“I’m impressed you understand that,” I said.
“Mama always told me that,” Angel said. “Grammie Zora, too. No drugs for me. No chasing with boys later like the older girls in my neighborhood do. And now with just Maddie and me, it’s ’specially important that I listen good. If I don’t get out of the neighborhood, then Maddie don’t.”
Angel pointed at the screen. “There’s Mama. That was when I turned nine. Her and Grammie Zora took me to the water park. Maddie wasn’t born, so you won’t see her there.”
Walking toward me and waving from the computer screen was a slim black woman in a one-piece bathing suit. Holding her hand was the Angel of three years ago, her unmistakable grin wide across her face. She wore a pink bikini and her spindly legs were bowed. Behind them were the giant, gleaming plastic tubes of the water park and running splashing figures of swimmers of all ages. I assumed Grammie Zora was holding the camcorder, because she was nowhere in sight.
Angel adjusted the volume of the laptop. Screams and laughter reached me. As did a low, calm voice from off camera. “Sir, would you kindly hold this for me?”
I assumed the voice belonged to Grammie Zora, because the scene abruptly shifted forty-five degrees, as the camcorder was passed over to the unseen bystander.
The scene straightened again, and Grammie Zora walked into view. She was an elegant woman, hardly what a person might conjure up at the phrase “voodoo woman.” She was slender, with a gracefully aged face and neatly cut, short, white hair that contrasted nicely with her jeans and red sweater.
“Here we are on Grace Louise Starr’s ninth birthday,” Grammie said, speaking straight into the camera. “And we love her more than life itself.”
Angel’s mother knelt down and hugged Angel. “She’s our little angel. And we want to sing her ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
Angel hit Pause, freezing that moment in time when her mother was alive and hugging her.
“That’s my born name,” Angel explained with great seriousness. “Grace Louise. But they always called me Angel.”
She began the DVD again. The next few minutes of the clip showed Grammie Zora and her mother singing lustily, with Angel looking upward and alternating grins at each of them. When they finished, Angel clapped enthusiastically.
“I love you, Angel,” her mother said one more time on the computer screen. She knelt, lifted Angel, and hugged her. Angel squeezed her arms around her mother’s neck.
Then the screen went dark.
“I cut the rest of that clip,” Angel said, very matter-of-fact. “Photoshop and a Macintosh. Mac’s the best. Anyway, the jerk holding the camera started going on about not having all day to stand there and hold it for complete strangers. It kind of ruins the rest of it. So I used Photoshop to get rid of him.”
I was touched. Not necessarily at the obvious sentiment on the DVD clip, but at Angel’s unawareness of her bravery. When
I lost my mother at her age, I was filled with resentment, self-pity and longing. It took me two decades to find my way back, and even after that, when I was prepared to admit it to myself, part of me still clung to the adolescence of suspicion and sorrow that had shaped my psyche and my inclination toward solitude.
“I got plenty more video clips,” Angel said. “I put them on a bunch of different DVDs. Instead of watching TV, I show them to Maddie all the time, mainly from the projector at night onto a wall. That way it’s closer to life-size, instead of watching it on TV through the DVD. Mama always said TV would rot my mind. So me and Maddie watch the DVDs of Mama and Grammie Zora, and I explain it all to Maddie. I think she knows what I’m saying too, though she don’t talk. I want Maddie to understand how Mama would have loved her just as much as Mama loved me. Good thing I got all those DVDs, huh?”
Better thing if you had a mother, I thought. I drew a deep breath and fought a slight quiver of sorrow for Angel that came with it. I wondered if she would think it all right for me to take her for a walk down King this afternoon, the way my mother had sometimes taken me.
“Good thing you have those DVDs,” I said.
Angel snapped the laptop closed and set it aside. She jumped off the bed but stood nearby, holding Maddie’s hand.
“How’s everything else?” I asked. “Is the little boy doing fine?”
