Will Do Magic for Small Change

by Andrea Hairston

  ∞

  It had started at breakfast. Cinnamon ran her mouth like a racehorse. She told Opal about wanting to play a warrior woman ahosi like in The Chronicles.

  Opal sneered. “Iris probably wrote those tall-tale lies to cheer Sekou up. Got some homeless fool to play-act with her. Still ready to believe anything?”

  “Uhm.” Cinnamon gulped down slimy sardines on stale Ritz crackers without chewing. She never knew what to say when Opal talked like this.

  “Big as a house, but when you gonna grow up?”

  Cinnamon sucked water from the tap so as not to choke. “Aunt Iris —” always stood in Sekou’s corner, loving him like blood family. So it was true; Iris would have done any good thing for him, but not lying. Iris simply used her West African studies to corroborate story details in The Chronicles.

  “Who did the magic art illustrations?” Cinnamon said.

  Iris couldn’t draw a stick on the ground, let alone get pictures to move off the page.

  “Your grandfather can carve anything come to his mind. Hear Raven tell it, Aidan can carve the wind.”

  Daddy was the painter. Cinnamon had never seen Aidan draw or paint.

  “Raven is the painter, but you ain’t seen everything.”

  Cinnamon hated Opal reading her mind. “So?”

  “When you get old, things repeat, and there you are facing the same boring BS again and again. You wait.” Opal always trotted out a long life of disappointment to justify her bleak outlook.

  “That’s not what Miz Redwood, Granddaddy, or Aunt Iris say, and they’ve lived way longer than you. You’re only forty-one.”

  “So?” Opal mimicked Cinnamon’s tone. “Don’t go bothering Raven’s folks.”

  A second can of sardines didn’t want to open. Opal took a screwdriver to the thin metal, stabbing a bent edge. Cinnamon raced to her room and got a Wanderer illustration for evidence: Kehinde danced with a snake in the vodun/orisha spirit cave. She ran back and stuck it in Opal’s face, saying what she hoped was true. “This is Miz Redwood’s favorite, because of the light caught on the page. A dark night, yet the water shines like day. Kehinde dances for Mère d’eau, Mami Wata we say nowadays.”

  Opal barely glanced at the waterfall spilling photons into their dreary kitchen.

  “A source, not a reflection. Fluorescent or —”

  “How can you spout physics at me and believe that hoodoo-voodoo nonsense?” Forcing the sardine tin open, Opal almost splattered grease on the spirit cave.

  Cinnamon jerked away. “Physics and hoodoo are different realms, different dimensions of truth.” The drawing blurred. Raven Cooper, tall and spooky, with smoky eyes and silky dreads twisting ’round a crooked grin, waved his arms in front of a gunman as two warrior women tasted tongues below a stained glass Jesus. Cinnamon turned a gasp into a gag and rolled the drawing back up. The back of it was blank.

  Luckily Opal didn’t notice the drawing turn into a moving picture. “I paid full price, and the shit’s gone bad.” She tossed the rotting mess at the garbage can. “You shouldn’t eat all that fat anyhow.”

  Nothing else to eat except Cinnamon’s rice cake sandwich lunch, an old jar of stewed tomatoes, and a shriveled grapefruit with cottony white stuff covering half of it. The black cherry ice cream in the freezer was Sekou’s. Shopping day was Friday, after the bus company paycheck. It was Wednesday. Opal sucked a breath. It sounded like stones were rattling in her lungs. She tossed the grapefruit.

  “Where you been hiding that picture?”

  “Nowhere.” Cinnamon stowed it quickly in her killer whale knapsack and kept her mind blank.

  “I bet Redwood put Iris up to this Chronicles scam. Damn alien fairy tales didn’t do your brother no good.” Opal blew smoke from one cigarette and stabbed the air with the embers of another. “Tall tale lies won’t help you either.”

  How do you know? Cinnamon wanted to scream. Look at how you messed Sekou up. Daddy wasn’t his fault. Reading her mind for sure, Opal crumpled into a chair. Cinnamon wanted to take her unkind thought back. Instead she said, “These sardines will stink up the house,” and crashed out the screen door with the garbage.

  Rain, the neighbor’s attack Doberman, huffed a bark and trotted to the fence.

  “It’s rotten,” Cinnamon told her, “I’ll get you something good, I promise.”

  “Don’t be feeding that mongrel!” Opal shouted.

