One Dark Body Read online

  “Charlotte Watson Sherman is an award-winning author who already has proven herself to be a writer of great gifts. ... In One Dark Body, her first novel, Sherman displays the same power of metaphor and turn of phrase that have made her poetry and short fiction so engaging. . . . Sherman has undertaken important work in One Dark Body. She has tried to convey the timely message that even the deepest wounds can be healed if we draw on our African cultural and spiritual traditions.”

  —Women’s Review of Books

  “Sherman’s elaborate, spectral imagery and lyrical phrases carry the characters in One Dark Body through their necessary journeys and leave them with hope and peace.”

  —Chicago Daily Defender

  “Novels that take readers into worlds they have only glimpsed briefly, through a door slightly ajar, through a tom window curtain, through an unguarded exchange, are rare gifts. They can sometimes leave readers breathless, feeling on the brink of discovery unexplored by most people. That is how One Dark Body, Charlotte Watson Sherman’s ambitious first novel, leaves the reader feeling, as if she had glimpsed a sliver of a fascinating world dusted with magic.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “The spirits of the lake and trees surrounding Pearl form an additional choms of ancient characters who affect the protagonists’ fate. . . . A novel of great promise and considerable interest.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Engaging characters and lilting prose illuminate this mythopoeic story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lyrical and infused with magic, and those who believe there is more to life than what we see, hear or touch will enjoy it.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “This novel explores the characters’ need for an unbroken connection between their African ancestors and their present African-American relations. . . . The evocative language and empathetic characterizations found in One Dark Body are a fitting sequel to Killing Color, the author’s collection of short stories.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  One Dark Body

  Also by Charlotte Watson Sherman

  Killing Color

  One Dark Body

  A NOVEL

  Charlotte Watson Sherman

  SWEET INSPIRATION PRESS

  ONE DARK BODY

  Copyright © 2020 by Charlotte Watson Sherman. All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Jody Kim, “My Spirit Dances Prayer.”

  “Floating” appeared as a short story in Killing Color, published by Calyx Books in 1992.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published by Sweet Inspiration Press

  Print ISBN: 9780984709533

  Ebook ISBN: 9780984709540

  For David

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Floating

  Crows

  Things Handed Down

  The Space Between Words Where People Live

  Blood Memory

  The Color of Spirits

  Soulcatcher

  One Dark Body

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people have influenced and helped this novel find its finished form: my editor, Stephanie Gunning, my agent, Beth Vesel, my attorney and friend, Keven Davis, Nancy Rawles, Tina Hoggatt, Lenore Norgaard, and especially my spirit guides, Brenda Peterson, Perry Ulander, and David Sherman.

  I am grateful for the support and friendship of Carletta Wilson, Barbara Henderson, Faith Davis, JoAnn Moton, Julia Boyd, Jody Kim, Rick Simonson, and Barbara Thomas; Colleen McElroy and Calyx Books Collective; Blackbird Books; and Red and Black Books Collective.

  I’d like to thank my family: Charles Watson, Dorothy and Harold Glass, Alton Sherman, Josh and Kitty Gardner, Erika Sherman, Richard Glass, Michael Glass, and Lois Sherman for being there for my daughters when I could not.

  For their patience and love, I am eternally grateful to David, Aisha, and Zahida Sherman.

  And for the music: Sweet Honey in the Rock, Esther “Little-dove” John, Miriam Makeba, Bobby McFerrin, SunRa and his Intergalactic Orkestra, and Miles Davis.

  One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being tom asunder.

  —W. E. B. DuBois,

  The Souls of Black Folk

  PROLOGUE

  Wasn’t nobody near the hushed water that time of night to see or hear the body move itself up from the hole in the bottom of the lake, through the opaque water, and past the lake’s upside where it floated dark and fluid as the little sea itself.

  The dark body moved silkily on the water, a shadowy milk, growing, moving simply, offering no resistance, but easing on, gracefully riding the waves.

  Old and new ribbons of algae twisted about the torso like banners, waving surely, softly too, toward the edge of the lake that rose from the water itself darker even than this moonless night.

  SECTION 1

  Floating

  I

  Raisin 1963

  This a funny place. Maybe cause of the mountain standing up behind our town watching like a big old eye. Or maybe it’s that lake stretching way out, reaching black to black, pushing its way cross the earth like it’s in a hurry to run away from here. Or maybe it’s that twisted-trunk, yellow-leaf tree next to Blue-the-wanga-man’s house, with the leaves that shine like gold lamps through the trees, day or night.

  But some folks say no, it’s not that mountain sitting back watching over us, and it’s not that black lake reaching, and it’s not that old white-trunked, yellow-tipped tree next to Blue’s that Reverend Daniles swears covers a hole leading from this world to the next. The thing that makes Pearl a funny kind of place is all that whispering we hear coming up from the ground.

  I first heard it one day when I was walking with Miss Marius from her house to town.

