“How many other times has this happened?” I asked.
“Miss Lula was the third time,” Cousin Tee said. “Wish it would be the last, but I don’t think so. They ain’t caught nobody yet.”
“Do the police have any suspects?” I asked.
“Ain’t nothing but maybe three police officers in the whole town, Cousin Danny,” she said. “It ain’t like Atlanta.”
“Actually, it sounds more like Mayberry,” Asha said.
“Folks are scared,” Cousin Tee said. “We’ve ain’t never seen anything like this here. You’d expect that kind of stuff to happen somewhere like up in Memphis, but here?” She sipped her coffee, grimaced sourly.
“I guess nowhere is safe anymore,” I said.
“Sure ain’t,” Cousin Tee said. She touched one of the many rings she wore on her right hand; it was a brilliant oval-cut ruby in a gold setting, and I thought I’d seen Grandma Ruth and other relatives wearing similar rings. Rubbing the gemstone as if for luck, she uttered under her breath, “If it keeps up . . . somebody ’round here gonna have to go ’head and take care of it on his own.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
But Cousin Tee’s attention shifted to Asha. “Girl, those is the cutest earrings! Where you get ’em from? You know I love me some jewelry—can’t you tell?” She cackled, and Asha went on to relate where she’d found them.
I gazed into my coffee, frowning. I suspected that Cousin Tee had purposely ignored my question. I decided to let it go.
But her remark lingered in my mind.
If it keeps up . . . somebody ’round here gonna have to go ’head and take care of it on his own.
Who was she talking about?
Chapter Six
After breakfast, we followed Cousin Tee’s Navigator along a bumpy, two-lane highway bordered on both sides alternately by dense woods, and swampland. Leaving the diner, Cousin Tee had promised that Coldwater was only a ten-minute drive from Senatobia, but we appeared to be in the middle of nowhere.
A few times as we wove through patches of forest, I spotted shanties nestled within the trees: lean-to homes that looked a stiff wind away from blowing down and collapsing in a heap. They brought to mind the strangely familiar shotgun house from last night’s hyper-vivid dream.
Would I find that house somewhere out here? I wondered. Or had it been merely a figment of my imagination?
Finally, we passed a sign: “Welcome to Coldwater, Pop 1,674.”
“Your family is close to five percent of the town’s population,” Asha said.
“You know, you’re right. Amazing, huh? We’re not in Kansas anymore, Doc.”
About a mile ahead, there was a traffic light. We made a left turn, and found ourselves on a four-way thoroughfare that was a fair approximation of civilization. It had a couple of fast-food joints. A Laundromat. A thrift shop, gas station, grocery store, car wash, and People’s Bank. Everyone moving about the town was black, and in light of Asha’s comment, I wondered if I was related to any of them.
After driving a few blocks, we left the main road and entered a residential neighborhood. All of the homes appeared to have been built decades ago: modest ranch models with carports. There was not a new subdivision or a McMansion in sight.
As we neared a stop sign, a mobile home park came up on our right. A group of young brothers clad in sagging jeans and white T-shirts as long as dresses milled around a black Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight. The car had supersized chrome wheels and tinted windows, the stereo booming the bass line of a popular hip-hop song.
“Looks like home,” I said, thinking of the number of times I’d seen similar scenes in Atlanta, young men with nothing to do hanging outside a car.
The men turned as one to examine us.
“Damn, that bitch up in there fine as hell,” one of them crowed to his partners. He tugged his crotch and shouted: “Yo, ma, you want some of this? I got somethin’ for ya!”
“Classy,” Asha hissed between tightly clenched teeth. “Can we hurry it up, Danny?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Some men are pigs. What else is new?”
I pushed through the intersection, and we left the leering posse behind.
We trailed Cousin Tee onto another road that carried us deeper into a rural area. Back there, the small, old houses sat farther apart on expansive plots of wooded land. Although the surroundings were remote, the twisty road was newly paved.
