“I seen her too,” Aidan said slowly. “Don’t need to be ’fraid of her. She’s a good spirit.”
“How you know? Ain’t she chase that preacher down his own well?” Iris was a spooky child. Everybody say, she know things nobody should know.
“Preacher drove his ownself down that well,” Aidan said. “Couldn’t stand what he see in the mirror everyday.”
Outside branches rustled and snapped.
Aidan glanced at the window. “Probably just the wind.”
“Uh huh.” Iris looked up at him, no more convinced by this explanation than he was.
“All right.”
Iris wasn’t going back to sleep ’til he scouted ’round the house for danger. He hurried through the kitchen, grabbing a shotgun as he went. His fingers kept slipping on and off the trigger. No whiskey drowned his blood lust — he wanted to kill somebody. He wanted to go hunt down the rest of Garnett’s posse and shoot ’em in their beds, only three out of twelve were left. He could do it in one night. A branch snapped, and whirling toward the sound, he almost sent a load of buckshot through Miz Caroline Williams standing a few feet in front of him, holding her gray horse. Her face was moonlight and fog, her hair, a knotted spider web. She looked like a ghost.
“Good evening,” Aidan sputtered.
“Middle of the night, actually,” Miz Williams replied. “I saw your light.”
Aidan grunted, still eyeing her through his shotgun sight. Her kin took part in every misery that plagued colored, Indian, or poor white Peach Grove for a couple hundred years. Shooting her might feel good.
“That sick gal you carry up to my house a while back, dry as death then, be doing fine now.” She stared down both his barrels. “She asked after you.”
She threw him off guard mentioning a good deed. He glanced ’round for other nightriders. Wind scattered dry leaves, and shooting stars cascaded ’cross the sky. They were alone in the night. Aidan lowered the gun.
“Why you riding so late? All alone?” he asked.
“Folks say, you be leaving here. Taking Iris Phipps up north, into winter.”
“It’s spring all over, even in New York City, and I ain’t selling you my land in the middle of the night anymore than I would in daylight.”
She thrust an envelope toward him. “For Jerome and…and his wife, for my grandchildren. You’re a good man. I trust you’ll do right.” Miz Williams hadn’t talked this much in years. Not to Aidan.
“Everybody calling me a good man all of sudden, and it used to be Crazy Coop.”
“They say you put the jug down and take in Iris Phipps. I call that good.” She talked like a normal, decent person.
“Why you steal all them people’s farms from them?”
Caroline bristled. The hand holding the envelope shook. Aidan didn’t touch it.
“My husband’s land,” she said. “I was just taking it back.” She looked at him without blinking. “So will you do me this kindness? Since you’re leaving anyhow, can you do right by Iris’s sister and my Jerome?” She couldn’t even say Redwood’s name. “This is just between you and me. Nobody else needs to know.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He took the envelope. “Everybody but me know I’m leaving.”
“I hope Jerome didn’t ruin it by now.” She got back on her gray mare. “Nothing like the yellow fever to make a body glad for any future we been offered.”
Aidan should have said her son was dust. No use her carrying false hope ’round like that. But she galloped ’cross the creek, stirring up murky water — gone before he could form the words. Maybe that was better. He went back into the house and threw cold water at his face. He was so steamed up, it didn’t make much difference.
Iris slept sound, curled in his arms. Aidan was wide-awake the rest of the night, wrassling with hisself ’til finally he couldn’t fight no more. The time to leave had come.
B O O K I V
In all the ten years that I have appeared and helped to produce a great many plays of a musical nature there has never been even the remotest suspicion of a love story in any of them.
During the same ten years I do not think there has ever been a single white company which has produced any kind of a musical play in which a love story was not the central notion.
Now why is this? It is not an accident or because we do not want to put on plays as beautiful and artistic in every way as do white actors, but because there is a popular prejudice against love scenes enacted by Negroes.
