as she searched the small diner. Looking around, a few eyes came to rest on her. Tempting as it was to take a peek behind the curtain for their minds, see what hidden words lay unspoken, she didn’t care much to push, unless she had too. Personal thoughts were just that, personal.

  After a moment, Luna spotted her grandmother near the back of the diner, sitting in a booth in a section all by herself. Walking fast, she tapped on the table, glancing around at the all the sneering eyeballs watching them.

  “Memaw, I don’t think we should eat here.”

  “Sit down, girl. I’m hungry.”

  Luna opened her mouth to argue, but quickly shut it. Instead, she rolled her eyes, huffing a bit, and sat, facing her grandmother on the opposite side of the booth. She looked at Ronna, wondering if the cancer had started in on her brain, making her senile. Certainly she should know better, having grown up here. Living here all her life. She ought to know better. Right?

  After what felt like a purposefully prolonged amount of waiting, one of the waitresses finally came to their table. She was in one of those Waffle House dingy yellow aproned uniforms. Hair semi-blonde, greying, pulled back in a frizzy ponytail. The lines on her face were unkind. The bags under her eyes reminded Luna of the boxers on the Saturday Night Fights her grandfather used to watch, when he was alive.

  “What’cha having?” The waitress clicked her glossy red nails against her note pad, popping gum between her coffee stained teeth. Her nametag said, Judy.

  “Can we have a menu, Judy?” Luna tapped the table with her gnarled down finger nail.

  “Menus are behind the salt’n’pepper.” Judy gestured to the end of their booth.

  “I know what I want.” Memaw had been rummaging in her purse. She came back pinching a golden wrapped treat between her withered fingers. The waitress said nothing, she simply popped her gum again, glaring at the old woman. Memaw didn’t seem to notice, or if she had, she was playing coy.

  “I’ll take the chicken fried chicken. Side of green beans. Pintos. Okra. Hmm…do you have cornbread? I’ll take some cornbread, too.” Memaw didn’t look at Judy. She unwrapped the golden sweet and tossed it in her mouth, ticking the candy between her tongue and teeth.

  The waitress scribbled Ronna’s order and then gazed at Luna. Eyebrow arched. Chewing gum, probably louder then she would with anyone else, or for any other customer.

  Luna sighed. “I guess I’ll take a Cobb salad, please. Sweet tea to drink.”

  Judy scribbled some more.

  “Ma’am?” Judy glared down at Memaw.

  “Yes?”

  “Drink?”

  “Oh…do you have lemonade?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lemonade would be nice.”

  Judy jotted some more notes and rushed off to another table that had just come in through the door. She smiled and giggled and asked how their day was. She even gave them a list of the day’s specials.

  Luna turned her attention away. And it was for the best. Had she continued, the stink of the place, the glares, and murmurs from far away tables, would have gotten to her. And if that happened, she’d make a scene. If she had dragged her grandmother out of here, she’d had made a scene. Nope. B
est thing now was to just ride it out. Making scenes, more than what they’d already had made, walking into this fine white establishment, could be dangerous. Not as dangerous as things had been, back forty-fifty years ago say, but certainly dangerous enough. Old ways; habits, die hard. The itch of racism, othering, grouping people, it’s all human nature, but it’s also a part of human conditioning as well. Cubs only learn to keep to bears because of what mama bear taught them, conditioned and nurtured them how to perceive danger. Same goes for people. Take a white kid or a black kid and raise them in a singular white or black neighborhood, without interaction or limited interaction with people of opposite color, they might not grow up to be racist at all, but they’ll grow up with a natural suspicion of the other. And let’s say we add in some verbiage, how you talk about those different colored people, well that’s going to add some spice to the mix. If your cub grows up with a limited exposure to black people, and all they know is how you talk about blacks being on welfare, well…they’ll be more like to grow up thinking all black people are lazy. If your cub grows up with a limited exposure to white folk, and all they know is how you talk about whites being racist, well…your cub is going to grow up thinking all white folk are racist. But then again, all this seems beside the point, doesn’t it?

