Little Gale Gumbo (7 page)

Roberta shook her head. “You can't treat the spirits like canned goods, Camille. Store 'em up in case of emergency, thinking they'll be there when you need them. They get their feelings hurt, they won't stick around.” Roberta dropped a few bay leaves into the pot, folded them in.

“I know,” said Camille. “I haven't forgotten.”

Roberta gave her daughter a worried look, then set down her spoon and reached into her skirt pocket. “Here.” She held out a filled red velvet bag tied with a black ribbon and smelling of rosemary and lavender, her mother's favored protection herbs.

“Momma,” Camille said, gently but firmly, “you didn't have to do that. I have plenty of bags I can fill myself. I'm telling you I'm fine.”

“And I'm telling you I know what I feel.” Roberta set the gris-gris bag on top of a tin of pralines and slid them both into a brown bag.

“Just take it,” she said, folding her daughter's hands over the top of the bag. “For me.”

 

Camille carried the bag back to the peeling-plaster studio apartment Charles had found them on Rampart. Coming in, she was overcome with a bout of fatigue and fell asleep on the daybed, rousing when she heard Charles's uneven steps in their tiny corner kitchen. She stirred, rising slowly to keep from getting dizzy, as she had been finding herself lately.

“What the hell . . . ?”

Too late she remembered her mother's gift. Charles came at her with the small red sack in one hand, their dented garbage can in the other. He waited until he was right in front of her before he thrust the bag into the can, sending up a puff of rotten food, the smell so wretched Camille was sure she'd throw up.

His blue eyes narrowed. He looked suddenly old to her, the harsh light of the kitchen turning one side of his face a jaundiced yellow. “I told ya I didn't want that bullshit in my house, Camille.”

“It was just a little something from Momma,” she defended weakly, swallowing down her nausea. “A gift, Charles.”

Charles took the can back to the kitchen and shoved it under the sink, closing the cabinet with his foot. “Baby, how many times I gotta tell you, you don't need all that anymore? I'm your husband and I'm the one that keeps you safe. Not some bag of chicken bones. And I sure as hell don't want you or your momma teachin' my kid any of that crap, either. You hear me?”

She nodded dutifully, rising to make his dinner of catfish and fried okra, then watching him across the table as he ate. She was relieved when he pulled out his trumpet later on, playing her a lullaby just before they climbed into bed, then pulling her swollen body against his erection, shuffling the moist sheets until he could slide inside her.

It was a comfortable routine, she thought, watching the blown curtains fold into ribbons as he thrust into her. The rage and the release. She'd heard about men who did far worse than raise their voice, or say hateful things. Some men hit and seized and shook.

She was sure Charles would never hit her, certainly not while she carried their child, and she was right. He waited until two months after Dahlia was born, when Camille had detected the smell of another woman's crotch on his chest hair. He dragged her from their bed and hit her so hard she fell back against the dresser, knocking down the mirror and shattering it all over the rug into tiny shards that sliced her knees as he held her afterward, sobbing with his apology.

 

Josie came on a damp, overcast day, almost twenty-eight hours after her first feeble push. It would not occur to Camille for many years that her daughters came into the world just as they would inhabit it. Dahlia, bold and insistent, had burst out a week early and with eyes wide-open, while Josie had lingered long in her mother's womb, finally peeking out two weeks late, refusing to open her eyes for several minutes, as if she still hoped there was a chance she might be put back in.

“She's perfect,” were Charles's only words when he finally arrived home from two days away, reaching for the red-haired infant with arms outstretched, too fixated to even grant his wife and first child a proper hello on his way through the bedroom. Camille could still recall the chilling look in his eyes when he'd first seen Dahlia at the hospital, the flat sound of his voice as he'd said, “She's too dark. She shouldn't be that dark.” But in Josie, there would be no confusion, no doubt.

“She looks just like my mother,” Charles whispered, tenderly lifting Josie out of her crib. “Jesus H. Christ, ain't that somethin'.”

