Filter House (2 page)

She can’t see. It is dark. She can smell the soil, hear the crickets, but it is all filtered, lessened to the trickle of experience that she used to be used to. The rays of her ori tease her with flickering glimpses of the essence. She turns, blinks her eyelids, parts her lips experimentally. “I—” she says, a creaking in the night. The crickets silence themselves. “I want—” She wants an A head. An
A.
But she doubts this bitter god will grant her wish for the asking. And she has used up all the trade goods the ancestors gave her, just to reach the point where she realizes that what she wants is
more.

She’ll have to use what she’s been given to get what must be gotten, then.

There. That darker darkness must be he. She addresses it. “I want—to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I mean like, this is so completely swollen! I thought you said you were only gonna give me a C head. But this A is—is—it’s—”

The god appears clearly before her, shining with anger. It lights him as though it were a fire, and he glows like a maddened furnace. “IT IS A C! A C HEAD IS WHAT YOU HAVE AND NOTHING BUT A C!!”

Loanna fears the heat of Ajala’s anger will ignite her poor wooden head. Also she feels something she’s never felt before, a sort of…tugging…at the top. But she persists. “Oh, chill, it’s all right,” she says. “I’ll let everybody know what a deal I got. Unless—” holding up a hand to forestall further wrath, “unless you don’t want me to. No, okay, I won’t tell. You made some kinda mistake, dincha?”

Ajala strives to control his anger. He succeeds in subduing himself to a dull red glow. “This is the C hut. It contains nothing but C heads!”

“Uhh, yeah. Sure. I understand. I won’t tell anybody. Except if they notice and ask me how I got it, okay?”

“AARRGH!” bellows Ajala. “COME!” He grabs her with one hot hand and drags her into the forest.

There is no path; at least none that Loanna can detect. The way is a lot more difficult and a lot less interesting than the last two trips. Just stumbling through the dark, her hand sweating in the hot grip of the god’s. She’d probably be a little steadier on her feet if it wasn’t for the insistent tugging at her scalp, pulling her constantly off course.

After a while, the darkness lessens. This seems to increase Ajala’s fury. Without warning he stops, picks Loanna up by the waist, and flings her over his shoulder. Then he’s off again, at an uncomfortable trot.

“What’s…the big…hurry?” she manages to whuff out between the god’s jolting strides.

“Dawn,” he explains. Between panting breaths he adds, “I must…return soon…to pay my debt…to the King…or lose my heads. But first…you will see…you are wrong. Not far now,” he ends.

By the time they reach the A hut, Loanna’s neck is sore from the odd tugging, which has for the most part been perpendicular to their path. The rest of her feels a little rough as well. And she feels even worse when she sees the A heads.

These heads are made of jewels.

Amethyst, rose quartz, aventurine, and other stones she cannot name, they glow with living light. Each is perfect, each unique. There is no way to pretend that what she wears is one of these. So much for deceit.

What else does she have? She has spent her inheritance. She has used her head, such as it is. She kneels before the luminous beauty of the As, but she’s being pulled away by this unaccountable vacuum. What
is
it?

“Mama!” she screams in fear and frustration. “Maa-maa!” And that’s when she gets it: the answer to her question and the solution to her problem, too, all at once, all in one. Where she’s going, where she’ll soon be coming from. The door, the gate, the entranceway for everything that ever was in the world.

“Wait,” she pleads to the unseen force. “Mama, wait just a minute. I got a idea.” Her mother must hear her, or
some
body must, for the compelling pressure to be born lessens just a little.

“Ajala,” she says. “You got the cowries. You got the salt. But you’d like more, right? Course you would. For an A head I—”

“You admit you have only a C head?”

“Yeah, well, I guess I did try to jack you around a little. Sorry. But now, if you let me choose an A head I can lead you to the source. Where I got the shells and cowries
from.
Take away as much as you can carry!”

“Is it far? I don’t have much time….”

“No, no, it’s really close. It’ll only take a few minutes, okay? Can I pick one?”

Ajala nods. Breathlessly, she selects a large, round head of pale blue celestite. There is a moment of disorientation as she removes her C and is flooded by the universe
~the turning, rising rightly, the eternal helix up~
. But then the celestite is over her ori, focusing and altering her perceptions, directing and filtering the rays of light that connect her to the world: her awareness of that connection. Plus she has her other senses: eyes, ears, nose; all working very well. Is that faint odor fish?

