Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  “Will I learn that? Who’s Shango?”

  “Shango Yemaya’s son. We start tomorrow. See how much you able to take in.” Big Mama held up her hand, pink palm out. “One more question is all you got for today. Might wanna use it later.”

  They left the bedroom to hang the clean laundry from the clothesline, under trellises heavy with blooming vines. In the machine on the back porch behind them, a new load sloshed away. Royal was watching tv; the rest of the kids were over at the park. Oneida felt the way she often did after discussing adult topics with her parents. It was a combination of coziness and exhilaration, as if she were tucked safe and warm beneath the feathers of a high-soaring bird. A soft breeze lifted the legs of her pajama bottoms, made the top flap its arms as if it were flying.

  Mornings were for housework. Oneida wasted one whole question finding that out.

  Sundays they went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not to church. “God ain’t in there. Only reason to go to church is so people don’t talk bad about you,” Big Mama told them. “Anything they gone say about me they already said it.” They got dressed up the same as everyone else in the neighborhood, nodded and waved at the families who had no feud with Big Mama, even exchanging remarks with those walking their direction, toward Cass. But then they headed north by themselves.

  Big Mama ended each trip through the exhibits in the museum’s tea room. She always ordered a chicken salad sandwich with the crusts cut off. Ivy Joe and Luemma sat beside her, drinking a black cow apiece. Royal drew on all their napkins, floppy-eared rabbits and mean-looking monsters.

  Oneida’s favorite part to go to was the gift shop. Mainly because they had so many beautiful books, but also because she could touch things in there. Own them, if she paid. Smaller versions of the paintings on the walls, of the huge weird statues that resembled nothing on Earth except themselves.

  The second Sunday, she bought Mercy’s birthday card there. It was a postcard, actually, but bigger than most. The French lady on the front had sad, soft eyes like Mercy’s. On the back, Oneida told her how she was learning “lots of stuff.” It would have been nice to say more; not on a postcard, though, where anyone would be able to read it.

  In fact, in the hour a day Big Mama consented to teach her, Oneida couldn’t begin to tackle half what she wanted to know. Mostly she memorized: prayers; songs; long, often incomprehensible stories.

  Big Mama gave her a green scarf to wrap the seeds in. She said to leave them on Yemaya’s altar since Oneida shared a room with the three other girls. After that, she seemed to forget all about them. They were right there, but she never seemed to notice them. Her own necklace had disappeared. Oneida asked where it was three days in a row.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Big Mama answered every time.

  Oneida saved up a week’s worth of questions. She wrote them on a pad of paper, pale purple with irises along the edges, which she’d bought at the gift shop:

  1. Is your necklace in the house?

  2. Is it in this room?

  3. Is it in your closet?

  4. Under the bed?

  5. In your dresser?

  And so on, with lines drawn from one to another to show which to ask next, depending on whether the response was yes or no. On a separate page she put bonus questions in case Big Mama was so forthcoming some of the others became unnecessary. These included why her brother had hardly any chores, and what was the name of Yemaya’s husband, who had never turned up in any story.

  But when Big Mama called Oneida upstairs, she wound up not using any of them, because there on the bed was the basket again, open, with the necklace inside. “Seem like you learnt somethin about when to hole your peace,” said Big Mama. “I know you been itchin to get your hands on my eleke.” That was an African word for necklace. “Fact that you managed to keep quiet about it one entire week mean you ready for this.”

  It was only Oneida’s seeds; she recognized the scarf they were wrapped in. Was she going to have to put them somewhere else, now? Reluctantly, she set her pad on the bed and took them out of Big Mama’s hands, trying to hide her disappointment.

  “Whynchou open it?”

  Inside was another eleke, almost identical to Big Mama’s. The threads that bound the black and brown seeds together were whiter, the necklace itself not quite as long.

  Hers. Her eleke. Made out of Mercy’s gift, the magic seeds from the Blue Lady.

  “So. Ima teach you how to ask questions with one a two answers, yes or no. ’Bout what you gotta know. What you gotta. An another even more important lesson: why you better off not tryin to fine out every little thing you think you wanna.”