Angel nodded. “I watch him close, just like you asked. When’s his mama coming to look after him?”
“Good question. I don’t have the answer,” I said. But I intended to do something about it, one way or another. “How about Maddie?”
“The nurse said that Maddie could go home tomorrow afternoon. That’s been a good couple of days. You sure you’re going
to pay for all this? Or maybe you’ve already found Timothy Larrabee and we can use what he pays me for the painting.”
“Timothy Larrabee.” I was startled to hear his name from her.
“I’m not stupid. I read that detective report before I gave it to you.”
“You’re definitely not stupid.”
“From what Bingo told you and from the detective report, you ought to be able to drive up to his front doorstep. You gonna see him this afternoon?”
“I told you already, I went to his church. I left a message for him. When I hear from him, I promise I’ll let you know.”
Then what was I going to do? Negotiate the sale of something that may or may not have been stolen? I needed to know more, and what little I had already learned simply hinted at what little I knew.
“Do more than let me know. Sell it to him. He offered a bunch of money for it. You tell him it’s for sale. Sounds simple
to me.”
“Angel,” I said, “I’d sure like to talk to your Grammie Zora.
I have a few questions. You give me her number, and I could call her this afternoon at her sister’s. Or is she traveling on her way back to Charleston to help you with Maddie?”
“She’s coming back later this week, but you can’t talk to her. I don’t want her knowing who bought the painting. Remember?”
“I do remember. So maybe you can tell me. It’s something Grammie Zora wanted Bingo to pass on to Timothy Larrabee. If
I understand the importance of that, it would help when I talk to Mr. Larrabee myself.”
Angel shrugged.
I took that as permission to continue. “Crown of thorns,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Angel stared up at the ceiling for long moments. “I don’t know if I want to tell you,” Angel finally said. “You being white and all. You’d laugh at voodoo.”
“Nope. I already know Grammie Zora’s a voodoo doctor.”
“You do?”
“That suffering root scared Bingo plenty.”
She grinned. “Maybe you’re not as white as you look.”
“Maybe I’d like you to tell me what you can about the crown of thorns.”
“Some man came by one night with his son, asking Grammie Zora to lay a curse,” Angel said. “It wasn’t good. Not at all.”
And she described it to me.
**
Grammie Zora’s altar was a dressing table in a room off the kitchen. The doorway from the kitchen was covered with strings of ruby red beads, and the windows of the room were draped with black. Little light reached the warped wooden floors, even during the height of day.
The dressing table was against the back wall; because the floor was uneven, chunks of folded paper beneath the rear legs kept the top of the table level. Grammie Zora kept most of her ritual supplies in the top drawer—red velvet mojo bag, parchment paper, dip pen, and dove’s blood bottled as ink for writing out magical intentions on the parchment, scales for weighing ingredients, and pestle and mortar.
The tabletop was covered with red velvet cloth. A white candle stood on the far right side and a black candle on the left.
A glass tumbler filled with springwater and witch’s salt served as
a centerpiece. For a voodoo doctor, this tumbler was the equilibriu
m point between the white candle’s representation of the positive forces and the black candle’s representation of the negative.
The entire back side of the altar was lined with incense burners, half filled with sand to keep the heat from damaging the altar cloth. Soot covered the wall directly behind, where years of rising smoke had baked particles into the thick gray paint.
It was to this room that Angel brought the father and son, where incense cloyed the air, swirling above Grammie Zora, where she sat hunched in an armchair.
The son wore greasy mechanic’s overalls, a tight cap over dreadlocks. He followed his father with reluctance, a man respectfully dressed in black pants, white shirt, and vest. The father walked with the stoop of a man who had lifted bricks and set them into mortar for an entire adult lifetime. The son moved identically, but his stoop, as Angel would soon discover, came from experiences much different.
Once the middle-aged man and his grown son were in the presence of Grammie Zora, the old woman nodded at Angel, giving the signal for Angel to depart. She did, but once beyond the ruby-bead curtain, stepped to the side to listen to the voices that carried clearly to her.