Ajala looks different through these eyes. Loanna decides that she now finds him cooler. She stands and beckons him to come and kneel before her. Parting her skirt, she brings him gently to the source.

The god is reverent. He prays to the source, mouthing soundless words. He speaks skillfully, with a silver tongue.

Loanna sags against him, pliable with pleasure. She is pulled taut again, stretched between these two irresistible forces: one between her legs, the other somewhere over her shoulders.

At last she can stand no more. “I like your approach,” she says softly. “Now let’s see your retreat.” To her surprise he backs away without protest. He looks up at her, smiling happily. A huge pearl falls from his lips; his reward.

She has to go. She really must. But as she is drawn away from the A hut, out into her life, Ajala places the C head into her hands (long fingers like her grandfather’s, but they don’t look a bit artistic on top of Uncle Donald’s square palms).

She is confused by the god’s offering. “Put it on,” he says in a receding shout. “Put it on, wear it over your A. You can always take it off again. And you may find it necessary, sometimes, to be less than you are capable of being. I know—” His last words are lost as she is born.

Loanna opens her eyes. Shadows sway on the stucco wall, struck by the lowering sun. The lingering sweetness of the god’s homage spreads like syrup through the afternoon air, mingling with the golden light. Her dream of the story is over, though Iya’s voice continues, twisting its ends together, pulling them up and into the eternal spiral.

“Yeah, we finally got you to make up your mind to honor us with your presence, and you came all in a rush into this world,” Iya finishes. “I was hot and dizzy from all that bendin up and down, all that runnin back and forth. Didn’t nobody offer
me
no ice chips. But I got to see you first, and right away, I knew you were special. A caul, yeah, but that don’t automatically mean that much.” Iya pauses. Her swift fingers lie still in her lap, their task long done. “It was your eyes told me. Told me everything I just told you—and then some. I can’t remember everything your eyes told me on the day that you was born.”

“So then was when you decided you were gonna teach me?”

“When you was old enough, right,” Iya says. “So let’s get on off this balcony and go visit Mam’zelle La Veau. You got the coins? Your
gele’s
on the bed, with the rest of your outfit. We’ll pick us up some flowers for the gravesite on the way. Anything else your ori’s tellin you to bring, baby?”

Loanna’s eyes close again, enabling her to focus on the resonance within, the quiet bell of her consciousness. “A—a egg? A
blue
egg?! Iya, how we supposed to get that?”

Iya rolls her eyes. “Honey, I don know. But if the ancestors tellin you Mam’zelle need a blue egg, we gone get her a blue egg.”

“But, Iya, don’t you think it might—”

“Loanna!” Iya’s voice is sharp and stern. “Here’s the first thing you gotta learn: when your head tells you somethin,
listen.
Specially if you askin a question. You get an answer, accept that answer.” She rises and holds out her hands to help her student stand.

“Today you prayin for the help and guidance of a woman who was famous for not takin nothin off nobody, the original Voodoo Queen. So you gotta be sincere, and you gotta stand firm for yourself. Like when we buy our flowers and you give the man a twenty-dollar bill, and if he only give you change back for a ten, what you gonna do?”

Loanna’s fingers trace the braids curving above her ears. “Ask him where’s the rest. Cause I know I’m not stupid. I can count.”

“That’s right. Same way with this. You know. You not stupid. That’s what you gotta learn to believe, honey, you wanna live up to your potential. After all,” Iya concludes as Loanna follows her inside, “what’s the good of havin two heads unless you use em?”

Wallamelon

“Baby, baby, baby! Baby, baby, baby!” Cousin Alphonse must have thought he looked like James Brown. He looked like what he was, just a little boy with a big peanut head, squirming around, kicking up dust in the driveway.

Oneida thought about threatening to tell on him for messing his pants up. Even Alphonse ought to know better. He had worn holes in both his knees, begging “Please, please, please,” into the broken microphone he’d found in Mr. Early’s trash barrel. And she’d heard a loud rip the last time he did the splits, though nothing showed. Yet.

“’Neida! Alphonse! Come see what me an Mercy Sanchez foun!” Kevin Curtis ran along the sidewalk toward them, arms windmilling, shirt-tails flapping. He stopped several feet off, as soon as he saw he had their attention. “Come
on!”

Oneida stood up from the pipe-rail fence slowly, with the full dignity of her ten years. One decade. She was the oldest kid on the block, not counting teenagers. She had certain responsibilities, like taking care of Alphonse.

