Stormwitch (3 page)

Such fierceness was admired. Ba would have been that fierce. She wanted me to fight like that, too. I tried, but in Haiti, I was too happy to get that angry. Now, I understand better.

I start to walk after the man and the boys, but a small woman with hair as white as Grandmother Jones’s grabs my elbow. “Be still. Don’t you say a word, girl. That’s Leroy Frye. He’s Grand Wizard in these parts.”

“Grand Wizard?” The phrase sounds ridiculous to me. “What kind of wizard is he?”

“Sheets, girl! The Knights! Ain’t you ever heard of the Ku Klux Klan?”

Chapter Three

Friday, 8 August 1969: Afternoon

“I keep telling you the beaches are open now, Ruba.” Clay Potts, my neighbor, shakes his head not five minutes after they meet me. We’re still close to the spot where I saw the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but we’re moving away quickly as Clay lectures. He’s seventeen, a year older than me, and he thinks he knows everything. “You don’t have to stay on that nasty piece of sand just because it used to be the colored section.”

“Nasty sand,” Gisele agrees. My cousin is only seven, but she has metal in her eyes. She’s been without a mother since she was a baby, according to the stories I’ve heard. Her mother was killed in the Civil Rights marches. But Gisele has her mother’s eyes, everyone says. The metal sparks when her temper flares.

Gisele walks beside me, holding my arm with her strong little fingers. The three of us have walked together like this almost every day, since I first came to Pass Christian. Besides chores and swimming, there is
nothing else to do.

“Grandmother Jones wants me to keep to the beach in front of our house,” I remind Clay. “She doesn’t want trouble at work.”

“Daddy says trouble finds you when it wants you,” Gisele mutters. “Ain’t no sense dodging it.”

“Mm-hmm,” Clay agrees as we pass the Richelieu Apartments. “Can’t spend your life stepping aside to let trouble pass.”

Somewhere on the third floor of that building behind him, my grandmother cleans and cleans and hopes trouble will pass. I don’t agree with that choice. Ba wouldn’t have either. Amazons led attacks in battles. They didn’t wait for the war to come to them. I slip my free hand in my pocket and touch the spine of my journal. I’ve written much of what Ba taught me about Dahomey and the war women between the scarred flaps—part to honor her, and part so I won’t forget.

Clay flicks a stone toward the sand. “Woman as smart as Mrs. Jones, tending Whitey’s house, minding Whitey’s business. Damn shame. She ought to own the Richelieu, hard as she works.”

“I tell her that,” I say. “But she gets ill with me.”

“She probably doesn’t mean any harm when she gets mad, you know.” Clay grins as he gazes off in the distance, like he’s remembering something funny, or maybe
he knows something I don’t. “It’s just her way. Is she still on you to speak up in church?”

The muscles in my neck go tight. “She mentioned it this morning. I don’t think she’ll give up.”

“Probably not. She’s like Mama.” Clay keeps on grinning in his know-it-all way. “Wants you to mind and act right, won’t take any lip, and church, church, church. Hard to believe they were ever loud enough and wild-minded enough to march for Civil Rights.”

An image of Grandmother Jones, decked in her Sunday-flower finest and walking for freedom, flickers across my mind.

I reject it.

Civil rights—the more I learn of that struggle, the more I respect any man, woman, or child who took part. But Grandmother Jones? If I had not seen a newspaper photo from Clay’s scrapbook, a picture of her stony face in a crowd back in 1963, I wouldn’t have believed she had lifted finger or foot for the Movement.

Clay’s mother, Miss Hattie—now, she has a face like an Amazon, hard and strong and unforgiving. She has an Amazon mouth, too. That woman’s tongue could shell a crab and have words left over. I could imagine her marching. I could see her leading the way and daring anyone to stop her. But Grandmother Jones … no.

Does her blood really run in my veins?

Clay takes us toward Blankenship’s Drugs. “Black Power’s where it’s at,” he says. “That’s what’s happening now. We should go right in that drugstore and eat at the counter. What good are the new laws if we don’t exercise our rights?”

Gisele and I don’t answer. We know better.

“‘We must make our own world, man.’” Clay’s making-a-stand voice sounds loud in the hot, damp air. “That’s what Amiri Baraka says.”

