Just Wanna Testify

by Pearl Cleage

  Aretha laughed, handing Regina the smallest camera case, which the sergeant immediately took from her. “I see their fans have already begun to gather in anticipation of their arrival.”

  “Anticipation, nothin’,” he said, reaching up to get the larger case. “They have arrived.”

  “They’re here already?”

  He nodded. “Been here about an hour. Went straight downstairs.”

  Aretha looked annoyed. “How many of them were there?”

  “Six all together,” he said. “But only one of ’em talked.”

  “That would be the whole gaggle,” she said as if they were a flock of migrating birds. “They’re an hour early!”

  “Probably on Milan time,” Regina said quickly. “That means they are true professionals.”

  “So what does that make me?” Aretha snapped.

  “An artist,” Regina said, reaching for another case.

  “Hang on, Miz Hargrove,” the sergeant said, motioning to another officer standing nearby. “Let me get somebody to help you with that stuff.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” she said, turning to Regina. “Do me a favor, will you? Go down there and make sure they’ve got everything they need, and I’ll get things going up here.”

  “I’m on it,” Regina said, heading for the big glass doors of the chapel in search of models.

  She took the wide staircase down to the lower level, listening to see if they sounded like birds, too, since Aretha had described them that way, but they didn’t. In fact, they didn’t seem to be making any noise at all. Countless movie scenes of fashion shoots, from Blow-Up to Sex and the City, had conditioned Regina to expect to hear loud music as the fashion fantasy took shape under the hypercritical eyes of people who knew the difference between Prada and Dior. But when she got to the bottom of the stairs, the first thing Regina noticed was how quiet it was. No music. No laughter. If she listened closely, she thought she could hear the sound of female voices murmuring somewhere nearby, but they were so quiet, she wasn’t even sure where they were coming from. She headed in what she hoped was the right direction.

  She had thought they were going to be using the small dressing rooms provided for speakers and performers, but the tiny cubicles had obviously not appealed to these women. Instead, someone had erected a kind of indoor tent for them in the large lobby space downstairs. It was constructed of diaphanous white fabric that fluttered softly in the artificial breeze coming from the building’s ventilation system. Through the gently billowing fabric, Regina could see five ghostly, back-lit figures moving around slowly. They appeared to be very tall and very thin, except for two who were shorter and quicker and appeared to be helping the others into and out of their clothes.

  “Looking for someone?”

  The voice came from so close beside Regina’s left shoulder, it made her jump. “You startled me!”

  The woman standing in front of her didn’t blink or apologize. “Security is supposed to be keeping people out of this area.”

  Regina was struck by how tall and thin this woman was, too. Her dark hair was pulled back so severely that it gave her face a stark, dramatic strangeness, and her neck was so long, it was as if her head was floating independent of her body. Regina had seen pictures of the models, but their manager—this had to be her in the flesh, what little there was of it—had been only a disembodied voice on the phone.

  “I’m Regina Hamilton.”

  “Then you’re looking for me,” the woman said, extending a black-gloved hand. “Serena Mayflower.”

  “Welcome to Atlanta,” Regina said, wondering if black leather gloves in May was the result of a cold nature or the latest fashion trend. “Aretha’s upstairs getting things set up. She wanted me to make sure you have everything you need.”

  “We’re fine,” Serena said. “The Essence stylists are with them now making some final wardrobe decisions.”

  Regina assumed those would be the shorter, faster silhouettes behind the veil. “Did you bring hair and makeup people from New York, too?”

  “They always do their own makeup,” Serena said. “Our skin is very sensitive so we try not to be careless.”

  “That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?” Regina said, surprised.

  “It’s unheard of,” Serena said, “but we know what works for us and we stick with it.”

  The way she said we made Regina wonder if these women were related, but before she could ask, the white drapes were pushed aside and one of the models came out, looked around quickly, and then walked over to where they were standing. Regina had seen models before, but none as tall and skinny as this one. Everything on her was elongated, from her giraffelike neck to her mile-long legs. The closer she got, the taller she loomed, which made Regina think that she was going to have to tip back her head to say hello—like a little child being prompted to greet the pastor after church. She needn’t have worried. Pleasantries were the last thing on this woman’s mind.

  “Look at this shit!” the model said, ignoring Regina completely and pointing one long, bony finger at her own head. “Scylla cannot be serious!”

  She was wearing a pair of high-wasted pants, a tailored white shirt, and a pair of leopard-skin ankle boots with five-inch heels. Around her neck there were easily fifteen colorful beaded necklaces of various lengths. But the beautiful clothes and fanciful jewelry were not what you noticed first. It was her hair, which was dark, fuzzy, and abundant. For reasons that Regina figured were unfathomable to anyone outside the fashion world, someone had teased it out around her face in a wooly mushroom cloud that added another four or five inches to her already overwhelming height, creating an effect as startling as a brightly colored parrot coming to rest on the branches of a magnolia tree.

  Serena looked at the agitated model without any discernable change of expression. “Scylla is always serious. You know that.”

