Red Now And Laters

by Marcus J. Guillory

  “Why you hangin’ around me?” I asked a little more politely.

  He placed his hands on my shoulders. They were hot.

  “I want you to remember everything your daddy taught you. Then I want you to forget it, every bit of it,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause a man without a knife don’t get into too much trouble. But a man with a knife gotta keep it sharp.”

  “My daddy know that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then why he taught me that stuff about you?”

  Sonnier smiled and leaned his head onto my shoulder.

  “Three knives are better than two, Nephew. Your daddy and that priest told you about God. I’m gonna show you God,” he said with authority and obligation.

  The scent of burned wood hung in the air.

  I wasn’t scared of him now. In fact, I wasn’t scared of shit. For the first time, for the very first time, I knew I had something. Power. And I liked it.

  We walked outside into the woods. Despite my initial fear of him, Nonc Sonnier was a thoughtful, caring man, or so I thought. I was still making my mind up about him and this strange gift that somehow was connected to him. He knew I was curious.

  “How did I, I mean, you end up?” I started but didn’t quite know how to ask. Father had told me about his arrival in Basile and his eventual lynching in 1953.

  “You’re wondering how real this all is, right?” he asked.

  “Oui,” I responded.

  “Most magic starts from love. Not power. Love is stronger, more personal, more intense than anger or hate. The feeling of love brings us closest to God. And with this closeness, we learn who we really are. And what we are truly capable of doing,” he said calmly.

  I didn’t understand, so he elaborated . . .

  * * *

  1. “The lwa live in the blood.”

  twenty-four

  sweet evangeline

  Basile, Louisiana, c. 1881

  On May 14, 1881, on a farm near Basile, Ameline Richard gave birth to a fair-haired baby boy whom she named Leon. It was an easy birth for the young Ameline, despite the fact that nobody wanted her to carry the child to term. Nobody except me. Ameline Marie Richard of the Richards from L’Anse des Rougeau—part Cajun farmers, part redneck scoundrels—was the very personification of the virgin Cajun belle, saved from sin and judgment and coloreds. Her father, Jean-Louis Richard, was one of Duson’s speculator-thugs charged with ripping off les gens du couleur libres of their land in the name of Americanization and the almighty Southern Pacific Rail. For six months Jean-Louis had managed to sequester Mlle. Richard within the curtilage of their small cabin on the banks of Bayou des Cannes. However, M. Richard’s floor plan betrayed his noble attempt to preserve his daughter’s virtue. Her room was located at the rear of the house with a large window that opened to the listless bayou, which hosted bullfrogs and bewhiskered catfish. Occasionally, a hyper bigmouth bass would spring from the water with eyes set on tempting dragonflies that hovered above, dancing and gallivanting for the honey-haloed ingénue who watched by her window. Sweeter than any spring rain.

  On summer evenings she found herself drawn to the open window in her bedroom as loup-garous and bayou owls moaned to her delight. Every evening after supper and a Rosary, young Ameline walked past her rag dolls from New Orleans (the ones she petitioned Papa Noël for with extra-special prayer and crudely written letters in passable French) to the window. Bayou des Cannes called to her.

  Soon she began waking up with the first rooster to witness the quiet of dawn on the bayou, when even insects are still asleep or drunk or dead. The air stands still at summer’s dawn in La Louisiane, still and static to the point of being downright thick. Thick air. Thick bayou air that can intoxicate. And mornings and evenings found Ameline Richard becoming a dedicated toper of the thick air of Bayou des Cannes. I watched her many mornings from afar. Watched her sleep, enthused over the gentle moment her eyes opened to see the morn. And after months of watching her, I was well aware that I was falling in love.

  Her father told relatives she was fond of the bayou, which would make any good Cajun proud. Her mother encouraged her, believing that bayou air was healthy for a young girl who was developing into a fine young woman only four harvests since she first bled. Eventually she begged her father to build a daybed that she might put under the window. Of course, he obliged.

  The bayou of brown murky murk provided quiet and quick transportation from Mamou to Evangeline Parish on late nights when my work required more time. Squirrel, who owned a durable Indian canoe, ferried passengers up and down the river for coin and had worked out an arrangement with me. I first saw her while transporting Dixie Boy whiskey along the bayou.