The boys ran ahead of her as she walked, and circled back again like little dogs. Kevin urged her onto the path that cut across the vacant lot beside his house. Mercy was standing on a pile of rubble half the way through, her straight hair shining in the noonday sun like a long, black mirror. She was pointing down at something Oneida couldn’t see from the path, something small, something so wonderful it made sad Mercy smile.

“Wallamelons,” Kevin explained as they left the path. “Grown all by theyselves; ain’t nobody coulda put em there.”

“Watermelons,” Oneida corrected him automatically.

The plant grew out from under a concrete slab. At first all she could see was its broad leaves, like green hearts with scalloped edges. Mercy pushed these aside to reveal the real treasure: four fat globes, dark and light stripes swelling in their middles and vanishing into one another at either end. They were watermelons, all right. Each one was a little larger than Oneida’s fist.

“It’s a sign,” said Mercy, her voice soft as a baby’s breath. “A sign from the Blue Lady.”

Oneida would have expected the Blue Lady to send them roses instead, or something prettier, something you couldn’t find in an ordinary supermarket. But Mercy knew more about the Blue Lady, because she and her half-brother Emilio had been the ones to tell Oneida about her in the first place.

“Four of them and four of us.” Oneida looked up at Mercy to see if she understood the significance.

Mercy nodded. “We can’t let no one else know about this.”

“How come?” asked Alphonse. Because he was mildly retarded, he needed help understanding a lot of things.

Oneida explained it to him. “You tell anybody else, they’ll mess up everything. Keep quiet, and you’ll have a whole watermelon all to yourself.”

“I get a wallamelon all my own?”

“Wa-ter-mel-on,”
Oneida enunciated.

“How long it take till they ready?”

They decided it would be at least a week before the fruit was ripe enough to eat. Every day they met at Mizz Nichols’s.

Mercy’s mother had left her here and gone back to Florida to be with her husband. It was better for Mercy to live at her grandmother’s, away from so much crime. And Michigan had less discrimination.

Mizz Nichols didn’t care what her granddaughter was up to as long as it didn’t interrupt her tv watching or worse yet, get her called away from work.

Mercy seemed to know what the watermelon needed instinctively. She had them fill half-gallon milk bottles from the garden hose and set these to “cure” behind the garage. In the dusky hours after Aunt Elise had picked up Cousin Alphonse, after Kevin had to go inside, Mercy and Oneida smuggled the heavy glass containers to their secret spot. They only broke one.

When the boys complained at being left out of this chore, Mercy set them to picking dried grass. They stuffed this into old pillowcases and put these underneath the slowly fattening fruits to protect them from the gravelly ground.

The whole time, Mercy seemed so happy. She sang songs about the Blue Lady, how in far away dangerous places she saved children from evil spirits and grown-ups. Oneida tried to sing along with her, but the music kept changing, though the stories stayed pretty much the same.

There was the one about the girl who was standing on the street corner somewhere down South when a car full of men with guns went by, shooting everybody. But the Blue Lady saved her. Or there was a boy whose mom was so sick he had to stay with his crazy aunt because his dad was already dead in a robbery. When the aunt put poison in his food he ran away, and the Blue Lady showed him where to go and took care of him till he got to his grandparents house in Boston, all the way from Washington, DC.

All you had to do was call her name.

One week stretched, unbelievably, to two. The watermelons were as large as cereal bowls. As party balloons. But they seemed pitiful compared to the giant blimps in the bins in front of Farmer Jack’s.

Obviously, their original estimate was off. Alphonse begged and whined so much, though, that Mercy finally let him pick and open his own melon. It was hard and pale inside, no pinker than a pack of Wrigley’s gum. It tasted like scouring powder.

Oneida knew she’d wind up sharing part of her personal, private watermelon with Alphonse, if only to keep him from crying, or telling another kid, or a grown-up even. It was the kind of sacrifice a mature ten-year-old expected to make. It would be worth it, though. Half a watermelon was still a feast.

They tended the Blue Lady’s vine with varying degrees of impatience and diligence. Three weeks, now. How much longer would it take till the remaining watermelons reached what Oneida called, “The absolute peak of perfection?”

They never found out.

The Monday after the Fourth of July, Oneida awoke to the low grumble of heavy machinery. The noise was from far enough away that she could have ignored it if she had wanted to stay asleep. Instead, she leaned out till her fingers fit under the edge of her bunk’s frame, curled down, and flipped herself so she sat on the empty bottom bunk.

She peeked into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was still asleep; his holstered gun gleamed darkly in the light that crept in around the lowered shade. She closed the door quietly. Her dad worked hard. He was the first Negro on the police force.

