by J. D. Horn
“And I,” Betty said, waving her finger in his mama’s face, “am not gonna have my babies take part in any of the old woman’s Hoodoo. You hear me?”
“Jilo,” his mama replied in her calmest voice, even though the angry set of her mouth and the crease that lined the center of her forehead told Jesse she was anything but relaxed, “is the last born. You want to be good and clear of the old woman”–her head rocked in indignation–“then we need to pass Jilo over the coffin.”
Jesse had almost reached his mother’s side when Betty caught sight of him. She pushed roughly past the mourners who didn’t have the sense to part between them like the Red Sea at the wave of Moses’s staff. “Gimme the girl.”
Jesse took a step backward and placed his hand over the back of Jilo’s little capped head. “It’s our way.”
“It may be your way, but it ain’t my way, and she’s my child.” Betty now stood within spitting distance of him, her chest and shoulders heaving. She flung out her arms, grasping at the linen of Jilo’s gown.
There was no way he was relinquishing the girl to those clenched and angry hands. “She’s my child, too.” For a moment, Betty’s face froze. Then her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head. Her lips parted, readying to speak the truth that his cousins had been whispering behind his back, the truth his gut already knew. The truth that his own heart told him was the greatest lie of all. But then she stopped. Her tongue darted out of her mouth and licked her lips instead.
She gestured with a wide wave of her arm that included him, his mother, the casket, and the baby. “All right, y’all heathens go right on ahead. Y’all do what you need to do.” She spun around and stomped off, heading toward the gate.
Opal and Poppy started to take off after her, but their mother swung her hand back, signaling for them to stay put. Jesse could read the worry and confusion on their little faces from a hundred paces. “You come up here with Daddy and Nana,” he called to them. They hesitated, keeping an eye on their mother’s receding back. “Come on,” he said and urged them forward with a wave of his free hand. The two girls joined hands and walked forward with some lingering trepidation.
Jesse’s mother positioned herself on the opposite side of the coffin. He shifted Jilo off his shoulder, taking her in both hands. She gurgled with laughter, a bit of drool falling from the side of her mouth. Her black eyes twinkled with such love and intelligence, so much soul. It was like she’d already lived a thousand lives, and held every secret of the universe in her chubby, damp hands. He pulled her in close and placed a kiss on her forehead, then reached her over the casket to his mother.
His mama’s calloused, yet gentle, hands brushed his. As he let Jilo drop into her grasp, his ears were met with a loud pop, and his eyes registered a flash of bluish light. Everyone stood there gaping in silent amazement. Jilo squealed happily and reached her chubby arms across the void of his nana’s grave toward him, a joyous mystery playing in her eyes.
TWO
It was May who had found her mama, and she had covered her mama’s face with a towel before alerting the others, hoping to spare her family from the sight. Her mama hadn’t gone easy. Still, there were those, including her sisters, who’d insisted on laying eyes on their mama before they could accept she was truly gone. Their souls now carried the same burden May’s did.
The mortician, artist though he was, had not succeeded in erasing the look her mama’s passing had left on her face. He had gummed her eyes and sewed her mouth closed, but her features remained a frozen, bloodless gray—her brow raised and creased, her jaw jutting forward, her neck arched in an eternal scream. May and her sisters had agreed it was best to keep the coffin closed to spare the others.
It was the magic that had killed her, May felt sure of that. May didn’t know a thing about working magic, but she’d grown up feeling it try to work her. It was always pushing to break through the dam her mama had helped her build up against it. Always looking for holes in her dreams while she was sleeping, whispering seductively while she was awake, promising her quick solutions whenever her problems grew heavy on her shoulders. But no. Her mama had put the fear of the magic in her, and May was bound and determined never to go down the path her mama had traveled.
The night before her death, May’s mama had come around in the wee hours and let herself into May’s home unannounced, just about scaring her out of her wits. May had roused to find the older woman bent over her, the smell of rum thick on her warm breath. “Don’t you forget your promise to your mama,” her mother said, her lips pressing against her ear. “When your mama’s gone, the magic may come after you good and hard, but you don’t let it touch you.”
