Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “There is such a thing as taking democratic action too far,” she complains for months at Madame’s studio.

  They begin with a roster of forty—adepts from the Oracle of Maat, the uraeus cobra logo on all of their practice suits, instructors from the Tai Chi Association, two medicine men from the Creek lodge, a clan grandmother from Seminole County, herbalists from Lagos, Shiatsu therapists and Rolfers from the Atlanta School of Massage, Fruit of Islam from the Bankhead mosque, two ex-bodyguards from Mayor Jackson’s corps, and her erstwhile students of English grammar and conversation. By Easter she is experiencing a body-mind-spirit connection she’d imagined possible only for disciples in the nether regions of snowbound Nepal. Attendance drops off as the weather turns warm, her boarders long since returned to the fold, restoring the good health of her budget. She stays on, spending most of her nights plowing through Gray’s Anatomy and sticking pins in the red dots of her pressure-point chart. She’s made a marshal of the citizen search team because of her calm and logical way in the woods.

  Wholesale defection begins in June when the headlines around the country announce the monster’s been nabbed. One man charged with two counts of murder, the defense hanging literally by a thread, carpet fiber that keeps changing color from yellow in May to purplish green by June. One man, two counts, leaving twenty-six “official” deaths still on the books and an additional thirty-eight not even being investigated. The circus tents are taken down. Eight hundred cops are withdrawn from the neighborhoods. One hundred state highway patrolmen are returned to the rural districts. Roadblocks banish. Armed helicopters disappear. Neighborhood security patrols disperse. Safety posters are taken down. One man, two counts, and amnesia drifts in like fog to blanket the city. “Let the Community Heal Itself” are the sermons. Back to normal. She grunts. Medfly in California, a tsetse plague in Atlanta, she masters butterfly metamorphosis and needs only five hours of sleep to keep working.

  One by one, they leave Madame’s studio, complaining. Silent sitting too hard. No mats, no hot sweat rooms. No ka-li charts or picture books to study. No striking bags or apparatus for stretching the legs. No shurikens, iron fans, nunchaku sticks. Not even an emblem to patch on a sweater, transfer to a T-shirt, solder on a key ring. No name for the school even. Too hard, too quiet, no good. Madame smiles and wishes them well on life’s journey, then intensifies training for those that remain—the Oracle of Maat folks, the brothers from the mosque, Tram and her. She is learning to be still as her mother used to counsel, to silence the relentless chatter inside in favor of that small-voiced guide she is experiencing as a warm hand steering at the base of her spine. She appoints herself town crier, alarm clock at least for the cadres of the neighborhood who continue to monitor the Klan, organize, analyze, agitate, and keep watch over the children.

  III

  They are sitting in a sana she cannot even pronounce. Nerves frayed and searing, muscles screaming for release, she sits beyond endurance until she becomes the sana and is calm, pointed, focused, and sure. Madame dismounts from the only cushion in the room and glides to the center of the circle sitters and lowers herself to the floor, facing the window. She, looking at Madame’s back, traces the carver’s line along each of the golden fibulae to the points. She senses a summoning, as though her mother had set down a space heater before her, then dragged it slowly away by its cord for her to follow. Madame sending out her power, she figures, rising to walk around into the light. She sits back on her heels before Madame, palms on her thighs, ready. Madame’s face turns from skin to old parchment, an ancient text she’s been invited to read.

  “One question, daughter.” Madame says it in English. She listens, waits, as if all her life this question’s been forming. Not a favor to tax her friendship, or a task to test commitment, but a question coming together and just for her. Daughter. It drives deep within to jimmy open a door long closed, padlocked and boarded over. It swings wide to a brilliant and breezy place she’s not visited since the days she was held dear and cherished simply because she was she and not a pot to mend or dress to hem or chair leg to join. She smiles at Madame by way of signaling, Let the exam begin. Then panic grips the door to shove it to. She gathers the weight of the years into a doorstop. Test. She’s heard of disciples who roam the earth unkempt and crazed by some koan a master has posed for solution: Why does the arrow never hit the mark despite the illusion of the bowman? Where does the dark go when the light is turned on? The door pushes against her back. She heaves against it, listing. The warm hand at the power base rights her. The door swings wide again.

