Now Boo Nanny looked at me hard. “Well, you got good color. I reckon ain’t nothing wrong with you a little strawberry pie couldn’t cure.” She took the battling stick away from me. “I better fix you up afore you set my wash to ruination,” she said.
I followed her into the kitchen. She always had a pie cooling behind the tin doors of the pie safe, punctured with little holes in flower shapes to let air through. You could tell what season it was by the pies she made, starting in spring with strawberry and rhubarb, following through the summer with raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, and cherry, then entering autumn with apple, grape, pumpkin, and yam.
She took out the leftover strawberry pie and gave me the next-to-last piece. I brought it to the back porch and ate while she returned to work.
Before long, our neighbor Mr. Marsh stopped at the fence. He had a wiry gray beard that looked like the moss that drooped from the branches of the live oaks.
“Afternoon, Miss Josephine. How you?” he said.
“Above ground,” Boo Nanny said. “How’s you and the missus?”
I slid my pie behind the kindling box. It would be rude to eat in front of him, and I didn’t want Boo Nanny to offer him the last piece.
“She ain’t pert like usual. She took sick to the bed and has the misery in her side. You got a little something you can fix her up with?” The neighbors all came to Boo Nanny to cure what ailed them.
She asked me to help her get a jar down from a high shelf. Her bedroom looked like a tobacco barn. She had poles suspended from the ceiling—low, so she could reach them—and hung flowers, herbs, and roots to dry. Her bed was pushed to one side to make room for a table, which held mounds of crushed leaves, seeds, and flower petals. The blue-tinted Mason jars that crowded the shelves were filled with crushed leaves, wrinkled roots, withered pods, and the threadlike insides of flowers that looked like insect parts. A larger jar held a soup of dark brown liquid with bits floating around, like night soil. Nothing was labeled; she couldn’t read or write, but she knew exactly which jars she wanted. She pointed, and I pulled a chair over and got the jars down. She shook out some seedpods and dried flowers onto one of Daddy’s old newspapers, folded it up, and returned to the backyard.
“Now boil youself up some turnip greens, take the juice, mix this with it, and feed it to the missus for three days. Come back and tell me how she’s keeping,” she said, and handed Mr. Marsh the packet over the fence.
“Thank you, Miss Josephine.”
After he left, Boo Nanny came and sat beside me on the back steps. I spent more time with her than any other adult. Mama kept house for Colonel Gilchrist’s family. She left the house early and came back late, but Boo Nanny was always at home. She knew when something was wrong with me.
“That pie ain’t perked you up the way I’d hoped,” she said, and patted my knee. Her hands were the color of pecans, black spots and all. “No wonder you ain’t none too spry, blame hot as it is. Maybe a story will fix you up.”
“What kind of story?” I asked.
“A ghost story.”
“How am I supposed to get scared in broad daylight?”
“This one ain’t scary. This one’s to make you laugh.”
I had grown up with her stories. I didn’t call her Boo Nanny for nothing. She introduced me to the wampus cat, sea serpents, headless haunts, duppies, night doctors, and plat-eyes, spirits worse than ghosts that took over the bodies of animals. Jack-o’-lanterns were bug-eyed, hairy creatures that bounded about like human-sized grasshoppers. Only people born with the veil could see them. Most people could see only the lanterns they carried. When I looked across the Cape Fear and saw bobbing lights, I knew it could be a boat, or it could be a jack-o’-lantern.
One horrible creature, the hag, wriggled out of her skin and flew about at night, jumping her victims and sucking blood out through their noses. “You knows when the hag ride you, ’cause you makes a sound, same like a shivering owl,” Boo Nanny said.
Once when I got a bloody nose, I was convinced a hag was riding me. That night, Boo Nanny gave me a saltshaker and told me if I found the hag’s crumpled skin under my bed, to sprinkle it with salt so it would sting too much for her to put it back on.
Now, sitting on the top step of the porch with her bent back, Boo Nanny looked ready to tie her shoe. Sandspurs had caught in the hem of her long skirt.
