Like Sisters on the Homefront Read online

  “Yeah, I can read.”

  Gayle hoped Great would come to life and say something snappy to make Uncle look like an overstuffed turkey. Her great-grandmother lay peacefully unaware of everything.

  Uncle Luther left the room marching. He want you to know he come and gone. When the thunder passed, Great’s eyelids rolled up.

  “He gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Gayle sat the baby on the rug and put the basin on the nightstand. “So you just faking? Oughta be ’shamed of yourself.”

  Gayle believed Miss Great would have laughed but laughing strained her stomach. She did smile though.

  “I made up that recipe,” Gayle said. “Here it is.”

  “Won’t be long ’fore it’s ready,” Great said, giving a weak inspection, which consisted mainly of feeling the mason jar. “Set it down in the bureau there. Ain’t no’n get to it.”

  “That thing won’t kill you, will it?” Gayle asked.

  “Naw,” Great said. “It won’t have much kick. By the time it ferment I’ll be gone to glory. I want a taste is all.” She wrapped her fingers around the jar. Gayle noted that the long fingers were much like her own.

  José crawled to her sneaker. Gayle bent down and lifted him up onto her lap.

  “I can’t believe Mama used to make this.”

  “Ruth Bell and that Ginny girl. Those two rascals. If Little Luther ever knowed they made it for me he’d have a natural fit.”

  Gayle felt Miss Great was in the talking mood. She propped her up with the pillows.

  “D’ain all they made. Ruthie made the love potion to put in Luther’s food for Ginny—them being close, like sisters.”

  “Whut?”

  “Now, Luther was much older than Ginny and didn’t see her as nothing more than his baby sister’s playmate. He was expected to marry a preacher’s daughter from Baker and unite the two churches. But Ginny loved herself some Luther and meant to have him for her own.”

  “What happened? Miss Auntie slugged it out with that Baker gal?”

  Great shook her head. “Ruthie’d have Ginny over to supper and sit her in front of Luther while he ate. Luther start to get a little hot under the collar. Never knew what hit him.”

  “Granny, you pulling my chain. No such thing as love potion.”

  “I’ve made potions, healings, salves . . .” Great chanted. “Anything God plant got power to heal. I’m tellin you. Better get what I know. . . . What Mammy Gates knowed. And her before her and so on to the root. We got the healing. We got the healing,” she said, trancelike.

  Gayle repeated it to herself. “We got the healing. We got the healing.”

  Great’s eyelids flickered. Gayle had to keep her talking.

  “Why don’t Miss Auntie make that potion? Uncle Luther could use some.”

  “Was Ruthie had the right sense of things,” Great said with a spurt of energy. “’Sides, with Ginny you had to write things out for. Measure precisely. Ruthie, I could say ‘a bit’ or ‘some’ and she’d feel it out. Ginny was just there keeping the secret.”

  “Do I got the right sense?” Gayle asked, looking at her long fingers. “How’ll I know when the recipe’s ready?”

  “It’ll ferment. Change colors. I’ll take some on the first change. Won’t last for the second.”

  “How’ll I know the first change?”

  “Got eyes, ain’t you?”

  It didn’t take long to tire out Great. Sometimes Great was lively, telling her stories. Then she’d seem peacefully weary, ready to slip away. Gayle wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle Luther sat at her bed ordering her to die so he could add her bones to the bone patch out front. Good old Great. She probably was hanging on just to have her peach liquor and spite Uncle Luther.

  “Miss Great, you all right,” Gayle said.

  She opened the bottom drawer to the wooden bureau. A strong cedar smell escaped. The drawer hadn’t been opened in years. She put the recipe jar in the drawer and closed it quietly. Then she collected her son and went downstairs to the kitchen. Cookie had made a sandwich and said she was going upstairs to sit with Great.

  “I don’t get it. Every time I go up there, you, Uncle, or Miss Auntie be sitting at Great’s bed watching. Not lifting a finger to clean or feed her but yawl be scoping.”

  Cookie took a healthy bite of her sandwich, chewed, then answered. “Great gotta Tell before she dies.”

  “Tell what?” Gayle asked.

  “The family history,” Cookie said.

