Tina Mcelroy Ansa

by The Hand I Fan With

  She said it just as innocently. She didn’t make a big deal of it and try to drown out the person sitting next to her with her version. Lena couldn’t even pinpoint the exact time when she had started switching back and forth. She just said it because it sounded right to her.

  She told Sister, “It just makes sense that if Jesus was conceived in Mary’s body and God was the essential father, then Mary with her womb, her egg, sure as shooting was the essential mother.”

  And in Lena’s mind, that made Mary divine, too. Worthy of prayer and adoration.

  Lena didn’t want to be the one who always was pointing out how the world didn’t seem to care a thing about a woman. But in her mind it was the same way the world had taken the pleasure out of things if you thought too much about it. Some of the best-used profanity insulted a woman: son-of-a-bitch, motherfucker, bastard. It wasn’t right.

  “It seems to me, Sister, that women—Mary, Ruth, Esther, Elizabeth, the women disciples at the foot of the cross—were the only ones in the Bible who were obedient to God,” she told her friend one Sunday as they strolled back from her mother’s altar where Lena had celebrated Mass. “And they don’t get no credit.”

  The altars and grottoes and retreats Lena had erected around her property emerged from that belief. First, she and Renfroe made a little grotto to Mary, using some medium-sized gray and orange and blue-streaked stones he and his crew had unearthed in their work on her property. Then, she asked Whit, the family’s old carpenter, to build a cypress altar to Oshun. It made sense to have a special place for her beside the running waters of the Ocawatchee. Then, while she was out riding her horses, she thought of Yemaya, and she got Renfroe and Whit to help her erect a shrine to her, too. Then, one May 5, Nellie’s birthday, she decided to erect an altar to her mother, her grandmama, Mother Hale, Mother Theresa and all mothers.

  By midsummer, once Herman arrived, Lena had stopped going to daily Mass at Blessed Martin de Porres altogether. By early fall, she had stopped attending Sunday Mass as religiously as before. From time to time, when she felt especially communal, she would slip on one of her mother’s light shifts with a sweater around her shoulders, kiss Herman goodbye, and drive over to Pleasant Hill for Mass on Sunday morning. But usually, Herman and the saints she honored was all the community she needed.

  At one altar or another, she celebrated the Eucharist each morning. Alone or surrounded by the spirits of all the loved ones she had lost, she intoned her declaration of faith as she lifted the bread and wine:

  “The Body of Christ. Amen. The Blood of Christ. Amen.”

  22

  SOM’UM-SOM’UM

  Lena’s grandmama had always said of her husband, Walter, “I could tell that Negro could really eat when he poured gravy over all his vegetables!”

  That’s what Herman did. But even with that clue, Lena was amazed at how much Herman ate. He was a big man, not overly tall and overwhelming, but a good-sized healthy man. Still, the amount of food he consumed was incredible.

  He didn’t hunker over his plate and wolf his food down. Lena thought he had lovely table manners. He just ate like a man who hadn’t had a meal—a good meal—in years. Actually, he hadn’t. He said that over the years since his death, he had tried to make himself whole so he could consume some delicacy he had come across in his wanderings, like a nice hot sweet potato warm and gray lying forgotten in some hunter’s open-fire ashes. But it never tasted as good as he remembered in life because he could never truly make himself whole. That was until he came to Lena.

  Herman ate with gusto, with appreciation, with occasional grunts of pleasure and smacks of his lips. He would bob his head as if he were listening to music even when music wasn’t playing. When it was real good, he rocked in his seat.

  “Wooo, I’m so hongry, I could eat up salvation and drank Jurdan dry!” he would exclaim as he sat down at the table.

  One night in July when they both woke hungry from making love, Lena asked Herman if he had ever eaten potato pancakes in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t think so, Lena, baby, but I could eat a little som’um-som’um,” he said as he pulled on the thin cotton drawstring pants Lena had ordered for him.