  “Stone Mountain,” Madame says finally, as though she’d waited for the wrassling to cease.

  Stone Mountain. A rock to prop a door with. A rock dropped into the pool of the mind. For a moment, she’s in a muddle as rocks rear up out of the ocean, and she scrambles across reading the fossils sketched into the face. Then tumble down and she stumbles across rubble in a quarry, searching out particular stones. Stone Mountain. She leaps from rock ledge to mountain peak following goats who leave a trail of fleece on bushes. Or is it a Red Army libretto in the Peking Opera repertoire?

  She exhales and lets it come to her. Of course. A mere thirty-minute ride out by U.S. 78. Stone monster carve tribute to the Confederacy mountain. Tourist trap entrapment of visiting schoolchildren lured under the spell of the enslavers of Africans and killers of Amerinds, lewdly exposed mammoth granite rock of ages the good ole boys think they can hide in from history. 865 feet high, the guide books say. 583 acres. The sacred grove of the wizard and greater and lesser demons who crank out crank notes in the name of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson riding across the monument on horseback. She smirks.

  Madame lifts her brows. Everything above her eyes slides up and back, taking her hairline out of view as though someone standing behind Madame, tugging at the mask and wig, is about to reveal the woman as a person she has known always, who has been there since the beginning just out of reach of peripheral vision, guiding her through her various rites of passage.

  “What is it for?” Madame asks with her face in place.

  “What is it for?” To rally the good ole boys, to dispirit the young, to celebrate the. She clutches the ropes as the scaffolding clanks against the side of the mountain. Madame, you could have called the Chamber of Commerce, the Tourist Bureau, asked any schoolboy at the Peachtree Academy. What is it for? Balanced, she leans out and runs her hands over the hind parts, the boots, then up into the uniforms. For this, I’ve been studying all these years and now all these months? Any almanac, encyclopedia, atlas could have answered your. Wind and rain have eroded a nose here, a ripple of hair there. Digging out an ice pocket just below Stoney’s hand. What kind of shit is this? What is Stone Mountain for? A chink just deep enough to fit the point of the chisel in. Eighth Wonder of the World, they call. The hammering has enlarged a hairline fissure running from the brim of Stonewall’s hat to the. Why ask me when a simple phone. Five sticks of dynamite shoved in just so he can bring the whole sucker tumbling down around. They say that staunch materialists rely on the sym. A people’s army could.

  “Teacher.” The word bowls in the breeze of her chest cavity, a resonating chamber. The words to be spoken already reverberating around the room. She hears the slap of flesh against wood as those around her, released from the sana by an imperceptible nod from Madame, sit readied awaiting instruction.

  “Stone Mountain is for taking,” she says.

  BABY’S BREATH

  And the women? Did he still see any of them, his mother wanted to know, sliding red rose into the dried bouquet. Louis shrugged. What was there to say? He’d believed himself deeply in love each time, been convinced they’d loved him. They said they did. But they kept killing his babies.

  “And Norma?” His mother had been conducting their conversation with the rose he’d bought at the airport, now she used a sprig of pale tiny beads to draw his eyes toward the jug that held the arrangement. It bore her signature
—a slab and coil terra cotta jug, amethyst encrusted sides, bowl-shaped at bottom, completely thrown open at the top. Louis acknowledged her handiwork with a quick, dim smile. He preferred to keep his eyes on her. He liked watching his mother feel her way through his business.

  “She seemed very devoted to you, Louis.” She was brushing her cheek against her shoulder girly-girly. He resisted the urge to pluck buds and bits of leaves from her cheek, her lashes. “She was special, yes?”

  He shrugged again and turned toward the window. And she, satisfied for the moment with her floral arrangement and his answer, drank her coffee. Louis carefully slid two fingers into the Venetian blinds and open-scissored himself a view of the block. There were plaster dwarves standing guard over garden hoses in his mother’s yard and in the next. He’d pointed it out to Norma as a thing he might one day film—trolls from Vienna Woods in the Black yards, grinning black-faced jockeys in the White.

