Daughters of Jubilation

by Kara Lee Corthron

  At one such tree, Grammie Atti stops. She inspects its trunk and stares way up into its thick branches above. I watch her but don’t say anything. Grammie Atti places a hand on the trunk and closes her eyes. She moves her lips but makes no sound.

  “Grammie Atti?”

  She opens her eyes, looks up into the branches again like she’s searching for something and then, reluctantly, takes her hand from the trunk. Without sayin’ a word, she starts trudgin’ again, so I trudge behind her.

  We get to a small clearing near Bottomless Pit. Which isn’t a pit but a pond; that’s just what folks call it. I’ve also heard it called Bottomless Shit, because apparently it was once used for that. It ain’t too big across, but supposedly if you get out in the middle of it, there is no bottom. Mama said when she was in school, one of her classmates went for a swim in Bottomless Pit and was never seen again.

  Anyway, if you can ignore the fact that there’s possibly raw sewage and a decaying corpse deep in the water somewhere, it’s a really pretty pond.

  “Okay,” she says, her sharp voice at odds with this tranquil scene. I turn to her. More sunlight has found us in this spot, and the moss on the ground feels soft as carpet under our feet.

  “You gonna change what we see and what we feel,” she announces. “In times of strife, it may be necessary for you to alter the atmosphere you’re in. So. Go ahead and do it.”

  I wait for her to say more, because surely there’s more to say. She just looks at me. Not even botherin’ to have an expression right now.

  “Can you be—I don’t know—more specific?”

  “Yes,” she says. She takes out her pipe and lights it. After her first exhale, I realize she has nothing more to add.

  “Change the atmosphere,” I sigh.

  “That’s what I said,” she affirms. “Just the one right here. The one that we’re in.”

  I glance around me. Why would I change somethin’ that’s already beautiful? But I guess that’s not the point. I plant myself and dig down deep. I’m not angry, nor do I have any reason to be, so I’m not sure how I can possibly do something this big.

  I turn to see what Grammie Atti’s doin’. She’s sittin’ on a rock, starin’ out at the water and smokin’ her pipe. She ain’t in no hurry.

  Another gentle breeze blows, and some love grass brushes against my ankles and I smile. I imagine bringin’ Clay here sometime, if I could do it without Grammie Atti knowing… and then I feel tickles and I feel the giggles comin’, and I ain’t in the mood to get hollered at, so I push ’em down. Down, down, down…

  To another place. There’s something else down here, and it pulses too. I can almost hear the giggles I shoved down here. Are these the giggles of haints? Ain’t sure, but if they are, they don’t bother me down here. I think I know what to do. I internally search for every bit of giggle or happy I’m feelin’ right now and gather ’em all up. I bring ’em on down to this other pulsing, and wouldn’t you know it? I have another band now. This one is greenish-yellow, and it makes me feel how I imagine drinkin’ champagne must feel. I’m giddy and bubbly and silly, and I can’t help it! My whole body erupts in a giant burst of joyful laughter.

  “Get it under control,” Grammie Atti calls from her rock.

  I’m bent over laughin’ so hard I’m cryin’. She’s right: I gotta get this under control. There can be too much of a good thing.

  I leap up from down inside my new greenish-yellow band and focus on the present moment. And then…

  I shiver in my short sleeves. It’s cold. Why is it so cold? I look up, and the sun has clouded over and lace droplets fall from the sky onto my hands, onto my eyelashes. Snow. I am seeing… snow. Falling from the sky, covering the ground, the surface of the water, and me and Grammie Atti.

  It’s astonishing. It’s an astonishing modern miracle that I can never tell anyone about. It’s too impossible to conceive. I’ve never seen snow before. Is it supposed to look like somethin’ from a fairy tale?

  “Grammie? Do you feel it?”

  “Uh-huh. You did good,” she says, not particularly interested in the island of storybook winter I just created. “Was it intentional or accidental?”

  I watch the dainty crystals melt in the palm of my hand.

  “Intentional,” I tell her. It was. I thought it would be fun if I could make it snow. I think about that rainbow I made for Clay and me on our first real date. The laughin’ kids in church. Those things just happened, but if I can do this kinda thing on purpose?

