“Sekou wrote The Chronicles?” Klaus was a fearless questioner.
“No. Sekou was a Guardian. I’m backup.” A story storm tingled on Cinnamon’s tongue. “The Wanderer is writing as we go along. You guys are backup now too, so you’ll have to memorize chapters with me. I got more at home. Pages come clear to my great aunt, and she sends them off. She and my grandparents are also Guardians. Every time we read, we keep the Wanderer from jumping off a bridge. The Wanderer is an alien from the spaces between things and needs us, like light needs an object to shine on or darkness wins. The Wanderer has broken into fragments and scattered, maybe into Ariel the actress. There’s nobody believing in the whole Wanderer. The Chronicles is the spell to put the Wanderer back together. Believing can make a body whole.”
Klaus and Marie stopped breathing again. Too much weird at once? Too fast? Even for a secret society posse? The scattered alien-from-another-dimension bit probably topped communications from the dead. Weird was hard to measure on an absolute scale though. For sure Cinnamon had taken them pretty close to flippin’ freaky.
“Try it now,” Mrs. Williams shouted and threw the de-icer to Mrs. Beckenbauer.
“Aliens and ghosts?” Marie shook her head. “Crossing the genre divide, aren’t we?”
“Granddaddy Aidan, Miz Redwood, and Aunt Iris had fantasy. Me and Sekou got horror sci-fi.” Diarrhea mouth was why Cinnamon didn’t have friends. Faggot brother, coma dad, and cigarette ash mom had little to do with it. “Whatever. I can’t think. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Marie looked hurt. Klaus was confused. Mrs. Beckenbauer blasted the frosted locks three times. She took a deep breath and wrenched the door open.
Sweeping snow from the windshield, Commander Williams said, “All aboard.”
They clambered inside, grown-ups up front, Mod Squad in the back. Mrs. Williams ratcheted the heat up to full. The fan sounded like poltergeists pounding the engine.
Mrs. Beckenbauer turned to her son. Klaus shouted over the racket, “Audi, a good deutsches auto, Muti. No angst, OK?” He spoke German/English to them all.
Commander Williams had the engine in gear, spinning through slush. Mrs. Beckenbauer sputtered then turned back to face the road. They were away!
“It’s glowing.” Klaus held up Cinnamon’s orca. He pulled out a few pages. “Words bright as day. Should I…?”
“Of course!” Marie said. “Why do you think it’s glowing? We’re Guardians.”
“Of course!” Klaus mimicked Marie’s exclamation point and they laughed.
“Pittsburgh will be a great city when it’s finished,” Mrs. Williams yelled at a detour sign. A bridge was out. It was miles to the next bridge. She backed up slowly and turned around.
“You really want to read it?” Cinnamon couldn’t get used to having friends.
“Are you kidding?” Marie nudged Klaus. “Go for it!”
“Listen first.” Spewing a fast storm of words, Cinnamon filled them in on The Chronicles from Kehinde and Taiwo’s appearance in a Mami Wata spirit cave to the dynamic duo boarding a steamship bound for Paris with baby Melinga and treacherous Somso. Klaus and Marie swallowed Cinnamon’s storm of words as if each one was sweet and true and precious.
Pittsburgh, PA, February 1987 &
Ocean Fog, 1893
I’m in no way an optimist. Optimism is a notion that there’s sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we’re doing, things will get better. I don’t believe that. I’m a prisoner of hope, that’s something else.
Cornel West
CHRONICLES 12: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —
Monsters on the High Seas
The first two nights on the steamship, Captain Luigi, a thin man with ghostly pale eyes and a frizzy black beard, stood on the bridge and cursed milky air. He also heaped scorn on stars skulking behind the fog. Many steamships disappeared at sea — thirty a year. Fearing La Vérité would run against a reef and sink, Luigi cursed the engineer, his lazy stokers, and everyone else.
A turbulent sea wouldn’t let anybody sleep. We were refugees of war headed to a masquerade carnival. I wanted to contain other selves, not put them on display. Wandering the foggy deck, I was forlorn, unmoored. In full warrior masquerade, Kehinde wouldn’t let me touch her.
“What are these tears?” She flicked her fingers dismissively.