“Grammie Zora, we needs hep. De boy, he skay’d tel ’e mout’ dry up. Sum de dey, de boy so ’f’aid ’e foot tie tuh de groun’.”
From all her time around Grammie Zora, Angel knew Gullah well enough to understand. The boy was so scared his mouth was dried up. There were days he was so afraid to move,
it was like he had a foot tied to the ground.
“Please,” the son said. “You know I don’t want to be here. Talking mumbo jumbo just makes it worse.”
“You and me,” Grammie Zora said to the father in her deep, quiet voice. “We know the past and our traditions. It’s good that the young people are moving on, staying with the world as it goes. There’s no harm in talking so’s the boy will understand.”
The man sighed. “He maybe don’t believe. But I do. Just so you know.”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t be here,” Grammie Zora said reasonably. “Why’s the boy scared?”
“White folks. They took him. And I heard on different occasions they took two of his cousins too. What I want is you to lay a curse on them white folk, make them suffer the way my boy suffered, but worse.”
“You know where these white folks live?”
“Tell her, Son,” the father said.
“They said I tell anybody,” he replied, “they’re coming back to kill me.”
“Grammie Zora, she afraid of nobody,” the father said.
“But I am,” the son replied.
Another sigh from the father. “He come home one night, all wet and shaking. Could hardly talk to tell. But I gave him a little whiskey, and that helped him some. These white folks, they wore masks. Like the KKK. But they weren’t KKK, were they, Son?”
“I don’t want to say nothing. I’m scared already, you telling the story.”
“They wanted to baptize him to Jesus,” the father continued. “Said he was a sinner.”
“They said,” the son finally broke in, his voice high and excited, “they said I was a drug dealer, that my case had gone to court and even if the judge had thrown out the evidence, they would not.”
“My boy ain’t ever taken drugs,” the father said to Grammie Zora. “He was cleared of the charges. Those white men in the masks, they had it wrong.”
“They said justice had to be done,” the son said. “They said they were going to baptize me to Jesus through water and fire.”
“What they did,” the father said, “was dunk him in water again and again till he was close to drowning. Then they asked him would he accept Jesus into his heart before he died, otherwise he’d be going to hell for eternity.”
“I said yes.” The son had begun to cry. “Then came the fire.”
“Fire?” Grammie Zora asked.
“There’s no way to explain it ’cept to show you,” the father replied. “Son, lift your shirt.”
Angel could only rely on her ears. She heard a zipper as the son undid the front of his mechanics coveralls. Then rustling, as if the son was lifting off his shirt.
“Turn around, Son,” the father said. “Let Grammie Zora see your back. Show her why we want her to lay a curse on those white men.”
A long silence followed.
“You’ll lay a curse on those white folks?” the father asked.
Grammie Zora, sitting deep in her armchair, waited several heartbeats to answer.
“I believe I can stop this,” she said. “Leave it in my hands.”
**
“Angel,” I said when she finished telling me the story, “how long after this did Grammie Zora wait to send for Timothy Larrabee?”
“Next day she asked her detective friend to find him,” Angel answered. “Then, soon’s she had the report, she sent Bingo to fetch him.”
Chapter 15
I sat parked in my Jeep, with Retha’s Wal-Mart receipt in one hand and my cell phone in the other.
Earlier, I’d taken Angel for a walk around town. It had been fun to indulge her, and she more than repaid me with her wide-eyed appreciation of everything new to her.
Now it was five in the afternoon, and the temperature had cooled to become almost pleasant. It helped that I had parked in the market area opposite the Doubletree, where the hotel threw shadows on
the bustling of tourists. The top was off my Jeep, and I smelled the nearby horses. This was the staging area for carriage rides, and I was close enough to hear the snorts of blindered Clydesdale horses.
