Gathering of Waters
Read Gathering of Waters Online
Authors: Bernice L. McFadden
Critical Praise for
Glorious
by Bernice L. McFadden
• Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Fiction
• Winner of the BCALA Literary Award for Fiction
• Debut selection of the One Book, One Harlem program
“McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth … McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.”
—New York Times Book Review
“She brings Harlem to astounding life … Easter’s hope for love to overthrow hate … cogently stands for America’s potential, and McFadden’s novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Bernice L. McFadden’s novel
Glorious
, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance.”
—Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President
“The book is sweeping in scope and brings to life the tenuous existence of an African American artist in the early twentieth century.”
—Vogue
“I hadn’t read a word of hers before [
Glorious
], but I will follow her from now on.”
—Alan Cheuse, NPR
“The novel is so intense and sweeping at the same time. Some of the scenes were terrifying, and some were very comic in the irony of what the narrator was experiencing and what she was actually thinking. The word for a journey like this is picaresque, but the ever-impending tragedy makes that word not quite right for this book.”
—Susan Straight, author of
A Million Nightingales
“A wonderful, rich read full of passion, history, wonder, and women you will recognize:
Glorious
is just that.”
—Jill Nelson, author of
Volunteer Slavery
“The seeming inevitability of cruel fate juxtaposes the triumph of the spirit in this remarkably rich and powerful novel. Bernice L. McFadden’s fully realized characters are complicated, imperfect beings, but if ever a character were worthy of love and honor, it is her Easter Bartlett. This very American story is fascinating; it is also heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and beautifully written.”
—Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of
The Scenic Route
“McFadden’s descriptions are sometimes wrenching, sometimes heartwarming, sometimes gritty, but always evoke emotion.”
—Books, Personally
“This is a book that is difficult to put down. Easter Bartlett is a character who reaches out to you from the first page and who you never want to let go of.”
—Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea
“Bernice L. McFadden broke and healed my heart in 235 pages.”
—BrownGirl Speaks
Also by Bernice L. McFadden
Glorious
Nowhere Is a Place
Camilla’s Roses
Loving Donovan
This Bitter Earth
The Warmest December
Sugar
Gathering of Waters
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2012 by Bernice L. McFadden
eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-110-3
Hardcover Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-032-8
Hardcover Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923109
Paperback Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-031-1
Paperback Library of Congress Control Number: 2011922902
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
For Richard May & Lula Mae Hilson-May
You are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal;
ye are not matter; ye are not bodies; matter is your
servant, not you the servant of matter.
—Swami Vivekananda, 1893
Contents
I
am Money. Money Mississippi.
I have had many selves and have been many things. My beginning was not a conception, but the result of a growing, stretching, and expanding, which took place over thousands of years.
I have been figments of imaginations, shadows and sudden movements seen out of the corner of your eye. I have been dewdrops, falling stars, silence, flowers, and snails.
For a time I lived as a beating heart, another life found me swimming upstream toward a home nestled in my memory. Once I was a language that died. I have been sunlight, snowdrifts, and sweet babies’ breath. But today, however, for you and for this story, I am Money. Money Mississippi.
I do not know for whom or what I was named. Perhaps I was christened for a farmer’s beloved mule or a child’s favorite pet; I suspect, though, that my name was derived from a dream deferred, because as a town, I have been impoverished for most of my existence.
You know, before white men came with their smiles, Bibles, guns, and disease, this place that I am was inhabited by Native men. Choctaw Indians. It was the Choctaw who gave the state its name: Mississippi—which means
many gathering of waters
. The white men fancied the name, but not the Indians, and so slaughtered them and replaced them with Africans, who as you know were turned into slaves to drive the white man’s ego, whim, and industry.
But what you may not know and what the colonists, genociders, and slave owners certainly did not know is this: Both the Native man and the African believed in animism, which is the idea that souls inhabit all objects, living things, and even phenomena. When objects are destroyed and bodies perish, the souls flit off in search of a new home. Some souls bring along memories, baggage if you will, that they are unwilling or unable to relive themselves of. Oftentimes these memories manifest in humans as déjà vu. Other times and in many other life-forms and so-called inanimate objects, these displays have been labeled as curious, bizarre, absurd, and deadly.
