Tina Mcelroy Ansa (17 page)

She became desperate. She didn’t know how long she would be able to keep her escalating strange behavior a secret from her family. She didn’t know how often she was walking in her sleep now. Once or
twice every few weeks, she would wake to find the bottoms of her feet black and her pajamas ripped, wet and dirty. But as far as she could tell, since the night she had awakened in the woods, she was the only one in the house who knew about it. And she was sure that if her parents knew she was as likely to be out roaming Pleasant Hill and the nearby woods at night as she was to be in her pretty eyelet-covered bed, they would just use it as a reason to keep her close to home. “For your own safety, baby,” she knew they would say.

All along, Lena had planned on Xavier University because she knew she would have the support of the nuns at Martin de Porres for a Catholic institution. And in her mind, New Orleans—three states over—was just far enough away for safety.

As soon as Lena was accepted there, she began keeping a road map she got from Mr. Brown’s filling station downtown under her bed. At night before saying her prayers and falling into a troubled sleep, with the joints of her finger, she would count off the miles that she hoped she would put between herself and her craziness the following fall.

As the weeks passed, Lena was surprised at how few problems she encountered trying to get away from home. Somebody must finally be looking out for me, she thought, like Grandmama promised.

When Nellie and Jonah drove her through the streets of Mulberry to the railroad station downtown on a September evening, Lena’s heart raced all the way there. She kept expecting something like a huge monster to rise up out of the road in front of her mother’s white Pontiac Bonneville with black leather top to bar her way on her final leg of departure. But none arose.

Lena was so excited about finally leaving home, getting far away, that at first she didn’t even notice all the people standing on the station platform when she and her parents climbed out of the stairwell into the evening air. Her brother Raymond was there from Texas with his new wife, Jackie. He grabbed her hair as she went by the way he did when they were children and messed up her careful hairdo.

Frank Petersen stood down the platform leaning nonchalantly
against a steel post with a Pall Mall dangling from his mouth. When she had seen him at the house the day before, his only parting advice had been, “Take up French, Lena-Wena.”

Gloria had worn the short purple dress that was Lena’s favorite. She made Lena take the twenty-dollar bill she pressed into the girl’s hand. Then she kissed her, leaving a big slash of lipstick on Lena’s cheek. Seymour/Yvette even flitted through the station briefly to drop a small red Christmas candle in Lena’s Aigner leather purse and to remind her, “All right, girlchild, don’t let me hear ’bout you being the candle, the wick and the flame, too, for some man down there in New Orleans.” Then he shook his Diana Ross wig and floated down the metal steps lightly as if he weighed 95 pounds not 195.

Her mother had been so proud of how beautiful and stylish Lena looked in her forest-green light wool suit—”Perfect for traveling,” Nellie had said to the smiling saleswoman who happily toted up the mountain of purchases the two McPherson women had made that day. Lena thought the same thing about Nellie as she watched her mother through the train window standing on the station platform dressed in a soft gray turtleneck sweater, straight camel skirt with a kick pleat in the back and high-heeled black kid pumps. Nellie had felt like crying as soon as the train pulled into the station and the thought of the distance the smoking monster would put between her and her baby girl—”I don’t care if you get to be eighty-five years old, you’ll still be my baby,” she had told Lena every year of her life on her birthday in November. Nellie stood on the platform, her brown eyes softly pink around the rims, her tinted auburn hair glistening like copper in the setting sunlight, biting her bottom lip to keep back the flow of tears and looking like a heartbroken heroine in a paperback novel. She had been able to keep her tears in check fairly well until Lena had hugged her goodbye on the train and whispered in her ear, “This my mama right here.” Then Nellie had cried like a baby as she answered, “This my baby right here.”

Jonah, finally getting thick around the waist from a lifetime of good food, stood next to her, his arm draped around his wife’s shoulders.
He was as pleased that Lena was traveling by train as he was of her college aspirations. Lena watched him from her car window as he walked up and down the platform proudly telling every porter, waiter and lineman—all of whom had known his father, Walter, when he had worked in the train yards—”Seeing my baby off to college, that’s what I’m doing here!”