  Damn! That is somethin’ else. I feel like a character from a Greek myth.

  “Do you know how you did it?” she asks.

  “I think so.”

  “Revert it.”

  “Already? But we just—”

  “Revert it. All this is temporary. You can’t be toyin’ with the planet’s real ecosystem. Do it. Now.”

  I wanna cross my arms and tell her no, I should be able to spend more time with my first snow, but I’m not brave enough.

  “Evalene! If you don’t do what I tell you right this minute—”

  It’s simple. I release my hold on my new greenish-yellow band, and it gently dissipates. And winter is gone. All gone. The sun is back. The ground is dry. My body just as warm as it was before. Like nothing ever happened. This time, she is impressed and can’t hide it.

  “Okay. You gettin’ good at this, ya know?”

  I nod. “Thank you.”

  I sniff the air, searching for traces of the snow scent, but all I smell is the warm summer dirt.

  “What am I not doin’ right yet?” I ask her.

  She frowns. “Hard to say. You catch on fast, but got this li’l girl in you that wants to throw tantrums way too often. She’s impatient as hell. You gotta watch out for her,” she warns. Then, quite uncharacteristically, she smiles, and it’s a warm, almost grandmotherly smile.

  “Come. Sit by me,” she says. I sit on a patch of sunbaked grass and look up at her perched on her rock.

  “Grammie Atti? How come we can do these things? Do you know?”

  She glances down at me; then she sighs, still smiling, but now more wistfully than grandmotherly. “Well. I don’t know how it began, but I know some a your foremothers used it when the masters’ and mistresses’ wickedness became too much to bear. I imagine their foremothers used it too. Somethin’ in our particular DNA is determined to live and to fight. It’s an advantage we’re fortunate to have. You gotta remember that,” she explains.

  “Mama sure don’t see it that way.”

  “Your mother made a choice. She’s a full-grown woman, and she has to do what she thinks is best.”

  This is the most compassion I’ve ever heard Grammie Atti express toward Mama. I wish Mama could’ve heard it for herself. I doubt she’d believe me if I told her.

  “Why do only some people have it?”

  She coughs hard, and it takes her a minute to recover. She probably shouldn’t be smokin’ her pipe so much. When the coughin’ fit passes, she acts like it didn’t happen. She covers the pipe’s chamber with her palm, snuffing out the flame.

  “How do you think the world would work if everybody could jube? Like anything else in the spirit realm, the select few are cherry-picked to protect the masses. No use cryin’ about it. Just the way it is.”

  “Are we… witches?” I ask her.

  She stares at me for a second before chuckling. “Who knows? Some people think witches ain’t human. If that’s the case, then you can’t call us witches. Most often, though, when you hear people cryin’ ‘witch,’ it’s just an excuse to hurt or kill somebody they’re scared of. Or somebody that just lives life differently. And these somebodies bein’ accused tend to have cooches.”

  “God, Grammie Atti!”

  “It’s the truth. Don’t matter what people call ya. They’ll decide who you are regardless of any label you might choose.”

  The one thing I know for certain about Jubilation is that there will always be more for me to learn
about Jubilation. I take in what she’s sayin’. It’s all useful, but it don’t answer the one question that’s been haunting me since my first run-in with Virgil and his flunkies. “How come I can’t jube when I’m scared?”

  She sighs. She seems more tired today than usual. “You can. You just can’t in his presence. Yet,” she says.

  So she already knows about him.

  “Why?”

  “He’s your malcreant. It’s what we call an opposing entity that’s found your Achilles’ heel and exploits it.”

  She looks down at me and takes my chin in her hand. Her eyes are sad.

  “You mighta given him somethin’ dear to you without even knowing it. Whatever it is, it’s a crucial piece a who you are. As long as he’s got it, the malcreant has the upper hand,” she says.

  That feeling of dread returns, pooling in my abdomen, and I’m reminded of what my mother said about him. She said he was a “pestilence” and that what he did to me was “unspeakable.” He does have something of mine, but I didn’t give it to him. He took it.