Aida Overton Walker in the Indianapolis Freeman, Oct. 6, 1906
Fourteen
Chicago and Peach Grove, 1910
Redwood slipped behind a bush and jumped from the bicycle to catch her breath. Her light cotton bicycle pants clung to damp thighs. The evening air was warm, and she’d been pedaling hard. She mopped her forehead and took stock of her environs. What show could Milton be doing ’round here? This modest residential neighborhood featured comfortable two- and three- family structures, all with running water, no doubt, and indoor plumbing. Robust trees, planted on an esplanade in the 1890s, provided a canopy of shade. Skilled white craftsmen — printers, machinists, master carpenters, electricians — and their families enjoyed a good life on these streets. Garden plots were in flower, and an occasional automobile rumbled down the cobblestones. The residents weren’t factory workers or from a slaughterhouse floor, but they also weren’t wealthy.
Redwood left the bike in thick bushes and strode down the street. Spying Milton and Eddie lugging furniture and boxes from a horse-drawn wagon into an empty house, she hid behind a tree.
“It’s gwine be hebben living here!” Eddie shouted. Milton grinned.
They wore loud colors and patterns and sang nonsense as they struggled with a large table. A white couple and three children observed from their next-door porch. An elderly white man stopped as Milton and Eddie disappeared into the house. Leaning on his cane, he twitched and gasped ’til Milton and Eddie come back out the house, laughing too loud. Nothing was that funny ’cept onstage.
“Who’s moving in?” the elderly man demanded, his face purple, his breath choked.
Milton and Eddie exchanged glances; Eddie was doing his best Sambo, darky act. “Why, we is, sir,” he replied.
“Yes, uh, thass the uh plum truth.” Milton had never been good at cooning. These folks didn’t notice his bad acting though. “Da gall darned truff.”
The old fellow was downright apoplectic. “That’s outrageous.”
Milton and Eddie grabbed a stuffed chair and headed into the house again.
George crept behind Redwood and grabbed her ’round the waist. She turned quickly and held a knife to his throat.
“I don’t like men sneaking up on me,” she hissed, harsher than she intended.
“I don’t like my sister spying,” George said.
“I ain’t goin’ stand in the dark no more. What you got Milton and Eddie doing?”
“Blockbusting.”
Redwood had been studying all kinds of words to uplift herself, but hadn’t come ’cross that one. “What’s that? Something shady I’m sure.”
“You goin’ put down the knife?”
“After you tell me what you doing.”
George laughed. “Fair enough.”
“And if I don’t like what I hear…” She didn’t know what, so she got quiet.
“When I buy my house two years back, panic peddlers try to cheat me like some ignorant Negro, but I offer to cut the fool and scare more white folk out, so blockbusters charge me a third of what other Negroes got to pay.”
Another white couple on a second-floor balcony watched Milton and Eddie wrangle an upright piano into the house. It banged Eddie’s toes. He dropped the heavy instrument, which clanged something awful. He hopped ’round, squealing louder than the grumbling piano. Milton hooted.
“You must’ve got yo’ porter diplomie from da coon academy,” Eddie said. “My toe ’llowed to fall off after dis.”
“Ai
n’t my fault if you got budder fingers.”
“You saying I’se done dropped it on meself?”
“How is you gwine play piano wid broken toes?”
George laughed quietly. The white people were not amused.
“You scaring these people into selling their homes dirt cheap?” Redwood said.
“They ’fraid of living next to colored, not me.”
“After you scare out these fool white folk, how much colored goin’ have to pay to live here?” Redwood still held the knife to his throat. “Three times as much?”
“A landlord gets the best rent he can, to make a profit. I’m not in this for my health.”
“Clarissa know ’bout this?”
“Clarissa married me for my money, my business sense, not my Georgia family pedigree.”
“What you marry her for?”
The white folk grimaced as Milton and Eddie carried on with a sofa now. Redwood marched away from George, disgusted.
He ran in front of her. “We all jigging and cooning for white folk.”
Redwood pushed past him to her bicycle in the bushes. “Corking your face and cutting the fool is one thing.” She hoisted herself onto the saddle. “But this.”
“Same difference.” He blocked her.
“Are you goin’ get out of my way?”
George didn’t move.
