June Bug liked women who were so light skinned that they could be called white, so enamored with love that they could be manipulated, and so young that they could be called girls. With Nelle’s mother, he had found two out of the three. June Bug considered himself to be a pioneer of sorts. Yet he lacked the actual motivation and follow-through to make strides in any movements of racial or political importance. Seated at the dinner table of Janette and Nelle’s small apartment, he dismissed his lack of involvement when the conversation turned to civil rights.
“I leave all that marchin’ shit to Martin Kang an’em.” He chuckled and took a swig of Night Train.
“You know they’re always looking for men to help out.” Janette scooped a spoon of mashed potatoes from the bowl to refill her plate.
June Bug shoved his plate above Janette’s, and she plopped the last of them onto his plate instead of her own. “Well, it ain’t gonna be me. You see that nigga got hit with a brick? Shiiiiiiit, that wouldn’t be my ass!”
“Who got hit with a brick?” Nelle asked. They looked at her, temporarily having forgotten that she was at the table.
“Martin Luther the Kang,” June Bug answered and laughed. “That nigga got smooth busted upside his head.”
“June . . .” Janette admonished him.
June Bug swallowed a mouthful of potatoes and glared at Janette. Her eyes lowered slightly. “Baby, I just don’t think she needs to be hearing about all that violence.”
“You right,” June Bug responded. “You just don’t think.”
Tension crept in like the chill draft that coagulated the remaining green peas on Nelle’s plate. “May I be excused?” she asked.
“Hell nawl,” June Bug answered before Janette could respond. “You asked a question, and I got answers for you. Now, your mama wanna keep you shielded from all the shit in the world. But I’m a man, and I know what you need to prepare you for the shit that’s out there.”
Male companionship was important to Janette. She took great pains to maintain her physical appearance and stressed the importance of proper care to her daughter. That said, having a daughter—a biological legacy to receive and continue the life’s lessons, which by the time of Janette’s generation of Marie Laveaus, had withered down to physical vanity—was of the utmost importance. And although Janette was missing the conscious cultural, spiritual, and political substance of Marie Laveau, she did feel compelled to protect and propagate the essence of her ancestor contained in dreams she did not fully understand and intuitions she blindly followed. June Bug’s beady eyes had penetrated her daughter, and Janette intended to make sure that nothing else of his would do the same.
One day as she braided Nelle’s hair, she asked, “Nelle, has June Bug put his hands on you?”
“Has he hit me?”
“Nooo . . .” Janette drew out the query.
“Um, he touched my hair one day. Said it looked nice?” Nelle raised the pitch of her voice toward the end, still reaching for a suitable answer.
“That all?”
“Yeah, Mama,” Nelle answered slowly, her mind raced. Their mother-daughter bonding time had gradually been reduced to weekly hair-braiding sessions. Her ten-year-old brain reached for something that would prolong the rare moments in which her mother showed some interest. She thought of the way June Bug’s beady eyes lingered over the softening places of her body. How he stuck out his tongue at her when her mother wasn’t looking and made it wiggle, suggestive of things she wouldn’t be aware of until years later. Without touch, he had made her feel soiled and aggrieved in a way that she could barely comprehend much less communicate to her mother. So she did what some girls have done when negotiating a space beyond their years. Nelle improvised. The words slipped from her mouth without the benefit of foresight as she described a scene that was a masala of her mother’s eavesdropped phone conversations and the pulp romance novels she secretly read with Eve in her basement.
Had Janette not been so incensed, she would have been able to discern the obvious fantastical elements and the omission of the less than romantic ones that every girl remembers from her first sexual experience. But Janette did not hear the words as much as invent them to accompany the visual image that etched itself inside her head. An image of June Bug and her little girl. An electric current of tension shot from Janette’s fingers into her daughter’s hair follicles.
Nelle reached up and tenderly touched her scalp. “Ow, Mama. Not so tight.”