“If you can get through this without smiling, I be giving you the last of the pie,” she said.
“Okay, I guess.”
We were hours away from the dark-thirty, the half hour before dark when ghosts came out. But I didn’t have anything else to do, and I wanted that last piece of pie, so I listened to the story of Aaron Kelly, a man who died and was buried by his widow. Before the coffin was cold in the ground, he slipped out and joined his widow by the cooking fire. She was not happy to see his skull and bones, and tried to coax him back into the grave, but he refused.
“Ain’t you miss me?” the skeleton said.
“How’m I gone miss you when you ain’t gone yet?”
“Ain’t you gone mourn me?”
“How’m I gone mourn you when you still here?”
A week later, a fiddler stopped by to court the widow. Before he could do too much sweet-mouthing, they were joined by her dead husband.
The fiddler had an idea: he would play and make Dead Aaron dance until his skeleton fell apart. So he took out his fiddle and played a tune. Dead Aaron started dancing. First, a rib bone dropped and rolled around like a barrel hoop. Next, a foot bone clattered to the floor, followed by a finger bone.
“Faster, faster,” the widow egged on the fiddler.
Boo Nanny told the story in rhyme and had me tapping my knee and jiggling my foot in time. Mostly I concentrated on not smiling. I wanted that last piece of pie.
He yellow teeth snappin’,
He elbows a-rappin’,
He jawbone a-flappin’,
Landy, Lawdy, Dead Aaron could prance.
He arms a-flip-floppin’,
He knee bones a-poppin’,
The dry bones keep droppin’,
Landy, Lawdy, that dead man do dance.
Till all’s left is de head.
“I’s still jiving,” it said.
The dancing skull proved too much for the fiddler. He fled from the house and never came back. The widow buried her husband’s bones, but word got around, and she never had another suitor.
I almost made it through to the end of the story with a straight face, but something about the image of the skeleton shucking bones as he cut the buck seemed so silly I had to smile. I was hoping Boo Nanny hadn’t noticed. But she didn’t miss much.
“No pie for you,” she said.
“I didn’t laugh.”
“You smiled. I seen you,” she said.
“Just once.” I knew she would give in. She spoiled me when Mama wasn’t around. Sure enough, she went into the kitchen to fetch the last of the pie.
When she returned, I said, “Where did you learn all these stories?”
“Around the campfire. Growing up.”
“When you were a slave?”
She nodded.
Mama had told me that Boo Nanny had worked on a turpentine plantation north of town. “Tell me stories from those times. Real ones, I mean.” As I got older, it was the true stories that interested me most.
“Them stories could scare you for true,” she said.
“Is that where you learned which plants could heal?”
“We ain’t had no doctors,” she said, and then stopped herself, as if she had given away too much.
“So what did you do?”
“Quit nattering at me, boy. You’s enough to wear a body down.”
“One story. Just one,” I pleaded.
“Best not wake up them old sorrows,” she said. “It’s like them haints. Once you stir them out of they bed, they don’t go back so easy-like.”
“I’m a big boy now,” I assured her. �
��You can’t scare me.”
“No need to worry your head about those dark times. All that matters is what’s a-comin’ tomorrow. And you got plenty of tomorrows headed your way—a smart boy like you.”
TWO
“Johnny’s riding over, then we can go to the parade,” Lewis said. It was the first week of summer vacation, and I was over at my best friend Lewis’s house. He lived on the rich white side of town, near Colonel Gilchrist’s house, where Mama worked.
“Why’d you invite him? He’s so … young.” That was the worst thing I could think of to say about Johnny. He was only going into fifth grade. Both he and Lewis went to the Gregory School, a private academy in a brick building much nicer than my public school, which was made of boards.
At that moment, Johnny rode up on his bike, ringing the bell to announce his arrival.
“Hey,” I said.
Without bothering to answer, he turned his back to me and addressed Lewis. “Where are your wheels?” he said.
“Moses is coming along,” Lewis said.