Her mama reached down and placed the palm of her hand along May’s jaw. “You hear me?” She released May and lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the mattress.
“Yes, ma’am,” May said, pushing herself up on her elbows. “You okay, Mama?”
“Your mama, she’s just tired. Worn out.” She lay down beside May, and May shifted to make room, wrapping an arm around the frail woman once she was settled. “She’s been fighting those devils too long, but she’s gonna put an end to it now, one way or the other. Even if it kills her.”
May didn’t ask who “those devils” were, or just how her mama planned to handle them. Getting Tuesday Jackson to share more than she had a mind to speak had always been an impossible task. A direct question would have been met with silence. May lay there quietly, hoping the rum she smelled on her mother’s breath might loosen her tongue, but it didn’t. Soon, May drifted off. That morning she awoke, as she always did, well before dawn, only to find her mother had already risen and left the house.
Now that May’s mama was gone, May wished she hadn’t given herself over to sleep that night. She would never lay eyes on her mama again, at least not on this side of the veil.
May knelt beside the filled grave, laying a piece of a broken cup there. Most of the family had already taken off, heading south to May’s house by car or by foot, Jilo’s name on all their lips. They’d be talking for years to come, no doubt, about how May’s youngest granddaughter seemed to have been kissed by the magic. Jesse himself didn’t believe Jilo was his, at least not by blood, so May didn’t know what to make of the spark that had passed from the grave to the girl. In this moment, she had neither the time nor the strength to consider its significance. It was only a short walk from the cemetery down Ogeechee Road to the dirt road leading to her house, so even those relatives inclined to take a more leisurely pace had probably found their way to the turnoff. They all knew the way, even though most of them didn’t live around here.
Her mama had done her darnedest to convince May and her siblings to get the hell out of Savannah, encouraging them to get as far away as they could. She’d succeeded to some degree with May’s brother and sisters, which had left the extended family scattered from Augusta to Jacksonville. “Not far enough,” had been her mama’s staple reply whenever May complained that her sisters lived too far for regular visits. Her brother, Louis, had made it as far as Macon, but he was gone now, too, buried in a plot half a state away, mixed in with his wife Miriam’s people.
May, well, she’d married Reuben, and his job, as well as his inclination, had demanded they stay in Savannah. May glanced over at the empty plot between her husband and her mother, both chilled and comforted by the knowledge that she would one day take her rest there.
But there’d be no rest for her today. Even though many of her kin had come bearing baskets of food to share, she’d have to see to feeding the horde descending on her home before packing them back into their vehicles or pointing them north toward the train station. Family as thick as a swarm of locusts today, and nothing but loneliness to contend with tonight.
The caretaker of the cemetery stood at a distance, leaning on the same rake he would use to scrape the grave clear of the pottery as soon as the last of the family was out of sight. The cemetery belonged to the city, after all, and Savannah ha
d no more room for the family’s traditions than her fool of a daughter-in-law did.
May was surprised to see a young white man approach the caretaker. Even from this distance, which made it hard to get a good look at his features, May could see his suit appeared well made, expensive. His light blond hair caught the light. May wondered what interest this buckra could have in an old black woman’s funeral, his gaze fixed as it was on the dwindling party. She watched as the caretaker nodded his head again and again, like it was on a loose spring. He seemed anxious to convey his understanding of—or perhaps agreement to—the white man’s words. The two conversed for another minute or so, then the white man reached out and patted the caretaker’s back. He turned away and headed toward a shiny black car waiting just outside the cemetery gate. As the buckra drew near, another man, dressed in livery, rushed to open the car’s back door at the exact moment of his arrival.
“You recognize that fellow?” she asked Jesse with a small nod at the car that was already pulling away. An overtired Poppy began crying and tugging on her father’s pant leg.