For almost an hour, he walked the porch with Josie wrapped in a blanket, leaving Camille inside to mop at her forehead, her neck, her breasts so swollen with milk she was sure they were filled with rocks.

 

Roberta and Miss Willa were fanning themselves on the porch when Camille visited several months later with the girls, cradling one child on each hip as she came up the steps.

“Now, you come give those precious babies to me,” Willa said, drawing both girls into her arms, much to the outrage of her newest poodle, Lucifer, who found himself deposited on the porch floor. The sisters filled their tiny hands at once with Willa's beaded necklaces, beguiled. “Come on, now, sugars,” she said, pressing the screen back with her hip. “Auntie Willa's got some Voodoo dolls that need dressing.”

Mother and daughter poured glasses of sweet tea and sat side by side on the unraveling wicker swing, watching the neighborhood children chase one another up and down the street.

“Seems awfully hot for long sleeves,” Roberta said evenly.

Camille said nothing, just sipped her tea, but it was hard to get anything past the lump in her throat.

Roberta reached for her daughter's hand and held it. “You and the babies can always come stay. I can protect you here. But out there . . .” Roberta's eyes misted. “Out there he's too strong.”

Camille nodded, rubbing her mother's hand. “He's trying, Momma. I know he is.”

“It's not always enough to try, baby girl. A man's got to
do
.”

Lucifer trotted to the edge of the porch and flounced down in the sun. The delighted squeals of the babies came floating through the screen, Willa's laugh like a plucked harp.

Looking back, Camille would wonder how it took her so long to fall out of love with Charles, even though the longing stayed, immediate and jarring, when she'd catch a glimpse of that handsome profile, or when he'd play the trumpet for her and the girls, and that bright, rich sound would fill their apartment. In the months after Josie was born, Camille believed Charles might finally do right by them all, his admiration for Josie was so strong. But not even nine months later, Camille watched him greet a blond woman on their porch who was dressed in a pinched silver dress that looked like it was made out of aluminum foil. Their heads were close as they conferred; then Charles came back inside while the woman waited, her back to the door, puffing madly on a cigarette.

“She needs a ride home,” he said matter-of-factly, and Camille had responded in kind, “Fine.” But it would be the first night he simply didn't bother coming home, the first morning he would return stinking of another woman's juices and not even bother to change before he collapsed into his chair at their breakfast table and took his morning coffee and grits.

That night Camille considered her mother's offer for refuge for the first time in three years of marriage, and she even packed a small bag for the babies, but she didn't leave.

She wouldn't have another chance. A few weeks shy of Josephine's first birthday, Roberta died of a heart attack in her kitchen.

Camille didn't leave the house for almost two weeks.

 

The girls grew quickly, riding rickety bicycles up and down the levee and climbing the branches of the great oaks in Audubon Park, whatever they could do to steer clear of their father's unpredictable moods. Sometimes Charles's temper would land him in prison, as it did in the spring of 1970, when he was sentenced for punching an officer during a Mardi Gras parade. For nearly two years afterward, Camille and the girls rented a room from Lionel Morrow and Roman Winters in their Creole cottage. Roman was a sculptor, and Lionel taught literature at the university. The men watched Dahlia and Josie when Camille worked the overnight shift at the candy factory on Decatur, letting the girls stuff themselves on bread pudding and caramel custard, then putting them to bed in one of the guest rooms with velvet canopies and crowded bookshelves that climbed to the ceiling. In the mornings while Camille slept, the men took the girls out to the courtyard, where Lionel read Thomas Hardy to Josie, and Roman showed Dahlia how to care for the gardenias and the satsuma tree. On Friday nights, crowds of friends, professors and artists, activists and drag queens, would gather at the house, and Dahlia and Josie would sneak out in their nightgowns to sample skewered shrimp and pluck fat, shiny olives from unsupervised martinis.

