by Cynthia Bond
Her husband joined the group. The men dropped their arms and parted. He stood taller among them. Without moving a muscle they all seemed to bend down to him. Otha felt a flush of heat through her skin, as if she were standing in front of the pit fire as well.
From this distance Otha watched the men’s blurred images take shape and form. Jaws and noses assembled into familiar faces. Otha’s breath halted as she saw they were men she already knew. Friends—deacons from her husband’s congregation. Men she had shared hymn books with for years, who had worn their Sunday best as they carried the brass collection plates. Men with patient smiles and familes. What were they doing standing before these flames? Otha lifted herself a bit more to better see their expressions. Even at that distance there was something in their eyes that seemed to crackle with the flames. Something she had never seen on Sundays or at P & K or at town functions. It sent her heart into her throat and made it hard to swallow.
In the red gold of the flames, Otha saw two men bring out a speckled calf, white with red dots—it looked like the Simpkins heifer calf not more than six months old. Eyes tender as creatures are who are new to the earth. The calf was scared. A baritone in the church choir, Josua Perdy flapped open a white sheet with strange markings on it—a black circle and twisting lines—and spread it on the ground. She watched as Deacon Marcus, the man who always bought his wife a bouquet of flowers on Friday, slowly tipped the calf over—it fell with a loud thump and let out a high, lonely mewl. Like a frightened child. Like a—and they bound its feet with a red rope. Tight, too tight, crisscrossed its legs. The animal began crying, long moans rising above the flames. Otha didn’t know she was crying too, until she heard the soft drops on the leaves beneath her chin.
As if part of an orchestrated dance, men in slick city clothes and polished shoes stepped out of the shadows and joined the circle. Men she had never seen—tall, high-yellow Creole men who looked like they had come from New Orleans. As they joined the circle, one by one, they handed her husband what looked like folded cash, each nodding, until her husband’s pockets were bulging and full. They were paying for something yet to come. Yet to—Otha felt the stars tilting, the world spin … it was too much, the thing to come.
She heard her husband speaking to the men. Their eyes rapt, alive. She could only make out a phrase here: “… at the peak of …,” then nothing, so she pushed against the wall of fear and crept even closer until the dangerous melody of his voice fingered the loose edges of her hair.
The calf’s sides were rising and falling like a bellows, skin so thin near its ribs. The heifer began to quiet some, but kept a steady beat, its hollow call unanswered. No mama. No field of grass. Only fire and the eyes of those men.
“Welcome all. Welcome all. Obeah, will you draw the circle?”
Obeah, a squatted man, opened a heavy tan sack and poured red powder in a wide circle around the men.
Otha looked around the forest, hoping for something to stop. This. To stop it. She looked up. The sky was heavy and a mist hung about the tops of the trees and the calf was groaning low. Nothing. No one was coming.
“We want to welcome our out-of-town members, come down here to experience the way we Sabine Negroes do our business.” Her husband smiled so pretty at the crowd and gave off a little wink. She had never seen him look so handsome.
“Now y’all, we got us two initiates joining us today if they got the grist.”
Two young boys, who looked to be about twelve, turned. Otha gasped as she recognized young Chauncy Rankin. His face fresh and upturned as if he was getting a medal. His younger brother Percy was the second. The men formed a tighter circle. Otha crept closer, and crouched lower still. Little Chauncy Rankin—he’d once stolen a pecan pie from her kitchen window.
All of them, all of the men began speaking into the flames, but they weren’t words, they were chanting something that Otha couldn’t make out. Words like snakes slithering from their mouths that made Otha’s hands fly to her belly, where she imagined her soul to be.
Her husband lifted his hands with a wide embellishment he’d never wasted on his congregation. His voice rang clear through the air. “I speaks these truths, my brothers. They done come into they manhood high time, so I speaks to them and to the rest of you who done forgot.”
Penter Rankin called out, “Tell the truth!”