  Over the hot, steaming plate of potato pancakes, thick with chunks of milled potato and white and green onion and lots of cracked black pepper, Herman wiped his greasy lips with a golden linen napkin and said, “Good God, Lena. Baby, now I know we meant t’ be together. Ain’t no way you can cook like this in the middle a’ the night, and God didn’t intend fo’ me t’ be yo’ man. You my treasure, Lena.”

  He was as much her treasure as she was his.

  They went back to bed smelling like potato pancakes and continued tossing on the big bed, Lena’s bites turning into hurried tiny kisses and Herman’s tickles drifting into long deep caresses.

  Herman kissed her and slowly began to seep into her pores. Lena quivered because she could feel him enter her through her skin and at the same time experienced the sensation of entering Herman through his salty brown, onion-scented skin. When Lena awoke, one of Herman’s broad callused artistic hands was resting lightly between her thighs on top of her matchbox and her right hand was lying on his chest covering his left nipple. She could still hear the sound of their laughter in the room. They laughed all the time together, bringing new lines and wrinkles to Lena’s pretty, young-looking face.

  Gloria was the first one to notice the change when Lena swung through The Place for their monthly meeting in July. “Lena, girl, who you fucking? You look great!!”

  Gloria suspected for a moment that it was another woman.

  Lena did look good. She was looking like a woman from a Maya Angelou story. A character from a Toni Morrison novel. A person from an Alice Walker poem.

  Lena threw her head back, but with a little lift of her chin that gave the gesture its own unique stamp, shaking the ends of her braids against her shoulder blades, and laughed in a way that made all the women in The Place look at each other and go, “Ummmmmmmmmmmm.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I need to have it stacked up behind my stove like cordwood,” another customer, a woman of a certain age, said, shaking her bony shoulders a couple of times at the prospect.

  The way Herman enjoyed eating, Lena felt she should have cordwood stacked up in her kitchen.

  Cooking turnip greens with their creamy roots and smoked ham hocks for Herman made him as happy as if she had given him a blow job. She reveled in washing the greens not twice, not thrice, but four times before cooking them, ensuring that Herman would not crack down on a piece of grit and spoil the whole experience in the middle of a near-ecstatic moment of gastronomic bliss. It was her pleasure to give the greens an extra dipping in lightly salted cold water.

  She put some ham hocks in a little water in a big Calphalon pot with one long cowhorn pepper, and while she washed the turnips, the meat cooked and filled the kitchen with an earthy funky scent. When the greens were clean, really clean, she took them over to the big black and white gas stove. She tasted the seasoned water with her finger and savored the slightly salty meaty flavor with an “Umm.” She tossed in two medium-sized yellow onions cut in quarters, then added the greens. It seemed she would never get all those greens in that tall gray weathered pot, but she did. And she punched them down with a big fork before throwing in another cowhorn pepper—a red one—covering the pot and turning the flame down to medium.

  Whenever she lifted the lid to check on the greens, she’d say the same thing she had heard her mother say a million times. “Lord, greens go away to nothing!”

  Lena started cooking like her mother, too.

  The first time Lena fixed fried corn for Herman—sweet white Silver Queen in the middle of summer—she thought she was gonna have to hose him down.

  When he first took a mouthful of the corn, he actually laughed at its deliciousness. “Shoot, Lena, I could eat that every day!”

  And Lena smiled at the memory of her father, who truly did love a
nd eat the fried corn that Nellie made every day that it was in season.

  But at first, during the last days of spring, they still ate the Mulberry ladies’ food as much as hers.

  Sister had warned her years before on a swing through Mulberry on her way back from a trip to Haiti that Lena would be making a big mistake if she ever tried to pass off the CARE food package meals as her own and serve it to some man she was interested in.

  “Girl, in Haiti, a woman would rather cut out her heart than let another woman even purchase the food her man is going to eat let alone cook it!!!!!” Sister had informed her as Lena had put bowls of collard greens and rutabagas and perfect tiny corn muffins in the microwave for quick heating.