  Grammie Atti lets go of my chin and stares up into the trees again. I watch ripples form on Bottomless Pit’s surface.

  “What do I do?” I ask.

  When she doesn’t reply after a minute, I look up at her face. Her mouth is set in a hard line, her eyes ablaze. I think she’s angry for me.

  “Sankofa. You heard that before?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s a symbol from an old African proverb. It means ‘go back and get it,’ ” she says.

  “Get it?”

  “He took something from you. So take it back.”

  I let that settle in my mind. No task has ever sounded so impossible.

  “You seen it, though. You just didn’t know what it was. Sankofa symbol is a bird with her feet pointed in the direction she’s going. But her head is looking backward as she holds a li’l egg in her mouth. You can look back without gettin’ stuck there, and you can take what belongs to you. No matter how delicate.”

  Grammie Atti’s backward cuckoo bird. I’ve always thought that deformed bird was a mistake, but maybe it wasn’t.

  A swift breeze catches some loose strands of her gray hair, and I hear something so soft, but it’s there. It sounds like all the voices of a choir holding on to one, long note. Maybe I don’t hear it so much as I feel it.

  “Do you hear that?” I ask her.

  “Just spirits in the air. They always around. You probably just couldn’t hear ’em before.”

  Spirits. Haints. Guess they could be anybody. I’ve never thought much about who they were when they were alive. Regardless, I don’t feel scared. It feels nice to have them with us.

  Grammie Atti reaches into one of the many odd pockets she sews on the dresses she makes and pulls out a cinnamon candy, which she offers to me. I take it and pop it in my mouth. Probably got lint and dust on it from her pocket, but I don’t really care.

  She sucks on one too, and we both just stare out at the pond.

  “My mother didn’t teach me, either,” she says unexpectedly. “Never had the chance. My grandmother was long gone by the time it hit. Had to teach myself.”

  “What… was your mother like?” I ask. I hope I’m not bein’ too nosy. This is the first time my grandmother has ever talked to me about anything personal. Today she’s in a quiet mood, open to talking. But I don’t wanna push her too far. If I do, she might never open up again.

  “Oh, so many things,” she says. “She worked a lot. She wept a lot. She was a churchgoer. Like your mother,” she says with a small laugh. “It’s amazing how rigid the patterns of our blood can be.”

  I have no idea what that means, but I wanna know more about my great-grandmother.

  “Were you… close?”

  “I’d say so.” She takes her tobacco pouch from her pocket and shakes more into her pipe. “I was with her when she died.”

  This I did not know. What I’ve heard about my great-grandmother is spotty and vague. My mother never talks about her. All I know about her death is that it was too soon.

  “Was she sick a long time?” I ask.

  Grammie Atti narrows her eyes at me, and I know I misspoke.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Told me what?”

  “That she was sick?”

  For a split second I can’t remember how I came to know that. Then it dawns on me that I never heard that. Because no one ever told me what had happened to her, I just pictured her dyin’ young of somethin’ like consumption. Like Camille. And at some point, that picture became my idea of the truth.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry,” I say.

  Grammie Atti’s expression softens, and she relights the pipe. She goes into herself momentarily, but seconds later she’s back.

  “I don’t believe she was sick,” she says, as though this is still a mystery to her.

  “She was haunted, Evalene. You and me, we can see things in other worlds, make big things happen. Lotsa folks can. It ain’t always a picnic, but you can live with it.” She inhales deeply. “My mother was haunted in a different way. Nobody paid her any mind. They just thought she was a li’l flighty. Her haints scared her to death.” Grammie Atti rubs her forehead. She looks up into the trees again, like there’s somethin’ up there she lost. “She believed they would kill her. So she wanted to kill them first. She got a heavy knife, the kind used for cleanin’ fish, and she stabbed ’em. She said. For days, she carried that knife around with her everywhere, stabbin’ into the air whenever she felt the need. She wasn’t sleepin’ anymore by then. It got to be too many of ’em at once. That’s what she told me. They chased her up the stairs and into the back bedroom. I chased her up there too, cuz I was scared, ya know?”