  So one summer’s night in 1880, I worked up the courage to reveal myself. It was the fireflies that carried the invitation that lured her from her daybed like the feu follet. She followed, easing carefully out of her window in her nightgown down to the banks of the bayou. I waited for her in my best clothes. And when she saw me at the bayou, she wasn’t alarmed.

  She smiled and said, “I wondered how long you would watch me.”

  “Sometimes waiting is more important,” I responded as fireflies wrapped us in divine light.

  She had heard of me and the colorful monikers—“witch,” “bastard,” “witch bastard”—but she chose to call me a name I had almost forgotten—Jules.

  The following morning at dawn we kissed good-bye. In my haste, I left my medicine satchel on her new daybed, maybe intentionally. Watching me paddle away in Squirrel’s canoe, she held my satchel to her chest with hopes that I would return for it. I believe she was in love.

  Sweet Evangeline. A prête moi ton mouchoir.1

  A Year Later . . .

  My plan was simple: set the Richards’ sugarcane field on fire and wait for the men to rush toward the fire with buckets of water. This distraction would allow me the opportunity to steal the newborn before the vengeful Cajun traiteurs disposed of him. However, after the flame was set and I had made it across the bayou, I could hear Ameline crying uncontrollably. I was too late. The vigilantes had taken the infant away only hours ago and reportedly buried the child alive, since it was taboo to kill a being with powerful witch blood by hand. Moreover, I learned where the child was buried. By the burning sugarcane field near the cypress tree. My tree.

  Some would say that I jumped over the bayou and dashed for the burning cane field. Others would argue that I took flight and jettisoned toward the field in midair. What is true is that I knew exactly where my child was buried. I could feel it. Near the outskirts of the burning field, under my tree, I feverishly pawed the loose dirt until I found my son, naked and bloody but motionless. I could hear the Richard men desperately barking orders to put out the fire. Other white men, including the Cajuns who’d buried the child, had now joined the firefighting effort. No one noticed me near the cypress tree with my hands stretched to the sky begging for Bondyè’s mercy. The infant was not breathing nor did he have a heartbeat. I meticulously used my pinkie finger to remove dirt from his nose and mouth.

  Give my breath to him. Take my breath. Give it to him. Let him live with my breath. Let him live. And take my soul, Bawon. Do not dig the grave.

  Then I sang from the bottom of my soul. I didn’t know what else to do.

  O kwa, o jibile

  Ou pa we m’inosan?

  Don’t you see I’m innocent?

  I bent down and placed my lips over his nose and mouth, then emitted a soft, focused breath of love and continuance.

  “Eh! Come see! The nigger witch is eating its young!” yelled a half-drunk Cajun.

  I looked up to find rifles pointed at me, but I ignored them and leaned my ear toward the child’s mouth. Nothing. Then I leaned closer to the ground and whispered in the child’s ear.

  “Grab him!”

  The vengeful Cajuns grabbed me. I didn’t put up a fight. The child was still. I was defeated. The gods of Saint
-Domingue had turned their backs on me, I thought, even after I’d offered my soul. At that moment, I gave up. They held me down spread-eagle and castrated me. Yet I didn’t scream or murmur, which gave the Cajuns an uneasy feeling. The fire roared. A defeated man. A ruined crop. A dead infant with the lwa’s secrets.

  Jean-Louis Richard pushed through the crowd with a rope.

  “Hang him, then set his heathen ass on fire,” Jean-Louis ordered.

  “Fais pas ça!” Nonc Emmanuel barked as he and thirty or so of his kinsmen emerged from the woods with rifles and buckets. Both families had arrived, the Guillorys and the Fontenots—the stewards of Basile. The Cajuns were outnumbered.

  “He ruined my daughter!” Jean-Louis protested.

  “And you have ruined him. So we should turn our attention to saving what’s left of your crop to prevent further ruin to your household,” Emmanuel reasoned as twenty of the Boudreaux men arrived with cane knives and guns.