Oneida ate a bowl of cereal, re-reading the book on the back of the box about the adventures of Twinkle-toes the Elephant. Baby stuff, but she was too lazy to get up and locate a real book.

When she was done, she checked the square dial of the alarm clock on the kitchen counter. Quarter to nine. In forty-five minutes her mother would be home from the phone company. She’d make a big breakfast. Even if Oneida wasn’t hungry, it felt good to talk with Mom while she cooked it. Especially if Dad woke up; with Royal and Limoges off at Big Mama’s, the three of them discussed important things like voting rights and integration.

But there was time for a quick visit to the vacant lot.

The sidewalk was still cool beneath the black locust trees. The noise that had wakened her sounded a lot louder out here. It grew and grew, the closer she got to the Curtis’s. And then she saw the source: an ugly yellow monster machine roaring through the lot, riding up and down over the humps of rubble like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. And Kevin was just standing there on the sidewalk, watching.

There were stones all around. She picked up a whole fistful and threw them, but it was too far. She grabbed some more and Kevin did too. They started yelling and ran toward the monster, throwing stones. It had a big blade. It was a bulldozer, it was pushing the earth out of its way wherever it wanted to go. She couldn’t even hear her own shouting over the awful sound it made. Rocks flew out of her hands. They hit it. They hit it again. The man on top, too.

Then someone was holding her arms down. She kept yelling and Kevin ran away. Suddenly she heard herself. The machine was off. The white man from on top of it was standing in front of her telling her to shut up, shut up or he’d have her arrested.

Where was the Blue Lady?

There was only Mizz Curtis, in her flowered house dress, with her hair up in pink curlers. No one was holding Oneida’s arms anymore, but she was too busy crying to get away. Another white man asked what her name was.

“Oneida Brandy,” Mizz Curtis said. “Lives down the street. Oneida, what on Earth did you think you were doing, child?”

“What seems to be the problem?”

Dad. She looked up to be sure. He had his police hat on and his gun belt, but regular pants and a tee-shirt instead of the rest of his uniform. He gazed at her without smiling while he talked to the two white men.

So she
was
in trouble.

After a while, though, the men stopped paying attention to Oneida. They were talking about the rich white people they worked for, and all the things they could do to anyone who got in their way. Kevin’s mom gave her a crumpled up Kleenex to blow her nose on, and she realized all the kids in the neighborhood were there.

Including Mercy Sanchez. She looked like a statue of herself. Like she was made of wood. Of splinters.

Then the white men’s voices got loud, and they were laughing. They got in a green pick-up parked on the easement and drove off, leaving their monster in the middle of the torn-up lot.

Her father’s face was red; they must have said something to make him mad before they went away. But all Dad did was thank Mizz Curtis for sending Kevin over to wake him up.

They met Mom on the way home. She was still in her work clothes and high heels, walking fast. She stopped and stared at Dad’s hat and gun. “Vinny?”

“Little brush with the law, Joanne. Our daughter here’s gonna explain everything over breakfast.”

Oneida tried. But Mercy had made her swear not to tell any grown-ups about the Blue Lady, which meant her story sounded not exactly stupid, but silly. “All that fuss about a watermelon!” Mom said. “As if we don’t have the money to buy one, if that’s what you want!”

Dad said the white men were going to get quite a surprise when they filed their complaint about him impersonating an officer. He said they were breaking the law themselves by not posting their building permit. He said off-duty policemen went around armed all the time.

Aunt Elise brought over Cousin Alphonse. They had to play in the basement even though it was such a nice day outside. And Kevin Curtis and Mercy Sanchez weren’t allowed to come over. Or anybody.

After about eighty innings of “Ding-Dong, Delivery,” Oneida felt like she was going crazy with boredom. She was sorry she’d ever made the game up; all you did was put a blanket over yourself and say “Ding-dong, delivery,” and the other player was supposed to guess what you were. Of course Alphonse adored it.

Mom let them come upstairs and turn on the tv in time for the afternoon movie. It was an old one, a gangster story, which was good. Oneida hated gangster movies, but that was the only kind Cousin Alphonse would watch all the way through. She could relax and read her book.

Then Mom called her into the bedroom. Dad was there, too. He hadn’t gone to his other job. They had figured out what they were going to do with her.

They were sending her to Detroit, to Big Mama. She should have known. The two times she spent the night there she’d had to share a bed with Limoges, and there hadn’t been one book in the entire house.