Wiping my eyes, I spoke half the truth. “I fear the aje might kill again.”
“Some warriors get lost in a killing fever, but not you. Ifa says journey, sacrifice to overcome enemies and find peace.” She narrowed her eyes. “Abla always gave ahosi warriors rum or palm wine, so they might sleep without dreams, march without pain; so that when they took a head they might blot out an enemy’s last scowl. After my first drunken raid, I decided to see and remember what I did. When it came time for revenge on the Fon, I would know every way to kill —quickly without pain or slowly for agony. I would know myself.” She gripped my arm tight enough to bruise. “Once, we defeated a village. The grown men and women laid down their weapons. At the edge of the village, a young girl charged me, brandishing an Eshu staff. I disarmed her easily. My cutlass was at her neck, but I hesitated. She didn’t fear death and scrambled up, staring in my eyes with hope. I thought to let her run into the forest.
“Coming from behind me, Abla pierced her heart and said, We’d never have tamed that one. I asked, How do you know? Wiping blood from her blade Abla replied, This girl would’ve broken her ahosi oaths and betrayed us. She’d have set gris-gris to poison our power. She’d have taken lovers, had babies, and assassinated us in our sleep. She wouldn’t have lived for the glory of battle. But you will be a great ahosi general. I see your glory coming.” Kehinde clutched the scar at her neck. “I sought glory, yet Abla isn’t master of my destiny or yours.” After this story, Kehinde slept peacefully every night, a knife in one hand, a cutlass within reach. No such luck for me.
The third foggy night on board, the bridge was deserted. Only a skeleton crew tended the steamship. Rich passengers from Europe snored on the upper deck. A tangle of rigging (for vestigial sails?) hung from slender masts thrumming softly in the head wind. Torn canvas covering the yawl boats rippled. Mist condensed on smokestacks and wandered through grime to form nauseating puddles at the base. As I vomited undigested tubers from dinner, a severed head rose out of cold fog and spat clotted blood and dead fish at my feet. Abla’s rotting, bloated visage rode the surf toward me. My death blow had left jagged flaps of skin and a gruesome stump of spine. A tentacle from a creature nesting in her skull slithered through the cervical vertebrae and flung filth at La Vérité. I jumped back, disbelieving my eyes and the seaweed clinging to my chin.
“Watch out!” A sailor tossed me a rag. He was more substantial than the shadows, but barely. I couldn’t see his face; his sweat smelled urgent. “The sea’s a fickle wench, bitching her own beauty and loving you too.”
I shook my head.
“English is what I’ve got.”
He thought I didn’t understand him. Actually I’d have welcomed Lady Atlantic playing a prank and dousing me with waste from our bilge. Instead, murdered Abla rode black water alongside the ship. Perhaps the sailor glimpsed this specter tossed about in unruly waves or reflected in my eyes. Rather than go on about his business, he drew nearer, leaning into my dangerous mood. His magnetic signature was as bold as his spicy scent. Abla spat at him. She shone bright as daylight, a hole in dark water, illuminating nothing but herself. I wished for a cutlass. My empty hands slashed the rising mist. The sailor jerked back, not far, though.
“You’ve killed me already, Wanderer.” Abla spoke Yoruba and displayed pointed, dagger teeth. “I won’t die for you again.”
“What do you want?” I spoke Yoruba also.
“You called me.”
“Liar.” I turned away.
Abla’s head, relentless and bright, floated anywhere I cast my eyes. She laughed. “Wherever you go, Dahomey will live in you.”<
br />
Her laughter recalled veins bursting and bones shattering. Blood oozed from the scar on my side. I groaned. The sailor offered me a scrap of fabric. I took it.
“You masquerade as a harmless wandering griot.” Squid tentacles slithered through dead eyes. “Yet, I recognize the aje who comes to take our heads and eat our history.”
“You confuse me with Fon spies.” Fire bubbled up my esophagus and through sinuses into nostrils. I clamped it down. The sailor’s hand hovered over my back.
“No girl ever resisted me, not haughty Somso or even proud Kehinde,” Abla shouted. “I called forth the aje. Your head belongs to me.”