  Lena thought about her friend’s comment briefly while she stood by the kitchen window overlooking the stables’ tulip and iris bed enveloped in a sheath of sunlight and watched Herman, his wooden stool pulled up to the center island in the kitchen, as he devoured Miss Dorothy Douglass’ squash casserole, Miss Mary Davis’ crackling bread, Miss Mary Howard’s string beans and ham hock, or Miss Doll Odom’s chicken and dumplings.

  Now, Lena cooked for Herman every chance she got or could steal, day or night. Before he came, Lena had never given a thought to food in the house. But Herman would ask regularly every day, “Lena, what we got in the kitchen to eat? What we got in the larder we can cook?” Some days, he would pretend there was nothing in the kitchen to his tastes. “What ya runnin’ here, Lena? A hooch house?” Then, he’d laugh at the plenty in his woman’s kitchen.

  Herman’s determined appetite reminded Lena of what her mother’s friend Carrie Sawyer would say when Lena was growing up.

  “Nellie, you cannot face this world on a empty stomach,” the corpulent woman whose kitchen always smelled like baked goods would say to her friend who came with Lena to visit as she heaped up a pile of collard greens on a beautiful old china plate.

  Herman seemed to believe in that. As much as Herman loved to eat, Lena couldn’t bear to think of him having faced that otherworld for a hundred years on an empty stomach. The very thought made her get up from wherever she was and go into the kitchen to put a pot of something on to cook for Herman.

  She started making a grocery list for James Petersen, something she had rarely done before. She had even started stopping by the Kroger or Piggly Wiggly for a fresh fryer or cherries in season that Herman loved.

  They didn’t always eat heavy. Not every day. Herman may not have had to watch his cholesterol and blood pressure, but Lena was human. She did. So, some days through the summer, for lunch, which Herman called dinner, and for supper, which Lena called dinner, they’d just take their plates out to the garden and pick their meal.

  A couple of hands full of tiny Sweet 100s tomatoes, some little baby crookneck squash with the blossom still attached, a couple of green cowhorn peppers for Herman because he liked his stuff hot, tiny immature Yolo Wonders bell peppers that she’d stuffed with whatever kind of cheese they had: Brie, cheddar, Swiss, American.

  Some days, they would shuck a few ears of corn right there among the cornstalks and not even make it back to the pot of what Herman called “biling water” he had left on the stove. They would just eat the sweet creamy corn off the cob.

  “Good to keep you regular,” Herman had informed her.

  Sometimes, the two of them caught what they cooked. Herman had shown Lena where a stand of bamboo was taking over a marshy area near an arm of the Ocawatchee that reached into her property. And taking out his new buck knife, he sawed off two long canes for them. They headed down to the river, their cane poles over their shoulders like two children playing hooky to catch some of those fat Cleer Flo’ Mulberry mullets that were becoming legendary for their special sweet streaked meat.

  They came back with just enough to eat that day—which was four or five good-sized fish considering how much Herman could eat on his own. After they washed and scaled them, Lena made up a batch of hush puppies with lots of chopped onions and fresh-ground white pepper and a little sour grass from the yard and fried them all up. Then, they sat and ate the feast, talking all the time about their fishing exploits.

  Herman cleared the table, then snaked up behind her at the sink and nuzzled her neck at the hairline as he slipped his big hands into the front of her shirt and massaged her shoulders and breasts.

  “That was some good fish and hush puppies, Lena, good eatin’. I don’t know when I have enjoyed a meal so.” He stopped and kissed the nape of her neck, then continued. “You know, I do ’ppreciate the delicious vittles the ladies prepare, and they good, too. But, Lena, you know, I’m like every other man in the world. I like the way my ’oman cook.”

  Lena had to turn in his arms and give him a kiss, her wet hands soaking the back of his tee-shirt. And before she knew it they were standing there in the kitchen making hard-driving love with Lena’s bare butt pressed against the edge of the soapstone counter and Herman’s pants down around his knees. When his thrusts lifted her to the top of the counter and she landed with a plop, they both chuckled and came.

  She became as happy in the kitchen as Herman was making her in all the other rooms of her house.

  In the summer, Lena moved around the Mexican-tile floor of her kitchen dressed in shorts, one of Herman’s shirts or undershirts and heavy work socks. The shorts made it comfortable when she snuggled under a heavy cotton throw with Herman while she waited for the corn bread to brown.