Cousin Tee swung into a long gravel driveway that led to a brick, ranch-style home that stood on a grassy crest. The lush, well-trimmed yard was at least three acres, dotted with pines and maples, and ringed with a wire fence.
I hadn’t visited the home place in over twenty years, and with the exception of a few minor cosmetic enhancements, it looked as if it hadn’t changed at all. My heart swelled, and that sense of certainty that I’d had since yesterday, that I was finally going to unearth new wrinkles in my understanding of my family, was stronger than ever.
A silver Cadillac was parked underneath a carport at the end of the drive. Cousin Tee parked behind the sedan, and we nosed in alongside her car. The driveway was large enough to accommodate half a dozen more vehicles.
I cut the engine. “Well, here we are.”
“The home place.” Asha took it all in, smiled. “Wow, I just realized how much of a city girl I am. This feels like a different country to me.”
“The land of my ancestors,” I said, my chest tight with emotion. On impulse, I kissed her. “Thanks for coming on this trip with me. It means a lot to have you here.”
“Of course. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
When we climbed out of the SUV, the first thing I noticed was the air. It was heavy with the mingled fragrances of flowers, grass, and trees, a stark contrast to the grimy urban fumes I’d gotten accustomed to in Atlanta.
The second thing was that the buzzing noise was louder. Not quite loud enough to be intrusive. But I could feel the hairs in my ears vibrating.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Asha. “That buzzing?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I hear birds chirping, but no buzzing. Is it the same noise you heard yesterday?”
I nodded. “Louder here, though.”
She examined me with what I recognized as her physician’s look, and I regretted that I had said anything. Asha was, not surprisingly, a stickler for physical health. In the two years we’d been together, thanks to her prodding, I’d gone for twice-a-year physical exams, whereas before she had come along, nothing short of unbearable agony would have convinced me to visit a doctor’s office.
“I may need to examine you, baby,” she said. “This could be a symptom of something.”
I shrugged. “Never mind, I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“That’s what I would expect you to say. I’ll arrive at my own conclusion.”
Cousin Tee came around the car and rescued me from further probing.
“Welcome to the home place, y’all,” she said. “Let’s head on in. Aunt Lillie’s waiting on us.”
Chapter Seven
Inside, we found a neatly kept home full of comfortable furniture, polished hardwood floors, live plants, and clusters of family photos. Two tall, lean teenage boys lounged in the living room watching a wide-screen TV. They unfolded themselves from their chairs and rose to greet us. I realized that they were twins.
“These are my boys, Trey and Jomarion,” Cousin Tee said. “Boys, say hello to Cousin Danny and his fiancée, Asha.”
His fiancée, Asha. I decided to let it slide, but in my peripheral vision I saw Asha smirk.
“Wassup, cousins,” one of them said, and the other one tilted his head in greeting and shook our hands. I’d already forgotten who was who. “You the one that wrote all them books?”
“That’s me,” I said.
“When you gonna make them into a movie, cuz?” Trey/Jomarion asked.
Asha chuckled. I’d fielded certain questions about my books so frequently she could
have answered on my behalf.
“As soon as Will Smith returns my calls,” I said, my standard answer.
Their eyes widened. “For real? You gonna get Will Smith to be in your movies?”
I was about to say that I was kidding, that there was no movie in the works yet, when I heard footsteps approaching behind us.
“Who’s that I hear up there?” a woman’s voice said from the shadowed hallway. “Is that my nephew visitin’ from ’Lanta?”
It was Aunt Lillie, my grandma’s eldest sibling at ninety-two. Aunt Lillie was slender and almost as tall as I was, with a thick head of silver hair, eyes like shiny pennies, straight white teeth—real teeth, not dentures—and a healthy, cocoa-brown complexion. Attired in a gaily colored sun dress, she moved down the hall with the sure-footed gait of a much younger lady. I remembered meeting her at the reunion five years ago, and she hadn’t lost a step.
I was relieved to see that she was still spry. Since she was the eldest surviving member of the family, she was the main person I was planning to question for information about our clan’s past.