What did he mean, “coming along”? It was my idea in the first place. For weeks I’d been looking forward to the inauguration of the Port City’s first full-time fire department.
Johnny turned to me with a sneer. “Oh.” He made me feel second-rate, even though he was darker and three inches shorter, not to mention a year behind.
“How’s he getting there? He doesn’t have a bike,” Johnny said.
I put my hands in my pockets and looked down. There was nothing I wanted more than a bicycle, but my family couldn’t afford one.
“My father said he’d drop us off,” Lewis said.
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged. “I’m taking my wheels. Maybe I’ll see you, maybe I won’t. It’s a dumb parade anyway.” He rode off.
Just because Johnny’s father had been appointed by a United States president to be the collector of customs for the Port of Wilmington didn’t make him better than everyone else.
Lewis was rich, but he was not at all stuck-up like Johnny “High-and-Mighty” Dancy. Lewis’s father owned his very own carriage. My daddy said that Lewis’s daddy was the richest Negro in town. Mr. Taylor owned a lot of real estate and a bank that lent money to Negroes so they could buy their own homes. That was how we got our house. Daddy spoke very highly of Mr. Taylor, and I liked him, too.
The parade was only six blocks away, but I was always glad to ride in a carriage. Lewis’s father let us off just as the parade was starting, and we found our place among the excited crowds that lined Market Street. A couple of men pulled a brand-new steam engine with red wheels as high as the men’s shoulders. An iron frame supported a towering silver cylinder, like an oversized milk jug, so shiny you could hardly stand to look at it in the sun. Firemen in their uniforms followed in a horse-drawn wagon. There were a few black faces among them, and that made me stand up tall with pride. Printed on the side of the wagon were the words I beheld in awe: WILMINGTON HOOK AND LADDER. I imagined how I would look in one of those red uniforms, waving at the cheering crowds.
“I want to be a fireman,” Lewis said.
“I do, too,” I said.
“I thought of it first.”
“We both thought of it at the same time,” I said.
“But I was the one who said it first,” he said.
“Why can’t we both be firemen?” I suggested.
“Okay. Suits me.”
After the parade was over—we did not run into Johnny, thank goodness—Lewis suggested we play pirates. Blackbeard was our favorite. The real Blackbeard lived a long time ago on Ocracoke Island and terrorized people off the coast of Wilmington. Lewis said that Blackbeard had dark skin like ours, but he wasn’t a Negro. He was just dark. He braided his black beard and tied the ends with ribbons, just like the hair of my eight-year-old next-door neighbor, Jane, who was always pestering me to play with her. Blackbeard tied his head up in a rag, like so many folks in our neighborhood.
Lewis insisted on being Blackbeard. “You be the first mate,” he said.
“I don’t want to be the first mate. I want to be Blackbeard.”
“Well, can’t both of us be Blackbeard.”
I gave in, because I wanted Lewis to stay my best friend. By his count, the primary job of the first mate involved running errands for him. He sent me to our house to get old newspapers to make a kite. We had plenty of newspapers. Daddy read them faster than we could burn them or use them up in the privy. When I got the papers, Boo Nanny was in the kitchen ironing. She paused, wiped the sweat from her gray temples, and asked what I was doing. When I told her, she said, “Honey baby, you you own man. If Lewis say jump, you gone hurl you own self off the cliff, just ’cause he say it?”
In our backyard, Lewis and I penciled the outlines of a skull and crossbones, then painted the newsprint black around the lines, so the design showed through in white newsprint. I sacrificed my red handkerchief to tear into pieces for the tail.
I wanted to fly the kite, but Lewis had other ideas. “Let’s go find Jacob’s Run. Then we can pretend to be slaves escaping,” he said.
Legend had it that tunnels ran under the city, where a former creek called Jacob’s Run emptied into the Cape Fear River. We had heard that the tunnels were used as a meeting place for runaway slaves, a hidden path for people fleeing the British invasion of Wilmington during the Revolutionary War, and even as a pathway to carry the bodies of yellow fever victims from the Confederate blockade runners to Bellevue Cemetery.
