Just Wanna Testify

by Pearl Cleage

  “Oh, no,” Abbie said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “It could never be you!”

  “Good, then I can relax. So what is it then?”

  Several weak little rays of sunshine were trying to pierce through the clouds but were getting nowhere fast. Abbie decided to just blurt it out, straight no chaser.

  “Blue says there are some vampires roaming around West End.”

  “Vampires?”

  Abbie nodded miserably.

  Peachy took a deep breath. “You mean like Dracula?”

  “Sort of like that,” she said, “but they don’t …” She didn’t even want to think about it, much less say it. “They don’t have to hurt anybody. They drink tomato juice.”

  “Tomato juice instead of …” Peachy didn’t want to say it, either.

  “They’re not dangerous, Blue says. At least as far as he knows.”

  Peachy took a long swallow of his coffee. There was no pre-agreed upon length of time to be taken when absorbing information such as this, so Abbie didn’t rush him.

  “I think I’ve adjusted pretty well to you and Blue and the whole past-lives thing,” Peachy said, after several long minutes ticked by. “But I gotta tell you, sweet thing, vampires are a whole other kind of thing.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What do they look like?” he said, sounding more curious than frightened. Peachy had seen a lot, and done a lot. He didn’t scare easily. “Do they wear those capes?”

  Like most people of his generation, Peachy’s idea of a vampire began and ended with Bela Lugosi’s brilliant portrayal of the forever-clean Count Dracula slinking through the streets of London, looking for a late-night snack.

  Abbie shook her head. “These are all women.”

  “Vampire women?”

  “They used to live in New Orleans, but Katrina disrupted their environment so they had to move.”

  “To West End?”

  “No, they’re in West End to work with Aretha. They’re models.”

  “Does she know?”

  “Not yet. Regina doesn’t know it either and she’s the one who negotiated the contract.”

  “What contract?” Peachy was looking more and more confused.

  “For the photographs.”

  He held up his hand. “Okay! Let me see if I got this straight. There are some lady vampires in West End working as models and as long as they drink tomato juice, they don’t need to drink … anything else.”

  Abbie was relieved. “That’s it exactly, but Blue thinks there’s more to it than that.”

  “Like what?”

  “He doesn’t know yet. That’s why he wants me to talk to Louie.”

  “What’s Louie got to do with it?”

  Abbie was famous for the convoluted pathways her stories often took, but Peachy was determined to keep up.

  “He knew their family back in Louisiana,” she said, the bell announcing his arrival right at that moment as if they had planned it. “I told him to come by this morning and tell me what he knows.”

  Abbie stood up and so did Peachy.

  “Well, I know one thing,” he said, following Abbie back into the house. “When I asked you to tell me what was worrying you, vampires hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Do-Right Men

  “They were always a family of women,” Louie said after he had reported to Peachy on the day’s seafood purchases. Abbie poured him a cup of coffee and joined them at the kitchen table. “I don’t recall a single Mayflower boy, but they had a gang of pretty girls.” Louie sipped his coffee and nodded approvingly.

  “What about their parents?” Abbie said.

  Louie frowned a little trying to remember. “No father anybody knew about, but the mother was tall and light-skinned just like the girls. Always wore long black dresses. All us kids were convinced she was some kind of witch.”

  Abbie and Peachy had talked a lot about witches when they first got together. One time she had discovered a town in Scotland where eighty-one people, and their cats, had been executed after a relentless witch hunt that went on for months. Three hundred years later, town leaders had finally apologized, but the statistics had frightened Abbie who was just learning to embrace her postmenopausal spiritual powers and didn’t want to hear anything about people being killed for having visions. Peachy had assured her they’d never have to go anywhere near that town, but he had never forgotten the frightened look on her face.

  “Did she claim to be one?”

  “Not that I ever heard,” he said. “They pretty much kept to themselves most of the time. Every couple of years they’d come to town for a while and then go back.”

  He was trying to sound casual, but Abbie remembered how startled he had been to hear her speak their family name yesterday.

  “Anybody ever go back with them?”

  Louie’s eyes shifted from Abbie’s face to Peachy. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Peachy shook his head sympathetically. “You might as well tell her what you know, man. She’s going to get it out of you anyway.”

  “The thing is, some of this stuff is just talk, but it might make you nervous.”

  Abbie sat back in her chair and looked at him. “I’m already nervous.”

  Louie took his best shot. “What about Blue?”

  “Blue doesn’t get nervous.”

  “Okay.” Louie sighed and surrendered. “Here’s the way it was told to me.”

  The way he said it made Abbie shiver, and she reached for Peachy’s hand.