  “Then she has lost her mind!”

  “It’s fine,” Serena said calmly. “When you see the photos, you’ll love it.”

  The model fluttered her hands unhappily around her hair without touching it and pouted her brightly painted red lips. “I will not love it. We look ridiculous.”

  “You look fabulous,” Serena said. “Now stop fussing long enough to meet Regina Hamilton. Regina, this is Sasha, the baby of our group. We indulge her more than we should.”

  “Tell her,” Sasha said, turning toward Regina and striking a Vogue-worthy pose. “Does this look like shit or not?”

  It looked like nothing Regina had ever seen on a woman’s head before, but Sasha didn’t look like any woman she’d ever seen either, so the standards that normally applied were obviously useless.

  “You look amazing,” Regina said, and that was true.

  Sasha snorted like that much was obvious. “We always look amazing. I’m talking about looking ridiculous.”

  A voice from the diaphanous tent joined the conversation. “Stop bitching and I’ll let you do the makeup.”

  Sasha’s pout disappeared and Regina had the feeling her expression was as close to a smile as the woman was going to get.

  “For real?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Serena paid no attention to the new voice at all. She looked bored.

  “For the whole shoot?”

  The curtains parted again to reveal another model. They looked enough alike in every way to be the twin daughters of some very odd-looking parents. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt and a hot-pink silk blouse with the same stacked necklaces and the same towering poof of hair. Regina wondered in what alternate universe this could be a college professor’s classroom attire.

  “For the rest of my fucking life, if you will just calm down and get back in here so we can get ready and go to work.”

  Sasha looked at Serena. “You’re my witness. You heard that, right?”

  “I heard it.”

  Seemingly satisfied with that less-than-enthusiastic response, Sasha sashayed back over to the billowing tent and
brushed past the other model, who had now fixed her gaze on Regina.

  “Scylla, meet Regina Hamilton. Regina, meet our creative director and resident genius. We couldn’t do it without her.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Regina said, trying not to stare. Standing among these women, she felt like a Georgia pine tree in the Sequoia National Forest trying to hold its own with the redwoods.

  “Are you the agent?”

  “Sort of,” Regina said, smiling.

  Scylla frowned. “What the hell does that mean? Are you the one we ought to talk to about doing the new portfolio or not?”

  Before Regina could respond, Sasha raised her voice from behind the curtains, where she seemed to be standing over a woman perched on a high stool.

  “Susan won’t let me put the green eyeliner on her!”

  “It looks stupid!” another voice cried from the inner sanctum.

  Scylla sighed and glanced at Serena, then back to Regina like they had important unfinished business but she had no more time. “Does anybody around here know what the fuck they’re doing?” she said, and ducked back behind the billowing fabric without another word.

  Chapter Six

  One Step Ahead

  Abbie had always felt sorry for the spirits that Hurricane Katrina had disturbed so roughly and who were now doomed to wander forever in search of a decent pot of gumbo, not to mention a final resting place. She knew some of them had found their way to Atlanta. It was pretty obvious when the headless chickens started showing up, lying in a pathetic heap of shiny, blue black feathers at the crossroads of two wholly innocuous southwest Atlanta streets along with the first wave of displaced New Orleanians.

  Around the same time, a tiny, dimly lit candle shop opened on the outskirts of West End, carrying everything from black cat bones and High John the Conquerer incense to a dizzying array of roots, herbs, and various potions guaranteed to get the job done, whatever that job happened to be. There had even been a few reports of headless goat carcasses showing up in city parks, but vampires? That was something else altogether.

  Standing at the kitchen sink in the small apartment that had been her first home in Atlanta, and that she now maintained as a kind of informal West End Women’s Center, Abbie felt nervous in a way she never had before. She hardly noticed the colorful bunch of flowers she was carefully arranging in a big, blue vase that matched the color of the walls in “the ocean room,” as she called it, at the front of the apartment. She was glad Blue was on his way over to tell her what was going on.

  She took a deep breath and headed back down the hall. Abbie placed the vase carefully on a table in the center of the sunny ocean room, and sank down gracefully on one of the deep purple meditation cushions that made this space a favorite among the women who came to her seeking solace or enlightenment or both. She loved this room, painted floor to ceiling in the most beautiful shades of blue, from turquoise to navy to the palest gray with touches of just-before-dawn pink. She had told Aretha that she wanted it to feel like the ocean and that’s exactly how Aretha had painted it.

  Abbie closed her eyes and took another deep breath to calm herself. She was surprised she hadn’t picked up some kind of disturbance in the air indicating the presence of something as unnatural as vampires, but why would she? They weren’t the same at all. She and Blue liked to call themselves reincarnates. They had died and returned many times, but there was no real connection between them and these strange creatures who never died and, according to Blue, never cracked a smile.

