Chapter 1 #3
“Hmph! They was about your age, trying something sort of like what Rosa just pulled.” She laughed a dry, husky laugh.
“I’d expect y’all’s generation to be up to some tomfoolery.
But this?” Shaking her head, she laughed that dry-as-summertime laugh again, but with something sounding like pride mixed in.
“Can’t say I blame her. I credit her for doing what she did.
We gets tired of being the ones always giving.
Dying. Just August they took that little Emmett and did awful things to him like he didn’t belong to nobody.
” She shivered at the cruelty inflicted on a boy from Chicago, younger than me, who was brutally murdered while visiting relatives down in Mississippi.
We sat saying nothing, until she continued, voice brightening.
“Lord, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when ol’ Parks learns what his sweet wife done. ”
“Yes, ma’am.” My thoughts were so hooked on what had just happened that my response sounded flat.
Colored folks’ pushing back wasn’t a new notion to me.
We might’ve been subtle with it most days.
That didn’t mean we didn’t find ways to thumb our noses at Jim Crow living.
Now, Miz Rosa’s actions? I couldn’t put a finger on it, but something about what I’d witnessed felt drastic.
Frighteningly heroic. Like maybe I’d been privy to change in the making.
Thinking on Miz Rosa, I forgot about myself and what I was running to or from. When I finally refocused, that bus was nearly empty and just about to head back the way we’d come.
“Oh, Lord…”
Thankfully, I signaled my need to get off in time enough for my stop. With a mess of anxiousness piling up in my throat, I just about tumbled outdoors into that December evening with nothing but my suitcase and uncertainty keeping me company.
Which way is it?
“Look for that split tree standing all by itself next to that sunflower field. That narrow road running alongside it takes you all the way to her place.”
That was the best Sadie could do seeing as how Miss Celestine didn’t have a proper address living way out here off of the back end of Hayneville Road in what my Louisiana family would’ve called “The Cut-Off” with all its shot houses, or speakeasies, and other less than suitable establishments.
Besides questionable businesses, wasn’t much else around here but fields.
A creek. A grove of trees that, in the descending dark, seemed close to creepy.
I didn’t scare easily. My acting, in Mama’s words, too bold was partly to blame for my being out there alone looking for Miss Celestine’s.
Being bold at home was one thing. Walking a dirt road in the semi-dark made me wish I was somebody’s innocent lap baby snuggled safely.
But I wasn’t an infant. And far from innocent.
I didn’t mean to touch Edward… or let him touch me.
I hadn’t meant to do half the things we’d done until I was good, grown, and married. But I did. He did. Now, we had things to fix. Rather, I was taking it upon myself to handle the fixing.
Edward doesn’t need to know my business.
That’s why I was out there surrounded by high grass and weeds, clutching a suitcase, and keeping an eye out for critters and snakes instead of studying at Sadie’s.
Not only was I too bold, I was too nosey.
Thank God. Otherwise, last night, I might’ve missed overhearing Doctor and Miz Stanton discussing Edward’s coming home from college for Christmas break this weekend.
Three whole weeks early, because of a broken leg!
I’d needed every one of those weeks to figure out what to do about my monthly flow disappearing.
“Dearest, he’ll handle getting back and forth to class on crutches. If that proves tedious, the infirmary made a wheelchair available. Edward’ll manage fine until Christmas vacation.”
I couldn’t have agreed more with Doc Stanton.
Leave it to Miz Stanton to object. True southern belle, she couldn’t tolerate the idea of her precious boy experiencing the slightest discomfort. His sister Abigail was two years younger, making Edward the oldest chronologically, but he was definitely his mama’s baby.
“Baby…”
For the first time, I allowed that word to slip across my lips, whispering as if afraid of its power, portent. I also knew it would be the last utterance when I saw the shadowy outline of a small house in the distance. The sight of it left me shivering.
Sadie said Miss Celestine won’t hurt me.
Soothing my mind with that yet-to-be-proven fact, I paused in the middle of a weed-infested path to consider the split tree that looked like it should’ve fallen long ago but was somehow standing.
It was wider, taller up close than it appeared from the roadway.
Some folks said God meant to lightning-strike Miss Celestine for dancing naked in the rain but had mercy at the last second and struck that tree instead.
Others said the tree broke down the middle and bled with the weight of too many Colored bodies lynched from its limbs.
Whichever was true, that split and twisted-looking tree might as well have been one of the white-gloved ushers at church ordering me along as if I had no say and couldn’t choose an alternate direction.
A small creek ran alongside the path like Sadie said. Should’ve been some comfort in seeing that child knew what she was talking about for once, but it wasn’t. The farther up that path I went, the less human I felt.
“She’s gentle. Efficient.” Quoting Sadie James while crossing a rickety footbridge, I knew I was desperate to be following my best friend’s advice when she’d barely even kissed a boy. What did she know about this kind of business?
According to Sadie, she’d not only overhead her brothers discussing such things, but her cousin Brenda Lee had a friend who knew a girl who’d needed Miss Celestine.
“Brenda Lee told me her friend told her that girl said Miss Celestine burns sage and lights candles and calls on the ancestors before doing her business. She packs your lady parts with healing herbs afterwards, and lets you rest a while. Then you leave. Like nothing happened.”
No hospital stay. No doctors asking Mama for more money than she made. No snooty “better thans” snubbing Mama and me because I was messed over and unmarried.
Approaching Miss Celestine’s, I was feet away from rectifying my mistakes. But the notion of deliverance didn’t keep sourness from burning the back of my throat, or sadness from swimming in my belly.
Pushing open a worn, weathered gate, I stepped into a tidy yard that seemed misplaced out there surrounded by overgrowth and wildness. Against the backdrop of Miss Celestine’s spooky-looking house that yard was last week’s spelling word: an anomaly. Meticulously kept. Cared for.
What I’d done was out of order. Anomalous.
Now, I had something inside of me that didn’t belong to a sixteen-year-old girl sharing a room with her mama in the Bible Belt, far from rich and too close to poverty.
The deeper I stepped into that yard the more I wondered though if I could care for, love, and keep the living matter within me.
Prettying up the mess I’d made wasn’t a choice for somebody in my position. Daddy was dead. Mama was a domestic and no matter if Doc and Miz Stanton treated us almost like family, that didn’t mean they wanted us to be—literally.
I’m so sorry.
Miss Celestine was the only salvation my world was offering. If I didn’t take it, shame on me.
Wiping the tears bathing my face, I headed for the wraparound porch.