  “How old were you?”

  She makes a funny sound, like she was tryna laugh, but a groan caught her in the act.

  “Ten.”

  She pauses to puff on the pipe.

  “She was stabbin’ at every inch of air and space in that room and screamin’. I tried to tell her that she got ’em all, but she wouldn’t stop. She saw one on the other side a the window, and she reached out to stab it and fell through the glass. They didn’t make ’em so sturdy in them days. I didn’t see her body land. But I heard it.”

  I’m speechless. This might be the worst story I’ve ever heard. And she had to live it. At age ten.

  “When I come out this far, I keep on the lookout. Sometimes she stops by. Usually up in the trees. She always liked high places.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to your mama, Grammie Atti.”

  She laughs dryly. “Don’t go gettin’ sentimental, girl. Everybody’s life’s hard. I ain’t special.”

  When she first told me she wanted to bring me out here for “field work,” I was grumpy as all hell and couldn’t wait for it to be over. But for the first time that I can remember, I don’t mind bein’ with my grandmother.

  We sit lookin’ out at the water sayin’ nothing more. Passin’ the time until the sunset turns the sky pink.

  18 Love

  IT’S LATE. I AM EXHAUSTED. And I have to look after that brat tomorrow, but I can’t sleep. Thoughts and images keep crowdin’ in on me, and I can’t get ’em to stop or slow down enough for me to relax. And then even if I do get to sleep, who knows what’s waitin’ for me in dreamland?

  There’s a knock at the door, which is surprising, since nobody knocks in this house.

  Mama slowly opens it and comes in.

  “Somethin’ wrong, Mama?”

  She sits on the side of my bed.

  “We need to talk about things,” she begins. I sit up, attentive. I don’t know what she wants to talk about, but I sure hope it ain’t Virgil Hampton.

  “You and Clayton. You’re real tight, huh?”

  Oh. This conversation. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe Mama can see that I’m growin’ up. “Yeah. I really like him, Mama. A lot.”

  “Uh-huh. I think you more th
an like him,” she says. I don’t say anything. She seems to already know, so why do I need to confirm it for her?

  “You know you too young to be havin’ sex, Evvie.”

  I drop my eyes to the orchids on my bedspread. I don’t wanna talk about this, either. She shakes her head and lets out a deep sigh. Then she hands me a small paper bag. I look at her, confused. She turns it upside down, and a box of condoms falls in my lap.

  I don’t touch it. If I touch it, it means I’m fine with what’s happening.

  “Please tell me he has had the decency to wear rubbers,” she says. It’s not a question.

  I fiddle with my hair, which I’d put in two thick plaits cuz I was too tired to use the rollers. I don’t think my mother has ever even used the word “sex” in a sentence before. At least not with me. I feel uncomfortable, and when I feel uncomfortable with Mama, I slip into good-girl mode. So my impulse is to deny everything.

  “But we’re not doin’… I mean, we haven’t done anything.”

  “Funny that your impulse with me is to deny everything, and with your grandmother, you didn’t bother denyin’ a thing. I was there. Remember?”

  Oh, yeah. I hadn’t thought about that lie too carefully.

  “Answer me. Does he use rubbers?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sometimes. He hasn’t… every time.”

  She looks so hurt. Maybe it’s the plurality of what I said that’s upset her. Maybe I’m makin’ it sound like we’ve done it a whole lotta times. We haven’t really. Compared to some. Oh lord, I shoulda just taken my chances and kept on lyin’. This is awful.

  “And what about the other occasions?” Through her hurt, she is deadly serious. I have to behave like an adult for this conversation.

  “There’s a trick to it. He doesn’t believe me. That’s why he uses ’em sometimes.”

  “A trick?”

  Damn. I can’t believe she’s gonna make me describe this.

  “You know how if you concentrate, you can locate your eggs inside? Well, when he’s ready to… when it’s time? I relax ’em, and they don’t let nothin’ stick. So? No baby.” Saying it out loud, I must sound like some crazy country woman. I probably sound a lot like Grammie Atti.