  Oneida remembered her manners. “Thank you, Big Mama.”

  “You welcome, baby.” Big Mama stood and walked to the room’s other end, to the mirror between her two altars. “Come on over here an get a good look.” Stepping aside, she pulled the black cloth off the mirror.

  The reflection seemed darker than it should be. Oneida barely saw herself. Then Big Mama edged in behind her, shining. By that light, Oneida’s thick black braids stood out so clearly every single hair escaping them cast its own shadow on the glass.

  “Mos mirrors don’t show the difference that sharp.” Big Mama pushed Oneida’s bangs down against her forehead. “Folks will notice it anyhow.”

  Oneida glanced back over her shoulder. No glow. Regular daylight. Ahead again. A radiant woman and a ghostly little girl.

  This was the second magic Oneida had ever seen. Mercy better believe me when I tell her, she thought. It was as if Big Mama was a vampire, or more accurately, its exact opposite. “How—” She stopped herself, not quite in time.

  “S’all right. Some questions you need an answer.” But she stayed silent for several seconds.

  “More you learn, brighter you burn. You know, it’s gonna show. People react all kinda ways to that. They shun you, or they forget how to leave you alone. Wanna ask you all kinda things, then complain about the cost.

  “What you gotta remember, Oneida, is this: there is always a price. Always a price. Only things up in the air is who gonna pay it, an how much.”

  No Mercy.

  When Oneida got home from Detroit, her friend was gone. Had been the whole time. Not moved out, but run away. Mizz Nichols didn’t know where. Florida, maybe, if she had left to take care of Emilio like she was saying.

  Mizz Nichols gave Oneida back the birthday card. Which Mercy had never seen.

  The white people’s house next to Mizz Curtis’s was almost finished being built. Everyone was supposed to keep away from it, especially Cousin Alphonse. While she’d been in Detroit, unable to watch him, he had jumped into the big basement hole and broken his collarbone. Even with his arm in a sling, Aunt Elise had barely been able to keep him away. Why? Was it the smell of fresh cut wood, or the way you could see through the walls and how everything inside them fit together? Or just the thought that it was somewhere he wasn’t allowed to go?

  No one wanted any trouble with white people. Whatever the cause of Cousin Alphonse’s latest fascination, Oneida fought it hard. She took him along when she walked Limoges to Vacation Bible School and managed to keep him occupied on Lincoln’s playground all morning. After school, they walked all the way to the river, stopping at Topoll’s to buy sausage sandwiches for lunch.

  So successful was this expedition that they were a little late getting home. Oneida had to carry Limoges eight blocks on her back. Aunt Elise was already parked in front and talking angrily to Dad in the tv room. It was all right, though. She was just mad about the house. She thought the people building it should put a big fence around it. She thought one of their kids would get killed there before long. She thanked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Oneida had enough sense to keep the others away from it.

  But after dark, Oneida went there without telling anyone. Alone.

  Below the hole where the picture window would go, light from the street lamp made a lopsided square. She opened
up her green scarf and lifted her eleke in both hands.

  Would it tell her what she wanted to know? What would be the price?

  Twirl it in the air. Let it fall. Count the seeds: so many with their pointed ends up, so many down. Compare the totals.

  The answer was no. No running away for Oneida. She should stay here.

  Her responsibility for Cousin Alphonse—that had to be the reason. The Blue Lady made sure kids got taken care of.

  Would Mercy return, then?

  Yes.

  When? Before winter?

  No.

  Oneida asked and asked. With each response her heart and hands grew colder. Not at Christmas. Not next summer. Not next autumn.

  When? And where was she? There were ways to ask other questions, with answers besides yes or no, but Big Mama said she was too young to use those.

  Finally she gave up guessing and flung the necklace aside. No one should see her this way. Crying like a baby. She was a big girl, biggest on the block.

  “Yemaya. Yemaya.” Why was she saying that, the Blue Lady’s name? Oneida had never had a chance to tell Mercy what it was. It wouldn’t do any good to say it now, when no one was in danger. She hoped.