  ∞

  Another bulb fizzled out in the cold playhouse lobby. Cinnamon shivered, thinking of what she should have said to her mom that morning. No matter what anybody (including Opal and Clarence) thought about The Chronicles, a true story wasn’t in a fight with facts. Plus, the elders couldn’t have written Acknowledgment for Temporal Gaps on the back of the drawing this evening. The Chronicles and the Wanderer came from the spaces between things, touching this moment and many others. Iris had seen Daddy too, ghosting through the Wanderer’s drawings. Sekou called that coincidental affinity: the Universe lining up in your direction. Cinnamon finally understood what he meant — Eshu laughing his ass off, waiting to see if you were taking notes.

  Cinnamon’s magic-words journal slipped from her lap and fell open on the grimy carpet. She spied Redwood’s hoodoo spell for actors. More coincidental affinity! The elders were probably cruising down the turnpike from Erie this very second, smiling at Pittsburgh hills leaping up out of nowhere. Cinnamon picked up the journal and spoke Redwood’s spell out loud, to give it more power:

  When you’re on stage, give Doubt a comfortable seat in the wings.

  Let Doubt watch you soar.

  What worked on stage worked in the everyday too. Opal was mad at the world. She didn’t want to believe in anything. Cinnamon wasn’t like that. She had different fire in her eyes. The Akan weavers were part of her posse. So was the Wanderer and Aunt Becca and Kevin. She settled in for a good read.

  CHRONICLES 10: Coast of Dahomey, 1893 —

  Masquerades

  Somso stared past suckling Melinga to the unruly sea. “You don’t want my story.”

  “But we do,” I said.

  Somso turned to Kehinde. “After spying ghost Taiwo and his traitor sister in the market, Yao had everyone hunting you. Abla, a brutal warrior like you, saw that I knew something and threatened me. I told her, I know my husband was shot dead and will never know his child. Abla didn’t care.”

  “How could you join forces with your husband’s enemies?” Kehinde scowled.

  “What are you?”

  “Not his enemy or yours.”

  “So you say. Yoruba raiders from Abeokuta captured Igbo slaves too.”

  “Everyone takes slaves.”

  “After Husband-Taiwo disappeared, Abla threatened to kill me and his tomorrow in my belly unless I became her spy and helped track you.”

  “You’re a traitor’s wife ready to stick a knife in her at the first opportunity,” Kehinde said. “Abla would have killed you both eventually.”

  “Why sell me to the impresario if she wanted to kill me?”

  “You were useful. Abla taught me that a good soldier doesn’t kill too quickly. ”

  “Abla claimed you killed your own brother. I told her she lied. Did she?”

  Kehinde’s breath caught in her throat.

  “Half a story is also a lie,” I said.

  Somso sneered at my feeble defense.

  “What can I tell you?” Kehinde slow-danced in the receding tide. “My head belongs to the king, not to myself. If he pleases to send for it or my brother’s head, I resign myself to duty. If my head is shot through in battle, this is honor. I’m gratified to kill or die in the service of my king. Brother-Taiwo was an enemy of Dahomey. He defied Béhanzin. He urged slaves on the king’s plantations to revolt. So when I caught him at the head of the rebels, stealing the king’s grain and killing ahosi, I didn’t know him as brother. We ahosi warriors were outnumbered, fighting fiercely, but with little hope. I decided to make the most of death and send a rebel leader
to the ancestors. As I aimed at Brother-Taiwo, a dying rebel fell against my arm and ruined the shot. My bullets lodged in the heartwood of an iroko tree.”

  “You didn’t shoot him.” I was relieved, as if Kehinde had aimed at my heart and missed.

  “Taiwo had an easy shot,” Kehinde said. “He hesitated. I quickly loaded my last bullet and shot a rebel charging in front of Taiwo toward me. One bullet took the rebel’s life and also pierced Taiwo’s thigh. Kehinde, he said, clutching the wound, your aim is efficient, stopping us both. As I drew my cutlass to take his head, he cried out. Greet your twin brother. I went ahead to taste the world and send word back to you. Have the years erased my face from your heart? Now it was I who hesitated. Taiwo? No. You lie. I said this even though I sensed he spoke truth. He didn’t shoot as I approached, but dropped his rifle.” The death dance sputtered on Kehinde’s limbs. She stumbled to a halt.

  Somso cried. Tears dribbled across her nipple into the milk. “Finish your tale.”

  Kehinde staggered about. “When I was first captive and Abla taught us the warrior way, I plotted revenge on Yao and the Fon invaders who’d stolen my life. I mouthed Fon oaths, yet swore to Oshun to be true to my ancestors, my family. I hid my hatred and lived a masquerade, miming loyalty. Now this fateful day had come. A wounded rebel leader, my twin, called me back to myself, urged me to set down the masquerade.” She could barely speak. “Yet, what you rehearse, you become. I’d forgotten who I was or how to be free.”

