I never saw no action. We just loaded ammo from the cargo ships to the carrier. Port Chicago.
Well, Gracie said. Maybe white folks will give you a second chance.
George looked at her. No, he said. If anybody get the chance, it’ll be these two boys here. He nodded at Lucifer and John.
Boy? Who you callin boy? We men.
George, they don’t want to talk bout no war, Inez said. White folks is goofy.
But George foretold. Almost a year to the day the four said their wedding vows, John and Lucifer would be shipped off.
JOHN POUNDED THE SCREEN so hard it bounced against the doorframe. For an entire week, he visited her, bringing roses and rosy talk. The bottom fell out of the sky, coating throats and lungs with a foot of dust. Then the summer rain washed away all heat and dust. Flowers freshened the air with their scent.
The congregation lifted and crashed a swell of voices.
I go forward for my God
I go forward for my King
I go forward for my Lord
I go forward
Sheila, I think I love this boy.
Gracie thought Sheila would reply in kind, I think I love Lucifer. What we gon do? She didn’t. Speak to Father Tower, she said. She called all preachers Father, a carryover from her Catholic schooling in Memphis.
Gracie did. Reverend Tower was a tall, built man. His arms were too short to box with God but had the right thickness of power to last a good round or two.
Gracie first reviewed her life in the Truth. Spoke about her three years of power and her sudden, unexplained loss of it. How she’d read the Bible trying to get it back.
I see, Reverend Tower said. He frowned down upon his desk, as if Gracie’s story was a puzzling fossil.
Reverend Tower, she said, how come God don’t show himself to us?
Sistah McShan, Reverend Tower said, niggas today got too much pride. They can’t bow low enough.
Gracie continued to relate her life story. Talked and talked.
Sistah McShan, come right to the point, Reverend Tower said. I beg you. Storytelling doesn’t like idle talk.
Should I stoop so low as to marry this boy? Gracie asked.
Sistah McShan, pride is the root of all evil, the termite that eats away at the tree of life. Only the Lord walks water with dry feet.
Reverend Tower didn’t live to hear the wedding vows. The day of the double ceremony, Gracie walked in a narrow lane of faces she knew or had seen in passing or had heard in hearsay — just as she could hear her slow feet and the white silence of her gown beneath the organ’s roar — for it seemed that all of Woodlawn was there, and nobody walked the thick red-carpeted aisle — so thick, you stepped carefully, lest you sink your footing — of the Mount Zion Baptist Church with dry feet, for Lula Mae (up from West Memphis), Beulah (up from Decatur), Big Judy and Koot (up from Fulton), Sam and Dave, Inez, George and Pappa Simmons, Dallas, Ernie, Spider, and Spokesman all bowed their heads like dripping trees and kept up a steady flow of tears. Surrounded by the glow of roses, even the organist cried.
Gracie and Sheila clenched their muscles against the hidden voices of the church. Marriage don’t stop gossip. And they ran and ran and ran, so the church eyes and voices couldn’t keep up — John was fast; he could snatch flies out of the air, could turn off the light switch and be in bed before the room went dark — especially the twenty-four eyes of the Deacon Twelve. The four newlyweds moved into a two-bedroom apartment, Sixty-first Street and Kenwood. Woodlawn. Sight limited to red, yellow, and green streetlights and, further off, the El scaffolding, trains passing like banners over the tracks, chewing and spitting rails. The apartment that would see John and Lucifer off to war.
GRACIE, JOHN SAID. He stroked her bangs and slick feather waves of hair. My Gracie.
John, you a natural-born fool.
They danced, John spinning her body, pulling her thighs and hips into tighter circles. The boards of the floor began to flex and squeak. He was above her — though she stood a head taller than him — and she could bury her face in the pillow of his scalp if she so choosed. She was lost somewhere, deep beneath the surface of her body, swimming away from her previous life. She allowed herself to be carried away by the sweep of blood.
The danger increased with her increasing belly. Hundreds of threads streamed out from her navel. She was so weak it took her half an hour to reach the bottom of the circular staircase.
John, my stomach hurt.
John opened his eyes. Sit down. Right here.
The black willing blood of the baby bubbled inside her. Her umbilical cord popped electric life, a telephone that transmitted the infant’s threats: I’m gon fuck you up. Gracie laid her hands on her belly, and felt the baby kicking the hard table of her stomach, its hot hatred sending spark-filled smoke streaming up through the coils of her intestines. She felt it, a lump of clay that had squeezed into her. And so it looked, a totally smooth face, cause someone had forgotten to punch in the eyes and had punched everything else too small, a pinhole nose and mouth.
Where the rest of it? John said.
At the funeral for the second unborn (John believing that burying this one would make him feel easier inside), John’s unseen words sizzled in the air while he watched the first clumps of dirt that thudded on the lunchbox-size coffin. You rotten inside. Polluted. And she remembered how she had felt earlier, at Cookie’s funeral, John standing beside her, his arms tight around her shoulders to keep her from sinking into the mud.
Cookie’s free now, Beulah said. She ain’t gon suffer no mo. Up there in God’s heaven.
Sho hope it ain’t St. Peter’s heaven, Sam said. He balanced on his three legs. Cause if it is, hope she brought an extra wing.
ONCE THE BABIES PINNED GRACIE IN THE STREET, between two rows of identical buildings, two lines of identical trees, one baby at each corner, stop sign-red. Their hands caressed switchblades. She screamed for help. The buildings watched her flight. Heads stuck out windows then drew back. Windows fell like guillotines.
ONCE JOHN SLAMMED TO A SKIDDING HALT to keep from running a deerlike baby down. What was that? he said.
A baby.
What?
She explained.
He drew back, as if she had shoved the stinking child in his chest. From then on, she remained silent about the attacks, fearing that any utterance would embalm her in her own words. Instead, she spoke about the ghosts of former times, a thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girl working miracles.
Can you still do it?
She gave him a tight look.
I mean, did you grow out of it or something?
Do you ever grow out of being yourself? One forever hears the calling.
John chuckled. That was some racket. We sure could use the bread.
She gave him a leather look, lest she knock him upside the head with her Bible. And he would come to learn, power was untouched by the test of water and time. She could tell John where he was and who he was with to the exact minute, to the number of thrusts it took to make some nasty woman come.
Once, in the middle of downtown Central, a baby began spreading its wings, flapping, and she, taloned, began lifting into the air, three feet high and rising. Luckily two kind pedestrians had the courage to grab one leg each and pull her back to the earth. (Since that day, she never left the house without her steel shank boots or fortified heels.) Enough was enough. She phoned Sheila.
Well, Sheila said. Put a glass of water beside all the doors and windows, then—