Lena almost weakened and started to call to the conductor to “Hold it!” when she looked out the train window at the intimate circle of loving faces of her friends and family on the platform. It made her laugh in surprise.

“I’ve got friends,” she said to herself softly as if she had never thought of it before. “People here who love me. Why am I going so far away? I may have come through twelve years of Martin de Porres with only Gwen speaking to me, but look at these folks who love me.”

Yet at 5:10
P.M.
, just as the conductor yelled, “All aboard!” she remembered the sleepwalking in the woods and the horrible visions in her dreams of people with their throats slit from ear to ear and corpses clawing their way up her bed sheets from the bottom of her bed. So she just smiled back at the faces outside the window and waved goodbye as the Silver Crescent creaked into slow motion and pulled out of the station.

Out of the corner of her eye, for just a second, she thought she saw two giant cats jump from the station onto the moving train. But when she leaned forward and looked again, she realized with a chuckle that it was just the conductor in his navy-blue suit, waving all clear to the engineer.

As soon as the figures on the platform were out of sight, Lena said, “Well, Lord,” went to her Pullman compartment and changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater she had packed in her carry-on luggage. For the first time since she was seven, she was embarking on an adventure of her own making. At seventeen, she felt free and unencumbered, the way she had when she had traveled to the beach with her family with her hair in a hundred braids.

By the time the Silver Crescent rolled into New Orleans, its last
stop, twelve hours after departing Mulberry, Lena had stopped looking around every corner and intently into the face of every stranger she saw. She had seen a man on her way to the dining car who was dressed in what looked like clothes from the last century, but she just kept on walking and didn’t look into his face. She had met two other Georgia girls headed for Xavier. They
looked
normal and the last thing Lena wanted was solitude on that train, so she invited them into her compartment for the remainder of the trip. She felt safer in the company of two or more people.

The three girls disembarked at their destination in a swirl of makeup cases and Samsonite luggage and skirt tails, because the Catholic university didn’t allow its female students to wear slacks everyday, only on Saturdays. They didn’t have to search for a taxi. The school had sent a big yellow school bus painted white with a nun at the wheel to transport and protect its students.

However, Lena found the nuns’ protection only extended so far. Her first night in her new dormitory room, she woke up half the floor with her screaming and pleas for someone to save her from the ghosts and creatures that attacked her. She tried to reassure the girls who shook her awake that the cafeteria food must have given her a rare nightmare. But the very next night the same scene from a horror movie: bloodcurdling screams in the middle of the night in a women’s dormitory. The terrors continued for three more nights in a row, with Lena screaming she was being pulled down a hole by her feet and couldn’t breathe. Her dorm mates’ concern turned to irritation and fear.

Lena’s assigned roommate, a big girl, at first so pleased to have a roommate as pretty as Lena with six Samsonite suitcases and a steamer trunk full of stylish clothes, soon regretted ever leaving her tiny town in Texas for a school in the big city. Lena’s wild screams and thrashing about in her sleep scared the girl to death. By the end of the week, Lena’s roommate had packed up her few belongings in her cardboard-thin suitcases and moved out of the room without asking the dorm mother’s permission.

It didn’t take long for word to spread throughout the dormitory that Lena was strange. No one said anything to the dorm mother, a graduate student from Nigeria who was still learning about black folks in the American South, but the residents traded stories among themselves. One coed swore that on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she had looked out the window and seen Lena walking across the green in the middle of the campus not wearing a stitch of clothes. At the first dorm meeting, another quietly repeated the story that Lena actually chanted some strange voodoo curse in her sleep. She swore she heard it one night when she listened through the door with a plastic glass to her ear.

Before Freshman Week was out and the upper classes were settled in for the semester, Lena was alone again just as she had been through all of her high school years in Mulberry: no friends, and folks fearing and shunning her. But in New Orleans, she didn’t even have her one friend, Gwen.
She
was on the other side of the continent at Berkeley.

