I tell Mambo all about our shopping in Marksville and dancing at the social because I’m trying to get her spirits up. Must say I get a little smile outta her when I tell her about the trumpet player smiling at me in my lemon frock all night.
‘Ya ain’t gonna have no trouble getting hold of men honey. I’m sure as hell there wasn’t anybody inside that place looking like ya, and he got sense enough to see it.’ Her voice sounds like it’s hard to get the words up out of her throat. ‘Ya mind ya find a good one though, ’cause that’s all ya needing.’
That sure makes me wonder why she chose Quince. It’s clear he ain’t no kinda help and Mambo all borne down with child. Our cabin ain’t looking good and clean at all, like Mambo’s always been fussy about, and our land looks like it ain’t been touched since I was back the last time. I reckon the place ain’t kept proper since I left. Ain’t right, and sure don’t seem like my Mambo.
I reach Mambo’s broom up into the grey cobweb hanging from the rafters above her bed. Never seen cobwebs up there before now. Mambo lifts her belly outta the rocking chair on the porch, saying she wants to come in and lie down.
‘Can’t be much longer, Mambo, the baby coming.’
‘Feels like anytime.’
‘Well, it look like it oughta been last week.’
Something shifts out of the rafters. Looks like a chicken wishbone bound up with red twine and a small wrap of leaves hanging from it. The leaves split apart and a dark red powder is spread all over Mambo’s bed. It’s a voodoo fetish and it ain’t one of my Mambo’s.
Next thing I know, Mambo is screaming like she’s gone lost her mind. Her eyes are sticking way outta her head and she’s yelling like she wants all of Avoyelles parish knowing about it.
‘Get it out! Get it out of here!’ Mambo is clawing at her throat like she’s sucked in some of that powder and it’s burning. ‘Out! Out!’
I pick the fetish up and throw it out the window. I ain’t ever seen Mambo scared of anything.
‘It’s gone, Mambo. I threw it out. Stop yelling.’
She’s gasping for breath and down on her knees. I’m fearful for that child she’s carrying.
‘Mambo! Stop it! This stuff’s only gonna work if you let it!’
‘You don’t know. You ain’t never know nothing about it girl.’ Her voice is raspy, it don’t sound like her at all, and she’s looking like she’s gonna be falling into one of her trances it ain’t ever possible to get her out of. I shake her hard on account of that child in her belly. She’s looking like the spirits are taking her over and I know for sure if that child gets to thinking it’s coming now, we’re all gonna be in a heap of trouble.
‘Help me. Please help me, Arletta.’
‘How Mambo? I ain’t know nothing about it!’
‘Open the closet. Here, take the key.’ She fumbles round her neck and I help her get the key to Pappy’s closet. She ain’t ever keep that key round her neck before now, but I guess that’s because she was sure of one thing. I was never gonna touch it.
I open Pappy’s closet, first time I seen inside that since he’s gone. It sure is orderly, like I’d expect from my Mambo, and filled to busting with dried leaves, roots and berries, powders in old tins, and all kinds of strange shapes I’m thinking I don’t want to be knowing about. One box is flowing over with coloured ribbons, some old and faded from Grandma’s time. Most of all I notice Pappy’s closet has a Mambo smell that stayed with me every day of my life till I left our cabin.
‘Quickly, Arletta.’
‘What do I do? What ya want?’
‘Bottle … white bottle, the small one, second shelf. Quickly, Arletta.’ It looks like she’s gonna stop breathing.
There’s several white bottles; I pick up the smallest.
‘Bring it.’ Mambo clutches it tight to her chest. ‘Hog hair – get me hog hair.’
I fumble where she’s pointing and bring the hog hair in a black wrapping I probably painted myself. She’s down on all fours and gasping for breath, telling me to get outside for a big leaf. I do as I’m told and she empties black powder from the bottle and folds the leaf up; she’s gasping for breath all the time. Then she pierces it through with hog hair so it stays put.
‘Cotton, any cotton. Hurry!’
I grab the box of cotton reels. Mambo, quick as a lightning strike, binds the leaf up and makes a loop at the end. When that loop is strung round her neck, she holds the leaf tight in to her chest. Her breathing gets slow and deep and normal.