  Eventually, she was able to stop. She wiped her eyes with the green scarf. On the floor, scattered around the necklace, were several loose watermelon seeds. But her eleke was unbroken.

  Yemaya was trying to tell Oneida something. Eleven seeds. Eleven years? Age eleven? It was an answer. She clung to that idea. An answer, even if she couldn’t understand it.

  On the phone, Big Mama only instructed her to get good grades in school, do what her mama and daddy said, and bring the seeds with her, and they would see.

  But the following summer was the riots. No visit to Big Mama’s.

  So it was two years later that Mom and Dad drove down Davenport. The immediate neighborhood, though isolated by the devastation surrounding it, had survived more or less intact.

  Big Mama’s block looked exactly the same. The vines surrounding her house hung thick with heavy golden blooms. Ivy Joe and Luemma reported that at the riot’s height, the last week of July, streams of US Army tanks had turned aside at Woodward, splitting apart to grind along Stimson and Selden, joining up again on Second. Fires and sirens had also flowed around them; screams and shots were audible, but just barely.

  Thanks to Big Mama. Everyone knew that.

  Oneida didn’t understand why this made the people who lived there mad. Many of them wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the street as Big Mama any more. It was weirder than the way the girls at Oneida’s school acted.

  Being almost always alone, that was the price she’d paid for having her questions answered. It didn’t seem like much. Maybe there’d be worse costs, later, after she learned other, more important things. Besides, some day Mercy would come back.

  The next afternoon, her lessons resumed. She had wrapped the eleven extra seeds in the same scarf as her eleke. When Big Mama saw them, she held out her hand and frowned.

  “Yeah. Right.” Big Mama brought out her own eleke. “Ima ask Yemaya why she wanna give you these, what they for. Watch me.”

  Big Mama had finally agreed to show her how to ask questions with answers other than yes or no.

  Big Mama swirled her necklace around in the basket top. On the altar, the silver-covered candle burned steadily. But the room brightened and darkened quickly as the sun appeared and disappeared behind fast-moving clouds and wind-whipped leaves.

  “It start out the same,” Big Mama said, “lif it up an let it go.” With a discreet rattle, the necklace fell. “Now we gotta figure out where the sharp ends pointin,” she said. “But we dividin it in four directions: north, south, east, an west.”

  Oneida wrote the totals in her notebook: two, four, five, and five.

  “An we do it four times for every question.”

  Below the first line of numbers came four, one, seven, and four; then six, zero, two, and eight; and three, three, seven, and three.

  “Now add em up.”

  North was fifteen, south was eight, east was twenty-one, and west was twenty.

  Big Mama shut her eyes a moment and nodded. “Soun good. That mean—” The brown eyes opened again, sparkling. “Yemaya say ‘What you think you do with seeds? Plant em!’”

  Oneida learned that the numbers referred to episodes in those long, incomprehensible stories she’d had to memorize. She practiced interpreting them. Where should she plant the seeds? All around the edges of her neighborhood. When? One year and a day from now. Who could she have help her? Only Alphonse. How much would it cost? Quite a bit, but it would be worth it. Within the Wallamelons’ reach, no one she loved would be hurt, ever again.

  Two more years. The house built on the vacant lot was once again empty. Its first and only tenants fled when the vines Oneida planted went wild, six months after they moved in. The house was hers, now, no matter what the mortgage said.

  Oneida even had a key, stolen from the safebox that remained on the porch long after the real estate company lost all hope of selling a haunted house in a haunted neighborhood. She unlocked the side door, opening and shutting it on slightly reluctant hinges. The family that had briefly lived here had left their curtains. In the living room, sheer white fabric stirred gently when she opened a window for fresh air. And leaned out of it, waiting.

  Like the lace of a giantess, leaves covered the housefront in a pattern of repeating hearts. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, sibling plants, self-sown from those she’d first planted around the perimeter, arched from phone pole to lamp post, encircling her home. Keeping it safe. So Mercy could return.