Lena tried her best to sound upbeat when she called Nellie and Jonah on the hall phone outside her room. But the first time they asked her if she liked her new roommate, Lena burst into tears. Nellie was ready to get in her black and white Bonneville and drive down there to New Orleans to get her baby, but Jonah joked her out of it.

“Now, we ’un babied Lena for almost eighteen years, you can’t expect her to just grow up overnight just because she’s away from home. She’s just homesick now. She may have a few tough days getting used to school and a new town and all. But she’ll be okay. She’s smart and tough just like her daddy.”

At least there was one thing Lena was used to: being alone. And she was totally alone amid the sea of freshmen until one evening during her second week in college when there was a rap on her dormitory room door.

“Come in,” she hollered, a little afraid to offer entry to God knew what.

The door swung open slowly, revealing a girl whom Lena knew lived on the floor above hers. Lena had seen her standing on the
landing of the stairs in short flowered baby-doll pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

“My name is Marian,” said the tall young girl with a figure like an hourglass and the first natural hairdo Lena had ever seen close up in person. “But you can just call me ‘Sister.’ Everybody does.”

Her hair—black, thick and nappy—stood about an inch and a half from her head and was so perfectly trimmed it looked sculpted. Her skin was smooth and clear, except for a small pimple on her cheek. Folks at The Place would have described her as “a good-looking dark-skinned colored girl,” but Lena knew right away that Sister was one of a kind, hard to pin down with a phrase.

She came in the room and plopped down on the vacant bed like an old friend. She was only a smidgeon taller than Lena, but Sister had a lankiness about her that made her seem taller. She put Lena in the mind of an old friend. Her familiarity made Lena want to smile. She just sat there and stared.

“I guess you know what they saying about you, yeah,” this girl called “Sister” said without the least bit of self-consciousness as she rose and began examining the bottles and jars on Lena’s scuffed dormitory dresser.

Lena pretended not to know what her visitor was talking about. But Sister paid her charade no mind.

“They’re saying you some kind of witch.” The way Sister said it, it sounded like the most normal thing possible for one teenager to say to another. She picked up an atomizer of Shalimar, sniffed the cap, then sprayed a spritz of the perfume down her breasts. She dropped her chin to her chest suddenly and took a deep breath. “They saying that’s why you had all those curly-headed boys around you at the Freshman Dance.”

Lena thought the girl’s tone was serious yet playful, so she didn’t feel the least bit offended by her charge of black magic.

“Now, me,” Sister continued, “I don’t care for curly-headed boys. I figured out a while back that curly-headed ones think they cuter than you and on top of that they can’t even kiss and stuff because they
always worried about how their hair is looking. But that’s what these half-Creole girls think, that you some kind of witch ’cause you had all them boys they want.”

“That’s what you think, too?” Lena asked as she pulled her knees up to her chin inside her new long green cotton robe and closed the Gwendolyn Brooks novel she was reading.

“I don’t know. Thought I’d come down and see for myself,” Sister answered as she moved on to Lena’s long wooden jewelry box and held up every pair of gold earrings she found to her pierced ears and checked herself out in the mirror. The only jewelry Sister wore was a long string of purple and pink pop beads that she had wrapped a few times around her neck.

“Aren’t you afraid like the other girls?” Lena asked. It was beginning to feel like a game of Twenty Questions.

“Shoot, girl, where I come from a witch ain’t nothing but another person, probably your grandma or your cousin or somebody.”

“Where’s that?” Lena asked, truly interested in this new young woman who seemed fascinated rather than repelled by her.

“Where’s what?” Sister asked, still looking in the mirror over the dresser as she held a pearl on a thin gold chain up to her throat.

“Where you’re from,” Lena answered.

“Right down here,” Sister answered, and walked over to Lena’s closet and peeked inside. “Good God, girl! Look at all these clothes in here! All these yours?”

“Uh-huh,” Lena answered. “Where’s right here?”

“Right here, outside of New Orleans, in Algiers Parish,” Sister said as she pulled the string switching the closet light on and stepped inside with widened eyes. She pronounced New Orleans “New Orleans.” “They make you stay on campus your first year even if you live right here in the city. Nuns! That’s why I’m here.