  “The story is that many, many years ago, back when Marie Laveau was still around, there was a family of seven beautiful sisters. The women in this family, as far back as anyone could remember, had been used and abused by the men they chose to marry. The girls’ mother herself had been beaten and tormented by the father for years before he finally ran off. Tired of the lying and deception and violence, the mother had decided that she was going to raise her girls with no man in the house. This was fine when they were little, but as they got older, you could see the men who came around counting off the years until they were legal, and you could see those daughters counting, too. Well, their mother didn’t want her daughters to suffer the same fate she had when she fell in love with their father.” Louie cleared his throat, took a sip of his coffee, and continued. “So one day Madame Mayflower went to see Marie Laveau and asked for a spell to protect her daughters from the charms of unscrupulous men.”

  “And did she give her one?”

  Louie ran his hand over his face and tugged on his chin like he always did when he was nervous or uncomfortable. “Not exactly. Madame Laveau said that if what the woman was looking for was a spell to keep her daughters from having sex with men, even she did not have anything that could guarantee that, but what she could do was make sure the men didn’t hang around afterward, which, in her experience, was when the problems usually started.”

  Abbie understood that. In her experience, men tended to be amazingly agreeable creatures when the promise of possible sex perfumed the air around a woman they were pursuing. The bad times came later.

  “Go on.”

  “So Madame Mayflower said that would be wonderful since she never had been able to see why anybody needed to have a man hanging around all the time anyway. So Madame Laveau mixed her up seven doses of a special potion and told her to wait until the next full moon and then pour it in their left ears while they were sleeping. After that, she promised, Madame Mayflower would never have to worry about her daughters being abused by men.” Louie looked at his almost empty cup. “Can I get a refill?”

  “Absolutely,” Peachy said. He brought the pot over and refilled all three coffees. “So did it work?”

  “I guess you could say it did,” Louie answered. “Those girls had all the beaus they ever wanted. Whenever they showed up in town, there were always two or three fools who would follow them home.”

&nbs
p; “But nobody ever bothered them?”

  Louie shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  “Did they ever marry any of those guys?”

  Louie shrugged. “Don’t know. None of them ever came back.”

  Abbie frowned. “Not even for a visit?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “So didn’t anybody ever go looking for them?” Peachy said.

  “When a full-grown man follows a beautiful woman off into the woods, whose job is it to tell him he shouldn’t oughta go?”

  Abbie looked at Louie. “There’s something else.”

  “There’s nothing else.”

  “Tell me.”

  Louie stood up then and walked over to the sliding glass door. Outside, the sun had finally broken through the clouds and the waves were dancing with white caps, but he didn’t notice. His voice was so quiet, Abbie could hardly hear him. She leaned forward, straining to catch every word. Peachy did, too.

  “Some people said the reason they never came back was because after they were done with a man …”—he turned to his friends like this was the last thing he wanted to tell them—“they’d bite off his head.”

  “Say what?” Peachy stood up so fast his chair fell over.

  Abbie closed her eyes and wondered how fast she could get back to Atlanta and tell Blue.

  “That was a long time ago,” Louie said quickly. “Old lady Mayflower had been dead longer than my grandmother had been alive when she told me that story. Who knows if there’s any truth to it?”

  Abbie opened her eyes. “Did your grandmother believe it?”

  Louie looked at Abbie without blinking. “She said she didn’t know whether she did or not, but one thing was for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If a man thought a woman could bite his head off if he didn’t treat her good, there would be a lot more do-right men in this world.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Personal Matter

  It was Saturday morning and the West End News was crowded with customers. Every table was full and the line at the counter was almost out the front door. During the week, people tended to come in earlier, pick up what they wanted, and head out to work or school. But on Saturdays, people came in later, hung around longer, and almost always ran into somebody they’d been looking for all week who coaxed them into sitting down for some catch-up. The cappuccino machine was working nonstop behind the counter, and Phoebe Sanderson was making sure every espresso aficionado got that little piece of curled lemon peel in addition to a jolt of pure caffeine via the best Colombian coffee beans this side of Bogotá.

  Henry was seated at a small table near the door, greeting regulars and making sure things were running smoothly. One Saturday a month, Blue made himself available to anybody in the neighborhood who needed his attention. It didn’t matter if the problem was a dog running around without a leash, or a serious zoning issue that required a call to the right person at city hall, Blue heard every complaint with equal concern and considered every request with equal seriousness.

  No appointment was necessary on those Saturdays and the only other person in the room during the exchange was Henry, who never jotted anything down but made sure all of Blue’s promises were kept in a fair and timely fashion. In the beginning, there were a lot more requests for protection, but as the neighborhood had become more peaceful, those had pretty much disappeared. People in West End didn’t often need to be protected from one another; and when they did, everybody knew whom to call.

  In the back room, Blue had just gotten off the phone with Peachy, calling from Tybee.

  “We’ll leave right after lunch,” Peachy said, describing their travel plans. “That will give me a chance to help Louie get set up for tonight and Sunday brunch tomorrow. We’ll come on by when we get in.”

  Peachy and Blue had toured together for so many years, they could communicate in a language of the road, where too much detail could be fatal. They were masters of the coded question. “Anything I need to know right now?”