  At first Mom had wanted to move out. But nowhere else Negroes could live in this town would be any better, Dad said. Besides, it wasn’t all that bad. Even Aunt Elise admitted Cousin Alphonse was calmer, better off, here behind the vines. Mom eventually agreed to stay put and see if Dad’s promotion ever came through.

  That was taking a long time. Oneida was secretly glad. It would be so much harder to do what she had to do if her family moved. To come here night after night, as her eleke had shown her she must. To be patient. Till—

  Then.

  She saw her. Walking up the street. As Yemaya had promised. And this was the night, and Oneida was here for it, her one chance.

  She waved. Mercy wasn’t looking her way, though. She kept on, headed for Oneida’s house, it looked like.

  Oneida jerked at the handle of the front door. It smacked hard against the chain she’d forgotten to undo. She slammed it shut again, slid the chain free, and stumbled down the steps.

  Mercy was halfway up the block. The noise must have startled her. No way Oneida’d be able to catch up. “Mercy! Mercy Sanchez!” She ran hopelessly, sobbing.

  Mercy stopped. She turned. Suddenly uncertain, Oneida slowed. Would Mercy have cut her hair that way? Worn that black leather jacket?

  But who else could it be?

  “Please, please!” Oneida had no idea what she was saying, or who she was saying it to. She was running again and then she was there, hugging her, and it was her. Mercy. Home.

  Mercy. Acting like it was no big deal to show up again after disappearing for four years.

  “I tole you,” she insisted, sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of the empty living room. One small white candle flickered between them, supplementing the streetlight. “Emilio axed me could I come help him. He was havin trouble.…” She trailed off. “It was this one group of kids hasslin his friends.…”

  “All you said before you left was about how the Blue Lady—”

  “’Neida, mean to say you ain’t forgot none a them games we played?!” Scornfully.

  The price had been paid.

  It was as if Oneida were swimming, completely underwater, and putting out her hand and touching Mercy, who swore up and down she was not wet. Who refused to admit that the Blue Lady was real, that she, at least, had seen her. When Oneida tried to show her some of
what she’d learned, Mercy nodded once, then interrupted, asking if she had a smoke.

  Oneida got a cigarette from the cupboard where she kept her offerings.

  “So how long are you here for?” It sounded awful, what Mom would say to some distant relative she’d never met before.

  “Dunno. Emilio gonna be outta circulation—things in Miami different now. Here, too, hunh? Seem like we on the set a some monster movie.”

  Oneida would explain about that later. “What about your mom?” Even worse, the kind of question a parole officer might ask.

  Mercy snorted. “She ain’t wanna have nothin to do with him or me. For years.”

  “Mizz Nichols—” Oneida paused. Had Mercy heard?

  “Yeah, I know. Couldn make the funeral.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her high-top, then rolled the butt between her right thumb and forefinger, straightening it. “Dunno why I even came here. Dumb. Probably the first place anybody look. If they wanna fine me.” Mercy glanced up, and her eyes were exactly the same, deep and sad. As the ocean. As the sky.

  “They won’t.” The shadow of a vine’s stray tendril caressed Mercy’s cheek. “They won’t.”

  A disclaimer: the system of divination Big Mama teaches to Oneida is my own invention. It borrows heavily from West Africa’s Ifa, and it also owes a bit to China’s “I Ching.” To the best of my knowledge, however, it is not part of any authentic tradition.

  The Pragmatical Princess

  (with apologies to Jay Williams)

  Princess Ousmani had fallen asleep in her chains, from boredom. She woke to the weight of a dragon’s head resting uncomfortably on her stomach. One rough, scaly paw kneaded her left shoulder, pricking at her skin.

  Ousmani closed her eyes again. She did not believe in dragons, any more than she believed in the affrits and djinns of her father’s homeland, or the water-demonesses of Mali, where her mother had been born. “It is a horse,” she told herself. “A very large and very ugly horse.” Peering out under her long, dark lashes, she considered the dragon’s glittering snout, its gleaming, golden eyes. Its irises were formed like slits, as were the nostrils inches from her own, from which an occasional wisp of steam escaped.