Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  Herman had also laid a smaller fire in her bedroom hearth against the cool of the spring night air.

  She stepped out on the deck in her bare stocking feet just in time to catch something in the sky that looked like a spark from the fire. “Oh, my God, it looks like a comet,” she whispered in awe as the shooting star arced across the sky.

  “You had any sup’er this ee-bah-ning, Lena?” Herman asked as if he asked her that every night.

  She jumped a little at the sound of his voice. I got to get used to that, she thought.

  “Uh-uh. Not yet. I usually get something before I go to bed.”

  “Well, there’s a whole heap a’ cooked groceries in there in yo’ kitchen. And it look good, too. I waited fo’ ya.”

  When Lena walked into the kitchen ahead of Herman, she saw that he had already started heating up the food in her favorite heavy gray pots on the stove. It smelled good.

  “I usually just stick the food in the microwave,” she said, lifting lids and stirring the big pot of black-eyed peas, turning the gas flame down a bit.

  “I looked at that box,” Herman answered her about the microwave oven. “Real interestin’. Right clever. But it ain’t the same as heatin’ it up on the stove over fire, is it?”

  He came over to stand by Lena and eyed the food hungrily. She turned with a big silver serving spoon in her hand and lifted it to Herman’s lips to let him taste. He closed his eyes and took the whole spoon in his mouth.

  “Ummmmmmmmmmm-uh,” he said as he slowly chewed and swallowed. Then, he sighed.

  Lena smiled at Herman’s appreciative yummy sounds. Her intimate gesture of feeding him from the silver spoon had even taken her a little bit by surprise. But his grunts and purrs made it seem so natural, just the way it should have felt.

  “That sho’ taste good, Lena. You eat like this every day?”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied. “I call them my CARE package meals.”

  The town women and the one man who prepared the CARE meals did care for her.

  Most of the food she had consumed in the last ten years had been cooked by the loving hands of Mulberry women, and one man who died the year before of AIDS. They felt it was their lifelong duty to feed Lena after her entire family was dead. Like mourners come to a never-ending wake, the steady stream of food continued into her house out by the river this tenth year after the double memorial services had been performed.

  Old women who knew her, knew her daddy, knew her mama, knew her grandmama, knew her daddy’s family, knew her mama’s family, ever went to The Place, whose husband or man ever went to The Place regularly, or were the recipients of the family love or largesse continued each week to send Lena food.

  Delicious food, hot-right-from-the-oven food.

  Fried chicken, with thick light brown crunchy gravy. Chicken-fried steak with darker brown gravy. Pork neckbones and spaghetti simmered in tomatoes and onions and bell pepper. Pork roast, standing rib roast and pot roast. Roast hen, turkey, duck and chicken. Chicken and dumplings.

  Pots of collard greens from somebody’s garden kept Lena regular for a week. Pole beans with little new potatoes and onions cut in quarters the way her father had liked them. Squash casserole, baked macaroni and cheese and candied yams. Pickled beets and peaches and bread-and-butter pickles.

  They sent turkey and dressing and rice and gravy that didn’t taste like Sunday dinner but tasted more like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  And the desserts! The desserts! The women and Cecil sent red velvet cakes, chocolate layer cakes, lemon-cheese cakes, coconut cakes, German chocolate cakes, lemon pound cakes, applesauce cakes. They sent banana pudding and bread pudding with raisins, pineapple chunks and peach slices. They sent peach and blackberry cobblers; icebox pies and coconut cream pies and lemon meringue pies. If they had their way, Lena would have weighed three hundred pounds.

  “Lots of it gets taken out to the homeless shelter or one of the soup kitchens in town where ’my children’—some young people in town—eat some meals. James Petersen takes it for me usually in the afternoon before I get home or the next morning.”

  “Then, why don’t the ladies just take the food to the soup kitchen d’rectly?” Herman asked.

  Lena just chuckled at the idea of trying to explain the machinations of her and her folks. “You are new around here, aren’t you?”

  And he chuckled because he, too, knew how good it made him feel to do something for Lena.