She drove the bicycle ’round him, yelling. “Gotta be something better to do than steal money from ignorant poor people.”
“When you think of it, let me know.”
Aidan jumped from Miz Subie’s roof and brushed his hands. Dawn had yet to scatter the dark. Cold fog rising from the creek puckered his skin. Princess snorted at him, her hot breath turning white. She was packed down with traveling bags, shotgun, and banjo. Iris stroked her neck, chattering softly to her. Miz Subie surveyed Aidan’s efforts. She looked so small wrapped against the morning chill in a Seminole patchwork coat, so fragile, like she could tip over.
“That leak shouldn’t bother you no more,” he said.
“Thank you kindly,” Subie said, teeth chattering in the cold.
“I’m not used to feeling the weather.” Drunk all the time, Aidan had lost touch with the seasons. He handed Subie a packet of papers.
She tucked them into the folds of the coat. “You in a hurry to leave all of a sudden.”
“You hold onto that deed, now.” It struck Aidan hard that he might never see her again. He clasped her hand. “I just ’bout run that farm into the ground. A miracle if it’s worth anything at all.”
“I’ll hold these papers ’til y’all decide where home is,” Subie said.
“Thank you for looking after my Princess.” He hugged the mule who nosed his pocket ’til he pulled out sweet corn and a sour apple and watched her eat. “She’s getting old, can’t do much heavy work. She’s good company though.”
“I know how that is. Here.” Subie had a get-there spell ready for him: a map she drew to Redwood, powder to fight alcohol demons, and his Maskókî hunting knife.
The back of his throat clutched. “I thought I lost that.” He thrust the knife in the empty sheath still at his waist.
“Luella found it. She say, put the blade under your pillow when you sleep, to cut pain.”
“Thank her for me,” Aidan said. He’d been willing to settle for Luella, for an easy life, but not the life he wanted. Luella was a warm bosom and a feisty spirit. She wasn’t adventure or love or forgiveness. “And tell her —”
“Luella understand already.” Subie thrust the tin of powder at him. He tasted it and grimaced as he swallowed. Subie shrugged. “Gotta be nasty to fight firewater demons.”
“Your map have us going every which way.”
“You know a better route to Redwood, take it.”
“Sorry, Ma’am, I —”
“Don’t forget dirt from Garnett’s grave. Spread the last bit with Redwood.”
“I won’t forgot none of your good-music spell.” Aidan kissed Subie’s cheek quickly. “I’m goin’ miss you.”
Subie ran her hand over the sharp ridge of his chin. “Don’t never wish I was young again, but every once and a while, I do wish I was still wild.”
“I don’t know if I could take all that heat.” He hugged her hard. “Thank you, for everything.”
“Keep your heart open. Snatch the change on the wind.”
Iris ran up and hugged them both.
“Remember, a good name is powerful juju.”
Subie held Princess who whinnied and brayed as Iris and Aidan, laden with baggage, staggered down the road.
They wound down an overgrown path to the colored cemetery. Even knowing where the boneyard was, you couldn’t always find it. Aidan was glad to have Iris leading the way through the dark. He figured Subie’s good-music spell wasn’t just so he’d be a good banjo player again, but he didn’t try to guess what she really had in mind. He’d just collect the dirt and do right.
“Nine is a hoodoo charm, a crossroads number,” Iris said.
Elisa and Ladd’s resting place was in the shelter of a massive grandmother oak. Gnarled branches trailing silvery Spanish moss leaned on the ground, scraggly elbows holding up a lopsided trunk. A pipe, Ladd’s music spoons, and a carved wooden box stained deep burgundy adorned their graves. The hardheaded cousins were buried in a circle ’round their parents. Wooden birds and animals sat on each little plot. Aidan brushed his fingers against the favored possessions of his friends, his family actually. Had they clutched these things before their spirits flew?
Aidan shivered thinking on what he still had to do.
Iris hugged him with her warm arms. Her little-girl sweat smelled sweet. “I’ll wait here. I don’t like going up there,” she said.
“Me neither.” Aidan grabbed his red leather journal.
Some folk didn’t rest in peace.