‘Oh Lord, child. Oh Lord.’ Mambo leans against the wall wiping sweat from her neck with the hem of her frock.
‘Mambo, what happened?’
‘It’s a curse, somebody’s cursed me, Arletta. Ain’t no wonder I been feeling so bad. I should have guessed it, I should know, I sure should, but it got me. This is bad stuff and it got me. First time.’
‘Mambo, don’t go talking that kinda nonsense. This ain’t real. Ya let all this happen, this is just something ya let happen. Ain’t real stuff.’
She ain’t listening. She raises herself up from the floor and I see the old anger flash across her face. I see that old Mambo look of hers fill her right up till she stands straight. She was stiff with fear a few seconds back, now I’m starting to feel kinda sorry for whoever it is thinking they were gonna put that wishbone up in Mambo’s rafters and get away with it. Seems to me only Quince ever gonna get the chance to do that, so I reckon I been right about him all along. She’s gonna find him out good and I sure am glad about that.
‘Arletta – y’all go on doing as ya see and please. I’m gonna go on doing as I see and please. Some damn vaudoux got in here and bring me a heap of trouble. Right here in my own cabin.’
‘Maybe Quince …’
‘Don’t be stupid, Arletta. He ain’t got no clue about nothing of it. He good for one thing, and one thing only is all he’s good for. Only thing he got is right there between his two legs. He ain’t got nothing else.’
I wince. I been living alongside Mrs Archer-Laing and her fine manners for just about the length of time Mambo’s been with child, but it’s got me right outta Mambo’s way of talking.
‘Mambo, don’t talk that way. Ain’t ladylike …’
‘’Cept he’s starting to earn, that’s something. Come on, help me, girl.’
She grabs the red-stained bed sheet and marches outside, pushing her big belly in front of her. She’s got herself in fighting mood and I gotta watch it don’t come my way. I’m wondering where the hell Quince has gone on Christmas Eve with Mambo just about to drop his child. I’m glad I come, but birthing babies ain’t something I been figuring on.
She gets a fire started out front so quick it looks like she just snapped her fingers.
‘Get a hold on that wishbone and don’t let ya skin touch it. Go on, use this leaf and get it over here. Don’t let it touch ya skin now. That powder gonna burn.’
It’s Christmas time, so I reckon on doing like she asks for the sake of peace on earth. I left the world of Marksville a few miles back. That’s the real world. Out here is Mambo’s world, the old world with the old ways. Back in Marksville they’re gonna be singing carols and ringing bells. Down our track Mambo’s mumbling and growling and stamping the earth, heading on down the warpath, same as always. I see she’s gone when her eyeballs start slipping and she starts shaking. I throw the wishbone and what’s left of the red powder packet onto the flames. All that old-tongue chanting takes me right back someplace I ain’t so keen on being any more.
She throws herbs and all kinda stuff into the flames till a yellow cloud of smoke lifts up, thrashing daylight and sounding like thunder. She starts out with one mighty wailing I know gonna be heard all the way over at Safi’s. Mambo’s old terrible self is right back where it belongs. I watch the flames get a hold of her stained sheet, then I help her back to the porch where we watch it burn.
‘Ain’t no wonder I been feelin’ worse than some old goat. Just ain’t no wonder, but I’m gonna
be fine now.’
Mambo falls asleep in the rocker and I get back to cleaning like it never happened. Still no sign of Quince turning up. When I’m done I sit out on the front step and close my eyes till I hear Mambo’s chair start rocking. The smell of that sulphur cloud is still hanging in the air and up my nose.
‘Want something, Mambo? A drink?’
‘No honey. I’m fine.’
I ask her who she reckons got inside our cabin, and tell her it looks like they gonna be needing locks, in case somebody’s taken to creeping about when she and Quince ain’t here.
‘Ain’t no lock gonna keep that out.’
The rocker is going full length on its runners. Mambo is mad.