  “No one forgets the taste of loyalty,” Somso said.

  “You know nothing,” Kehinde replied. “Memory is a masquerade that must be performed or it can’t live again. Kidnapped Yoruba, and Igbo girls too, were broken by Abla and so well trained, they resisted rescue by brothers, uncles, and even fathers. Abla could make these girls bring death down upon their families and clans. Witnessing their submission to Dahomey, I’d felt contempt for the loyalty they offered the Fon. Wise Abla gave me years of easy praise and valor. Now, facing my rebel brother on Béhanzin’s plantation, a true battle raged inside me, and I understood Abla’s powers. I’d become a proud, undefeated warrior, an inspiration for griot storytellers. I was loyal to the ahosi who fought with me. They were my family and destiny, not a Yoruba past I could barely recall; not a vanquished clan who offered poor protection against the mighty Fon. Should I honor the naïve oaths I made as a stupid young girl? Or did Eshu Elegba laugh at the foolish woman I’d become, a woman who had lost her true self?

  “I raised my cutlass but shouted to Brother-Taiwo, Run! Pierced by a second bullet, he staggered into range of my blade and said, You have not forgotten. He fell against me, mumbling: Ifa says, what we look for is near us, yet we don’t recognize it.” Kehinde glared at me, the Wanderer who had stolen her brother’s form, who could speak his mind.

  “What happened next?” I said, meeting her eyes.

  “I would have dropped my weapons and fallen with Brother-Taiwo. But he wouldn’t let me die. Don’t falter, he said. Your twin goes ahead to the land of the ancestors, but you must save yourself. When the Fon stole you away, I swore to free you. Because of you I became a rebel leader. I’ve been fighting for you ever since. Today Eshu offers a way, for you, me, and my wife. Somso. She carries my son, our tomorrow. I knew of her. Yao, the spy who killed our father and raped our sisters, complained of a Babalawo protecting him from enemies and stealing his beautiful wife Somso.”

  Yao the murderer of dreams had been Somso’s husband!

  “Yao sold me.” Somso spit a bad taste in the sand.

  Kehinde grunted. “Keep my Somso safe, Taiwo pleaded. I go on to our ancestors, so promise me, Kehinde, if you find her and my son, do this. Impossible, I thought, yet twins share one destiny. I swore to Eshu to see Somso and his child through if I found them. At my promise, Brother-Taiwo’s sense left him. He collapsed.” Kehinde waved at me. “Eshu makes the road. Today I fulfill my promises.”

  “Did Husband-Taiwo die at your feet?” Somso trembled. “Tell me of his death.”

  Kehinde shook her head.

  “I would hear this too,” I said.

  Kehinde gathered herself. “The plantation slaves fought with passion. We warriors had more skill and rifles. Seeing their leader fall, the rebels were thrown into disarray. Before they regrouped, before the ahosi warriors could spare energy to chase a traitor, I picked my brother up and ran. I slashed down anyone who tried to stop me. The air was thick with smoke and dust. Blood clouded many eyes. I stumbled to the empty ahosi camp and gathered what I could of my life. Eshu favored our escape. I carried Brother-Taiwo to a spirit cave. Dying, your husband spoke his love for you.”

  Somso’s face hardened. “Did you really renounce your king for your brother?” She stroked Melinga’s downy hair. “Perhaps this is the noble tale you recite now.”

  “Kehinde has never recounted these events,” I interjected.

  “What other tales has she kept from you, Wanderer?”

  “Such stories are hers to share as she pleases, not mine to demand.”

  Somso sniggered. “How could Husband-Taiwo have such a sister?”

  “How could he choose such a wife?” I asked.

  “Once the Fon train a girl for war, they’ve broken her. She is never a woman again.”

  “What do you know of the Warrior and the Wanderer?” I hissed at Somso. Kehinde gripped my shoulder. “I faced the end of myself for Kehinde’s trust, for all her stories.”

  “Love is blind,” Somso said. “Kehinde, you say you carried your brother in one arm and struck down warriors with your other hand? That is a tale for a gawlo to flatter kings or manipulate villagers. Do you poison my mind and the Wanderer’s with praise-singer lies and hope we’ll trust a traitor, an oath-breaker?”

  “I saw Kehinde balance her brother on the fulcrum of one shoulder. Kehinde has carried me too. She is the stillpoint of my wandering.” I was shouting. Melinga paused from drinking. I lowered my voice. “A liar believes no one.” Melinga suckled again.