  Luna lingered on her grandmother. Memaw was gazing outside the window, at the passing traffic on Route 92. Near pristine Chrysler’s, Buicks, Tahoe’s. Dignified southern gentlemen. Southern belles. Two story colonial homes in subdivisions with names like Robert E. Lee and Beauregard and Bullock and Cook and Forrest. So much different than her own neighborhood. In the southern and eastern reaches of the Delta, houses were scattered about, weather worn and used up, ruined by the confines of time. The roads here in the north Delta had been recently paved. The same could not be said of the road Ronna Blanche lived on.

  She seemed older, with the sun coming in and highlighting the lines on her face. The browns of her eyes looked like deep pools filled with all the wisdom of folks her generation. The years and miles walked in this place. All the many things she’d seen and done. The stories that’ll go unspoken or shared. The weight of the doctor’s appointment sunk further in, the Big C, as some called that horrible thing, the mutant cells, devouring flesh from the inside out. An abnormality come to snuff the light out from behind those dark intense browns. How long? she wondered. How long does she have? A month? Weeks? God help me, why hadn’t I come sooner? Why did I wait so long? Was it because of my father? He never talked much about it, we just stopped coming. Maybe it was the family religion. Was he afraid I’d learn about voodoo? That I’d become like his mother?

  Judy had come and gone, leaving behind their drinks. Luna took a long satisfying gulp of her sweet tea. Her throat was as dry as sand. Dark and lonesome thoughts will do that, leave you as brittle as bone, if you let ’em.

  Luna was tapping on the table with her chewed nails. Glancing; not looking at her grandmother. Lingering outside or darting to the walls and the decor.

  “I’m not dead yet, girl.” Memaw’s voice was strong and confident. She giggled, dry. Perhaps she’d had her own dark and wandering thoughts.

  “I didn’t say anything.” Luna folded her arms.

  “You didn’t have to, I can see grief on your face, Lulu.”

  “You don’t…whatever. And so what if I am worried. At least one of us should be.”

  Memaw said nothing, she only smiled and laughed. Here expression was not cruel; rather, warm, the laugh of someone who’s seen this scene before. Something like nostalgic recognition. The way a parent may giggle watching their child confront something they’d been through themselves. Tying a shoe. Heartbreak. Pimples. A speeding ticket. A bad grade at school. Etc. Etc.

  “How can you not care? You’re dying, Memaw. You’re dying…” Luna pressed. She could feel the burning behind her eyes again. She quickly looked away, gazed outside at the passing traffic, anywhere but the table.

  “Lulu…”

  “No. Don’t.” Luna wiped away a straying tear. “Just tell me, why? Why did you write to me, if, somehow, you knew, you knew and you don’t care. Why? I love you, Memaw. I do. And I’m sorry I was never around. After mom and dad…died, I…I don’t know. I just kinda shut down, shut myself up. For a long time…” Luna thought of Bobby Weeks just then. His gristly, muddy face came from that part of her that missed home so much, missed Texas, missed her house (her grandfather’s house), missed her garden, her kitchen, and her books. Her solitude.

  Her voice must have gone a note too high. More glances shot their way. Luna closed her eyes. Focused them out. Shut the inside whispers at the surrounding tables, deep in the subconscious, floating somewhere between their lips and their thoughts.

  The waitress returned with their food, setting their plates on the table a bit too abruptly. Luna wasn’t hungry when she’d ordered, but she was now. Famished would be a better word for how loud her stomach growled. She ate, as if she hadn’t eaten in years. Sipping on her refilled glass of sweet tea, caring little for the fact that the cooks had no doubt done some horrible thing to their lunch. For a moment, her grandfather, Pappy, came to mind. Even after her mom’s mom had passed, Pappy had always insisted on eating at least one meal, once a day at the table. He’d called it, “Breaking Bread.” A shared meal, not every meal, but often enough to carry a conversation. ‘Breaking bread,’ he’d say, ‘can heal the broken hearted, that’s why it’s called soul food.’

  When Judy returned with the check in hand, Memaw ordered two slices of pecan pie, sending the would-be waitress off huffing to fulfill their order. The old woman snickered, ever so softly, gazing out again at the passing traffic, looking beyond, almost, as if searching for something…or someone. The pies came soon after. They ate. Vigorously.