‘I reckon, sure as day follow night, on some upstart bitch working over La Pointe and Pawnee way being inside of here. She’s been after my people for a long time, I know that for sure. Thinking they’s gonna go her way ’stead of where they’s always come. I knows all about folks round here and that’s strong medicine, that’s good stuff. Arletta, sit down girl, I’m gonna tell ya somethin’ ya don’t know.’
I do as she says, but she knows I’m only gonna be listening to keep her in fine humour.
‘Pappy make it so ya ain’t ever get any faith in me and Grandma’s ways. He go way out so ya ain’t never gonna get it at all, but I’m wanting to tell ya something, and I want ya remembering it all ya whole life. Ya understanding me, Arletta?’
She reaches over and takes my hand. I sure don’t recall her ever doing that before and it strikes me if I had ever spent time learning her ways, I was maybe gonna know a different Mambo. She taps her bony finger in the palm of my hand. Can’t say I’m gonna be understanding her mumbo-jumbo, but I’m gonna listen anyhow.
‘Ya see, Arletta, when folks get off to one of them doctors in Brouillette or Marksville they say, “I got a sore head, or a sore leg,” and that doctor’s gonna treat them for that. That’s his way, he trained up for it. Out here, when folks come to me with something ailing, I remember some old uncle, he had this same thing. Maybe my Mambo told me some great, long-gone uncle have that same thing too, and she know’d it from her old Mambo, way back. This thing is in this family and it gonna grow out in its own fine time. Nature taking its own way and heal it out in time. It’s gonna die in the blood. Sometimes that take one generation, maybe it take two, three. Maybe it just gonna take that long. That’s their own blood pumping through them folks and we watch that blood do what it gotta do to make its own healing. Blood is strong stuff, I always telling ya that, and the best healer this world’s got, same as water. Ain’t no business of ours meddling with this and meddling with that unless we knows it. We been mambos round here for a long time, till y’all take to learning, and we know all that stuff about folks coming to us.’
I look away then because I ain’t wanting to see that look she gets when she’s mad that I ain’t gonna be Mambo.
She just carries on talking, says sometimes a family gets a weakness in the mind and that goes way back in them too. Ain’t nothing gonna stop it till that grow out and nature gets done with it. That’s when the spirit moves on, and that family’s always gonna be stronger for it, able to fight that thing off if it comes again. Sometimes folks got a weakness for liquor on account of that spirit feeling tired out and needing to sleep, but life comes, wakes it right up and it ain’t its time. Them’s old spirits, she says, and them’s just tired. Some folks soft, ain’t strong enough to be standing up for what’s right because it’s set out in blood that they gonna be like that. All that stuff set out in spirit and blood and a mambo needs to be learning how to know which one they’re dealing with.
‘We mambos keep folks’ record about all that in our mind. We knows about all them folks and families, and how we been helping them, father to son, mother to daughter, over time. We keep track on all them cousins and even all them cousins’ cousins, some they don’t even know they has. That get handed down to us, like a family telling us its own story. I learn all that, Grandma taught me all them lines on folks and how they cross over with one another. We keep all that in our head, Arletta, it goes from mother to daughter, generation to generation, so what look like mumbo-jumbo to you and Pappy make good sense to us. That’s our business, to be remembering the spirit line in all them folks that come to us, remembering how the blood is flowing in the family, when they don’t even remember it themselves. Sometimes they get a lot of pain outta remembering stuff they don’t wanna be remembering, so Mambo remembers it for them, so they get a release from that pain. That’s the way a family make sense to us. And we hand down what we learn, about what heals what and what works with one person and ain’t no good on another. We of the old ways gotta learn us all that. We help how we been told, but we gotta find ways of facing up to all them changes when bad blood takes to moving out when its time comes. That sure is the tricky part, sure is hard work for a mambo. And we got the gut for it. That’s old voodoo ways, Arletta. That’s our old ways and we proud of them. We don’t get ourselves all this pride for nothing.’
Seems I got some of my learning ways from Mambo’s blood, same as Pappy’s.