  “Maybe she wrote it down somewhere.”

  “Oh no,” Cookie said. “She’d never do that. Someone’s been doing the Telling since we got here, adding more as it goes along. It’s like talking to our ancestors.”

  “I’m sorry, but that sounds creepy. Talking to those dead folks planted in the yard like rutabagas.”

  Cookie laughed at Gayle. “Cousin, it’s who we are.”

  “Unh-unh. We alive. They dead,” Gayle stated flatly. “If you ask me it’s stupid. What if Great got hit by a car before she could Tell. Then what?”

  “It’s supposed to be done by talking,” Cookie insisted.

  “How you know Great’s not senile? Out of all yawl I like her best, but she can’t tell me from my mama—and me and Mama don’t even favor. How she s’posed to tell you something ’bout hundreds of years ago?”

  “Great has it. She told me. When the time is right she’ll do the Telling.”

  “And that’s why yawl be guarding her bed—so she could say your great-great-grandpappy be planted next to your great-great-grandmammy?”

  “Cousin, our past is in the Telling. Yours too.”

  “Zat all? I’ll save yawl the trouble. Once we was slaves then we got free, ran the white folks out the big house, and took over—teach them who not to mess with. End of story.”

  Cookie laughed at Gayle’s rendition.

  “Surprise you to know we shared this house with the white folks? Um-hm. When the Union soldiers killed off the master, Great-great-great-grandma Mahalia hid and raised the master’s son. He grew up and took Mahalia’s baby girl for his wife and we’ve been in this house ever since.”

  “You lie.”

  “It’s in the family history,” Cookie said.

  “So you saying we got white blood?”

  “Now, Cousin Gayle, look in the mirror,” Cookie said.

  Gayle sucked her teeth. She could have done without that bit of family history.

  Cookie added, “We’re direct from Africa too, now. If you read Mama’s papers you’d know about the two sisters from Senegal. But like everyone else we got some Indian, some white, but mostly us. You should read the family history, Cousin. That way you can share it with José when he is older. We all know the history. But the one who Tells is the one who holds hands with the past. The past keeps us alive.” Cookie was doing a recitation for the school play. Miss Auntie was her drama coach.

  Gayle was not interested in the past. Specially not no slavery—though those potions and healing plants sounded interesting. But she had no desire to link hands with the ancestors. They were in the ground where they belonged.

  “I’m the one,” Cookie said short of a boast.

  “One what?”

  “The one she going to Tell.”

  “How do you know?” Gayle said, almost laughing at Cookie’s pride and sincerity. Cookie cared so much about the slave days, but she didn’t care about what she looked like in kneesocks.

  “Great said Mama gonna throw in a book for the whole world to forget. Papa gonna change it to suit the gospel according to Luther. That leaves me to Tell.”

  “And what you gonna do with it? Carry it to your deathbed ’fore spitting it out? So stupid. Over a couple of cabbages planted in the front yard and an old slave house.”

  Cookie laughed off her cousin’s ignorance and took her sandwich up to Great’s room.

  “Cookie’s out of luck if she thinks Great’s Telling. Great ain’t Telling no one nothing. Know
how I know?”

  José patted her mouth.

  “’Cause Great stubborn like you and me.”

  11

  “A WHOLE THREE HOURS in church. Can you believe that?”

  José kicked his legs, anticipating falling baby powder from above. He clapped, signaling “Me! Me!” as his mother dashed powder down her orange minidress.

  “If God everywhere, why can’t we pray at home when we feel like it?” She stuffed one last diaper in her shoulder bag, then snapped it shut. “Just answer me that, little man.”

  Her aunt entered the room carrying a long gray-blue dress and a white slip. “Morning, sweetie,” she said, laying the dress out on the bed.

  Gayle glanced at her aunt, then at the dress and slip. Auntie, ya buggin’. For real.

  Miss Auntie cleared her throat. “I said good morning.”

  “G’mornin,” she said to her aunt, who was outfitted in an ivory suit, red pumps, and a summer brim—with a feather, no less. She then glared at the dirt-kissing dress spread out on her bed, its doofy Peter Pan collar and lifeless gray shade. “What’s that?”