The Reverend flashed the grace of his body against the flames and leapt up onto a stone. “Now Brothers, I was a little boy when my papa sat me down and tell me this. Just like his papa told him. Just like I’m telling y’all cuz I don’t want you getting down on your knees asking no God for nothing, not no fine clothes or no grand house. Don’t be asking for no wife to love you, or to feed your children neither. I seen men doing that whiles the whole family starve bug-eyed and them still down on they knees when they carried the youngest one out. I don’t want no man on earth to be that kind of a fool.”
Peeking through the brush, Otha watched her husband point his long, firm arm like an arrow into the sky and say, “That man up there? That one on his Roman chair? With his snow whiskers and his icicle nose? That White man what breathe out frost when he speaks, with them froze blue eyes like a lake in winter? You got to know he already done picked out who he favor and it ain’t the likes of you. It ain’t nobody with a lick a color spread over they skin. Not them he seen fit to drag down into four hundred year of slavin’. Not my grandpa who died in them salt swamps of Florida. It ain’t your brother Tom got lynched over in Jasper, and dragged some twenty miles ’til they wasn’t nothing left of him to bury.”
The men started stamping. “Call it Brother Jennings.”
“You ain’t got to look far or wide to see whose ass he lean down and wipe anytime they ask him. God ain’t nothing but a butt boy for rich White men. He let them do whatever thing they want, then make they way as smooth as glass. But White man, he ain’t content with all that. He got to rule it all. God his mistress, but he wed to the Devil. How many times we find his workings in them woods? How much our blood he feed his soil, how many upside down crosses he be burning. They been courting the Devil since before Jesus walked the earth. And they doing it still. Back to the day Eve spawned them.”
The men pushed closer, their faces hungry for his words like dogs waiting to fetch.
Otha watched her husband’s eyes go black as he talked about Eve. He told the old story of how she alone baked evil in the bread of the world. Then he added, “Cuz who you think give birth to every nature of pestilence on this old planet earth? Locust and yellow fever—cotton blight and slavery—and when she took that bite of the apple, she open her legs and out come all of that, and worst of all—out come the White man!”
The Reverend looked at the two young initiates. “You just boys and just catching on to they curse. You got to know they born with it, but when they get they first blood it’s too late. One day you’ll find yourself wrapped up in knots for the want of a woman. You gone want her touch and she gone make sure you do by how she parade in front of you, but the second you reaches out she got to say no. Why? Cuz it’s the nature of woman to make you shamed of the desires she done give to you in the first place. Cuz she carry evil inside her like a disease she don’t never catch but can’t help but spread.
“So hard as it might be for y’all boys to understand, we got to get them early. Got to snatch they evil when we can still use it against any enemy what come to cut us down.
“Some folks say slavery and the whip make us crazy. Some say we got so twisted up with pain and hate so we do this here. But is that true, brothers?”
The men screamed out like someone held a knife to their throats. “No! No Brother!”
“I say unto y’all, we as wise as Solomon and learn to use what we got, to take the reins of evil. We needs us some vessels to do just that!!!”
There was a pause in the crowd. Her heart pounding in her mouth, Otha watched as a giant of a man brought six little girls into the center of the circle. They were crying.
Weeping. Little crumpled girls who looked like they had been kept in a dark box, cramped, wincing in the light of the fire. Next she saw Papa Bell’s grandbaby, little Ruby so pretty, her face like a heart. She wasn’t dirty, but had on a pretty blue dress. A blue bow in her hair. Why!? What are they gonna do to that girl? Those girls? What are they—? Otha almost stood. Almost. But God or the Devil held her tight to where she crouched.
“And these little ones here?” A practiced treble rang in her husband’s voice as he preached hellfire. “Don’t be mistook by they age, like a rattler and they poison, they come of age they gonna bite us.”
The circle of men shouted out “Heya!” and “Speak it Brother, Speak it!”
Otha watched in horror as he pushed six crying girls forward.
A power surged through her husband so that he shook from head to toe, reached his hand into the heavens and screamed, “And do you know how we take they evil?”
The men answered, “Yes! We do, Brother Jennings!”
