Stormwitch (2 page)

“Yes, Grandmother.” I fidget, thinking about her church.

Introduce yourself
. That’s a step in joining, and I’m not sure if I want to take it. More than that, I dread standing up and facing all those blank eyes and stiff smiles. Most of those people don’t know me, and I don’t know if
I want to know them. The very thought makes my stomach hurt. My eyes drift to the corner of my journal sticking out from under my pillow

I need to take it and get away from here for a time. I need to write.

Grandmother Jones is talking, and I have to make myself listen as she prattles about the day’s plans. “Now, you got grits and bacon on the stove for breakfast—oh, and some biscuits, and I left beans and ham in the icebox for later. And—”

“Yes, ma’am.” I can’t stand to hear this next part again, so I say it for her. “The number for the Richelieu Apartments is on the wall by the telephone. I’m not supposed to leave our road or the part of beach straight across the highway from us. I’m supposed to say
ma’am
and
sir
to white folks I meet, and keep my eyes on the ground when I say it.”

“Good girl. I’ll be home around five.” Grandmother Jones kisses my cheek and I can’t help going stiff like her starched cotton blouse and apron. She keeps telling me this is the way of things in America, and I mustn’t speak against it no matter how the television blares of change and revolution. She tells me black people don’t have many businesses to hire other black people, that working for white people puts food in our mouths and shoes on our feet.

Me, I could do without the shoes.

I see Grandmother Jones to the door.

One breath of Mississippi brine makes my heart pound in my throat. The breeze smells of salt and wind and storms, with the slightest hint of spice.

Is there a storm coming?

Is Zashar the old Amazon stormwitch sending a spirit across the sea?

No. No! Not yet. I can’t face her!

“You okay, Ruba?” Grandmother Jones asks as she walks past me and outside, heading for her old yellow and black car.

“Y-yes, Grandmother,” I manage.

Chapter Two

Friday, 8 August 1969: Noon

Before Grandmother Jones has been gone an hour, I’ve retrieved my journal from beneath my pillow, fastened on my cloth belt and pouch to store shells and herbs, and walked miles from home despite the fact Grandmother Jones wants me to stay in my yard. I can’t help it. I feel too trapped, staying on our dead-end street or the little patch of beach Grandmother Jones says is “safe.” Still, to please her in some small way, I stick to places where I see black people.

One part of the endless Gulf shore has the whelk I collect to paint. The shelling beach is far down the coast from our street, near a long wharf where shrimp boats come and go. The part nearest the wharf is used mostly by blacks, and I’ve visited often enough that people have stopped staring at my height and how I sift sand to search for shells.

Ignoring the handful of swimmers, I hunt until I find a few small whelks. Then I settle on a drift of sand to
write. Soon, my neighbor Clay and my distant cousin Gisele might come, since their families don’t keep them prisoners around their yard like Grandmother Jones would like me to be. Clay and Gisele were born here. They know the rules, and how to take care of themselves. According to Grandmother Jones, I don’t know these important things, and I’m having trouble learning.

Clay and Gisele think I’m figuring things out fine. So do I. If they find me, we’ll go shelling together before walking home. For now, though, I write, using a small piece of pencil I keep tucked in the book.

Dear Ba:

Grandmother Jones mentioned me introducing myself at her church again. She said I should talk about Haiti. Maybe even about Dahomey. But those people at her church don’t really know me, and I don’t know them. What if I make them angry? Grandmother Jones gets angry so often when I bring up things from the past, about the way I say things and what I’ve been taught to believe. Would her church members be any different? I don’t know if I want to find out
.

I’m on the beach again today. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is plain. When I face west along the single ribbon of beach hugging the road—a road that seems to run forever—I see nothing but ocean on my left. No trees, no plants, nothing but sand. On my right, I find the opposite. Almost no sand, all trees and vines and
grass with houses, stores, and a few hotels crammed in like mistakes of nature. If I face east, I see the same thing, only with right and left reversed
.

I know from driving back and forth to the store with Grandmother Jones that all the Mississippi towns run together, from the Alabama line to the Louisiana border. I couldn’t tell where one stopped and another began—and I can’t now as I squint into the distance. Thickets of pines and palms divide the land on the far side of the road, and they separate houses grander than sugar plantation mansions. Did you ever see the houses white people live in around here, Ba? Did my mother tell you about them when she came home from college?