“How’re you doing, Aunt Lillie?” I said.
“Come here and give your auntie some sugar, baby!” She clasped me to her bosom and kissed me on the cheek. “So glad you could make it here to see us, uh huh. How my baby sister doin’?”
“Grandma’s doing well,” I said. “She sends her love.”
Grinning, Aunt Lillie whirled to Asha. “Oh, my Lord. Now who’s this pretty young thang here? This your wife?”
“Fiancée, ma’am,” Asha said, and grinned at both of us.
“She sure is pretty, my, my, y’all gonna have some beautiful babies,” Aunt Lillie said. She pulled Asha into a hug. “Nice meetin’ you, sugar. You with family now, so make yourself at home, you hear?”
Around Aunt Lillie’s shoulder, Asha winked at me. I could only shake my head.
Cousin Tee ordered her sons to return outside with me to help bring in our luggage. When we got outdoors, we found three big, muscular, mixed-breed dogs gathered around my SUV, sniffing at the doors.
I stopped in my tracks. “Whose dogs are those?”
“They the family’s dogs, cuz,” Trey/Jomarion said. “They ain’t gonna bite. Just let ’em smell you, you’ll be cool.”
As if on cue, the dogs trotted to me, tails wagging. They sniffed intently at my shoes and legs. One of them stuck his snout against my crotch. I massaged the dog behind the ears, and he licked my fingers.
I noted that none of the canines wore collars or tags.
“What’re their names?” I asked.
Both of the boys shrugged. “They ain’t got no names, really, man.”
Dogs without names? All righty, then.
“Do they stay in dog houses somewhere around here?” I asked.
“Naw, cuz,” Trey/Jomarion said. He swept his long arm around. “They just, like, roam ’round here. They watchdogs, you know.”
“They seem awfully friendly to be watchdogs,” I said.
One of the boys fixed me with a stern look. “That’s ’cause they know you family,” he said.
Chapter Eight
Aunt Lillie offered to cook us breakfast, but we told her that we’d already eaten. She seemed offended that Cousin Tee had allowed us to dine at, in her words, “some greasy spoon when they got family here they coulda ate with.” We assured her that it was no big deal. She insisted on feeding us, though, and dug out a sweet potato pie she’d baked last night, and a tall pitcher of sweet iced tea.
Cousin Tee left with her sons to take them to a football camp, and promised to return later. Asha and I sat on the fabric sofa in the living room, balancing plates of pie on our laps, while Aunt Lillie got on her knees and dug out one photo album after another from a cabinet underneath the coffee table. They were humongous, thick albums packed with a dizzying array of pictures, some sepia-toned, others in full color.
Grandma Ruth had a good number of snapshots at her home in Atlanta, but Aunt Lillie’s collection was much larger. Paging through the album, I discovered photos of relatives whom I had never seen or heard of before. Whenever I came across such a picture, I would ask Aunt Lillie about it, and she would relate with her steel-trap memory exactly who the individual was, how he or she fit in the family lineage, and colorful anecdotes about the person’s life. She was a walking and breathing history book.
“Who is this, Aunt Lillie?” Asha asked, index finger tapping a black-and-white portrait of a tall, regal, mustached man dressed in a dark suit. She glanced at me. “Danny strongly favors him. He has to be family.”
There was, I had to admit, a striking resemblance. It was almost like viewing a photo of myself, if I’d lived in another era.
Sitting in a nearby upholstered chair, Aunt Lillie leaned over Asha’s shoulder, squinted. “Ah, that there’s your Grandpa Orin.”
“Grandpa Orin?” I flipped to the family tree that I was sketching on my pad. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him. Where does he fit in, Aunt Lillie?”
Aunt Lillie took a sip of tea, gazed out the window. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts, remembering, perhaps.
I waited for her to continue. I’d already filled in the names of Grandma Ruth’s and Aunt Lillie’s parents, and their grandparents, too. It confused me that Aunt Lillie had called this man Grandpa Orin, because I didn’t have any entries that went back further in time than their grandparents. Could this Grandpa Orin person perhaps have been Aunt Lillie’s great grandfather?