Janette relaxed her hands, leaned down, and kissed the back of Nelle’s head. “Sorry, baby.” She rubbed oil onto the parts she’d made in Nelle’s hair, placing particular care on those that were reddening. “You gonna go stay with your friend Eve and her aunt for a little while, okay?”
“Why?” Nelle asked. Her heart raced with panic, and she grew anxious that the lie would bring Janette closer to June Bug instead of closer to her.
Janette thumped the back of Nelle’s scalp where moments earlier she’d planted a kiss. “Don’t you why me! You just do as I say. You hear me, JaNelle Marie?”
Nelle placed a hand on her sore head. “Yes, Mama.”
They sat in silence as Janette continued to braid Nelle’s hair, yet her mind refused to be silent. Her hands worked through her daughter’s long tresses on muscle memory and her thoughts turned to that unknown ancestor of whom she knew so little. Even the stories and speculation about her lineage had been so distant that they seemed more rumor than truth. She wished for it to be true. She longed to be able to take care of things, as Marie Laveau had.
No one knows what happened to the first man Marie Laveau married. He disappeared into the creole-thickened New Orleans air and was never heard from again. A death certificate was issued years later, although no body was found. There was no inquiry. It had been a thing that was taken care of in the way women have been known to take care of things. Almost magical in its mystery and craft. Yet, something of it remains. It must, because nothing ever truly disappears into nothingness. There are bones to be buried. Trinkets to be stashed. Souls to be exorcised. Laveau’s first husband was never found, not that anyone dared to look for him, yet in its stead looms the disappearance itself.
While Janette silently plotted June Bug’s exit from their lives, Nelle couldn’t wait to share the recent developments in her household with Eve. They would escape to the basement of Eve’s house, where all secrets were shared, and exchange ideas about the adult world within its cold concrete walls.
A decade later, the basement walls had been insulated for warmth and covered in wood paneling. Although they were better equipped for keeping secrets, none had been told between Eve and Nelle since their time at Tuskegee. Still friends, the dismissively classified “separate paths” had redefined closeness. It was apparent in the stiff one-armed hug that Eve gave Nelle when she entered the house. Nelle briefly pressed her cheek against Eve’s, and they both pulled apart, relieved to be done with a ritual that had become archaic.
The living room had changed little since they were girls. Ceramic elephants littered the surface of the faux fireplace’s mantel. They threatened to burst from the glass curio cabinet. Elephants loomed majestically from several paintings on the walls. They had doubled in number since the time of Nelle’s two-week stay while her mother rid the world of June Bug. Elephants have long memories, and if the ones that lined Ann’s house could talk, they could have spoken volumes on the silent strains of Eve and Nelle’s friendship.
Nelle eased past Eve into the living room’s interior just as Ann arrived there from her own room down the hall. Ann welcomed her in a warm embrace. “Nelle! I been asking Every where you been.”
“Hey, Miss Ann. It’s good to see you. How you feeling these days?”
“Oh, I’m fair de middlin’,” Ann slipped into the familiar drawl of the South reserved for home. The tension Nelle felt moments earlier eased. Ann reminded Nelle of the South,
where the weather, food, and people were all warm and soothing. “How’s your mama?”
Nelle smiled. “Oh, you know Mama, Miss Ann. Looking for a new husband.”
Ann and Nelle’s chuckles drifted conspiratorially into a simultaneous “hmph.” Eve brushed past them and walked down the hall and through the kitchen to the basement stairs. She paused and turned her head back slightly. “You coming?”
“What y’all gotta be runnin’ down to the basement for at this age?” Ann asked, nervously clutching Nelle’s arm. “I know y’all don’t have little girl secrets still.”
Eve sighed. “We already talked about this, Mama Ann.”
“But, Every . . .” Ann began to protest but thought better of it.
Nelle reassuringly patted Ann’s hand before detaching and excusing herself to quickly follow Eve down the stairs. Ann reluctantly returned to her bedroom and the Harlequin romance book that awaited her.