  “Your church dress,” Miss Auntie replied coolly.

  “Already got one on,” Gayle told her aunt.

  Miss Auntie stared down her blunt nose at Gayle’s bright orange dress. “No, sweetie. That is not a church dress.”

  “It’s the style,” Gayle whined.

  “I know what it is,” Miss Auntie said. “And I know where it’s not going.” She gave Gayle five minutes to change into the gray-blue dress.

  Gayle stepped into the slip, hoping to tear it. She “accidentally” dropped the linen dress, then kicked it up off the floor. She caught it and balled it up, wanting Miss Auntie to start a fight so that she would be left at home.

  “You don’t want to look like you just rolled out of bed, do you, sweetie?”

  Before Gayle could answer, Great’s Sunday nurse, Miss Foster, appeared in the threshold, glasses on the tip of her nose. “Mercy, baby! Go’n down the hall and show your great-grandma the old dress still got it.”

  Gayle sucked her teeth. “I knew it. Dress a hundred years old.”

  Gayle watched her relatives spring to life as they pulled into the pastor’s very own parking space. Especially Miss Auntie, who seemed to grow another three inches on top of her skyscraping self. Miss Auntie lovingly wrapped her arm around her niece and grandnephew, as if she wasn’t responsible for having Gayle look like Mammy Yokum, and proceeded with the tour.

  “Here is the first brick your grandpa and Great-grandpa Luther laid into the foundation of Freedom Gate Church. Here is the stump from the field where Great-great-grandpa Luther preached during slavery. They had it transplanted, you know. Here is the opened gate, our family symbol . . .”

  Don’t she know this baby heavy?

  Hip shifting, eyeball rolling, and heavy sighing did not deter Miss Auntie from conducting her tour. Gayle was relieved that services were about to begin, so she could sit down.

  Uncle Luther was installed on his throne, looking out at his kingdom. The house was packed with high-spirited churchgoers who lived, lived for this day.

  Cookie sat in the choir pew, another pecan-pie face in a blue satin robe. She smiled in Gayle’s direction.

  Think she cute. Only reason she up there, her daddy’s the pastor.

  Two hours fifty-eight minutes to go. During the first prayer she asked that the music be thumping and the choir be jumping. That Uncle Luther wouldn’t preach too long and that Miss Auntie wouldn’t try to push her up on stage when the call for sinners sounded.

  Same people fall out calling “Save me, Jesus” be acting up all over again Monday to Saturday, thinking they foolin’ God like He don’t have two eyes. That’s why you’ll never see me jumping up screaming, “Save me, Jesus.” I likes cussing and fussing and kicking up dirt, and God knows it.

  “Say what, sweetie?”

  “Huh? I ain’t said nothing.”

  The service moved slowly. Gayle bounced José on her knees to soothe him until Miss Auntie made her stop. How was she going to get through church without a cigarette or gum?

  After nearly an hour of preliminaries, Uncle Luther rose from his throne and ascended the pulpit. Heads leaned forward to receive The Word. When he spoke his voice boomed, filling every corner of Freedom Gate. This is what God must sound like, Gayle thought. Like he could send a flood bursting through the pews.

  Cookie was right. Uncle Luther could preach! Wasn’t even halfway into the sermon and people were falling out with the hallelujahs. When he pointed from the pulpit, his finger dug into your chest. When he hurled his question down into the congregation, he meant to be answered. And if the response from the congregation didn’t resound loudly enough, sincerely enough, he’d go back to the cannon and fire off that question until someone was on his feet—hallelujah—with the right testimony.

  Gayle would just as soon keep her testimony to herself. The only exclamation that she felt forthcoming did not belong in church.

  José caught the spirit. He threw his hands in the air, smacked his mother in the face, and hollered with all his power. Before Gayle could reach into her shoulder bag for a bottle or a pacifier, a woman usher reached over her and scooped José from her arms. Gayle lunged forward to grab her baby, but Auntie pinned her down.

  “He’s going to the nursery. Sister Walker will keep him.”

  “They can’t just snatch my baby.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Aunt Virginia said quietly. “He can play, get fed and changed. Now hush.”