I know from previous conversations that Amiri Baraka is a poet who once was called LeRoi Jones. Clay thinks the African name the poet chose is more beautiful than the name his family gave him. After Leroy Frye on the beach, I don’t like the sound of LeRoi. And I
hate
Jones. So I agree. Amiri Baraka is a fine name.

“Baraka,” I say, letting the syllables sing in my mouth. Perhaps I will change my own name.

“‘And now, each night I count the stars,’” Gisele murmurs. Perfect. Doesn’t sound like a little girl. Barely even a southern accent, as if speaking a dream. “‘And each night I get the same number. And when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.’”

We stop and stare at her.

“That’s part of Baraka’s ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,’” Clay says. “How do you know that?”

Gisele shrugs. “Daddy likes it. He says it to me every
night, ‘cause of the last part about a little girl talking to her hands. I like the part about stars and holes. You believe stars leave holes if they don’t come out, Ruba?”

I think about Ba and I nod. A hole where a star should be.

Clay looks mad because Gisele knows something he doesn’t know about his favorite poet. “One day, the Black Panthers’ll come down here and leave some holes. And we
are
going to sit at Blankenship’s main counter, the one that used to be ‘white-only.’”

“Daddy says they’re violent,” Gisele mutters. “The Panthers.”

“So?” Clay shrugs. “Sometimes that’s what it takes. Besides, I don’t think they’re violent. Just … loud. And proud. They don’t lie down when somebody tries to step on them. What’s wrong with that?”

“Grandmother Jones doesn’t like the Panthers,” I say.

Clay laughs. “That’s because she’s old school. She worked with the Delta Ministry and all.”

I fish through my memory for what I know about the Ministry and find nothing. I sigh. Who can remember all the American political groups? Grandmother Jones has tried to teach me all the important ones. Clay goes over them and over them, like they’re spells or holy words. It reminds me of those books in the Bible that talk about nothing but who begat whom. After a while, when
Grandmother Jones reads those parts out loud, she sounds like a bee buzzing on about nothing.

CORE sticks in my mind, because it’s a real word. The Congress of Racial Equality.
Core
means the center of a fruit to me, the truest, strongest part that stays when everything else gets eaten—and the part that usually holds the seeds. So I think of CORE as the group that stayed in Mississippi when everything else got eaten. SNCC is the only other one I remember most of the time—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Clay’s stories about Freedom Summer stick that student committee in my thoughts, especially how they walked right out into the fields to talk to workers, and how a lot of them got bombed and beaten up. He describes Freedom Summer in so much detail it’s hard for me to believe it happened five years ago. To listen to Clay, Freedom Summer was yesterday.

The Black Panthers are much easier to think about, because they’re happening now and Grandmother Jones doesn’t much like the way they do things.
Panther
makes me think of the leopard, Dahomey’s royal symbol. War women in Dahomey were also called Wives of the Leopard—the king. It helps me when I’m angry or sad to see myself like that, as fierce enough to be a Wife of the Leopard.

In Haiti, there weren’t any groups like the Black
Panthers. We had only nationals and rebels. In the Africa I learned about, there were two groups as well—Dahomey’s Fon and their enemies. Black people fighting black people, so often and so hard they couldn’t even think about fighting white people if they needed to.

When I first came to Mississippi, I thought it was different here, that black people fought white people instead of each other. Now I know that’s not true. Grandmother Jones and black people who think like her fight with black people who think like Clay.

Like me?

Clay is still talking. Clay is always talking. He says the time is now for black people in America, and he tries to get me to say
black
instead of
colored
. I do my best, but Grandmother Jones’s drills are hard to overcome. Even Crazy Sardine, Gisele’s daddy, who lives with her in the house beside us with his two-foot Afro and giant platform shoes, still says
colored
instead of
black
half the time.

And he reads poem-songs to his little girl at night. That I did not expect, though I’ve gotten the feeling that Sardine and Gisele may know more than they show—about everything and everyone. Like Ba. Like other people who know about history and magic.

My mind turns back to what I heard on the beach about Ray-boy Frye and his father. “What do you know about wizards in the Ku Klux Klan, Clay?”

Clay stops dead in the road. I see tar bubbles snap near his worn white sneakers. “You know I hate talking about the Klan. Gisele’s not old enough—”

“Shut up,” Gisele says angrily, eyes sparking. “I’m plenty old enough to hear anything
you
got to say, Clay Potts.”