  And the equally coded answer. “It’s all good,” Peachy said. “Louie had the whole recipe.”

  “Good,” Blue said. “See you tonight.”

  He had hoped Louie would have some information about these Mayflowers and clearly he did. Not a moment too soon, Blue thought. Regina and Aretha were going to be out with them again all day shooting, and even though he had sent security to their location, there were still some big holes in their story that would be cause for concern until he plugged them.

  Henry tapped lightly on the frosted glass, cracked the door open, and stuck his head inside.

  “You about ready for another sit-down?”

  Blue nodded. “Who’ve you got out there?”

  “There are some guys from Morehouse who would like a word with you,” Henry said.

  “Students?”

  “Graduating seniors.”

  “They looking for a job?”

  Henry shook his head. “Said it was a personal matter.”

  “I guess nobody told them everything around here is a personal matter.” Blue smiled. “How many of them are there?”

  “Five.” He slid a piece of paper across the table to Blue. “I told them to write down their names and where they’re from.”

  Blue picked up the paper. Each one had written his own name with the same blue pen: Stan Hodges from Trenton, majoring in chemistry; Jerome Smith from Atlanta, a prelaw major; Jackson Stevens from Detroit, majoring in business; Lance Johnson III from Milwaukee, also a prelaw major; and Hayward Jones, a political science major from New Orleans.

  “Shall I bring them on back?”

  “Sure.” Blue folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “Let’s see what the next generation’s talking about this morning.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ordinary Mortals

  Aretha was setting up an interesting shot in a history professor’s book-crammed office in a big old four-story building with high ceilings, creaky wooden hallways, and one small elevator that squeaked alarmingly above the second floor. Tucked away on a quiet corner of the Morehouse campus, they had somehow eluded the crowds they had generated the day before, and things were going smoothly with a minimum of disruptions.

  Once she had set up her lights and positioned the five models in the small space, there was hardly room for Aretha to move around and get the shots she wanted. Regina and Serena didn’t even try to squeeze in. An empty classroom across the wide hallway was as close as they could get, which was fine. They were still in the process of evaluating each other, and some time alone was just what they had both wanted.

  Serena was busy confirming their deal in principle so contracts could be sent down this afternoon. That was all fine, but Regina still wanted to know why this woman who was so good with details had not mentioned meeting her husband the day before. Of course, she wasn’t going to ask her directly. That would come across as suspicious and insecure and she refused to claim either of those emotions. She was hoping for conscious and curious. Conscious of the omission of information. Curious about why.

  They settled their business with a promise to exchange the necessary signed documents on Monday and then there was silence. Through the open door of the classroom where they were camping out, they could hear Aretha across the hall, murmuring instructions, offering encouragement and affirmation.

  “Good, good … keep that. Do more with that. Yes, yes … Use that hand more. Good …”

  “Sounds like phone sex, doesn’t it?” Serena said, tucking her BlackBerry into her giant shoulder bag.

  “I guess it does at that.”

  Serena walked over to the big window and looked out at a green expanse of a quadrangle in the middle of the small, beautifully landscaped campus. There was a touch football game in progress, although the players probably should have been in class. Two smiling girls were watching and applauding frequently, so the game was far from over.

  “Aretha told me about t
he big benefit coming up on Saturday,” Serena said, introducing a more neutral topic. “She said it’s a very big deal around here.”

  “We do it every year to raise money for one cause or another,” Regina said. “My husband and Peachy Nolan started doing it almost twenty years ago. Things were really different around here then. It was like the Wild, Wild West. Once they got it cleaned up, they started raising money to make sure it stayed that way.”

  “That’s admirable.” Serena folded her long, lean frame sideways into one of the student desks. “But to tell you the truth, it’s still a little too close to the frontier for my taste.”

  Her comment made Regina feel defensive, but she tried to keep her tone even. “What do you mean?”

  Serena rippled her shoulders. “I mean, it’s just a matter of time. If your husband hadn’t been prepared to take charge, this neighborhood would be just like all the others.”

  Even though she knew it was true, Regina resented Serena saying it so calmly. “Is that why you dropped in to see him yesterday?”

  Serena didn’t flinch. “Aretha suggested it. Did she tell you?”

  “No,” Regina said, hoping she didn’t sound like a paranoid, overly possessive wife. “He did.”

  “I see.” Serena stretched out her legs in the aisle and crossed them neatly at the ankles. The soles of her black Christian Louboutin pumps were a smooth bright red, as if they had never touched the ground.

  “Your husband is a very charismatic man,” she said calmly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen eyes like that. Do they run in his family?”

  There was no hint of discomfort for not mentioning the visit.

  “Our daughter has them.”

  “How wonderful,” Serena said. “Those are genes anyone would be proud to pass on.”

  Regina didn’t know what to say to that and before she had time to figure it out, the door opened across the hall and the models strode into the room like they had just been released into the wild.