  Norma had seemed special to his mother, Louis was thinking, staring out over the sewer grating that had been home plate, simply because Norma was the only one he’d ever brought home. She was more real then than the others—photos in his wallet merely, long-distance descriptions, hearsay from his brother Bobby. But special? Norma just happened to be on the scene at a time when he’d had money enough to come home on holidays. His shrug had been designed to say all that. His mother’s muttering into her coffee mug was her way of saying she wasn’t buying it but what the hell.

  Louis frowned. “Seemed,” “just happened to be”—a careless way to put it, careless and dishonest. He’d loved Norma, maybe loved her still. Sitting now at his mother’s kitchen table, a hundred miles from Delaware, three years gone from the New York apartment Bobby had taken off his hands, he still felt for the them they’d been. And felt protective and alert, now that his mother was eyeing him over the rim of her mug, for any signal of a sneak attack. Norma had been “that skinny one” and “her” for the whole of a year.

  He peered between the crack in the blinds. It was dark but for the spill of moonlight on the lawns. A mere five years ago, the silhouette of the bridge, sharp between the brick high school and the domed courthouse, would have been visible. Looking up from his homework then, he would count the lights strung round the marina, would listen intently to the brush and slap of the water against the boats docked there and dream himself aboard a yacht with one of the girls he tried to talk to, but Bobby always turned the dances out too soon and ruined what might have been a good thing. There was little he could see now, for a sodium streetlight had been installed just in front of the house. Too close and too bright, it bleached out the view. The only clear image in the dark of the glass was the reflection of the spray of baby’s breath in the stoneware jug.

  “You wanted to marry her, yes?”

  He withdrew his fingers and let the blinds snap to. “I thought I did.” He’d definitely wanted the baby, he knew that. Knew that the moment it had been conceived, and knew the moment and the rightness of it like he’d never known anything else. The knowing had come all of a rush like light, the certainty shimmering up his spine where Norma’s heels were locked against his back. Something opened up to him and he was new all through and knew what he wanted to do, to be. For two years, fooling around with film courses at NYU and trying to be Miles Davis after hours, he’d been making up things to do, to be, and fashioning elaborate point systems to give some value to how he spent his life. But holding on to Norma, his body shuddering, his toes no longer trying for traction against the sheets, he knew.

  And Norma had said she wanted the baby, was glad—scared, but glad. Her enthusiasm waned, though, in less than four weeks, and he found himself alone in the talking, the planning—wedding arrangements, natural birth classes, setting up housekeeping for real and not just playing at it. By the second month, she’d grown unreachably sullen. He would come to her with the light on and see her open, glistening, wet. But inside she was dry and no longer closed lovingly around him. Would clench her muscles too soon, too tight, and push him out.

  He’d cut his last class one Tuesday and, rather than go to rehearsal, borrowed brother Bobby’s car to pick her up at the clinic. His mother had taught him that attentiveness was the thing, so he spent the telephone money for yellow roses. She wasn’t there, hadn’t been in weeks. Lied to him later, said she had so gone and been told she might not be able to hold on to the fetus. She was so delicate, so frail. She was her parents talking at him. Her mother: Norma is small-boned, refined. Meaning that he was crude and not what they’d had in mind. Her father: We had misgivings about her going off to grad school; she’s never been hardy. Meaning that they hadn’t sacrificed for the likes of him. Who were his people anyway? And what, no undergraduate degree even? So alike in look and sound her parents were, like a pair of cymbals on either side of him that Sunday dinner in Delaware, it was just a matter of time before the tympani rumbled, and they crashed together to wipe him out.

  Not waiting for spring break, he went on the road to make money. Her letter caught him in New Orleans, said she’d had a miscarriage. But she couldn’t look him in the eye and say it when he blew the gig to fly back. She told the hairbrush it had been very scary, all that blood, all that pain. Told the eyebrow pencil that at least it was over. He felt the lights dim but kept his vigil in the mirror anyway, waiting for her eyes to meet him there. When she did look up, stand up, it was only to turn profile and pat her emptied-out belly. The Easter outfit her parents had sent would fit now, she said. He still waited for her in the glass, praying “Look at me.” She didn’t. When the semester ended, she took her degree and her trim daughter self home to Delaware. And he lay around in the dark a lot not answering the phone or the door, not picking up his books or his horn, his life bottomed out.