  Herman began humming to himself as he moved around the kitchen getting out of Lena’s way, watching where she kept bowls and plates and utensils. Hearing the tune, Lena reached over without even thinking and turned on the controls for the music system. Nat King Cole singing “Mona Lisa” filled the cabin.

  Herman was not really in the way. It felt good to Lena to have him in there. She even pretended she couldn’t reach a big serving bowl and a crystal flower vase in the cabinets over the soapstone sink and needed his long arms to get them down for her.

  “Oh, happy to he’p ya,” he said, and leapt sprightly to retrieve the desired items.

  Lena could see he wasn’t comfortable standing around doing nothing. So, she asked him to get the pails of cut flowers inside the door on the west-side screened porch.

  She never even considered that Herman might not know his way around her house.

  He came back bearing two deep tin flower pails of daffodils, delphiniums, jonquils, dogwood limbs, twirls of wisteria blooms and even some early roses and sprouting grapevines.

  “Lena, this part a’ yo’ magic?” he asked.

  She smiled at Herman’s handsome face framed by the beautiful spring blooms.

  “No, that’s Mr. Renfroe, the gardener’s magic. He cuts flowers from all over the property whenever he works, either in the morning or the evening when the stems are nice and stiff, he says.”

  Lena came over to the pails and began choosing big tall flowers to put into the vase she had filled with sugar-sweetened tepid water. Herman watched her as if she were creating life with the pink, yellow and purple blossoms.

  “He takes most of the flowers in to the nursing home in town or by Miss Onnie’s house or Miss Pansy’s or Miss Emma Floyd’s, they can’t get out and garden anymore. And on the weekend, either I take some or he takes some by St. Martin de Porres for Mass.

  “But regardless, he always leaves some pretty ones for me on the side porch out of the sun. I used to have a house full of orchids. A man from North Carolina delivered them. But even with the greenhouse, I couldn’t find enough time to keep them going.”

  With a grunt, she picked up the enormous arrangement she had put together and headed for the Great Jonah Room. Herman followed her wordlessly.

  “If I don’t have time to arrange them, James Petersen puts them out for me. He’s pretty good at it,” she said, placing the huge arrangement on a long narrow wooden table behind one of her copper-colored leather sofas facing the fireplace, then standing back to see how it looked there.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Lena,” Herman said, bringing his hand to his broad brown brow, still mesmerized by her flower arranging, “I shoulda he’ped you wi’ that. But I swear, you looked so pretty ’rrangin’ them flowers there that I couldn’t think or move fo’ a minute.”

  Lena just smiled and went back to the kitchen to clip and arrange the other flowers. She tried and tried to set her face in an experienced “I’ve heard that shit before” mold, but she couldn’t stop smiling and blushing a pretty hot color.

  “You look like a flower yo’self in that red outfit, Lena.” He walked in behind her and took down a large blue pottery vase from the open-faced cupboards and handed it to her.

  “Pretty vase. Look like som’um my Indian people made.”

  “It’s Seminole,” Lena explained, taking it from him and filling it for the first time with water.

  Herman just smiled and said, “I thought so. Seminoles some a’ the folks I grew up with.”

  Lena turned the tap off.


  “You grew up with Indians?” she asked. “You weren’t on a plantation, you weren’t a slave?”

  She had not meant to blurt out the question, but it had been on her mind.

  “Naw, Lena, my peoples wasn’t slaves,” Herman said. He stopped, lifted his strong chin a bit and studied Lena’s face as he continued, “My pa and my ma took off from slavery.”

  Lena held her breath as Herman paused again. Then, he spoke.

  “My peoples was Maroons!”

  “Maroons!!?” Lena asked.

  “Yeah, baby. My folks run off from the plantation they was at in South Georgia, place named Cypress Oaks, long ’fore I was born. Mama was pretty heavy wid my oldest sister when they took off into the night. We’d sit ’round the fire at night in the woods in Flor’da, and they usta tell us children about that night and the plans they made fo’ the run fo’ freedom.

