Nia
The postcard caused Porsha to remember the two letters she had found in Lula Mae’s lil house. She opened her purse and searched through the contents. Receipt for the plane tickets. Boarding passes. Reverend Blunt’s business card. (She put it aside for safekeeping. You never know. It might come in handy someday.) Funeral program. (Some extra copies for friends.) Rusty horseshoes. (She would need to mount them above the doorways for good luck.)
Finally the two envelopes. Why had she kept them for herself, not revealed them to anyone else, secretly lifted them from the shoebox and slipped them down her dress and between her breasts like a thief?
She quickly removed the letter from the first envelope. (The spine had been neatly cut with a knife or opener.) The envelope was stained and faded but the letter was not, the sheet of blue-lined notebook paper whiter than white after all the years.
Dear Mamma:
Having many things to write unto you, the story of a man is lost and the story of his image loses a little interest every time it’s retold. So I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full and the story complete.
I have many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen. I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face.
Greet the kin by name.
Yours.
The second envelope was much heavier than the first. She examined every detail before opening it. Size. Shape. Texture. Color. Two spots on the triangular flap. Like eyes. (Could it be watching me? He be watching me?) R.L.’s tears? His spit?
She removed the letter from the envelope. Fine stationery. Several folded pages — as many folds as a navigation chart — all unnumbered, no heading, no subscription.
Brothers here, brothers there. Often did I think of the inhabitants of the deep much happier than myself.
Words shimmered and wavered. Folded, collapsed into one another.
To give an account of all I’ve saw, a thousand tongues would be insufficient; so please excuse my humble hand. Resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be understood.
She stared as if staring would restore the words to sight.
Though I am not present before you, my story wears an honest face. In the time of our fathers, writing was the voice of an absent person, and that absence bespoke another voice, the only voice.
She told herself out loud, How am I sposed to read this?
Read my little tale with reverence. Today, as I write it, all is quiet within me. You can see by my penmanship that I am not scribbling as I usually do. I’m not blessed like you. You could always write a pretty hand.
For a moment, she imagined that the letter was written to her.
All my life I’ve been absorbing bits of people around me. I have had business and conversation with wise folk, churchmen, laymen, fools and the like.
Her fingers dream moist on the paper.
It should be easy to follow the thread of my story.
The moist pages move with wave rhythm in her fingers.
The seams show.
Words lift on light wings and settle like colorful butterflies on common objects in the room.
Nobody can write their own life to the full end of it unless they can write it after they are dead. Some other must always judge us.
The television wavers in the distance like far-off smoke.
The pen employed in finishing my story and making it what you now see it to be has had no little difficulty putting it into language fit to be seen and read.
She sees R.L.’s one surviving photograph, the crumpled black-and-white which gives up his form, his color, his hazel eyes.
As you know I came out here for fresh fields to plough, new pastures. We martyr to motion. So here I am missing the changes of season.
She sees his long legs sheathed in shining cowboy boots.
What I have written is written. I drink this cup full to the end. And the water is sweet. I read. I think. I sleep. I read some more. God, enable me to proceed in this labor in the whole task so that when I render up at the last day an account of the talent you gave me I may receive pardon for the sake of Christ our Lord.
She looks up from the letter and sees Deathrow in her window, his face a reflection of eternal dreaming life.
SHE LEFT HUNDRED GATES for the summer’s first heat. Summer was already doing its work, for an old red ambulance, a long and low red hearse, was parked in front of the building, anxious for the sick or the dead. She drifted like a candle flame through the heated haze.
Taxi!
Where to, ma’m?
She entered the taxi to a humming air conditioner.
Where to?
She told him.
The cab pulled away under a sky that demanded to be noticed. Slow constellations wheeled overhead, fat swollen stars she had seen for twenty-eight years; none had any name or meant anything by shape or brightness or position. Thick trees bloomed on both sides of the expressway. (She’s intensely alert to trees tonight.) The air rippled like camouflage. She said his name: Deathrow. He was somewhere definite, a dot on a map. She said his name: Deathrow. If voices had legs, they could crawl into all sorts of places, unexpected, unwanted perhaps, uninvited guests, willing and hungry. Deathrow.
She settled back in speed. Monday. The past week had rushed like a torrent. The flood had forced the new Cotton Rivers to reschedule the Great Awakening for today. (The media had it that he would declare Monday the new Sabbath.) And he had moved the location from downtown south to Woodlawn, to Mount Zion Baptist Church, which Reverend Tower had built and raised, a church high enough that every lowlife on Church Street could watch it from the deep gutter, Deacon Rivers his right-hand man, his first mate who took the helm when Reverend Tower died, directed a church where he was also to die and be remembered.
The thought sends her.
One, two, three, four
Snap, snap, back, back
Put yo hands on yo hips
And let yo backbone slip
Shake it to the east
Shake it to the west
Shake it fo the one
You love the best
How many years had it been since she’d lived in Woodlawn, lived where the Stone Park Rangers and the Crazy Insane Disciples waged war with death-hard fists, sharpened switchblades — steel drinks blood in the darkness — and single-shot zip guns? She remembers, they — Uncle John and Gracie, she and Mamma and Lucifer — shared a two-bedroom apartment (or a big one-bedroom that served as two) in a courtyard building on Sixty-third and Kenwood, a cramped, cavelike apartment with batlike moths, scurrying mice, slow arrogant roaches that ran antelope-quick at the sight of Mamma’s curving broom, where the old, the original Cotton Rivers’s tall pointy church rocked across the street, the church that King Kong climbed once in broad daylight, gnatlike fighter jets pestering him, while you watched from the living-room window. When you were alone, ghosts would flit across the ceiling, bump into walls, get tangled in the curtains, and tiptoe from room to room. One night a spaceship circled the building, spinning its rainbow of interplanetary lights against the drawn shades. Little men moved against the white shade screens. You threw the bedcovers over your head. Prayed for Uncle John’s return.