  Even though the only place I ever lived was in her house, I never thought of her house as mine. And don’t nobody else think no different from me.

  My mama left Pearl soon as I was born, years before the last coal mine closed down and lots of colored folks left town. Folks from Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama. Come all the way to Washington to shake that red dirt off their feet, get those red fingers off their souls. Miss Marius always say, “You can run to the new South, but you can’t hide from the old South, not even way out here.”

  But I remember when I was back in my mama’s stomach, floating like a pickle in a jar. I remember what was said, the bargains struck.

  I could hear them talking while I was floating, sitting in all that water.

  A high dark sound, my mama’s laughing and crying and a long, sharp tone, smooth as the knife Miss Marius used to cut meat from bone. I remember Miss Marius talking, talking, saying the same words over and over till my mama’s cry turned into a stretched-out moan.

  And Miss Marius going around in the water with me. Going around in the tart, dark liquid. The low sound of her voice stroking me inside that bag, inside that wineskin where I floated in a dream.

  “What did you take, Nola? What did you put up inside yourself, child? Tell me. I’m gonna help you a
nd I’m gonna help this baby, too, but you got to tell me what you put into yourself. I got most of the okra out, but what else? What was it, Nola? Was it something from inside the house, something from the woods?”

  And Miss Marius and my mama went around, circling till my mama, exhausted, let the words fall from her lips like some hard, funny-shaped stones. “Blue told me to use cedar berries and camphor,” she said, and that’s all I remember from when I was in my mama’s stomach. But folks don’t know I even remember that, not even Miss Marius, cause them first years Miss Marius’s deep voice and big-knuckled hands was all the mama I thought I’d need.

  “Hush that foolishness, child,” Miss Marius always say. “Everybody needs they mama and you got one just like everybody else. She’ll be back when she gets a notion.”

  But it scared me when Miss Marius talk like that. I don’t know if I like my mama’s notions. The very first one she ever took about me left me shriveled up and gasping inside her womb.

  That’s why I come out looking so old and wrinkled everybody took to calling me Raisin. But I don’t think it’s the wrinkles that make me look old. I think it’s like Miss Marius says, I’m an old old soul.

  We live out on the edge of town on the east side, where all the colored people live. Miss Marius’s house is the last one you come to fore you hit all them trees and marsh at the edge of the lake, out where old Blue lives.

  We live in what used to be an old rooming house. We got a downstairs and a front room and a kitchen with a big black stove.

  Upstairs is where we all sleep. Miss Marius and Nathan in the big room at the front of the house with that window letting in all the light from the world.

  Miss Marius and Nathan got no children of they own, but Lucille and Lucinda are sisters and they act like they the ones come outta Miss Marius’s body, even though Miss Marius say we all her children. Since they been here the longest, longer than my twelve years, they both get to sleep in that room big enough to be a play yard, with all them goop-de-goos they got spread out all around the floor. They both got white-painted beds with flowers all scrolled around they heads so when they laying in em, it’s like they laying inside a wreath, kind of like a halo around their heads.

  I sleep with MC and Wilhelmina and Douglass in the back bedroom, in that big old brown bed that we climb up onto with a stool. It be tight sometimes with all us squeezed up in it, but I’m just glad I don’t have to share the bed with Lucille.

  Lucille gonna be big, just like Miss Marius. She got a thick-waisted body and short, strong legs. Her neck’s thick too, and strong enough for all the yelling she think she gotta do. She like to drop her head back and yell loud as she can.

  Her hair ain’t black and thick like mine, it’s the color of a tree trunk and her eyes the color of moonstone.

  One time at supper, I made the mistake of trying to tell her how pretty I thought her eyes was, but she raised herself up like a rattler in her chair and hissed, “Shut your mouth, you old wrinkled-up raisin, fore I put you in a box and sell you to Miss Lomax to eat.”

  Everybody at the table laugh when she say that, they scared not to. But Miss Marius and Nathan never crack a smile.

  I didn’t mind. Whenever they start talking about how wrinkled up and black I am, I just close my eyes and think of a warm soft place like a tub of hot water I can lay my body down in, or a nice dark space like a womb.

  Lucille say don’t nobody love MC, Wilhelmina, Douglass, and me, and that’s how come we living with Miss Marius and Nathan. MC ain’t nuthin but a baby, so it always make him cry when she say that, but Wilhelmina, Douglass and me all about the same size, so we don’t cry, we just look at her.

  “Your mamas left you on Miss Marius’s porch like a sack of bad-luck pennies. Ain’t nobody ever gonna love you,” she liked to say, knowing nobody try to talk about how her own mama left her and Lucinda.

  When she say that I think of the time Douglass stuck his hand in a bucket of snakes and pull out three so I won’t have to, like Lucille was trying to make me do. And Douglass about as scared of snakes as me.

  Douglass’s mama took all her children but him back to Memphis a while after the mine closed. She left him with Miss Marius so he’d be in good hands.