  “How they prepared, keepin’ some a’ they little vittles saved back. Who they told the truth on the place and who they had to lie to till the moment they left. Who they left behind. How it hurt that they couldn’t take everybody. How everybody wouldn’a wanted to go, to take the chance, if they could have. How good and scary it felt to leave, to just set foot off the place.”

  “You mean to tell me ya’ll were Maroons in Florida?” Lena felt as if she had stepped into a history lesson.

  “Well, when my folks run off they headed south ’cause they’d been listenin’ and payin’ ’ttention. And they knew how close Spanish terr’tory was. Soon after they took off, my pa and my ma, they met up with a band of Indians, Seminole is what they was. Huh, honest people.

  “Did you know Seminole mean ’runaway,’ Lena?” he asked.

  “Anyway, they had had some experience with runaways from other plantations, and they welcome my family. Ma had her first child right there on the Seminole settlement.”

  “So, you weren’t born in Georgia?” Lena asked as if she had just met Herman at a cocktail party.

  “Naw, Lena, I was born in Flor’da, not here in Georgia, but I ain’t got no sand ’tween my toes. I got pine needles and cypress beads. We lived in a settlement in the nawth part of Flor’da in the swamps. Ain’t nothin’ but a made-up line separate ’em—Flor’da and Georgia.

  “Then, after the war and ema’cipation, I traveled on back up this way, doin’ this, doin’ that. Kinda settled ’round here in Mulberry.”

  Herman looked at Lena and smiled. “Sho’ am glad I did.” Then, he continued.

  “Naw, baby, my daddy warn’t no slave. My mama neither.” Herman paused. “Naw, baby. They was warriors!”

  And Lena just nodded her head.

  “The Indian tribes ’round down south, you know, they didn’t play, neither. Seminoles waged three wars wid this country fo’ they freedom. But, Lena, everythang they used in everyday life, they made it pretty. Remind me a’ my people. Them Indians and us black folks was good to each other. But ya’ll don’t know nothin’ ’bout that, do ya’ll?” Herman sounded sadder for humanity than exasperated with local black folks.

  She remembered a poem she had written in college during the height of the black awareness movement in the sixties and asked Herman, “Want to hear a poem I wrote in college?”

  “Sho’,” he said with a surprised smile on his face. “I’d be honored.”

  Lena put the dish towel on the counter and stood up straight like a schoolgirl in Catholic school.

  “Grandmama on my Mama’s side

  Granddaddy on my Daddy’s side

  Both said their Grandmamas were longhaired Indians

  Lately, no one gives a damn.”

  “That’s a good poem, Lena. You put words up against each other real good.”

  Lena smiled “thank you” and took a little bow there in her kitchen next to the African violets blooming on the shelf over the sink.

  “I wonder how many people think about that? You know, the ties and the connections?” Herman mused.

  It sounded like a rhetorical question so Lena did not answer. She kept clipping the ends of the flowers at a forty-five-degree angle and listening to Herman talk. He had a nice voice, strong, unhurried, southern. He talked sort of like Lena Home, if Lena Horne had bass in her voice.

  Lena wondered how long it had been since he had last spoken.

  He stopped his talking of the ties between black people and red people to answer her question.

  “Lena, I ain’t spoke in a hundred years. Ain’t had no throat, ain’t had no mouth, ain’t had no tongue. But I’m happy to say I do now.” And he smiled and looked at her so it actually made her blush.

  “Why you think that?” he asked. “I’m talkin’ too much?”

  And she chuckled at his unshielded forthrightness. It spoke of another century, another time when folks didn’t spend so much time explaining and dissembling. Lena felt she always had to think twice before she opened her mouth. She thought she was going to like this Herman’s frankness.

  “Naw, Herman, you’re not talking too much at all.”

  It was the first time she had said his name aloud to him and the sound of it was so intimate, she lowered her eyes and blushed again.

  “It’s interesting,” she reassured him. “You are right. I hardly ever think about Native Americans in a real sense. And I got their stuff all around here.

  “Humph, isn’t that something?” she said seriously as she gave Herman the big vase of flowers.