I buried my face in the sailor’s soft cloth, wishing I could wake from this nightmare to moonlight playing tricks on exhausted senses. The patient sailor stepped closer still, concern wafting from his pores.
Abla floated within reach. “Ifa says: Don’t use a broken rope to climb a palm tree. Don’t enter into the river without knowing how to swim. I am your history and your destiny.”
I leaned over the rail. “We leave your realm behind and travel to a New World. You have no power there.”
“You tell yourself lies you wish were true.” Slimy creatures wriggled through Abla’s teeth and got sliced to bits. “Soon you won’t remember your true story.” Tentacles reached for me.
I batted them away. “Ifa says: This person should sacrifice so her eyes don’t see evil where she is going.”
“You have nothing left to sacrifice. You will scatter to oblivion. Murderer.” Abla sank into the water. Acrid bubbles drifted up and burst in the air.
Certain she would return to torture me again, I threw myself over the railing toward the bubbles, hoping to end her torment once and for all.
CHRONICLES 13: Atlantic Ocean, 1893 —
Light Show
I might have drowned this body, but faster than thought, the sailor gripped my hips. My torso banged into the prow. I arched my back reflexively and saved my head from slamming into metal and wood.
“Swim in the morning. The sea is restless tonight.” The sailor spoke gently, but his grip on my waist was harsh. The wound in my side screamed pain. Aje fire smoldered in my lungs as he hauled me back on the deck, back to human. I yanked his left hand from my throbbing side. The sailor whistled. “You’re a strong one.” His right hand slid over my flat breasts then hovered with the left at my hips to catch any foolish move. “They say you Dahomean warrior women are men in disguise except the plump one with the baby.” He was between me and the railing. “I would hear what you say.”
Afraid to speak or look at him, I drank cold mist and doused the aje’s fire.
“Look.” The sailor traced a glowing horizon line. “Dawn is coming. The sun, a jealous lover banished for the night, burns the mist away, burns the sky red, and the sea rejoices. Nothing like it on land, hemmed in by hills and forests or city buildings. Dawn is not crowded out here.” The deck rocked under us, and I almost vomited again. He clutched my waist to steady me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” The music of his speech and the shifts in his magnetic fields were different from Kehinde’s, but he spoke English, a language she insisted I learn, a strange comfort to my ears. His rumbling chest was compelling. His skin smelled of fish, soap, and hot iron. I liked the taste of him.
“Do you touch women so freely where you are from?” I spoke his tongue. “Or only men?”
Shock sparked from his skin; his pulse jumped as he let go of me. “You meant to harm yourself. I —”
“Sought my breasts to save me?”
His shame smelled almost the same as Kehinde’s. “I beg your pardon.”
“Who are you?” My lips curled into a smirk.
His heart rate slowed. “No one you should talk to.”
“Too late, friend.” I leaned against his rough skin. His pungent surprise filled my nostrils. After a few moments his arms dropped gently against my back. In the circle of his being I fluctuated between man and woman and calmed the aje. “What’s your story?” I smiled on his chest. “What adventure brought you to Dahomey?”
He shook his head.
“Surely not just dawn on the open sea.” I drew his silent warmth into me until he shivered. “If not your story, tell me your name.”
“On this ship, I am called Bob.”
“Thank you, Bob, for holding on to me. On this world, I am Taiwo, the Wanderer.” I dashed below, so he couldn’t snag me with a response or a question.
Many nights passed before I saw Bob’s dawn. It was as he described — a true wonder. Black gave way to a pearly gray, then the sky caught the fire of the rising star. Bob hovered in the dark, a shadow. I ran around the boat to experience the light show from every perspective. As the mighty orb burned a hole in the horizon and made its grand appearance, Bob shielded my eyes, or the star’s high energy rays would have scorched my retinas.
“Too much of a good thing, and you go blind.” He pulled me deep into the shadows.
Dawn’s afterimage lingered, dominating my visual field.
Bob headed below deck before my eyes adjusted to the dark, before I could catch the look of him, before I wanted him to leave. The day passed slowly as I waited to witness dusk on the open sea. I regretted missing such a spectacle even once. The steamship waded through cold fog. The star was a white disk; the sea rippled with unruly kinetic energy. Dusk was gray slop, and I was disappointed, forlorn. Captain Luigi and I cursed the weather together. That night, as I glimpsed Abla shining in the distance, Bob approached and gave me a bag made of soft material with a latent itch.