  When they finished, Memaw was looking at her. There was something curious about her eyes, as if she were weighing out her words, measuring how many to say or how to say whatever thought had come to mind. Honestly, Luna didn’t really know her grandmother as much as she’d liked. She stayed away for a long time, at no fault but her own unwillingness to remember she had family outside of Texas. But she knew her well enough now to know, Ronna Blanche didn’t pussyfoot around anything. If she had something to say, she’d say it, while though, at the same time, keeping composed, giving what she needed or wanted at the right moment, the kind of discipline that seems to come only with age and experience.

  Memaw cleared her throat. “Lulu,” she started, “I need to tell you a few things. You might not like what it is I’ve got to share with you. I’m hoping you’ll at least understand, in the end. Why I wrote you, sent for you; there’s more going on than doctors and hospitals and long lost relatives. Maybe I conned you out here. I guess you could look at it that way, with my sickness as a way of getting you back in the Delta. I’m sure you’ve seen some things that’ve made you curious. This place is…different. The Delta. This town is caught in a time loop, wouldn’t you say?”

  Luna only nodded.

  “I like to think of this place like a bubble. Sure, new fancy things come and go, but for the most part, the Delta is as it was when I was your age.” Memaw stopped. Looking out the window, again. Searching, she continued. “Did you know you’re the last of the Blanche line? Yup. Not a very wide ancestral line, but certainly long. All the way back to the first slaves brought into the region back in the Great Migration, some twenty-years after we gave the boot to the Brits in the Revolution. Our family tree started on them sugar plantations in Haiti. From what I’ve been told from my mama, and her mama before her, and her mama’s mama, and so on and so forth, we came up the Gulf and was brought into the Delta soon after that.”

  “How—?”

  “Let me finish, Lulu.”

  Luna folded her hands together. Lips pressed together, but ears open.

  “What was I saying? Oh. Yes. I remember. Maybe the best place to start is by telling you a story. No complaining, girl. And no interrupting me, either. You
might not understand what it is I’m about to say. You might not even believe me, but I hope you do. And I hope you understand why we did the things we did. Why I did the things I did. I have no doubt when I’m gone, he’ll come to you.” Memaw stopped, sipped on her lemonade, and continued.

  “Death is as natural as life, to defile that balance is a terrible thing, Lulu. And we did some mighty defiling against Samedi, our Loa of the Dead. The ramifications…” Memaw paused, looking away from Luna, she wiped at her eyes. Her face was wet.

  Luna shifted in her seat. She’d never seen her Memaw get so upset before. Not a single tear, not even when the doctor handed her a death sentence.

  “There used to be more of us, Lulu. More Blanches, that is. We had our own circle. And I was a Queen. But the balance had to be kept. Samedi demanded retribution for what we did…and maybe we deserved what came of us.”

  Luna reached over and touched her hand. It was cold and trembling. “Memaw? What are you talking about? What happened to our family?”

  Memaw waved her off. “I told you, girl. Let me finish what I’ve got to say.” She drank more lemonade. The ice rattled in her hand. Setting it down, she gazed across the restaurant and then back to Luna.

  “Like I said, Lulu, I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you a story about a boy named John Turner.”

  Chapter 10

  1964

  Ronna Blanche

  Ronna never heard Del Shannon wailing, “I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,” cruising up the never-named red-dirt road in the mostly undeveloped woodlands of the Mississippi Delta from John Turner’s father’s 1953 Cadillac. Nope. She first heard of John Turner after he’d gone missing. Rumor was, John wasn’t from the area. Hell. He wasn’t even from Mississippi. He was a college student from North Carolina, come down in a chariot ablaze in righteous indignation. The Cause. The only one that mattered in those dawning years of the 1960s, at least for the disenfranchised of the south. Seemed like in those days, most everyone had something to worry about. Vietnam. Brezhnev. Women’s Rights. But in the south, what was important was the idea of equality. Equality for every man and woman. And young John, he’d come with Bob Moses and a handful of other student volunteers in a quest to kick start the Black Freedom Movement in the right fist of the Confederacy. While the soul of Dixie may belong to Montgomery, as scary as it sounds, things were worse in the Delta. Boys like John Turner came with high hopes and dreams, never truly suspecting how dark those woods got at night or how blind justice really was in those days, or how they still are.