  “Where to?” he asked, happy to be of help.

  “Wherever you want them,” she said, and immediately felt as if she had just conferred a blessing on Herman because she felt the warm holy feeling flood back over her like the welcome heat from the fire. He smiled and took the flowers to her bedroom and placed them on the linen and mudcloth-covered table by her bed.

  She leaned on the sink and watched Herman stride out of the kitchen. When she remembered that he was hungry, she hurried into the dining room to set the table, throwing one of her mother’s damask tablecloths on first. Then, she took down her simple gold-rimmed bone china from one of the white pine hutches in the Great Jonah Room.

  Herman stirred the food and heaped it up in big serving bowls, using whatever china struck his fancy. When he put his choices on the table next to hers, it looked like a marriage of opposites. The delicate crème china looked right comfortable with the heavy red vintage mixing bowl full of turnip greens and the big yellow soup tureen from her grandmother’s friend Miss Zimmie’s kitchen full of lean stew meat and potatoes with carrots and onions. Herman had wrapped corn muffins in a striped dish towel and set them in a basket he had found hanging on the wall.

  There were already candles burning everywhere, on the dining room table, on the buffet and on top of the old rolltop desk she used for a small bar. She placed two lit tall green tapers from Christmas in the center of the table. That’s when she saw the amaranth-colored hyacinth bloom lying by her plate.

  She picked it up and bringing it up to her nose, inhaled deeply.

  “Thank you, Herman.”

  “My pleasure,” he said proudly. “Yo’ pleasure is my pleasure, Lena.”

  Lena was as pleased as she could be with the situation.

  Then, pulling out the dining room chairs her mother and father had occupied, they sat down to eat.

  “You want to say grace, Lena?” he asked, stretching his hand out to take hers as if they were in church.

  She took hold of his hand, the first time they had touched all night, and felt the rough calluses on his palms and the tips of his fingers.

  “You believe, Herman?” she asked.

  “Believe?” he said, then laughed. “Shoot, Lena, baby, you can’t be dead and not believe in God.”

  She looked at Herman and smiled at the thought of them sharing faith.

  “Well, then, Herman, you go ahead.”

  Herman bowed his head and closed his coal-black eyes. Then, he lifted his broad head and looked right at Lena, then, he bowed his head again, his thick wild hair fram
ing his sweet dark face like a halo, closed his eyes again and said, “I do thank you, Lord.”

  He squeezed Lena’s hand and then let it go.

  As she served up the thick slices of stew meat in gravy, she paused and, looking to Herman, asked, “You eat red meat, Herman?”

  Herman just chuckled.

  “Lena, you ever had what they calls Apalachicola oysters, shellfish from the long skinny top of Flor’da, the Gulf side?” he asked. “They some little sweet oysters.”

  “Oh, yeah, Herman. We can get some shipped in. Same day,” Lena leapt to suggest.

  Herman just smiled.

  “Lots a’ mens say those little oysters taste like a woman to them. But me, to me they taste like freedom.”

  “Freedom?!” Lena asked with her own smile at the image of the moist-wet mollusk Herman raised before her.

  “When I was growing up in Flor’da, oh, I was ’bout eight the first time the grown folks let me go. They’d round up parties and we’d forage on the coast to harvest us some of those little sweet ones from the waters there. It was only partly dangerous, I guess. We was all dressed alike, our scoutin’ party, travelin’ the backwoods the mens knew.

  “We eat all kinds a’ thangs in the woods, Lena. That’s why I laughed when you asked me if I eat red meat.”

  Lena just smiled at the story, remembering how her father, Jonah, had relished good mealtime conversation. Her father had been like Herman: He would eat anything! But she did wonder at how a question about red meat led to a story about eating oysters.

  “Funny thang ’bout freedom, baby. It seem to have a lot a’ extra arms and limbs to grab hold a’ thangs. It ain’t always the thangs you want to grab holt of either.”

  When they finished eating, Herman leaned back in her father’s chair at the big dining room table and patted his hard flat stomach and said, “Uh, I feel like a new man!”