“No ma’am,” Jesse said, holding out the baby for her to take. She accepted Jilo from him and wrapped her in a tight embrace. Jesse knelt to scoop up Poppy. “Probably just someone looking for the entrance of the white section. We should get back to the house now. Folk are there already, I bet.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but seems to me that a fellow who can afford a car like that would have sent his driver to ask directions, not come on his own. No,” she shook her head, feeling a chill run down her spine, “I think that man wanted to get a good look at us, at what we’re doing here.”
“I recognize him,” her sister-in-law Martha said, drawing near and leaning in like she had good gossip to share. “That there is that Maguire boy. He’s probably come looking for your mama’s help.”
It was true, her mama had occasionally met those seeking her assistance at the cemetery’s entrance. Still, the young man’s presence didn’t sit right with her.
“Help for what?” May found her gaze turning back to the caretaker, who shifted uneasily from foot to foot under the weight of her stare.
“It was all in the papers yesterday. His father, big man Maguire, had a bad stroke the same night your mama passed. Looks like he might not be long for this earth either. Reckon the doctors told the boy they can’t help his daddy, so he came looking to see if your mama could.”
“Well, he came a bit late for Nana’s help,” Jesse said, hefting Poppy up onto his shoulders.
“That he did,” May said, placing her hand behind Jilo’s tiny head and hugging the girl close. “That he did.”
THREE
Cousins, uncles, and aunties were spread out around Jesse’s mama’s house and yard. The older folk, those around Nana Tuesday’s age, sat crammed tight inside the darkened living room, taking their turns at soughing, snoring, and fanning themselves as one reminiscence after another rose up and got passed around, either prompting smiles or birthing discord depending on the memory and how it was either recalled or misremembered. Family members his mama’s age and younger had taken to the out-of-doors, sprawling out on blankets beneath the shade afforded by the tall oaks at the rear edge of the property, praying for a breeze.
Jesse’s aunties by blood hovered around the kitchen, getting under his mama’s feet, arguing over the cooking. Aunties through marriage, the wives of his father’s kin, knew better than to join the fray, choosing instead to watch over the children, both the little sleeping ones like Jilo, and the wild, older ones, who were roughhousing and running around, shrieking with laughter until someone would remind them of the passing they’d come to honor. For a time, the laughter would fall silent, replaced by an unnatural, though blessedly temporary, stillness.
Jesse didn’t like the quiet. When it got quiet he could hear his family’s whispers.
That his mama owned this place outright stood as a matter of pride for the whole family. Not many folk around Savannah, white or colored, owned their own houses, and this one even had enough land for a vegetable garden. Jesse’s daddy had been a cook on one of the Central Railroad’s executive cars. He’d worked for years to squirrel away the money for this house, not wanting to marry until he had a home for his wife. That was why he’d married a woman sixteen years his junior. “I was his queen,” his mama often said of his daddy, “and this place here,” she would add with a tone of solemn pride, “was his castle.”
Just a bit south of the cemetery, the house was bounded by a creek and a thick cluster of live oaks and pines, which, to Jesse’s childhood imagination, seemed to go on forever. He knew this house and its land would come to him one day, after his own mama died. Now, though, he and his family lived in the city’s new projects in Yamacraw, joined hips and shoulders to their neighbors with barely the room to spit between. His mama wanted them here with her, but, much to Jesse’s shame, blood between Betty and his mama was bad.
The silent glares of disapproval his mama cast at Betty were proof enough of her disappointment in Jesse’s choices. She’d sacrificed to get him into the university so that he could become a lawyer or a doctor. Not the dockworker he’d become to support his young wife. Betty refused to live under his mother’s roof, where, to be fair, she had never been made to feel welcome. Instead, she used the dusty and crowded streets of Yamacraw to remind him of his failures without ever having to say a word.
By any right, the front porch should be sagging under the weight of his extended family, but Jesse sat alone on the freshly lacquered white swing, beneath the fading haint-blue overhang. His kin was either avoiding him or giving him breathing space. Maybe it came down to a little bit of both. Jesse didn’t really give a good goddamn which it was. He’d chosen this seat for a reason, and that was to keep an eye on the bend of the road in anticipation of Betty’s return.
