“Why not?”
Aidan leaned away from her and tuned his banjo. The melody he played was close to Abbaseh’s, but his finger worked magic on the strings, pulling pain and tears and fear right out of her. He played swamp currents, lightning flashes, snow in May, the El jumping the track and streaking ’cross the stars. His music was the ancestors’ voices whispering on the wind, the hustle and bustle of great grandchildren yet to come. When she was ’bout to bust, he started singing. Redwood set her voice close to his:
The water is cold, the water is deep
Before I’m old, before the long sleep
Into someone’s heart, I’ll set sail
And find what’s lost, write a brand new tale
Aidan set down the instrument. Redwood was trembling all over. With such a skimpy scenario, she didn’t know how to feel or what to do. Acting meant reaching for truth, conjuring a world for yourself and your audience. Acting wasn’t the same as lying, although you could lie while you acted. She didn’t want to think on that too much.
“You always were a conjure man with that banjo, but that is the best music I ever heard.”
Still blindfolded, she reached out and found Aidan’s face. She undid the cloth over his eyes and ran her hands ’cross the ridge of his jaw and through the soft hairs of a beard that never came. She paused at his mouth and touched the warmth of his breath, the bumpy wetness of his tongue. His lower lip was slippery and smooth and made her sigh. The feel of him raced up and down her spine. Aidan gripped her wrist, startling her. He undid her blindfold. His watery eyes caught all the light. She could see clear through him, back to his ancestors, back to the beginning of everything and up to now. He was looking all the way through her too.
“You all right?” he asked. “You breathing funny.”
What could she say? With him looking into her and her blood moving so fast, she was dizzy and prickly everywhere. “I want to be all right. You?”
He breathed a warm swamp breeze onto her cheek and shook his head.
“Clarissa, Iris, and them trying to take the trick off my body.”
“Uh huh.” He ran his fingers down her face to the bead at the cleft in her neck. She almost couldn’t stand it. “Is it working?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.” She rested her face against his arm. “I thought of acting with you.”
“Acting? What you mean?”
“If well…if I didn’t feel,” she gestured, “if I started disappearing on myself.”
“Tonight ain’t the only night. We got however long it takes.” He tried to pull away but she held onto him.
“No. We can’t let any more time go by.” She wasn’t feeling dull or blank, just on edge. “This is the moment we got! Let me make you feel good.”
“I’m not goin’ run away from you,” Aidan said. “Even if we don’t —”
“In our next moving picture, I want to fall in love with you.” She opened his shirt and stroked his chest. The hair under his arm tickled her. She tickled him back with her tongue. “Do a scene like this.”
“Like what?”
“A love scene.” She kissed the gooseflesh rising on him. “Let’s try it.”
Aidan cut his eyes at her.
Redwood put her storm hand over his heart and felt it beating underneath the bones. And then her own heart was throbbing between her legs. “When I was a young gal, sixteen or seventeen, I imagined you kissing me, touching my secret spots.” She pulled off his shirt. “I imagined touching you, too.” Getting him out of the pants was a feat — she was fumbling at buttons, and he seemed clumsy as all get out. After freeing his left leg, she left a tangle of black wool bunched from his right knee to his feet. “I had you hollering how Daddy did, when Mama got him good and couldn’t get him to shush ’cause she was so busy hollering too.”
“In a picture show?” Aidan laughed. “With cameras running?”
She kissed the scar on his knee, where the nightrider’s gun had burned him to the bone. “I felt bold and brazen, imagining you inside of me. Did you know that?”
“No.”
Redwood held the weighty stones of his manhood ’til he groaned, and then lifted her arms. Aidan undid her belt and beads easily. He hesitated and then tugged on her blouse. Silk slid over her skin like river water. Since she hated corsets, her belly and tiddies were quickly exposed. He considered her in the flickering light. It had been dark that other time they were intimate. He touched the lion scars on her shoulder and ribs.
“My brave Sikwayi.” Something come over him, fog rolling over the moon. “I ain’t done this for a while. I ain’t used to touching soft anymore.”
Redwood laughed. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be as scared as her. “We ain’t done this ever. We’re making it up as we go.”
Aidan laughed some of his tension away too. “I know how you like to rehearse.”
“We can do this scene over and over again.”
Aidan kissed the scars on her ribs. He ran his lips and tongue ’cross her tiddies, over both her nipples to the other smooth ribs, enjoying her shivers and squeals. Then his tongue was in the cleft of her neck stroking down to her navel.
“Making a crossroads sign, huh?” she said. “A good-loving spell.” As he did it again, she didn’t fight the sweet ache that was spilling all over her.
He set a purple orchid in her hair. “Miz Garnett gave that to me a long time ago, but it ain’t wilted,” he said softly. “You still with me?”
“Yes. You feel much better than I imagined.” She rubbed her lips against the inside of his thigh, making her own sign. His muscles were taut; the skin was smooth; dark hair was silky and curled near his swelling manhood. He tasted salty and earthy, like thunder root.
“So where are these secret spots?” he said.
“Why should I tell you? You got to search. You might find something I don’t even know ’bout!”
Aidan kissed her storm hand. His lips were hot on her cool palm. He found quite a few spots that she’d never known of and got her to hollering. Of course she was hoodooing him too, with every touch, so he wasn’t one bit quiet hisself.
“Free people,” she said. “How do the Seminole call it?”
But she remembered and they spoke the words together.
“Istî siminolî.”
The End
Author Biography
Andrea Hairston was a math/physics major in college until she did special effects for a show and then she ran off to the theatre and became an artist. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for over thirty years. She is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio and Television. She has received many playwriting and directing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting.
Her first novel, Mindscape, was published by Aqueduct Press in March 2006. Mindscape won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K Dick Award and the Tiptree Award. “Griots of the Galaxy,” a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. In March 2011, Ms. Hairston received the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for distinguished contributions to the scholarship and criticism of the fantastic.
She is currently working on a new novel, Will Do Magic for Small Change.
Redwood and Wildfire is a novel of what might have been.
At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This “dreaming in public” becomes comm
on culture and part of what transforms immigrants and “native” born into Americans. Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a “city of the future.” They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlors, in wounded hearts. The power of hoodoo is the power of the community that believes in its capacities to heal and determine the course of today and tomorrow. Living in a system stacked against them, Redwood and Aidan’s power and talent are torment and joy. Their search for a place to be who they want to be is an exhilarating, painful, magical adventure. Blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers, and actors work their mojo for adventure, romance, and magic from Georgia to Chicago!
Table of Contents
B O O K I
One
Two
Three
Four
B O O K I I
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
B O O K I I I
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
B O O K I V
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
B O O K V
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
B O O K V I
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Author Biography
Redwood and Wildfire Page 48