But if that were true, I reasoned, doing quick math in my head, the man would’ve lived in the mid eighteen hundreds, if not a bit earlier. The photo didn’t appear to be that old. It had the look of a portrait that had been taken no more than a hundred years ago, if that.
“We’ll come back to that, child,” Aunt Lillie said, and reached over and turned the page. “I gotta think on it, gotta get things straight in my mind first.”
Up until then, Aunt Lillie had been able to narrate minute details of family history with great precision and quickness. Her hesitation seemed out of character, but I merely shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do this at your pace. You’re the oldest surviving relative I have. I’m just grateful for the opportunity to spend time with you and soak up whatever you can tell me about our roots.”
“The child wanna know ’bout our roots,” Aunt Lillie said, as if speaking to an unseen presence in the living room. There was a gleam in her eyes. “You come to the right place for that, sugar. Uh huh . . . done come back home to where it all started for the family.”
I was suddenly convinced that Aunt Lillie knew something key to my project. What hidden knowledge she harbored, I had no idea, but secrets danced in her bright eyes.
I suspected that they had something to do with this new person, this Grandpa Orin.
But as I’d learned from talking to my grandma, you couldn’t rush old folk. They would tell you what they wanted, but in their own sweet time and fashion. If I could keep Aunt Lillie talking, perhaps she eventually would reveal her secrets.
I reached inside my leather satchel in which I kept my laptop and research materials, and withdrew my digital voice recorder. “Mind if I turn this on, ma’am? It’s a recorder.”
She gave the device a suspicious look. “Don’t be recording me, child. You apt to get me in some kinda trouble.”
“Sorry, my mistake.” I started to put it away, but she stopped me with a wave of her hand and a laugh.
“Go ’head, sugar,” Aunt Lillie said. “Somebody need to set all this down for us.”
“That’s right,” Asha said. “It’ll be helpful for the next generation.”
I switched on the recorder and placed it on the coffee table, close enough to capture our voices.
“I’ll tell you most of what I know ’bout our roots,” Aunt Lillie said. That secretive shine came into her eyes again. “Anything I leave out, you’ll learn in God’s time.”
“That’s goo
d enough for me,” I said, though my curiosity had become like an ache in my gut.
Aunt Lillie laced her long, spindly fingers across her stomach. Sunlight streaming through the blinds caught the ruby-encrusted ring on her right hand. It was an exact replica of the ruby that Cousin Tee wore, and that my grandma wore, too. I wondered if the gemstone was a family heirloom of some kind.
Quietly, Aunt Lillie looked from Asha, to me. And then, she started talking.
Chapter Nine
Bruno Jackson wanted to kill me.
I had committed the unpardonable sin of embarrassing him during a flag football game in our PE class. I’d repeatedly and easily blown past him to catch several throws downfield while he struggled in vain to keep up with me—during one play, he’d actually fallen on his butt as I raced past him—and in his mind, the only way to even the score and reassert his dominance over most every kid in the eleventh grade was for him to rearrange my face in front of the locker-room crowd.
Bruno was the stereotypical school bully: bigger than everyone, strong as an ox, and about as dumb as one. I’d managed to avoid a confrontation with him simply because we’d never had a class together—I was in College Prep level courses; he was in Liberal Arts—but every student got thrown together in gym class, a combustible mishmash of braniacs and academic bottom-feeders like Bruno. Bruno was such a poor student and had so many disciplinary problems that he couldn’t remain academically eligible for any school sports. Gym class was his stage to shine, and I had stolen his glory.
He showed up beside me in the locker room after the game was over. I was about five-ten, slender. Bruno was six-two and reputed to bench press four hundred pounds.
“Thought you were the man out there, huh, Danny Booger?” he said, purposely butchering my last name. He had a habit of making up demeaning names for kids he didn’t respect, which was half the student body.
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