He climbed a slight rise until he saw an ellipse of white marking Garnett’s grave, shells from a Sea Island — she was a Gullah woman in life and death. Star magnolias at the end of a bloom sprinkled petals and scented the air. Aidan’s legs felt rubbery, his mouth was dry and ashy, and blood was heavy in his heart. The headstone sparkled with its own light. It read:
Garnett Phipps 186? – 1898
You can’t set the spirit on fire except with love.
Tiny rocks had rained down on the hilltop, singeing the grass and flower petals on the grave. Meteorites, from the lights falling out of the sky last night?
“Has your soul come home, Miz Phipps? A falling star…”
Aidan poured whiskey from a bottle he’d found under his porch and placed a silver dime near the headstone.
“Miz Subie say, I got to buy some dirt from you to work this trick.”
He patted hisself, cussed under his breath, and looked ’round anxiously — nothing to put the dirt in. He took the train tickets and money from the alligator pouch and stuffed these in his shoulder bag. The rain of rocks had left the seashells unblemished. He fingered several quickly, almost expecting to feel an echo of Garnett’s spirit ringing in their chambers. The shells were quiet under his touch. Then he noted a single broken shell. He scooped it up along with the goober dust and glassy meteorites, and digging from the head, the heart, and the feet, he filled the pouch.
Suddenly overcome, he sat down by the bright headstone and wrote quickly in his journal for the first time in several years. A story spell was better payment for Miz Garnett than one thin dime.
A Name is Powerful Juju
Aislinn laughed as Aidan and Big Thunder chased her up through the last stunted trees and scraggly bushes to the edge of a cliff. The early morning sky was misty. Blue-green mountains rolled across the horizon like waves of an ancient slow-moving sea. Aislinn tottered on an outcropping of rocks, as if falling, and scared Aidan, but Big Thunder put his arms about her.
“Don’t fall,” he said. “This is Enotah, a high place. One of the highest in all the Enchanted Land. It would take you a long time to
reach the bottom.”
“I knew you’d catch me,” she said.
“This place is so high, it can save you,” Big Thunder said. “A long time ago when a flood raged and killed all the people in the valley below, a few families escaped in a great canoe. But where could they grow corn? Where could they hunt? The Master of Breath filled them with hope until they reached Enotah. Here, above the flood waters, where the trees gave way, they planted crops, fed their babies, and grew old, content to watch the stars shooting by.”
“A sacred place then?” Aislinn said.
Aidan came and stood close to his parents, feeling their warmth as the wind whistled through the bare rocks. They gazed out on the forests below. The deep green seemed to go on forever, even though Big Thunder complained of the loggers who toppled mighty trees and left the land naked.
“Why is this an Enchanted Land?” Aidan asked. “Are there fairies and Leprechauns here, like in Ireland?”
“It’s what the Cherokee called these lands,” Big Thunder said. “Many peoples have come and gone, fought and died over this ground. The Cherokee say the Nunnehi, invisible spirit people, lived inside the mountain and also the tiny Yunwi Tsunsdi. Perhaps the fairies of Ireland too.”
Aislinn pulled away from them and dropped down to the ground at the edge of the cliff. She found a cracked white shell and put it to Aidan’s ear.
“That shell swallowed the ocean a long time ago. You can hear it inside still,” she said. “It will never forget this song.”
Aidan listened and heard waves crashing against the tiny walls.
“Your daddy swallowed the lightning,” Aislinn said. “That’s why they call him Big Thunder.”
“You are Wildfire, like your mother, a spark that takes hold in someone’s heart.”
“And we too have seen the Enchanted Land.” Aislinn kissed Big Thunder.
Aidan knew he should look away from their passion, but he felt like a seashell catching an ocean wave.
“Big Thunder and Miss O’Casey would smile on this medicine work.” Aidan tied the alligator bag to his waist. “Even the gator must be grinning at what its ole dried skin be holding. Goober dust for the whole trip.” He stood up and passed his hand over the headstone. “Sorry won’t do, I know, Miz Garnett, but the rest of my life could be a prayer to you.”
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