In the basement, boxes of varying sizes had been pulled from the storage room at the rear and now sat in rows blocking the sofa and loveseat. They sat atop the wooden card table. They leaned against the secretary and perched haphazardly on the mahogany floor-model television.
Nelle pressed Eve for more information on their goal. “So, you’re just gonna go through her personal things then?” Although it was apparent that Eve had already begun her search. Some boxes were open, their contents spilled out in front of them like eviscerated organs.
“What other choice do I have?” Eve defended as she tossed two pillows with stitched images of elephants.
“You could try talking to her again.”
“I’ve been trying to talk to her about this ever since I could talk!” Eve lowered her voice. “Funny you giving advice on talking to parents.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nelle frowned. “What are we even looking for?”
Eve searched her brain to remember information from her meetings with Brother LeRoi. “Letters. Photographs. Obituaries.” Then added, “And you know exactly what it means.”
Nelle sat on one box and began rummaging through its neighbor. More elephants. Little bags with elephant earrings and brooches, gifts that were too ornate for Ann’s prudish tastes. A dark purple Crown Royal bag stuffed with other balled-up velvety Crown Royal bags. Nelle held up a small glass elephant figurine and peered at Eve through its translucence. “So, we’re finally going to talk about the elephant in the room?”
Eve suppressed a chuckle that would have threatened the seriousness of the mood. “So, you want me to talk to Mama Ann, which I’ve done practically all my life, but you haven’t given so much as a whimper to Miss Janette about yourself.”
Nelle’s face twisted. “It ain’t her business.”
“No? She seems to think it’s her business to get you married off to some Billy Dee Williams. It’d save her a whole lot of trouble if you just told her.” Eve smirked. The onus of the conversation had switched, and she gladly shared the guilt of conversational omission. Their conversation overtook their initial task, and neither noticed as they ransacked the boxes that they had entered the age of the owl, the elephant’s predecessor. They had ceased to unwrap the newspaper-bundled trinkets, assuming them all to be elephants. They were too engrossed in personal conflict to read the newspapers that had been repurposed as wrapping paper. Nelle missed reading about the “accidental death” of one Jesse “June Bug” Birch in the Chicago Defender dated twelve years earlier. The words “June Bug” nestled in the palm of her hand as she replaced the wrapped owl with moveable bead eyes into the box. A small sound escaped as the eyes shook in their plastic sockets, but neither Nelle nor Eve heard.
“Told her what?” Nelle feigned innocence.
Eve was taken aback. She looked around but had no reply.
Nelle smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You wanna talk about it? ’Cause I’d love to talk about my life with my best friend who completely lost interest in it once I told her I was a lesbian.”
Eve’s eyes widened and Nelle’s confidence was bolstered. “Yeah, I can say it. I can say it all day long, and you’d be used to hearing it by now if you quit acting like that part of me didn’t exist. Don’t you even care?”
“I care about you, Nelle. But . . .” But Eve had been indoctrinated in the 1960s Black Power politics of Black babies for the revolution, and gays and lesbians could not naturally produce them. She still struggled with the idea of tying reproduction to Black liberation, especially since she, herself, did not want to have children. At least, she didn’t think that she did.
“But?” Nelle pressed, knowing that they were skating close to previous arguments. She wanted to push hard against the weak spot in Eve’s beliefs on the “natural.”
Eve snorted. “It’s not just me. I mean, even Maya Angelou wrote that—”
“Oh, that’s bullshit,” Nelle argued. “The world of the pervert, right? Angelou got the brunt of being painted as unwomanly, which is the case for all Black women, mind you. Especially tall, dark ones like she is.”
“But—”
“But nothing! She takes that same definition of unwomanly hurled against her and turns it on lesbians. Jive bullshit, and so disappointing.”
“But—”
“But what?” Nelle shouted in exasperation.