Behind those big houses, less than half a mile from the ocean and still within sight of the waves, shacks like ours hide in little clumps and groups. Our clump, six houses in all, sits at the back side of a dead-end street. The street used to run somewhere, but Grandmother Jones said a hurricane tore it up and the city never built it back. The cars take other roads now, mostly the one highway that separates the beaches from everything else
.

I pause and chew my pencil. In Haiti, cars were few and mansions fewer. Back in Haiti, I walked hours every day, hunting shells and collecting herbs for Ba to make conjure. Few herbs grow wild in Pass Christian, and white people make the evil eye at me if I come too near the places where the plants might be.

Of course, Grandmother Jones would give me an eviler eye if she found my shells and herbs anywhere around her house. The thought makes me laugh, and then it makes me frown. I tuck my pencil in my journal and stare out at Mississippi’s brown ocean. It’s not always brown. Tides and storms darken it, with sea plants and silt. Sometimes it turns blue, but never clear, and to me it never seems bright.

I want to go home to Haiti so badly my chest aches. The only cure I know is walking, so I get up, slide my journal into one of the two dress pockets, and get moving again. There’s no sign of Clay or Gisele, so I head back home.

On the way toward our road, I pass long, clean beaches full of white people sunning themselves, playing radios, throwing beach balls, and riding the waves on floats. They never look in my direction. It’s as if I’m invisible because I’m black.

I wouldn’t be invisible if I marched out on their sand and caught their ball, would I? And what if I splashed into the ocean beside them? Would they all come running out like I’m a shark?

Don’t think about things like that, child
. Grandmother Jones’s voice slips through my mind, unwelcome but forceful.
Laws might keep some people from hurting you, like Dr. King said, but laws won’t make them love you
.

In Haiti, all beaches are black beaches. And if Ba had come here to this place years ago when she was still strong and healthy, she would have walked where she chose, when she chose, and dared anyone to stop her. I know in my heart I’ll never be the warrior she was, Dahomey Amazon blood or no. I can’t bring myself to stroll out on that beach alone.

Grandmother Jones is so different from Ba. She would have me be peaceful all the time, no matter what’s done to me. She would have me never give thought to stirring up trouble by invading the white beach.
Live and let live, leave well enough alone
—those are her Christian ways. I don’t think I can follow in her footsteps, either. My thoughts and wishes come as they will, and I know one day soon I’ll do … something outside what she considers peaceful. I just don’t know what that something will be.

My stomach twists and starts to burn. I can’t be as good a warrior as Ba, and I can’t be as peaceful as Grandmother Jones. When real troubles come—like the storms Ba and I used to fight—what will I do then? Scream and run away? Battle and lose? I feel like a failure before I even try.

Long minutes later, I turn onto another “colored” strip of beach full of dark skin and big, welcoming smiles. Black people.

Colored
people. The word still sounds odd to me. As if
I might be purple or green.
Colored
. Grandmother Jones uses it. Drills me on it. Insists I say colored to refer to my skin when I speak of it out loud. Some people around here say
Negro
. Pronounced Nee-grow, or Nih-grah. Some even use another word. A hard, ugly-sounding word, nothing like the way we mention our color in Haiti. There,
Negro
was said with a roll of the tongue. Neh-gro. Black. Beautiful. The word and our skin.

Nearby, a transistor crackles. When I glance up, I see it’s the property of a fat-cheeked boy with skin almost as dark as mine. He holds the radio out as I approach, and I stop to listen to it for a moment.

“Not a cloud on the horizon, folks,” the radio announcer says as I hold it to my ear. “Y’all ordered sun, and sun y’all got!”

Music follows, and it has a beat. I kick sand and dip my hips and think of Haiti. The boy giggles, but a thin, harsh voice makes him jump.

“Well, look here. It’s the juju girl. Where’d you learn to dance like that, coon?”

I hand the radio back to the fat-cheeked child. He tucks it under his arm and runs, kicking wet sand into the dirty ocean.