  He liked that outfit as much as he enjoyed her fancy lingerie. But if one of them was frying some fish or a chicken or two or three rabbits in the big black iron skillet on the stove, he insisted she wear the long-sleeved shirt and big linen pants he fetched from a hook in her closet and brought to her.

  Herman made cooking for him a pure joy. And his joy soon made Lena’s big yellow kitchen a place of beauty and solace. By early July, when the first of the tiny green butter beans that her family had favored so had come in at the farmer’s market out by the Mulberry Mall, Lena was cooking up a pot of the sweet green wonders first thing in the morning so she and Herman could have them for lunch when she returned home from her increasingly shorter days at work in Mulberry. Some days, she, like a farm wife, took great pride in boiling up two cups of rice at noon to a fluffy consistency and spooning it into one of her mama’s favorite blue and yellow sunflower serving bowls. Then, with the big silver spoon with no slots or holes in it to leak any of the thick pale green juice, she’d heap up serving after serving of the tiny green butter beans over the steaming rice.

  The way Herman sat down and enjoyed the dish, Lena began to feel truly sorry for people in life who didn’t have someone to cook butter beans and rice for them.

  Nellie had told Lena so often that a big part of food preparation—an honored and sacred undertaking in her house—was the presentation, so Lena never forgot to take time to arrange the food fetchingly on Herman’s plate.

  “Don’t think just because you cooked something delicious that your job is over,” Nellie had said over and over. “Now, run outside, baby, and get me a few sprigs of your grandmama’s parsley and something else that’ll look pretty next to the mashed potatoes.”

  It was her mother’s words Lena recalled in the kitchen. It was her father’s voice she heard in the dining room when the meal was prepared.

  Her entire childhood, Lena had heard a man’s voice say, “Children, go wash your hands and come put the ice in the glasses,” as a prelude to eating. It was the true signal—like ringing the chimes at the beginning of Mass—that her father was home and the meal could legitimately and rightfully move ahead to consumption.

  Herman had brought back that sense of reverence to her dining room table out by the river.

  Other than feeble attempts at romantic dinners, no one had sat around her big oak dining room table after she moved to her own house. No one, that is, until Herman brought his big-eating self into her life.

  Herman brought a sense of reverence back to her kitchen, too.

/>   He wasn’t much of a cook himself. He could “scratch around” okay in the kitchen enough to fill his stomach, “in a fashion,” he said. And he could make some of the lightest, fluffiest, big old buttermilk biscuits that they sopped for breakfast and snacks, although he’d end up with flour all down his shirt and splashes of buttermilk on his forearms where he had rolled up his sleeves. Herman called the biscuits “catheads” and the molasses he called “mule blood.” But really cook?

  “Shoot,” he said admiringly, “cookin’? Now, that’s a real skill. That’s what you got, baby. Now, you can really cook.”

  It made her proud.

  Whenever Lena wanted to tease him about his appetite and her cooking, she’d pat his flat hard stomach or pinch his beautiful black behind, and say, “Herman, don’t you think you getting a little thick through the waist? Maybe I need to cut back on the corn. You look almost plump!”

  Herman always had a comeback for her:

  “I ain’t fat,” he’d say, “I’m tall. That’s all.”

  It was part of some old song, long forgotten by everyone but Herman.

  “I ain’t fat, I’m tall. That’s all.”

  23

  HAUNTED

  “We’ll eat as soon as the dressing get done,” Lena had heard her mother say hundreds of times when Lena, Edward, Raymond and Jonah would stroll from the living room through the kitchen and back asking if there was something they could do to hurry dinner along.

  “We’ll eat as soon as the dressing get done,” Nellie would say without bothering to look up from the Sunday paper she was reading. The corn bread dressing she made with her own egg bread, Colonial sliced white bread, onions, bell peppers, celery and stock from the cooked hen to keep the dressing moist during baking. Lena pronounced the last two words just as Nellie had, “get ’un.”