“But I just don’t care to hear about that.” Eve’s words swirled around them, commanding time to slow itself just enough so that they could float weightlessly between an intake of breath and its inevitable exhale. They spread themselves amid the boxes of the storage room, climbed the shelves of the storage racks, and stole away into the cedar closet snuggling with quilts and spare pillows. The words filled the small storage room so that there seemed little room for Eve and Nelle. Little room for conversation, so they continued to rummage through boxes in silence. Eventually it seemed not enough space for the words themselves, and they drifted upward to a vent and slid through its evenly cut slits into the aluminum shaft that circulated cold air in the summer and heat in the winter to various parts of the house.
Unknown to Eve and Nelle, the vents distributed more than air. Sound, too, traveled through the shafts, and it was in this way that their words reached Ann as she sat reading her romance novel in her room. It was no secret to Ann that the vents served as the house’s informal intercom system. Actually, it was more a listening device than an intercom, as sound seemed to be interested only in traveling upward from the basement and not the reverse. Ann had made sure of this years ago, after discovering that she could hear her niece’s basement activities. It had always served as a secret resource, like so many others that only parents and guardians are privy to and which reinforce their seeming omniscience in their children’s eyes.
Through the years, Ann had learned more about her niece by eavesdropping than by actual conversation with her. She had listened as Eve described her first kiss to Nelle. It had been with a boy named Jericho. Later, Eve had been surprised by an uncannily pertinent talk Ann had randomly initiated about the sexual motivations of teenage boys. Ann had shakily listened to details of Eve’s first sexual experience, and the following day Eve found a pack of Trojan condoms on her bed with the note “Better safe than sorry.”
Eve had been more disturbed by the note than the condoms, which she had immediately discarded. Her aunt was an unwanted presence in her sexual acts. But she had kept the note, rereading it nearly every day for months and wondering whether her birth had been a sorry consequence of sex. Eve hadn’t asked her aunt for clarification. Their cycle of indirect communication continued, with Ann listening through the bedroom vent to Eve’s life and commenting on it in ways which she felt were appropriate and Eve, in turn, adding those comments to the growing list of questions she had about herself, her aunt, and what intersections, if any, existed between their lives.
As Eve and Nelle sat in the basement, Ann received their conversation a
s disembodied voices floating into her room. There were no elephants or owls in Ann’s room. There were no trinkets or figurines. No photographs. No knickknacks. The bed was a modestly full size. She had a white nightstand, white dresser, and white chest of drawers. Everything else—from the curtains to the bedspread, from the throw pillows to the carpet—was some shade of green. Celery-colored doilies adorned the furniture. Forest green pillows were carefully arranged on top of a mint-green duvet. Pastel blue-green, olive, and asparagus hues leapt at the eye from different items.
Ann placed the laminated bookmark she had received from church during Lent between the pages of her romance novel—which she had previously learned through the vent was called “Mama Ann’s soft porn” by her niece. The quote on her bookmark was taken from the book of Mark, chapter 1, verse 13: “And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.” The biblical quote found itself pressed between pages that included, “She could feel the palpitations of his throbbing manhood against her and could no longer resist unbridling her own passion.” And so, temptation and Christ were placed in strange collocation with two others in a dance of resistance and surrender. Ann placed the book facedown on the bed and gave her attention to the vent. She thought it was no wonder that Nelle had turned into a lesbian after the June Bug fiasco. Ann was just relieved that Eve hadn’t “turned funny.” There was bad blood in every family. She had tried to share some information with Eve the last time she asked. She had hoped it would satisfy Eve’s curiosity. But her version of events was truncated.
Eve’s voice rose through the vent. The cadence was so much like that of the mother Eve had never known. At times, Ann would close her eyes when Eve spoke and could see her sister, Mercy, as clear as day in her mind’s eye. It seemed to her that Eve was becoming more like Mercy, and Ann couldn’t understand how it was possible. Ann always thought of Mercy, particularly during the times Eve and Nelle were huddled together in the basement. She had told Eve that Mercy had come to Chicago pregnant and disgraced. We had some people up this way, and your mama came for a fresh start, I suppose. But now Ann allowed her thoughts to travel backward, past Mercy’s death, past Eve’s birth, past Chicago to Macon County, Georgia, in 1950.
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