He shrugs. No intention of answering me, I can tell, but I keep talking. “This boy at the beach today, and his father, a Ray-boy and Leroy Frye—”

“Man, Ruba.” Clay lifts his shoe and pops more tar bubbles. Snap. Snap. “They’re the worst trash in town.”

“But what about these wizards?” I ask. “Grandmother Jones warned me about the Klan, and you told me a lot about them, but you never mentioned wizards. Are they powerful?”

“It’s not what you think.” Snap. Snap!

Gisele squeezes my arm hard because Clay’s angry. The fast kind of mad, like when your heat rises and your teeth clamp shut and you make fists without even meaning to.

I know better than to say anything to somebody who looks like that, so I wait.

“They don’t have any real wizards,” he says. “They just call themselves knights and dragons and other dumb stuff, to sound all righteous and scary. Bunch of crackers in sheets, burning crosses and acting big. Easy to string
up a man when you got him outnumbered ten to one.”

Gisele shudders but keeps her fire eyes on Clay’s face.

My throat tightens and I rub it with my fingers.

String up a man
, he said. Like beans and peppers. Like fruit or shells. I see a horrid mind-picture of people hoisted by the neck and left to dry like spice or produce. Thrown to the gulls like scraps.

These Klux men don’t have any real magicians like I feared when I heard the word
wizard
, not if they kill just to be killing. “So … the Klan doesn’t conjure?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Clay’s irritation hisses through his words. “Of course they don’t conjure. No one conjures. That’s superstition and nonsense. Slave stuff. It’s 1969! Did you live under a rock in Haiti?”

“No. We lived on the beach!” My brain squirms with confusion. That man, that boy—they seemed so powerful. Acted so powerful, for those few minutes on the beach. “Why did that boy call me juju? How does he even know about juju?”

“What do you know about it?” Gisele asks fast, as if she’s been waiting to do it since she met me. “Daddy told me Haiti’s lots like Africa, even though it ain’t far from here. Daddy says lots of people in Haiti still do African spells. You do African spells, Ruba?”

I don’t want to answer, so I pretend to ignore her.

Clay acts like she didn’t speak. “Ray-boy was running
his mouth, that’s all. Juju’s an insult, like all the other cracker things they say.” His eyes go distant, and I can tell he wants away from this conversation. “Where’s your gold dashiki, anyways? Looks better than that dress.”

“Grandmother Jones packed all of my African clothes in a trunk.”

“I like that red robe you wore last week,” Gisele says. “It’s pretty. And the blue and pink one.”

“They’re all beautiful, Sister,” Clay agrees. “You should wear them proud.” He struts with one finger pointed toward his knee. “What do you want?”

“Black Power,” Gisele and I say together, mostly to shut him up.

I lift the collar of my plain white frock and feel like a dozen fools. “Grandmother Jones doesn’t want me in my African colors. She says this dress suits my station.”

Clay rolls his eyes. “We have to get her into this century, Ruba.”

This time, I don’t answer. I’m thinking about Ba again, and how she said even centuries can’t fix some problems—like Zashar the stormwitch, like the witch’s grudge against my family and all white people. Zashar hated the Amazons who supported the rightful king instead of the imposter she chose to help steal Dahomey’s throne. She hated the white slavers and slave owners for what they did to Dahomey. It doesn’t matter
to her that it’s history now, not even a little. There’s no reasoning with her. When she comes, we just have to fight her—every time, until she’s gone or we’re gone.

I figure centuries can’t fix the Klan, either, with its fake wizards and knights and dragons. Or Grandmother Jones, with her endless quotes and closed-up mind. She believes what she believes, no changing it, just like that vengeful witch.

The ocean suddenly pulls my attention and I look toward the horizon. It’s so clear. Not even a streak of clouds.

The stormwitch can’t be up to her old tricks. She just can’t be.

But if she is … if I have to chant a storm she meddles with, I’ll have to do it alone. Would these people here, my “family” now—could they possibly let me face what I’ll have to face and not interfere? Could they help me if I needed help?

I hold Gisele’s hand tighter and blink at Clay’s swinging shoulders. “If we got into trouble, would you trust me, Brother?”