  Gayle turned, trying to follow the woman who had marched off with her son. All she caught was the woman’s tail so high off the ground it seemed to smack her in the back as she clomped down the aisle in her white marshmallow wedges. José wasn’t complaining. In fact, he was trying to gum the baby snatcher’s neck when he ought to be wailing for his mama like his sun and stars had been torn from the sky.

  Who she think she is snatching my baby?

  It was one thing to pass José off on the homegirls when she got tired of him, but having José ripped from her arms made her face burn.

  “Gayle Ann, turn around,” her aunt whispered.

  Gayle wanted to sink down in the hot pit where her anger pulled her, but Miss Auntie was right there stroking her hand. Then the choir rose in unison. They marched out from the choir chamber in perfectly timed step-bops until all were in place. They formed a wave of blue satin, swaying, moaning softly over the accompaniment of the organ. Cookie now stood apart from the magnificent blue, and took the microphone. With eyes closed and head tilted back, she proceeded to wash over the hot pit where Gayle sank. Gayle resisted Cookie with all her jealous anger, but could not fight the feeling of being lifted by song.

  Was that Cookie? Causing all of that?

  “Miss Auntie,” she whispered, “why Cookie ain’t said she could sing?”

  “Sweetie, the Lord didn’t bless Cookie’s voice so she could brag. No. That would be falling to pride, and you know who fell to pride.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gayle lied.

  When the service ended, Gayle raised her hand—hallelujah!—truly glad it was over. She shot straight up thinking about the door, the mob, bumming a smoke, then getting her baby. Before she could make a move Miss Auntie grabbed hold of her. “Let me take you around, sweetie. Your mother’s friends would love to meet you.”

  Gayle wasn’t in any hurry to meet them. Especially the way they stole glances of her face for their “that’s the one” gossip. As if Gayle cared.

  “Ginny! Ginny!” called one such starer. “And who might this young lady be?”

  “Paulette, dear. How are you? Surely you remember Ruth Bell. This is her daughter, Gayle Ann, visiting from New York.”

  “Your mother and I went to high school together. Sang in the choir.”

  Gayle recognized her from the choir, the way her voice pushed itself forward trying to rise above the sopranos. Gave her a headache.

  G
ayle said, “Yeah, that’s nice,” but it came off like “Beat it, old bag.” Auntie felt it and yanked her arm.

  “I expect to see you in the choir, young lady,” the woman said.

  “I don’t sang,” Gayle said.

  “How can that be?” Paulette gasped, which seemed put on to Gayle. “You’re Ruth Bell’s baby girl. Singing genes like that don’t just die out.”

  Gayle could really care less. All these people saying how Mama could sing when Mama hated music. Mama always went through the house turning radios off, worried to death about her electric bill.

  “I wanna get my baby.”

  “Your baby? How old are you, child? Can’t be more than ten, eleven.”

  “Get glasses, lady. I’m old enough.”

  She felt Miss Auntie’s hand tightening around her wrist. Paulette sped off to the gossipers, leaving Gayle to endure Miss Auntie’s wrath and pointing finger.

  In the nursery Gayle tried to be mannerly to Miss Auntie’s friends. One of them turned to Miss Auntie and whispered, “Country, ain’t she?” Miss Auntie poked the lady. Gayle took José and left the nursery. She knew what the giggling was about. All those black folks from Georgia spoke proper Southern like Miss Auntie. They weren’t at all impressed that she was from New York. They all thought like Uncle Luther, who had said at the dinner table, “Blacks in Georgia snatched up opportunities when the crumbs were falling. Only opportunities for blacks in New York is in the street, then six feet under.”

  There he stood, Uncle Luther, every inch the man of God, greeting his congregation. When he caught sight of her standing thirty feet away with child on hip, he turned his back.

  She found Cookie with the other choir members.

  “Sang yo ass off, dincha?”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Cookie said, not looking directly at Gayle.

  What? Cookie was supposed to turn a shade of purple, correct her language, or shush her because God was listening. Cookie wasn’t even there. Too busy searching over her cousin’s head. She nodded absently and smiled as a cluster of people praised her voice.

  Gayle looked around to see who or what had put that dazed expression on Cookie’s face.