  “Who doesn’t lie, Wanderer?” Somso said. “If you saw my husband wounded, why not heal him as you healed me?”

  “I didn’t yet know how.”

  “Why should I believe you?” Somso said.

  “Why would I let Brother-Taiwo die?” To have Kehinde for myself. With respect to a stillpoint, Wanderers were ruthless.

  Kehinde read me like an Ifa diviner reads a throw of palm nuts. “Don’t doubt yourself, Wanderer.” She circled Somso. “Were you so noble with Abla — resisting threats valiantly? Or did you volunteer what you knew? Perhaps you desired revenge. Did you love my brother or still long for Yao’s caresses?”

  Somso shivered at these suggestions. “What do you mean?”

  “Did Abla promise you Yao’s bed again? A French doctor cure?” Kehinde halted behind Somso. “Why should our honor be doubted when you led Abla to kill us? I saved your life, and Wanderer-Taiwo did as well.”

  “You are both sorcerers proffering polluted visions,” Somso whispered.

  “You’ll betray us the first chance you get.” Kehinde gripped her cutlass.

  “So kill me now.”

  “The Wanderer has decided.” Kehinde drew the blade across the sky. A burst of high frequency starlight scattered through the atmosphere, burning it blue. Morning. “You and Melinga are our story now.” She made a gesture above my head, a knife thrusting from the crown of my braids into the clouds. “Eshu rides the Wanderer.” Kehinde turned to Somso, calm and empty, the potential between a bolt of electricity and its target. My skin prickled. “We must trust each other. What is there for any of us in Dahomey? Our ship steams away soon.”

  To my surprise, Somso nodded. “Chicago will be Melinga’s homeland.”

  “It is settled,” Kehinde declared, even though nothing was settled.

  CHRONICLES 11: Coast of Dahomey, 1893 —

  Fire from Elsewhere

  The wind carried melancholy melodies from the European ship. Sand flies, crabs, and birds scurr
ied through the scenes of birth and death. Melinga dropped into sleep, a pebble into deep water. Her warm milk breath drew beads of sweat from Somso’s skin. Kehinde gathered books, medicine bags, comb, and horsehair whip.

  “Let’s not miss the boat.” She marched ahead.

  I helped Somso up. We trudged toward the old slave hut and departure. My chest ached. Like the ocean tugging on the shore, Dahomey raked my heart. “Somayina who doesn’t travel alone, did the Fon steal you from yourself?”

  Somso’s lip curled at my question. “I never missed Yao’s bed.”

  “You are Igbo. Why did Brother-Taiwo marry you?” Kehinde asked.

  Somso stepped over stony roots. Desolate gray seaweed tried to snag us. “I was never circumcised. My mother was a Christian and intended that I marry a Christian man who wouldn’t mind.”

  “That isn’t an explanation.” Kehinde was relentless. “What else?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone willingly to a Yoruba man. They don’t know how to treat a wife. Neither do the Fon. But Yao took me captive in a raid. Despite round hips and high breasts, I didn’t give him children. What is a wife who produces no sons or even daughters?” She gestured disgust. “Yao’s mother told everyone, Somso isn’t circumcised. She is barren and lustful. A man shouldn’t keep such a repugnant wife. I wasn’t a warrior or a healer. So Yao sold me to the king’s plantation where Taiwo toiled making palm oil.” A smile caught fire on her face. “He never hid from the Fon. An Ifa diviner, a great Babalawo, Taiwo wore the ide Ifa on his left wrist.” She held up a bracelet of opal beads anchored by strands of green and yellow glass. “Everyone sought his council. Great wisdom can’t be subdued. Yao and his spies came seeking the secret of his power. Taiwo recognized them easily. He warned them of a deadly destiny that could bring ruin.”

  “Why would a rebel-slave leader do that?” Kehinde asked.

  Somso shrugged. “Where to hide from destiny? Unspoken, blame the mouth; unheard, blame the ear. Yao, always prudent, offered the necessary sacrifices. Change or die, yes? The other spies ignored the verses Taiwo recited. Soon after, the ajaho, head of the king’s spies, accused them of treason. They lost their heads. Many avoided Taiwo, but Yao greeted him with respect. Taiwo offered Yao wisdom and Yao protected Taiwo from other spies. Our village had peace. We were happy to work the lands where Taiwo made palm oil. Several foolish Igbo women warned against consulting a twin, yet when no man would marry me, I asked Taiwo to cast Ifa.”