When Charles was released in the summer of 1972, he came for them in a peanut butter–brown Dodge Dart, and waited in the car while Camille and the girls packed their things with aching hearts. They returned with Charles to the Quarter and a drafty apartment on Bourbon Street two stories above Adam's Serpent Strip Club, where girls in sheer tops and heart-shaped pasties beckoned men from arched doorways. When Camille found Dahlia mimicking the topless dancers' poses in front of the window a month later, Camille demanded they move. Charles found them a new home in the Irish Channel, two blocks from a bar that happened to be looking for a trumpet player for its weekend band. The lavender-and-ivory raised shotgun was bathed in sun, and there were children the girls' ages on either side of the house. Camille grew contented, enduring Charles's bleaker moods and bursts of rage, working protection spells when he was at work, and taking ritual baths in milk and mustard seed after he'd gone to sleep, and in the years that followed, while Charles drifted in and out of jail for one offense or another, Camille traded her minidresses for flowing caftans and her straightened curls for an Afro.

She grew strong. Not quite strong enough to leave, but strong enough to keep her wits about her, to raise her daughters to have regard for their history and their home, and to speak civilly but firmly to Charles's lovers when they arrived at her door flushed and strung out, hoping to spare her daughters the truth of their father's infidelities.

But even at thirteen, Dahlia knew.

“You don't have to pretend, Momma,” Dahlia announced one stifling Monday afternoon when she was helping their mother take down drying sheets off the porch. “I know who those women are who come around.”

Josie sat in the porch swing behind them, giving a bottle to Miss Margie's new baby boy.

Camille gave her oldest daughter a warning look. “Watch you don't drag my nice clean sheets all over the floor, Dahlia Rose, and don't worry so much about who's coming and who's going from this house, you hear?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Dahlia said.

“Why do you have to upset Momma like that?” Josie asked when Camille had gone inside with the laundry.

“Me? He's the one who's upsetting her, not me. And why are you always defending him?”

“Because he's our daddy,” Josie said weakly, carefully shifting the infant in her small lap.

“Yeah, well, he's crazy.” Dahlia dropped into the swing beside her sister. “Do you know what he does at night? He locks the doors and he hides the key in the broiler. He doesn't know but I saw him do it once. That's how crazy he is. We're like his prisoners.”

“We are not,” Josie said. “And don't talk so loud. You'll scare the baby.”

Dahlia shrugged. “Look for yourself tonight if you don't believe me. All I know is, I'm never getting married.”

“That's silly. Everybody gets married.”

“Not Mrs. Kemper's boarder, Miss Clarice,” said Dahlia. “She takes lovers instead. A whole bunch of them. I heard Momma talking with Miss Willa about it the other day, and you should see the way men look at Miss Clarice when she walks down the street, like they forgot how they got there or something. I want men looking at me that way, following me around so I can tell them to bug off when I'm bored instead of the other way around.”

“But if you don't get married, you can't have babies.”

“Who said I wanted babies?”

“Well, I do,” said Josie, smiling down at Randolph. “I want five. Three boys and two girls.”

Dahlia frowned. “All I know is, I don't ever want to fall in love if it means some man thinks he can lock me in at night, or tell me where I can go or when I have to be home to fix him some meal that he's too drunk or high to even eat—”

“Shh,” Josie ordered, seeing their father come down the street. “I heard Momma telling Miss Margie that Daddy might get laid off at the dock.”

“Good,” Dahlia said. “Then maybe Momma will leave him.”

“Don't say that. I don't want Momma to be alone.”

“She's not alone. She has us.”

Charles came up the steps in his work clothes, the smell of grease filling the porch. “Shit, don't tell me you got yourself a baby now, Julep?”

“No, sir. It's Miss Margie's. His name's Randolph. Isn't he precious?”

Charles nodded next door. “Well, you give him back and get in there and help your momma, both y'all. I got a gig tonight.”

“Yes, sir.” Josie rose obediently, the infant pressed protectively to her shoulder.

 

They took their seats around the table while Camille served up heaping bowls of red beans and rice.

“Mmm,” Charles said. “These are some good beans, Camille.”