The screen door cried out as Aunt Miriam, his Uncle Louis’s widow, came out onto the porch, carrying a plate covered with rice and a shrimp-and-okra gumbo. A thick slice of golden cornbread crowned the feast. “Your mama sent this out to you. She wants you to eat.”
Jesse didn’t want to eat. His pride was hurting. Still, his stomach rumbled at the scent of ginger, garlic, and bay leaf riding beneath the hot sweetness of cinnamon. Biting his lip to keep it from quivering, he shook his head and waved her away.
Shame was riding him like the hag, drawing the very breath out of him. The other men, the ones old enough to be married, had their plates brought out to them by their wives. Even when she was around, Jesse’s wife wasn’t the kind to go fetching him anything. But after strutting out of the graveyard, Betty had taken off in a direction that decidedly wasn’t homeward. No, she hadn’t gone home, and she sure as shooting wasn’t here. Nobody said a word, but a knowing look passed from face to face, a silent telegraph conveying a dirty supposition of where Betty was headed: off to a man who decidedly wasn’t Jesse.
His aunt Miriam’s face fell, making him feel all the worse. Jesse realized she’d been using the opportunity to look after him to fill the gap her husband’s death had left in her heart. “I’m sorry,” he began to say, but she’d already turned away, the scream of the screen door drowning out his mumbled regrets.
His gaze drifted back to the gray sandy path that passed for a drive. Empty. Dry and dusty. He found himself praying for rain. A good solid downpour that would drive his nattering family with their sly smiles clean off his mama’s land. A new flood that would wash down the whole world, rinsing away its sins. And Jesse, the new Noah, could ride out the storm with those he loved, on a tiny floating island built by his own hand. No other men to catch Betty’s eye, no other man to fill the spot in her heart or her womanhood, the two parts of her he’d once thought she held sacred for him.
He felt eyes on him. “I cooked this to your nana’s tastes.” His mama stood before him, grasping the plate he’d refused. Jesse was surprised he hadn’t heard her approach. He wondered how many other things happened right under his nose
without him noticing. “You’d be showing disrespect not to eat. To your nana and me both.” His mama held the plate out to him and waited. “Baby,” she said after a moment, her tone comforting. “It’s yo’ girl everyone talkin’ about, not your wife.”
Defeated, he took the plate, but lowered his eyes. “And what they’re saying is that Jilo isn’t my girl.” He felt a pang in his heart. “But she is. Even if she isn’t, she is.”
“Of course she is,” she said, “and you send anyone who says otherwise to me. I’ll clear things up for them right quick.” His lowered gaze came to rest on her hands. She was rubbing the knuckles of her left hand with the fingers of her right. Jesse could tell her arthritis was bothering her; her joints were swollen, and holding the plate had seemed like work for her. Arthritis had flared up in her early, way too early. His nana could have used her magic to ease his mama’s suffering, but he knew she had never offered, and his mama had never asked.
“No,” Mama continued, “what they saying is ‘Old Tuesday’ left a bit of her soul with Jilo. They saying Jilo gonna have the power now.” She sat down at his side, the old swing complaining about the added burden. “Eat,” she said, tilting her chin down and looking at him with one eye opened a tad wider than the other. He knew this look. He’d grown up seeing it creep onto his mama’s face right before she lost patience with him.
He took a bite. Then another. It was delicious, but his heart remained heavy. He let the fork rest on the plate. “You think they’re right?”
His mama shook her head. “No, that was just Mama kissing the little one good-bye. She was telling us she was proud we were honoring her in the old way, but she took whatever magic she had with her.” She reached out and lifted his chin, turning his face toward her. “You and I both know she didn’t want her magic to live on past her. That’s why she never showed me any of it. That’s why she never let us rely on it. She didn’t want none of that for us.”