  That would be awful, she thought, to live forever without any possibility of laughter. Abbie loved a good laugh. One of the things that had drawn her to Peachy Nolan and kept her by his side for the last four years was his sense of humor. The sex was great and the company was terrific, but the glue that held them together was their laughter. They laughed when they cooked, when they made love, when they watched the sunset, or toasted their good luck in finding each other. What if she’d been a vampire and missed all that? Abbie wondered, and she shivered a little.

  At sixty-five plus, Abbie was in her prime and she knew it. Fit enough to turn cartwheels on her favorite Tybee Island beach whenever the spirit moved her, she had greeted the first signs of approaching menopause with the confusion and dread that seemed to be expected of women. But she had emerged on the other side, with determination and deep trust in the wisdom of her own natural femaleness, a self-described visionary, vital and invigorated, who could not only look deeply into her own heart and soul, but could help others navigate that often unknown territory as well.

  She had been wrapping this new role around herself as if it were a gossamer shawl when Regina had emerged from a disastrous love affair, shell-shocked and shaken to the core. Abbie eagerly embraced the opportunity to bring her new gift of wisdom to bear on the life of her favorite niece, and they both emerged stronger from the collaboration. Soon after she had predicted that Regina would meet Blue in Atlanta, Abbie met Peachy at their engagement party and the two had been inseparable ever since.

  Peachy had a house in Savannah that he had shared for twenty years with his late wife, and they both had carte blanche at Blue and Regina’s Tybee Island beach house. The four of them regularly gathered there, with Sweetie in tow, begging her father to build her a sand castle. Two years ago, Peachy had opened a small restaurant on the island, called it Sweet Abbie’s, found an amazing chef in Louie Baptiste, formerly of New Orleans, and now had so many customers that you needed reservations even during the off-season.

  Abbie’s work often kept her in the city, but Peachy shared her love of their independent lives, as much as they cherished their time together, and both were thriving. When Blue called, she told him she was driving down to Tybee that afternoon, but when he told her what was going on, she agreed to meet him immediately.

  When he arrived a half an hour later, she had calmed herself and greeted him with an affectionate hug. “You okay?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “And how’s your beautiful daughter?”

  He smiled and nodded as she closed the door behind him. “Fine.”

  “Gina?”

  “Fine, too. She’s out with Aretha on the shoot.”

  “Does she know?”

  Blue shook his head. “Not yet.”

  He followed her into the living room furnished simply in white wicker with lots of bright pillows. The white walls were unadorned by design, since Abbie felt that a person could more easily access her own dreams and visions without the presence of paintings, posters, or other artwork. Although it looked a little bare at first, its very neutrality was somehow more soothing than the dramatic walls of the ocean room.

  Blue liked this room and they often talked here as confidants. When Regina first brought Blue home to meet Abbie, they had greeted each other like old friends, and so they were. She took a seat in a small rocking chair. Blue sat down on the love seat and placed his hat beside him.

  “Aretha doesn’t know either?”

  “Neither one has any idea.”

  Abbie had so many questions, she didn’t know where to begin. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” he said. “One of them came by the West End News. When I confronted her, she admitted it.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I must have run across them before, but I can’t remember when. There isn’t any doubt in my mind, though. These women are the real thing.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Not anymore. Seems they’ve been able to substitute tomato juice to quiet any problematic cravings.”

  “Tomato juice?” Abbie sounded as incredulous as Blue had been when Serena first said it to him a few hours ago.

  He nodded. “I know. It sounds crazy, but she seemed to be on the level.”

  “Can you read her clearly?”

  One of Blue’s gifts was a talent for mind reading, but a small frown flickered across his handsome face. His eyes, which
changed colors as often as his mood, were now a deep gray. “Not as clearly as I’d like to. I knew what she was, but I can’t seem to access what they’re really doing here.”

  “I thought they were doing a fashion shoot for Essence.”

  “That much is true,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “Regina negotiated the whole thing.”

  Abbie smiled a little at the pride in his voice despite the seriousness of the topic. “Based on what I’ve heard, she got a pretty good deal, too.”

  Blue smiled back, his square, white teeth almost as startling as his eyes in that Africa-dark face.

  “Go on.”

  “They got here yesterday. Aretha had dinner with them last night, and first thing this morning the leader of the group shows up to pay her respects.”

  “Do you think she knew that you had been here before?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed surprised that I knew so much about her, but I can’t be sure. Their faces don’t show much emotion.”

  “What did she say when you told her you knew?”

  “She said they were from New Orleans, like I told you, and that they weren’t dangerous as long as they had access to tomato products.”

  That would never be a problem in West End, Abbie thought, where bountiful community gardens provided enough fresh tomatoes to supply every family and neighborhood restaurant with them, fresh or canned, all year round. She hoped they weren’t here to buy up the tomato crop. Somehow she didn’t think the Growers Association would like that one bit.

  “So where’d they go when they left Louisiana?”

  “Somebody bought them an island,” Blue said, like that was something that happened every day.

  “An island?” Abbie said, incredulous. “Where?”

  “She didn’t say, but there’s nothing much on it, so they come to the mainland every so often to make some money and lay in supplies.”

  “Including tomatoes?”