“It makes me scratch.” A strange gift, I thought.
“Red wool,” he said. “From sheep. Animals of the north, not a jungle creature.”
“What is it?”
“A hoodoo medicine bag, mojo against whatever monster is out there in the water spooking you.” He tied the mojo around my waist and stared out to sea.
I squinted at nothing; Abla had vanished. “What do you look at?”
“The past.”
“Can you see it from here?”
“What I see is not long gone.”
I widened my eyes. Sea and sky merged in smoky fog and blackness. “Tell me.” Bob’s face was close. The dark hid his expression as he examined me. I was more man than woman. Could he smell a rise in testosterone? “Should I beg you? Fall down and kiss your ankles?”
He scratched his neck. “Thomas, a regular on the night watch, was tormented by sea monsters, as you are. Leviathans, he called them, royal fiends from the mouth of hell. One stopped his heart right where you’re standing. With his last breath, Thomas claimed that these beasties tracked sinners by the stench of their crimes. He was certain leviathans would never forget or forgive him.”
“Where I stand?” Trembling, I stepped away. The cold wind was suddenly unbearable. “What great evil had Thomas done?”
Bob pulled me into the warm circle of his being. “Thomas never said. But I think, if there is a god, a heavenly father, he knows the temptations of his own creation. If he loves us as much as the preachers say, he forgives us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Why make souls to burn in hell? God is not so wicked, or he is not god.”
“You believe this, but what did Thomas believe?”
“In fallen angels, in leviathans patrolling the seas and devils walking the land. These leviathans hounded Thomas half way ’round the world.” Bob looked again into the past and shuddered. “I have keen eyes, Taiwo, but I’ve never seen any princes from hell riding the waves of sin, stealing souls, and fouling the waters. I too have sinned. Thomas said it was nigger luck keeping me safe.” Bob shrugged. “The day before we left Dahomey, Thomas begged me to fashion a charm that very afternoon, to protect him from the princes of darkness. They were closing in to claim his tarnished soul. I repeated what I always said, Even your god loves you. I had no time to create a charm. Mojo isn’t a grab bag of potpourri.
“That night I heard shrieking,
a woman’s voice, terrible enough to boil my blood. I thought it came from shore. Thomas’s brother, Liam, made fun and said it was a banshee, warning the ship that one of us was about to die, family perhaps. Liam didn’t think on his brother, but I raced around the ship and found Thomas clutching his chest on the upper deck. He pointed toward the coast and said a sea monster had bitten off the head of a woman warrior and flung her body against the rocks. The monster was coming for him next, for all sinners on board. No, I said. Listen to me. Your god loves you. Thomas was gone already. I don’t know if he heard me.”
I gasped at the image of that fateful night, vivid in Bob’s words, unclear in my mind. Two lives the aje had taken. I was this aje still.
Bob patted my back, gently, as if I might break. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into telling this ugly tale. It’s not even my story.”
“When you tell Thomas’s saga,” my voice shook, “it belongs to you and to everyone who listens.”
Bob seemed embarrassed. “Keep the mojo safe. Hide it somewhere on yourself.”
“What’s inside?”
“Nine things: a broken chain, salt, goober dust from my momma’s grave, an elephant’s hair, sand from Death Valley, a pebble from every continent I’ve walked on, so three, and a rabbit’s foot.”
“Why a foot from a rabbit?”
“To drive evil far and keep it away. To be exact, I used the left hind foot of a rabbit shot dead with a silver bullet in a boneyard at midnight when the moon was new. It was the 13th of February, a Friday, and the fellow doing the deed was a cross-eyed, left-handed, red-headed, bow-legged colored man sitting astride an albino mule. That unlucky fellow is my no good first cousin, who lies all the time, even to me.”
“Sounds like Eshu rides him.”
“That may be. Don’t know Eshu. I do know I fixed the mojo hand with smoke from the ship’s engine. Keep the mojo alive with a dab of this now and then.” He handed me a little bottle of rum scented with herbs and flowers.
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