When I turn back toward the beach and the road, three white boys are slouching toward me. I’ve seen them along the road before, at a distance. Two of them stand
square against the sky, as big as me—bigger, and built heavy. I see sunburn lacing through their freckles. These two have passed by this beach before, and hooted and jeered at me when I wore my golden print dashiki—Ba’s beautiful African robe.

As for the third, the smaller white boy who called me
juju girl
and
coon
, I’ve not heard from him before, nor seen him up close. He wears blue shorts frayed to his grubby knees, and his face and his yellow shirt have purple streaks from a grape soda he’s drinking. Even his teeth are purple. He looks younger than me, maybe by several years. I figure him for twelve, or maybe thirteen, but he acts like I should think he’s older.

“Answer me.” The boy’s ice-blue eyes blink beneath hair so blond it shines. “Look at them beads. That bracelet. You straight from A-freek-ah?”

Around me, colored people scatter like ants. I’m suddenly alone in a crowd as people open a wider and wider circle. I clench my fists. This little boy, he spits cruel words like poison, like they give him some special power.

If I were Ba, I would draw my
couteau
—my knife—and cut him some manners. If I were Ba, I would hex his fortune ruined—and maybe still I would cut him. If I were with Ba in Haiti, I might slap him. But I’m alone, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and this piece of nothing thinks he’s my master.

With the training I’ve had from Ba in fighting, I could hurt him. I probably could kill him, and I might not be sorry. But Grandmother Jones would never forgive it. I’d lose my home again. I’d be arrested and even more lost, so I don’t. Instead, I grind my teeth, lower my eyes, and force myself to answer in the way I’ve been taught.

“I’m from the West Indies, sir.”

The boy snickers. “Why’d you come here? Got all the darkies we need in Mississippi.”

His friends laugh as I shrug and study my toes. My muscles tense and my fingers flex, itching to teach these three what it means to disrespect a descendant of Dahomey’s war women.

“What’s that in your dress pocket? A book?” The boy points a purple-stained finger at my journal, and I put my hand over it before I can stop myself.

“Why don’t you read it to us? You can read, can’t you?”

He reaches toward my journal, and I look up, glaring straight into his eyes.

Daring him to touch it.

The blond boy’s sneer doesn’t falter, but he puts his hand down. His cheeks turn pink beneath the purple stains of his drink, and his smile turns frozen.

“She’s gonna mess with you, Ray-boy,” one of his friends says.

The boy’s temper is instant. “Shut up, Dave Allen.” To
me he says, “Give me that book.”

I don’t answer, but I keep my hand where it is.

Ray-boy sticks out his hand again. “Give it here before I hurt you, girl.”

Slowly, carefully, I shake my head
no
.

As much whining as growling, he shouts, “Give me that stupid book!”

I’m ready to fight to keep my journal, but a man interrupts us.

“Ray-boy!” he calls from the sidewalk.

For a moment, I hope the man will force the boy to apologize, or at least shame him for trying to steal my journal. As he strolls up behind these large-eared monsters, I give up that hope. His face swells red beneath scraggly stubble, and his eyes are flat and mean. The stench of sour beer and sweat surrounds him as he claps his hand on purple-tooth’s shoulder. “This gal givin’ you some lip, son?”

The boy hesitates, seems to weigh telling on me against the fact that he still doesn’t have the book he demanded.

“Naw, Daddy,” he says. “We’s just funnin’ her.”

The man grunts. He eyes me for a second, long enough to make my heart beat faster with worrying about what he’ll do. Then he grunts again.

“It’s time for the meeting. You can have your fun later.”

And with that, they leave me standing, my hands still in fists. I shake from my chin to my toes, grateful for the precious weight of my journal in my pocket.

You will die
, I think at the man’s back as he walks away,
once for each time you insult me
.

But I regret the death-wishing before the thought finishes. I’ve never been comfortable wishing death on anyone even though my foremothers made many such curses. If an Amazon of Dahomey fell in battle and couldn’t be retrieved by her fellow soldiers, she would lie bleeding and screaming and cursing, and kill any enemy who tried to give her aid. If she had no weapon, she’d use her brine-hardened fingernails and filed teeth to tear out throats and gouge eyes.