Yesterday evening, late, when I showed up with my suitcase on Bitter’s porch, he glanced up at me, indifferently at first, then with recognition. We stood yards apart, both aware of my daylight skin next to his night-color, and said nothing for a while. He looked me over — my short, boyish hair, my slender hips — and slowly shook his head, as if sorry for my confusing physical geometry: a creature who can’t fully settle on what she really is.
Finally, I set my suitcase down on his cracked plank porch, where old honeysuckle vines, crushed and heavy and rancidly sweet, grew up between the boards, and said, “Hello.”
He rattled the ice in a Smucker’s jar of weak red tea, swatted a horsefly, and watched me wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. I half expected him to pitch a story, some silly yarn out of nowhere. I’m nothing but a old mose, he used to tell me, spinning hot air and hoo-raws. The old-school patter, the uncle-jive: who he’d always been, or pretended to be. Instead, he only grinned and, with a twist of his pear-shaped head, led me around back to what he called his mud-dauber shack, an old wooden tool shed, empty now except for a mattress and sheets. The shed was clustered around, he said, with “couronnes de chene,” and I remembered, like a lantern flaring on in the middle of the night, this lovely Creole name from my childhood visits here. “Mistletoe,” I said.
He tossed melting ice from his jar into the high yellow grass. “That’s right, Seamstress. So. Some of the Bayou City did rub off on you.”
“More than you think.”
“This here’s my guest-house now, since I got need no more of my tools,” he said. “May smell like gin. Mostly buddies of mine sleeping off weekday drunks in here. You welcome to it for now. Back door of the house’ll be open when you need a john.”
“Thank you.”
“Pretty low-rent for a mayor’s girl.”
“It’s just fine. It’s more than I expected on such little notice.”
“Well. It’s late now. I’ll let you get settled. Back door’s open, too, when you ready to chat. That letter you sent, girl. It was short.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I knew you didn’t have a phone — ”
“Don’t turn this around on me.”
“I’m not. Thank you. Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’ll talk?”
“Sure, we’ll tow out the cotton whenever you ready. Don’t see nothing, don’t say nothing.” That was the way he used to tell me good-night when I was little, and I smiled.
He left me then in the dusty mud-dauber shack with only a flashlight to steer by. In the corners, sprawling, elaborate spiderwebs. Dirty-towel curtains. He wanted me to breathe “low-rent” again, to take old sharecropper dirt into my lungs. Punishment. Nostalgia. He wasn’t about to give me any of that poor-mulatta-bullshit you saw in the corny old stories or fall back praising my credentials.
As I unlatched my suitcase I remembered the word gris-gris and an afternoon when I was eight or nine, here in the yard, and Uncle Bitter instructed me in bayou lore. “Never pull down curtains from windows and doors to wash in the month of August. Sure as you hang a clean curtain back up in August, you gonna be hanging a shroud on your door ‘fore the month is done. Never kill no spiders, neither, girl. Never. That’s bad luck for a longtime.”
So, since we’re only midway through August, the spiders and towels will stay, I thought, turning back the sheets.
And that’s how I woke this morning, fresh from a hanging, surrounded by the pure good luck of crawlies and filth.
I folded yesterday’s clothes and buttoned on a new cotton blouse. A piece of red flannel was nailed to the wall above the mattress, and I wondered if this was another bit of gris-gris: some happy charm for helpless drunks, or a spell to chastise long-lost kin. I remembered more of Uncle Bitter’s magic from years ago. Dried frogs on a doorstep bring tragedy to a home. If an alligator crawls beneath your porch, it’s a sure sign of death. If a gal cheats on her man just before baking, her bread won’t rise. Bitter swore an innocent neighbor of his was beaten to death by her husband when her muffins kept failing.
“Gumbo ya-ya,” my mama used to snap whenever she’d pass through a room to find my cousin Ariyeh and me sitting in Bitter’s lap, listening to his tales. It meant, she told me once, someone who blabbed all the time.
“What you Yankee niggers know ‘bout the bayou?” he’d toss back at her.
Her light cheeks turned the color of raspberries.
It’s a measure of how place-bound my family has been that my Houston kin have always regarded Dallas, both suspiciously and with awe, as “the North.” Mama, tight-lipped, snatched me up and took me north one day, in 1974, when I was three years old. We made four or five visits back to Freedmen’s Town, all before I was ten, then never returned.
As a teenager I missed my uncle’s stories, his sweet affection for my cousin and me. He called me Seamstress — Small Woman, in his parlance — and Ariyeh, Junebug, because she was chubby and round as a child. When I slipped into my twenties, went to college, then got a job with the Dallas mayor’s office, I lost sight of “Down South,” like my childhood had all been a fever dream. A heat rash in steamy swamp-grass. I got one scribble from Uncle Bitter, on my twenty-second birthday, telling me how much it pained him that I hadn’t been to see him in so many years. It didn’t open “Dear Seamstress.” “To the mayor’s girl,” it began, and ended, “You and your mama too fine for us folk?” By then, I believed that was true; I threw the letter away. Three years passed before I finally answered him, earlier this week, saying, “I need to come down. If you can make room for me somewhere, I promise not to be a bother.”
Thinking back to last night, I count it as a good sign that he greeted me, finally, as “Seamstress.” I suspect, too, he knows why I’m really here … maybe better than I do. I’m traveling on impulse, the way Mama used to do, and — no. No. Mama never acted impulsively in her life, and neither have I. If I could believe she left here impulsively I might be more at peace with her ghost, more at ease with myself. Truth is, I think, she fled deliberately because she was determined I’d become someone else, not the girl who’d grow up here.
I pluck a toothbrush and a comb from my case, walk across the yard, tap on the back door, painted blue but peeling. No answer. “Hello?” The door creaks like a rope pulled taut as I push it open, gently. I recognize nothing in the house. The furniture I’ve always remembered as gaudy, big, but these old chairs are faded, green, and small. Rugs cross the floor, fraying, the color of exhausted dirt. The place smells of onions. On a cutting board next to the kitchen sink I find a handwritten note: “Seam — Gone to do my Sunday business. You on your own til tonite. Some of us gather round ten at Etta’s Place over on Scott Street,” and he gives me an address. “See you there if you so incline.”
His Sunday business, I recall Mama saying sadly long ago, was dominoes and bust-head in some raggedy-ass ice house somewhere. She used to fret about his drinking; he had what he called “high bloods.”
This kitchen. I remember afternoons here, the bready smell of catfish frying on the stove, a saxophone signifying from the phonograph in the living room, and Mama running a hot-comb through Ariyeh’s abundant hair. A dry, singed, old-cloth odor. I wailed, wanting the hot comb too. “Honey, you don’t need it,” Mama said. “You got that pretty hair, thin and wavy.”