You may have read in the news about the feline having all the characteristics of a dog, the primate who walked upright from the day he was born until the day he died, of men trapped in female hosts and vice versa, the woman who woke one morning to find that she had grown a tail, the baby boy who emerged from his mother’s womb flanked not in skin but scales, the man who grew to the towering heights of a tree, rivers overflowing their banks, monster waves wiping away whole cities, twisters gobbling up entire neighborhoods, relentlessly falling snow blanketing towns like volcano ash.
These are all memories of previous existences.
Listen, if you choose to believe nothing else that transpires here, believe this: your body does not have a soul; your soul has a body, and souls never, ever die.
To my memory, I have never been human, which probably explains my fascination with your kind. Admittedly, I am guilty of a very long and desperate infatuation with a family that I followed for decades. In hindsight, I believe that I was drawn to the beautifully tragic heartbrokenness of their lives, and so for years remained with them, helplessly tethered, like a mare to a post.
Their story begins not with the tragedy of ’55 but long before that, with the arrival of the first problem, which came draped in crinoline and silk; carrying a pink parasol in one hand and a Bible in the other.
I
n 1900, the Violet Construction Company purchased a tract of land on the south bank of the Tallahatchie River and dug up the bones of the Choctaw Indians and the Africans. They tore from their roots black-eyed Susans, Cherokee roses, and Virginia creepers, and removed quite a number of magnolia and tupelo saplings. They did all of this to make room for forty threestory clapboard homes complete with indoor plumbing, grand verandas, and widow’s walks. A road was laid to accommodate horse and buggies and the rare motorcar. The cobblestone sidewalks were lined with gas street lanterns and the street itself was christened Candle.
Oak floors, chandeliers, wainscoting, and brass hardware dazzled potential buyers who came to view those homes that looked over the prettiest part of the river. The people walked through the spacious rooms holding their chins and sighing approvingly in their throats as they admired the fine woodwork and custom details.
The homes sold very quickly.
With the creation of Candle Street came jobs for laundresses, maids, and cooks, which brought in more people to the area—darker people.
So in 1915, the Violet Construction Company purchased a second tract of land, this time on the north shore of the river.
The north shore tract was cleared of most of the ancient, towering long-leaf pines whose thick canopy had deprived the land of sun, which turned the earth hard, dry, and as uneven as a washboard. Running vines speckled with yellow thorns coiled around trees, rocks, and the carcasses of animals and people who had stopped, dropped, and died there. The Violet Construction Company removed all of it and used the cheapest grade of pinewood to erect thirty modest-sized homes that did not have indoor plumbing, widow’s walks, or verandas. At night the Negroes had to depend on the light of the moon to guide them along the rocky, cratered footpath. And if there was no moonlight—well, God help them.
The Violet Construction Company named the street Baxter’s Road, but since only Negroes occupied those homes, both black and white alike began to refer to the little community on the north shore as Nigger Row.
The church, funded by the Negro community, was built in 1921. The residents of Candle Street gifted their dark, wooly-haired neighbors a small crate of Bibles and a proper crucifix set with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus molded from plaster of paris and nailed resolutely to its center. The Negroes did not have a man of the cloth living amongst them, so sent out word that they were in search of a suitable cleric to lead their flock.
As fate would have it, Reverend August Hilson and his family had recently been displaced by the race riots that erupted in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Negroes who managed to avoid being shot down in the streets like dogs, or burned to a crisp as they slept in their beds, packed up what they could and fled Tulsa.
For weeks, August and his family lived like nomads, wandering from one town to the next until they wandered all the way to Greenwood, Mississippi. There, August learned that his services were in dire need, “Just down the road,” the bearer of the news advised, “in Money.”
August Hilson and his family took possession of a home on Nigger Row on a cool November day. The photographer from the local newspaper came to capture the auspicious occasion. The family posed on the porch. August was seated in a mahogany chair cushioned in red velvet. The long, dark fingers of his right hand curled around his favorite Bible. His left hand rested on the intricately carved lion’s head which looked out at the photographer from its post at the top of the armrest. His wife, a peanut-colored, petite, full-bosomed woman named Doll, stood dutifully at his right side with her left hand on his shoulder, her right hand wrapped around the long neck of her beloved pink parasol. The children—a daughter named Hemmingway and a son named Paris—were stationed to the left of their father, arms still at their sides.