‘This woman over Pawnee way ain’t from no family, she got Indian blood, I hear, and there sure ain’t much of that in her that I knows about. She been mixing Indian ways with our ways and that ain’t ever gonna work, ain’t real stuff, she just mixing and choosing whatever she take a fancy to, ain’t no blood-learning in her, ain’t no memory of folks, and there ain’t no Tunica shaman taking her on at all, either. They came all the way out here one time, way back, warning me, telling me all about her. Tunica got ways just as proud as our ways, just as good as our ways. We respect one another, even help one another out sometimes, ’cause I know all them Tunica and Biloxi shamans same as they know me.
‘Confusion and mix-up stuff is all she got and selling it for some price too, from what I hear. Them ways are old ways, them’s pure ways and ain’t no mixing unless ya real smart with it. It don’t serve them and it don’t serve us. Times be that a mambo and a shaman talk about stuff, there sure is, but she just start up on her own, ’cause she take a fancy it something she wanna be doing.’
‘Why?’ I ain’t able to figure anybody wanting to be a mambo. ‘Money?’
‘Well, I say that’s about it. But she gonna get big trouble from some shaman out there. That’s for sure, I knows that. They ain’t looking kind on her at all. She’s one stupid mamma, and she got too much of what they’s calling ego. That ain’t pride. Pride a different thing altogether. A mambo don’t just start up, Arletta, a mambo get born that way, even if they don’t know about it. And she gonna find out we ain’t always get paid, neither. Good folks take care of their mambo no matter what, and a good mambo take good care of them. Always been.’
She leans back in the rocking chair and closes her eyes.
‘A mambo always looked after.’
It’s more than I ever hear her speak in my life. She sure had a lot to teach me if I’d been born a mambo.
‘I know her, know who she is, but I don’t know who’s telling her about our ways. Somebody learning her something, but she ain’t got no memory of my people. If ya gonna teach, ya gotta teach it all the way. Grandma spent her whole life teaching me, since I was born, and I knew that was all done when y’all come along. That’s why I ain’t never start with it. I knew ya ain’t never gonna be no mambo.’
‘I’m sorry, Mambo. Seems I always knew I ain’t no mambo neither.’
‘I knows it, Arletta.’
Maybe I ain’t no mambo, but I sure like hearing about my own people. She tells me how our people come from Africa, but they came to Louisiana from Haiti. My great-great-grandmother went by the name of Celia Dessalines, and she says them Dessalines were powerful folk in Haiti. They were powerful folk in Africa a long time before that.
‘“Fon”, they called them back in the old country,’ she says. ‘And Celia Dessalines’ ma was what they called a “botono”. That’s what they called a
sorceress. My Mambo told me that before we ever set foot on this soil it got handed down from mother to daughter, once to a son ’cause ain’t no daughter born. The Dessalines take it in spirit, and blood, that’s our memory, from Africa, before we were even called Dessalines.
‘And like I say, Arletta, I don’t know who might be talking to this Pawnee woman about our ways, but I know for sure that ya just found bad stuff. Mambos deal with bad stuff all the time, cursing and devils and all kinds of stuff. Mambo knows a good spirit and Mambo knows a bad spirit. Ain’t no bad spirit, ain’t no devil, ever gonna heal no folk.’
She opens her eyes and looks at me.
‘That was bad stuff. I know devils, Arletta. Ain’t no healing in them.’
‘Is that what you are, Mambo? A healer?’
Ain’t what I ever thought.
‘Sure. But a mambo can be lot of things, Arletta. Healing ain’t always gonna come on how outside folks think it’s gonna come. They don’t know what a mambo knows and no mambo ever gonna be talking other folks’ business. And a mambo don’t pay no mind to what folks spouting out their mouth, neither. We taught to listen past them sounding words. Most times words just noise for foolin’ folk.’
She laughs.
‘Lord, Arletta, the nicest-sounding words I ever hear come outta the worst kinda folks I ever meet, and that’s the truth.’
She gives another little laugh. It’s good to see her smile.
‘What ya gonna do about that Pawnee woman?’
‘I’s near my time, and that’s a powerful time for a woman. Y’all get on over to Safi’s for the night. I gonna do what I gotta do.’
I ain’t leaving so close to that baby coming, so I tell her I’m just staying put.
‘Next weekend, that’s when the baby gonna come. Next weekend.’
What the River Washed Away Page 12