“How we do it?!”
A man hollered like a hammer. “We teaches them!!!”
“What do we teach them?”
A flurry of voices screaming on top of each other:
“How to use they lust to please us—!”
“—so we can take—”
“—take they power back.”
“Yes, my Brothers! Take it back! And what Make They Power Stronger!?”
Obeah, the man who had poured the powder around the circle, answered. “The blood make it so.” Otha didn’t notice until he spoke that the man had a butcher knife. That he was standing over the calf.
The Reverend said, his voice as flat as death, “Them gals is for y’all to do with as you please. Them that paid go first.”
Otha saw one of the girls run and try to break out of the circle, only to be grabbed hard and thrown back with the others, so she crumpled her body and stood still. One of the city men pulled her towards him and held her possessively, arms crossed over her chest.
“But this one …” Her husband gently took hold of Ruby. He held her face and gave her a smile. “This one belong to me. Ain’t nobody else touch her. She a prize heifer, worth a-plenty. We send her out where she collect the White man’s power and bring it back to me so’s I can lead y’all.”
The drums began. The girls were all crying, sobbing uncontrollably. Ruby looked glazed and accepting.
Otha heard a sound, a high careening cry, she looked and saw that the knife had been plunged into the calf’s neck by Obeah. Its legs bucking, writhing, blood spurting on the white sheet.
She jumped, so that the branch broke that she rested upon. The Reverend peered in her direction and searched the dark of the woods. Otha watched little Ruby do the same. In a split second the child’s eyes saw her. The Reverend took a step towards the woods, and Otha tasted bile in the back of her throat. She watched the girl Ruby take her husband’s hand and turn him away from her. She saw her husband’s face twist into a jagged grin as he called out to the men. “Now don’t break ’em y’all! They for training! We gots to keep them whole!”
Penter Rankin ran up and threw an ale barrel full of white powder into the pit fire and the flames turned bright blue and green. A wall of blue smoke filled the clearing. It rolled so high and thick it seemed to cover the sky, so that Otha could only see shapes and bits and pieces of men and girls. Arms pulled, dragged off. Pants … legs running. Screams. Screams of the children. The dying heifer calf moaning. Pain. Red on one face. A child’s cheek red. A man’s hands.
Otha was frozen. She wanted to run. Wanted to tell. But who would she tell? Where would she—where would she??? But she waited because, maybe, maybe one day she could tell God. He wasn’t listening now … But later, when the blue smoke was gone. When he could see into the fire. See what they were doing. She would tell the Father so he could set it straight.
Then, then she couldn’t wait—Otha lifted to go, to run, towards or away she did not know, but a hand slapped over her mouth. Another over her eyes. She fought, fought like life was a treasure that she would die to protect. Another set of hands held her down now. She tried to bite, and scream, she kicked into the hands holding her legs. She heard another scream pealing through the trees, a child was screaming louder, louder still. She managed to lift up, against the weight of hands—bodies. Someone punched her hard on the back of her head and she fell forward. In a second, a shock jerked through her, blocking all transmission, so that a jangle of images cut through her. She came to—minutes? hours? later, jerking on the dumb earth. They were still around her. Her hands were moving, moving against the carpet of dry needles, eating at the earth with her hands. Another jolt shot through her and scrambled the last of her reason. Time stopped and crushed in on itself, too too much for her tender spirit to fathom. Otha was shut down, and passed into unconsciousness.
She awoke the next morning while the sky was still gray. The sun was miles from the horizon. She leapt up and hit her shin against the log, reminding her of where she was. She had soiled herself. There were coals burning where the fire had been. They had—the men. The back of her head ached. They had—had someone hit her? They? Who? Something tilted inside her. She fell against the log. It was as if a scale had been tipped in the night. Something had happened, but she scratched in the ashes of her mind and could not remember a thing. Had there been a fire? Who stood before it? She had followed her husband? Or had she run from him? Little webs stretched before her eyes with spiders that devoured every thought before it could surface. Nothing remained of the night before so she walked in the dim gray pale of morning through the forest path; her reason snagged on a tree branch. She felt something tickling her thighs and saw that her hands were lacing again. She thought to stop them but they persisted against all signals to stop. So she walked home, opened her door. She scrubbed her privates with a soaped face cloth and climbed into her bed beside the Reverend, sleeping like death.