  “That boy slow, Miss Marius. Look at the way that eye jumps, the way he rocks on his feet. He can’t make it on this long trip. Can he stay with you till I get settled? I’ll send for him soon as I do.”

  Miss Marius say, “I’ll keep him till you ready, Louisa. Y’all go on and make your home.”

  Wilhelmina’s mama did her about the same as mine did me, cept she use a wire to try to get Wilhelmina out, but it didn’t work.

  “She a special child, Leona, that’s why she here. Leave her with me. I’ll take care of her,” Miss Marius say.

  Wilhelmina got a mark, look like a blue moon setting on her face. I think about how she sit with MC, humming soft as water in his ear the times he sound like there’s a hole in him so deep nuthin but water could fill it up.

  I think about the way we sleep, four brown^spoons with our arms around each other. And I look at Lucille when she say don’t nobody love us.

  I look at her mean as that goat Miss Marius call Moses on account of his white beard hanging down to the ground. I look at her mean as Moses look at us and I say, “No, you lying, Lucille. Somebody do love us.”

  And I don’t even flinch when she grab me by the two plaits Miss Marius wove into my head, I don’t even yell when she pull out the weave and swing me by my plaits to the ground.

  I only remember the time I was over to Miss Lomax’s house when she first got her new TV and out of the blue glowing in the screen I saw a cowboy jump out of a box and dig his heels into a horse’s sides. The man jumped off the horse and grabbed a cow by the horns and tried to drag the cow down to the ground.

  And when Lucille swung me down by my plaits into the dirt, just like that cowboy roped that cow, I jumped up with a wild look still in my eyes and say, “You’re still lying.” But my legs were turning like wheels on the road.

  II

  This my secret place. My green, green holy place, inside this circle of red cedar trees, next to that big-leaf maple with moss that clings to it like smooth green skin.

  Even the ground is green and covered with leaves, leaves my teacher Miss Dubois say is called oxalis. I put one of the leaves in my mouth and taste its juicy sour, then rub the green softness into my wrinkled skin.

  “One day these wrinkles be gone and my skin be smooth and soft as these leaves. One day it will,” I sing into the ears of licorice ferns and salmonberry. Then I lay down to dream on a wild ginger blanket, my smooth, soft second green skin.

  A woman comes down the road toward me, a small black bag in one hand. Her eyes are knives and she is not smiling. Behind her is a bright gray cloud. It is raining white balls, but she is not wet. The woman’s arms reach for me, brown and unwrinkled. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. I turn from her and run toward the black lake. The woman is behind me, running. She is fast, almost faster than me. I run to the edge of the lake, look back at her reaching hands, her mouth opened like an 0.1 jump.

  The water’s coolness soothes me, then starts to burn. I call for help, but she is the only one there, standing, waiting at the edge. My head slips below the surface. I scream as I go down.

  “Wake up, girl. What’s wrong with you?”

  I open my eyes and see Sin-Sin standing over me. He’s the color of that stone Miss Dubois got on her desk, Brazilian agate. His skin so bright it shines.

  “What are you doing in my secret place, Sin-Sin?”

  “This ain’t your secret place,” Sin-Sin say. “It ain’t nobody’s secret place cause it ain’t even no secret. I walk around back here all the time. So does Blue.”

  “I never saw neither one of you down here before and I always come down here.”

  “Well, so do we. What you doing falling asleep out in the woods, girl? Don’t you know all kinds of things be
out here waiting on somebody like you?”

  Sin-Sin ain’t but fourteen, so I know he don’t have to talk like I ain’t got good sense.

  “Ain’t nuthin out here waiting on me no more than it waiting on you. How come you walking around down here?” I ask.

  “To get away from my mama,” he say.

  “What you want to get away from Miss Dubois for? She nice.”

  “That’s cause she ain’t your mama. She was, you’d be running down here hiding, too.”

  “I wish my mama was a schoolteacher,” I say.

  “That’s cause you ain’t never lived with a schoolteacher mama before, that’s all. Once you get a taste of all the books she make you read, you be glad you got the mama you got.”

  “Miss Marius my mama.”

  “That right? I thought she Lucille and Lucinda’s mama.”

  “She is, sort of. She our mama, too: me and Wilhelmina and MC and Douglass, she our mama, too.”

  “Your mamas left all of you for Miss Marius to keep?” he ask.

  “Uh huh,” I say back.

  “You’re lucky. Mamas are hard on you, making you work all the time around the house, and read all the time and study figures and wash your hands fore you come in the kitchen and always wanting you to clean your ears. And they don’t want you to talk like you want to talk. I wish mine would leave me with Miss Marius.”

  “Miss Marius alright. I can’t stand Lucille. Always act like a razor in her mouth,” I say.

  “She’s big. Don’t nobody mess with Lucille.”

  “I told her she a lie, right to her face,” I say.

  “You did?”

  “Yep.”

  “That must be why you hiding in the woods. Lucille gonna get you good for saying that.”