  “We have no quarrel with you and your people, ’Manuel. This nigger is a witch, you know that,” Jean-Louis said while scanning the crowd of angry Creole men who could either save his crop or cut his neck.

  Heavy steps on the forest floor competed with the roaring flames of the burning cane field, yet the Creole faction did not turn their backs to investigate the noise approaching from the dark forest. The white men’s astonishment confirmed the noise and the new allegiance. About one hundred freedmen came to the forest edge carrying buckets and knives, not-too-distant flames shimmering off their sweaty bodies, some still carrying scars from slavery, scars they’d received from some of the men present, both white and Creole. But their eyes spoke of their new allegiance, and in their hands they carried the choice. Help or hurt. Bucket or knife.

  While the competing factions had their standoff, I had managed to bury my severed penis in the ground and slowly climbed to my feet.

  “Mon bébé!” Ameline cried as she ran toward the scene. She screamed when she saw little Leon on the ground. I averted my eyes and threw my hands over my bloody area. I was embarrassed.

  Then, in the midst of the night air, among silent men and to the chorus of burning flames, my son screamed.

  Ameline threw herself over the infant, and I ran into the burning field, never to be seen again during the lifetime of all present that hot night except for the crying infant, whose mother quickly carried him away through the thick, intoxicating bayou air.

  Into the fire I ran, past orange and red gusts, with the burden of knowing that I had broken my bargain with Nonc Emmanuel and others—the bargain I’d agreed to the night of La Grande Promesse. I had caused a commotion, burnt a cane crop, and left a child. I would not be able to return to the community again. As when I first arrived in Basile, I was to return—alone.

  * * *

  1. Means “Loan me your handkerchief,” which derives from a Creole tradition in the 1800s where a young man would hold out his handkerchief to a young woman, inviting her to dance at one of the old-time country dances usually held at homes. If the woman took the handkerchief, they would dance.

  PART III

  confirmation and its burdens

  To whom shall I hire myself out?

  What beast must I adore?

  What holy image is attacked?

  What hearts must I break?

  What lie must I maintain?

  In what blood tread?

  —Arthur Rimbaud, public domain, published in 1873, “A Season in Hell”

  twenty-five

  them your people

  Part Two: Incident at a Catholic Church Teen Dance

  Black Jesus Ridin’ Slab as Seen from Park Bleachers in 1987

  A pearl white 1975 Chevy Monte Carlo glided down MLK, clean and glowing like E.T.’s muthafuckin’ fingertip, bumpin’ Darrell Scott’s “14” out of sixteen-inch Fosgates and an Alpine deck. Two light-skinned girls from Missouri City both sat in the front sharing a wing dinner from Timmy Chan’s with French fries showered in ketchup, Season-All, and Tabasco. In between nibbles, they smiled and primped with chicken grease glossing their lips. Pretty girls and fried chicken riding in a nice car on a sunny South Park Sunday afternoon, have mercy.

  The Chevy was sitting on shiny Tru-spoke wheels with three-point spinners and Vogue tires dripping with bubble gum–scented silicon dressing that left wet candy oil trails in its wake. The immaculately lustrous chrome-spoked rims gleamed from the worn gray cement. God must’ve shined those rims personally with His very own spit and a white lamb rag. The roof was cut out on both sides for the custom T-top. That’s how he liked it. Chop top pulled back so his daddy could see him shining. Ain’t he looking good? Ain’t he sharp?

  “Black Jesus? ’Sup, nigga!” I yelled.

  It was Black Jesus behind the wood-grain steering wheel running a soul brother afro pick through his TCB-moisturized shag, other hand on the wheel, leaning hard against the driver’s-side door. He honked his police siren car horn and chunked up the deuce ’cause Black Jesus was all about peace, baby, and riding slab.

  “Man, who you wavin’ at?” asked Raymond Earl as Black Jesus continued down MLK headed to MacGregor Park, probably coming from the Village apartments.

  “The nigga that bought the jube,” I answered as Raymond Earl passed me a warm bottle of MD 20/20 Orange Jubilee wine wrapped in a brown bag. I took a deep swig.

  “You better quit talkin’ ’bout Jesus like that, Johnny. You gonna get struck down.”