I had decided first to call the woman named Retha. My intention was to ask her if she wanted me to come and get her, as it didn’t seem I would be able to bring Billy Lee back to her. I wondered if she had been able to keep her secret, that Billy Lee was no longer in the household.
The cell phone is an amazing tool, a by-product of the wave of technology that has transformed the world in the time since
my childhood. It is the same technology that I take as much for granted as the next person; it never occurred to me that something as simple as caller identification on the other end of my call would lead to as much trouble as it did.
So I dialed the number on the Wal-Mart receipt, blithely unaware of yet another chain of events that my bumbling would set in motion.
“Yup,” a male voice answered after two rings.
“Hello,” I said. “Is Retha there?”
“Nope. And her husband don’t take kindly to men callers for her.”
The line went dead as the person on the other end of the phone hung up on me.
**
“Girl! You look good!” Camellia squealed with delight as she pranced around Angel in tight quarters of their secret place. “What done happen to you?”
Angel grinned. “Fancy hairdresser. And shopping. Today, with that guy I told you about. Nick. The one with a leg he can take off. We went to some fancy shops on King, and he caught me looking in the window at some clothes.”
“Girl, you look pretty but your face is sad.”
“You know I can’t stop thinking about Grammie Zora.”
Camellia reached across for Angel’s hand. They sat in silence for several minutes.
“There’s been other people gone dead,” Angel said. “We both seen that. But it wasn’t real because it was other people. Know what I mean?”
With her other hand, Camellia stroked Angel’s hair. Camellia was the only person Angel allowed that from.
“What do you think happens to people after they die?” Angel said.
Camellia leaned back again and hugged her knees to herself. “My sister asked me that. I told her we just get put in some dirt and bugs eat everything except our bones, and that’s what they use for those skeletons in the doctor’s office.”
“Yuck,” Angel said. “It’s bad enough people die. They don’t need other people to see their bones.”
“I didn’t say it was true,” Camellia answered. “I said that�
�s what I told my sister. I didn’t want to scare her by telling her most people get thrown in hell and burn forever.”
“Don’t do me no favors,” Angel said. “You know I’m always thinking about Grammie Zora. I wished she could see me like this.”
“Don’t get mad just yet,” Camellia said. “Remember how I told you ’bout my grampa, how he used to come round with candies and take me to the park and the zoo sometime?”
“The one that’s dead now.”
“Him. He took me to church some when I was little. Made me learn about God and Jesus. That God lives in heaven but he’s around us all the time, too.”
“You can’t see him but he’s everywhere.” Angel rolled her eyes. “And you say it’s me smoking Herman’s weed?”
“It’s what my grampa told me. See, you can talk to God by praying to him and he listens. Or to this guy named Jesus, some dude could walk on water and stuff like that. God sent him so we could learn more about God. Except when Jesus was telling people about God, they got mad at him and killed him and sent him back to God, so now Jesus is in heaven with God and steps in and helps God when there’s so many people praying all at once that God cain’t listen to ’em all.”
“So when you pray, what’s God do?”
Camellia sighed. “Mostly nothing, near as I can tell. I ask him all the time to make Herman be nice and it don’t work. But it cain’t hurt to keep at it because Grampa said God loves you and he’s waiting for you in heaven when you die. Sometimes when I’m scared and alone it makes me feel better thinking that.”
“Heaven . . .” Angel had a lot of theology to grapple with, and she wanted to be clear on the terms and definitions.
“Angels fly around and Grampa said you’re never hungry and you don’t got to worry about people hurting you.”
“That doesn’t sound bad like burning forever in hell.”
“Heaven’s what’s good. Hell is the other part I learned about on television,” Camellia said. “After Grampa died, and there was no one to take me to church, I used to watch church on television on Sunday mornings to learn more, but it didn’t take long for me to get scared and so I stopped. Folks on television like to yell about going down in this big fire and burning forever with the devil chasing you all the time.”
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