  “Yeh, Norma was special,” he said, feeling his mother’s hand on his arm.

  “But she broke your heart,” she whispered. And he could feel his arm bulge in her grip. He didn’t know whether it was the rose, the verbena or his mother’s perfume, but some fragrance gave him ease. He’d comforted himself after Norma with the certainty that raising a child with in-laws like that would have been a disaster. “A Miscarriage of Justice,” he called the tune when outrage and mourning was still the music of his days and nights. His buddies thought “She Gave Me Good Memories” a more suitable title if they got to record it. And then he comforted himself with blond hair: Carole of the long legs and the rabbit-in-residence, the test-tube device she’d gotten from her health collective. No guise, no lies, no delicacy, Carole bluntly told him she was going back to her husband and the baby was out of the question. Next morning he awoke from a nightmare warm and wet beside her, blood clots in the bed.

  “Broke your heart, Louis. Broke your heart.”

  But then some woman would always be breaking his heart, to hear his mother tell it. He left himself wide open, just like her. Louis was like his mother; Bobby like his father. She would work that in if he let her. He drew away from her mothering hands, searching for something to say about her new drying technique or the new jug, anything to steer her away from her theme song: Bobby had been unwanted, Louis unexpected, but it had been their father who was the mistake. He didn’t like what happened to her face when she spoke of his father. And didn’t like what happened to him, had been happening for so long he and his father still stuttered at talking, met only in the old dog, the Irish setter they cared for together, touched through.

  “And the other one, Louis? The one you took to Puerto Rico. Think you might get back together again? This new one seems kind of… rough.” She was running her hand over the bead work in her caftan just as he was fingering the embroidery on his shirt, wondering where he’d adopted that particular habit of the self-caress. “What was her name? The one last winter?”

  Toxemia. The doctor had told them, addressing Louis exclusively though, which made Wynona mad, that a diet of junk food was dangerous to mother and child, especially since mother was no spring chicken and dran
k too much. And that had made Wynona sputter. And so did the jars of vitamins, the blender, the juicer, his experiments with stir-fry and tofu. He found bags of potato chips squashed down in the hamper, sticky candy wrappers and greasy doughnut bags stuffed in the corners of her linen closet, soda cans in the shoe bag, bottles everywhere. She was devoted to junk, addicted. “I never had a problem a gooey eclair couldn’t solve,” she liked to joke. His nagging and then the pregnancy itself was the problem. Chocolate cake and brandy was her solution for a time. “I’ve had all the babies I can afford,” she said, barring his way to the bedroom. And it did no good explaining that he was reliable, loved her, was not like the others, he cared—for she’d already set his bag and horn case in the hall. And it did no good swearing he would stick by her, wanted the responsibility and “afford” had nothing to do with it—for she’d demanded her key back. And it did no good writing her how he could adequately, lovingly care for her, the boys, the baby—she sent the letters back. And in a week’s time, it had done no good clocking her moon, counting the tampons in her linen closet, or contemplating a pinhole or two in her diaphragm—a D & C and it was all over.

  “Wynona just couldn’t get into the baby thing all over again,” he said.

  “I can understand that. Now what about this latest one?” When he didn’t answer, she grabbed up the mugs and dumped cold coffee into the sink. “You ought to try getting married first, Louis, then starting a family. That’s how it’s usually done, you know?”

  He raised the blind, trying to figure it. Such a sudden change in weather. So cold, so angry, so bristly. Had he missed a beat somewhere? How different it had all been on his last visit. They’d walked along the wharf arm in arm and visited her studio. And she’d said, “She must be crazy, Louis, not wanting your baby.” And her warmth and the waters had surrounded him, protecting him against the bumps and jolts of the world. Now each time she went by his chair, setting up the ceramic coffeepot for another go, the breeze was chilly. Louis pulled the newspaper he’d brought in from the airport toward him. Maybe he could wait her out. They’d have another cup of coffee and then stroll down to the studio and he’d touch the still-damp bowls and jugs and tell her they were beautiful, she was beautiful.