Easter morning found her awake under the three-star quilt she had made three falls ago, hands furious, her husband snoring beside her. She leapt out of bed and fell down again. Balance lost, the floor slanted until she slanted her head to meet the new angle and was able to walk that way. She put on her robe and fixed breakfast, glad to have something to occupy her hands; holding a spatula and flipping pancakes proved manageable. Keeping them busy was best so she cleaned while the household prepared for Easter Sunday. Otha looked at her husband and felt sick but she could not place where this feeling had been born. He chewed and swallowed and pulled back his chair and put on his hat. He always went early so she found the tail of a voice in her throat and croaked out, “Good day.” He glared at her, but there was nothing unusual about that. She swept and scrubbed and told Ephram and Celia to go on without her, that she had plenty much to see to before the picnic. Ephram kept asking her what was wrong, what was wrong, until she was sharp with him and told him to go to service. Celia gave her her father’s glare. Long a disappointment to her fourteen-year-old daughter, this was nothing new either. Once they walked away, what was left of Otha died right there on the kitchen floor. She felt all that was familiar: the heart that beat for her children; the morning quiet of her garden; even the ever-present low note of sorrow that ran through her marriage; the lavender scent of her mother; her daddy … every memory, every bit of her retreating, retracting. She burrowed like a parasite into little pockets in her body, then she barricaded them from the inside, until there was nothing, until all that she had been ceased to be.
Some new thing emerged that thought to lift her form and walk her into the bedroom. This new thing took off her robe and proceeded to get dressed. It tied her shoes and put on her hat. It decided that it would be best, if she could not stop her hands from lacing, to carry the lacing tat and pretend to work on it whenever someone glanced in her direction. This new being never considered not walking to the picnic because it lived under the sway of the Reverend’s moods. He would already be livid that she had not come to the church
. Why had she not come to the church? No, the floor had had to be cleaned and the breakfast dishes washed and so she couldn’t go but she had wanted to, she would tell the Reverend when she saw him. She would explain to him very clearly, very slowly, so that she would make sure she was saying the words correctly because something was tilting her thoughts as well, mixing up the correct sequence. She was planning exactly what she would say as she walked over the hill, which is why the first scream was such a surprise. A little bug of memory collided with the web of her mind again. A child somewhere was screaming bloody murder, but it was devoured just as the Reverend punched her in the face.
The rest of the day was a blur of women and glimpses of Ephram sobbing. Her memory spitting out a dragonfly, in the form of her husband standing beside some girls, but why was he there and he wasn’t really there but why did the girls turn into blue smoke? When she mentioned the girl in the forest he had begun beating her in earnest but even that felt distant, except she needed to see Ephram and tell him something about his bed, perhaps to take a red thing from there, but what, she could not fathom. And then she was too weak to stop someone from hurting her boy, and a pain ripped through her soul as she was torn from him, ripped like a spider from its web, and she was hit so hard the buckboard raced to her head and held it all the way to hell.
The sleeves they wrapped around her were too tight around her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe in deep enough to sustain consciousness. She kept waking up gasping for air and then passing out again. Finally an angry White woman did something with buckles and she was able to stay awake, and then she wished she hadn’t. She found that she was wearing a diaper and that it had been soiled more than once. She was in a room with four other Colored women all wrapped similarly. When she arrived the Reverend had taken her into a room and told a White woman that she had tried to throw her children down the well and had then run naked to the Easter picnic, that she was crazy and that he loved her but what could he do. The White woman had put her hand on her Black husband and patted his back then she had shoved Otha into another room, getting the little jacket over her bruised body. When she cried for her son the woman had pushed her hard against the wall.