  “You ain’t see that white Monte Carlo with them redbones in it that just passed by?”

  “I ain’t see shit. I’m on that jube,” he said as I passed the bottle back to him.

  By now everybody called me Johnny since a bit of peach fuzz had started collecting under my nose. It had been two years since I saw Sonnier, even though I had made several requests to him. I guess he wasn’t going to show up for dumb, childish shit, particularly around Christmas or my birthday. But Black Jesus was everywhere, and he was kinda ghetto. I never told anybody who he was. Some things are best kept secret. But he was around. Two years earlier, when my cousin in Louisiana escaped from jail and picked me up from Little League practice, it was Black Jesus who called Harris County Sheriff’s Department. But this same Jesus would buy me beer and wine at the convenience store as long as I had half of the money. I was certain that Black Jesus wasn’t “real,” but this idea of “real” had begun to change during the past two years. I was beginning to see things.

  Father and I regularly treated the ill on Saturday mornings throughout Harris County. As I moved into my second year, he began to let me treat alone while he waited in his truck. The patients were primarily old-timers who were acquainted with our ancient art and placed full trust in me. Sometimes Black Jesus would watch me heal. I think he may have been jealous.

  But Black Jesus was never hard to find. MacGregor Park on Sundays. Rainbow Skating Rink on Friday nights. Saturday nights in the parking lot at the Rhinestone Wrangler or The Rock, leaning. Always leaning. Black Jesus always found something to lean on, and when he’d see me, he’d nod and say in a long Texas drawl, “What’s happening, dawg?”

  He kept everything at arm’s length and never once said anything about being holy or tricking miracles or coming back from the dead. To be fair, it’s not like I asked him, but I knew because he told me. You see, that was his only problem—he was a tattletale, which meant I had to be careful what I said and did around him unless he was participating too, such as buying my underage ass bottles of cheap wine and cold malt liquor.

  I thought about Black Jesus and chuckled a little bit, more drunk than amused. We were sitting at the top of the bleachers by the ball field at Sims Bayou Park waiting on some girls. We’d promised them Bartles & Jaymes but decided to just save them a half bottle of warm Orange Jubilee.

  I laid down on the metal bleachers with “Wake me up when them girls get here.”

  (Orange Jubilee)

  • • •

  “I made room in the icebox ’cause P
a-June bringin’ me a whole bunch of ponies,” Father announced like he’d just changed Baby Jesus’ diaper.

  Fuck, he’s loud, I thought, while laying down my drunk in my bedroom.

  Pony cans, as they were affectionately called, were the beer industry’s cute venture in small six-ounce containers that only achieved further alcoholism. That little small can won’t hurt you. Father was almost more excited about the arrival of small ale than about his sister’s arrival in Houston.

  Tante Doralise the Infamous had avoided warrants and lack of funds to find a moment of sobriety to escort her over the Sabine River. She and her motley offspring—all seven of them. There was no occasion for the visit. She’d barge into the lives of her siblings (four in Houston) for food, gossip, and, if she was lucky, a zydeco dance at the parish hall. But her arrival was always treated as a holiday. Dinners were planned, previous plans were canceled, and I was told I would be receiving my cousins—the Augustine boys from Lafayette (Alvin and Michael), Bad-Ass Billy Boudreaux from Grand Coteau, Rodney Boudreaux from Ville Platte, and Satan incarnate himself, Peter “Poon” Boudreaux from New Orleans.

  The exact amount of theft and damage to property was incalculable. Various misdemeanors and felonies had been collected in seven parishes to the extent that Fathers James, Guillory, LeBlanche, Malveaux, and Cisneros would no longer hear any of the boys’ confessions. Each had earned his own criminal celebrity, and by the time they crossed the state line into Texas, the oldest had only recently turned sixteen.

  Of course I was the good cousin, the modern cousin, not relegated to rural rules of mischief. Their accents were heavy, their movements seemed abrupt and rash, responding to needs and wants quickly—brute-like. Honestly, they were embarrassing and simple. I was looking no more forward to their visit than Jesus was looking forward to Pontius Pilate. And Mother felt the same way.