We had tried many times to find the tunnels. Our friend Nellie Parsons lived in a house built before the War Between the States by her great-grandfather, a free black carpenter. She swore that there was a passage leading from the well in the backyard to the tunnels. We had thrown rocks down the dry well, but were too chicken to lower ourselves on ropes and look around.
“This time we’re going to use smarts. Your smarts, old man,” Lewis said.
“If the tunnel follows the path of the old creek, that means it must empty into the Cape Fear,” I reasoned. “So if we go to the wharf, we might see where it comes out, and then work backwards.”
“Exactly what I had in mind,” he said. If the plan worked, he’d claim credit.
We walked to the south end of the wharf. The tide was out, and the boats sat lower in the water. Noisy seagulls and crows ambushed the fishmonger, who was gutting the day’s catch. Cats circled the wooden bench, scrounging for scraps. Several Negro boys perched at the water’s edge with fishing poles. The air smelled of fish and tar.
Four-masted schooners were docked in the slips, bow first. White bags of sugar, like overstuffed pillows, were lashed together, twelve in each pile, waiting to be hoisted on deck. Mingling among the workmen were merchants, dressed in suits and ties despite the sweltering heat.
I walked along the edge of the dock, looking for clues. I saw reeds at the shoreline, along with a yellow froth, the color of foaming yeast. Fish nipped at the refuse the fishmonger emptied into the water. I could hear the water sloshing under the dock, but I could see no evidence of a stream feeding into the river.
The idea of a passageway hidden beneath the cobbles and pavers intrigued me. But nothing held Lewis’s attention for long. By the time we reached Lippitt Ice House, he had lost interest. We paused on the dock to watch a schooner unload the ice that had been cut from ponds in New England in the winter and stored there until summer, when it was delivered down south. In port, the ice traveled on cables that stretched directly from the ship’s deck over Water Street to the second story of Lippitt Ice House. The giant blocks were covered in sawdust and straw, with patches melted away to reveal a glossy surface that reflected the blue of the sky.
Lewis wanted to stand underneath the blocks and wait for the melt-off to cool his skin.
“Betcha I can catch more drops than you,” he said.
He made everything into a contest.
I didn’t want him to think I had a jellyfish spine. On the other hand, I didn
’t want my gravestone to read: CRUSHED BY A YANKEE POND.
“You go ahead. I’ll watch,” I said.
He positioned himself in the middle of Water Street directly under the shed-sized block of ice. Wagons and carriages made their way around him. A man pushed a handcart over the gutter and up onto the wharf to get out of his way. Lewis didn’t seem to notice and kept his face turned upward, waiting.
Overhead, pulleys and cables creaked and groaned as big-muscled men guided the massive block two stories above the street. I held my breath as I watched the ice bounce and sway in midair. The ropes attached to both sides of the block did little to steady it.
“One!” Lewis shouted, and, after a few moments, “two!”—letting me know each time an icy drop plopped down on him.
A mule-drawn wagon clattered over the cobbles. The driver yelled for Lewis to get out of the way. Just at that moment, a drift of sawdust and straw from the ice block above landed on Lewis’s head. He started dancing about and waving his hands, as if attacked by hornets. Spooked, the mule bolted forward into traffic, barely missing Lewis. Carts lurched; people scattered. A white sailor crashed into a vegetable stall, causing a pyramid of potatoes to collapse and roll into the street. The vendor screeched and flapped her arms at Lewis like a riled-up chicken.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lewis said, and shot off through the crowd, running as fast as he could. I followed, walking at normal speed, and found him panting on a thick coil of rope by the dock’s edge.
“You look like you’ve been rolling in a barn,” I said, laughing.
“Do I?” He brushed his face and hair to get rid of the sawdust and hay.
I saw Johnny Dancy on his bicycle, coming toward us. He was the last person I wanted to run into. I slipped behind a barrel of turpentine, hoping he wouldn’t see me, but no such luck.
He stopped his bicycle next to Lewis. “I been looking all up and down the wharf for you. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” I said.
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