It’s more like this story I read in college. A man fasts to astonish paying crowds. Abstinence is not a skill so much as the curse of his life. As he’s dying, he admits, “If I could have found food I liked, I would gladly have eaten.” Somehow, I felt the truth of that line in my skin. Nothing I was supposed to like was giving me any nourishment. And so — what? I find myself back in Houston, looking for palatable old recipes? Well, but it’s not that simple.
In Dante’s Hell — another outlook I ran across in college — damnation is a constant lapsing backward, repeating one’s sins. Swimming against the current, never getting things right: I understood that too. But my family’s original sin, the start of the cycle: Cletus, Daddy, Mama. It had to do with them.
Else, why would Mama have fled?
I need to know it, nail it — whatever it is — so I can shut the fucker down. “Everybody has a buried story,” my teacher told me, the one who assigned Dante and Kafka. The one who told me, You must know everything. “And everyone’s purpose in life, no matter how foolhardy their attempts may be, is to be heard.”
Down the street, the church is humming now with the preacher’s calls to witness. I been sanctified, Lord, and offer up a joyful noise in Your name, amen! Sometime I get to ‘membering the slothful sinner I surely usta could be, and FALL on my knees, Lord, humble before Thee, handing up my soul, amen! Touch me with your flame, amen! Take my tongue and teach your grace through me. Enlist me in your mighty army, Lord, amen!
In the testimonies, I hear blues rhythms, the pacing of Uncle Bitter’s hoo-raws, the gumbo-okra lilt of the Deep South, Louisiana, Africa, and the Caribbean, our misty ancestral sources. I’m a rampaging, devil-dousing soldier for Christ, amen! I hear the music of my childhood — music that, like the blues, Mama worked to drum from my head. I was sixteen the last time I set foot in a church — the day Mama married a Dallas lawyer. By then, we were living in a perfect, all-white world, and I was, on the surface, a perfect, all-white girl. My skin was twice as pale as Mama’s. I could waltz into any public place, in any part of town. My mop had thickened by then — I no longer had that “pretty hair”—and so, for both of us, to maintain the mask, Mama kept the bathroom stocked with Frizz-Away: “Deluxe Hair-Straightener — No Lye, No Muss, No Fuss!”
I’m a salesman for my Lord, stepping door to door with a surefire sin-cleaner. Its name ain’t Hoover. Its name ain’t General ‘Lectric. No sir. It’s Jesus Christ, amen! He’ll leave you sparkle-plenty!
Last month, when the breast cancer finally carried Mama home, I refused her Methodist church, her lawyer-husband (“You’re her daughter, you should be here!”), everything but the parched north Dallas graveyard once she’d been laid to rest. I visited late one evening, alone, carrying a sorry, paper-wrapped rose from a nearby Safeway. Her stone was simple, just her name, fitting a taciturn woman. But her last words to me rapped like a faulty pipe in my mind: “I’ve tried to be a good woman, Telisha. God spare me! God spare me from Hell!”
What was it she was afraid to repeat? And why? And how did her trap become my own? For surely that’s part of my story, too.
She left for me her perfect world, darkened only by the whispered admission, years ago, that my great-grandmother, Sarah Morgan, was once attacked by a black man and never recovered. All the rest I’ve stumbled over, as through neighborhood debris, on my own.
Still no witness to my daddy. Nothing to tell me, directly, who I am. So I keep spinning from one perspective to the next.
One day I’ll be coming on home, Lord, coming on home —
I left the rose on Mama’s grave and determined to return to Freedmen’s Town. Or at least, her passing is one of my reasons — my most conscious excuse — for coming back. Now, I zip my bag up tight. No matter what I find here, probably my life won’t change. Even if I alter my thinking, I won’t be any more, or less, welcomed anywhere I go.
So why the hell am I here?
My legs tingle, nearly asleep. I shake them out, stroll the alley behind my uncle’s house, where Ariyeh and I used to prowl with empty shoe boxes, hoping to catch lizards and horned toads for Bitter to use in his spells. He’d slip the boxes from us, bend to hear the creatures’ scratchings, mumble some gris-gris, then tell us to set our prisoners free. He didn’t need their bodies, he said. “I drawed their spirits clean out of their skins, see. Now I hold the power in my fingers!”
The alley smells of gin, spaghetti sauce, and urine, the way it always did, and I long to see Ariyeh again, to laugh with her, run with her through drippy bayou heat, past vacant lots where the first freedmen here sharecropped and sang. I wonder if she’ll be at Etta’s tonight with Bitter and his pals? What will Etta’s look like? I’ve never been inside an ice house.
Someone in the church takes up a mouth harp, wheezes a plea to God. I remember my confusion, as a child, listening to the spirituals — Lawd, Lawd, oh yes my Lawd — then walking home from Sunday school with Ariyeh, past the railroad tracks, hearing the winos whistle and yell at us, “Oh Lawd! Oh yeah! Gonna be fine someday!” What was the difference between the sacred and the old men’s wolf calls? Is this what Bitter meant when he said, “The world sure does love a nigger joke. Always playing tricks on us.”
The church melody evokes for me lonely soldiers in a field, squatting around a campfire, stuffing their backpacks with gris-gris — frog legs, dried scorpion claws — to give them luck in battle. For a moment, as I stand dazed in a mosquito swarm in the alley, I can almost walk up to Cletus Hayes, in my mind. I can almost see his face. Then: the mad red welt around his neck.
The church thunders with voices, mouth harp, tambourine, sharp guitar. Laughing and clapping. I wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. There’s a train acoming, Lord, and I’m gointer be on it! I know these people. Yet I don’t. I’m hoboing my way to Heb’n! They are making a joyful noise, and keeping Death at bay.
2
THE FAINT-HEARTED wont find Etta’s Place. No signs, no lights, no outside paint — just weathered wood and an illegible address on the door in orange Marks-A-Lot. I spun my tires for half an hour, up and down Scott Street, trying to ferret out the club. Now my car is the only one in the lot. The neighborhood, nearly treeless, exposed, looks as scoured and salty as a coastal town. Everything’s the dingy gray-white of seagulls.
The Flower Man’s house sits on a corner down the street. I remember sneaking around it when Ariyeh and I were kids. We never knew what the Flower Man did, never even saw him. But he’d covered his house with giant plastic roses, TV trays, Barbie dolls, seashells, clay birds — all nailed or glued to the walls so you couldn’t see the wood anymore. A bottle tree hides his front porch: bare cedar limbs holding empty colored bottles, which, according to bayou lore, will trap evil haints. The bottles ting like out-of-tune piano keys. Aspirin containers, vitamin jars, sodas. Green, purple, blue. The house is like a gulf-side beach, a flotsam-catcher whenever the tide comes in. Like everything else I remember here, the place looks worn now but still glorious in its trashy get-up.
I lock the car. Opening Etta’s door, I get a splinter in my thumb. I’m the only one here. Ten-thirty. Coors crates block the back wall. Microphones huddle near a Pearl drum set in a dusty corner. Termites appear to have colonized the bottom third of the bar. A gray-haired woman stands there, thin as a diving board, quivering like someone’s just jumped off her. She croaks, “Take a load off, dear. Make yourself at home.”