Jilo (Witching Savannah #4)(2)
Opal looked like her mother, except for the unfortunate addition of his ears. Poppy was the dead ringer of his mama, who in her youth had been as beautiful as Betty, maybe even more so seeing as how his mama’s beauty never relied on any manmade artifice. The little one, squirming in her big sister Opal’s arms, didn’t resemble any of them. And still, he loved her as surely as he did the ones who bore his likeness.
The sun was heading up in the sky, and the fresh heat it brought was unforgiving. His starched white shirt felt like a plaster cast, what with the sweat that ringed his underarms and banded the back of his shoulders where the garment pulled tight. “You keep Jilo in the shade,” he called out, and Opal moved out of the sun, taking shelter beneath the canopy of an ancient live oak.
Betty had it right, of course—he could forgive her infidelity; in truth, he could forgive her for just about anything. He loved that headstrong woman to her core. Besides, she still had the power to make him stop dead in his tracks and stare after her, just like that day he’d first laid eyes on her in Atlanta, outside her daddy’s store where he’d worked while putting himself through school. For her part, Betty hadn’t shown much interest in him until her daddy out-and-out forbade the courtship. If they took up together, her daddy had shouted out loud enough for the entire city to hear, she’d be marrying poorer. She’d be marrying darker. She’d be marrying down. Still, take up with each other they did, and one fine morning around twelve years back, Jesse and the then fifteen-year-old Betty eloped, leaving Atlanta behind and settling in Savannah, where Jesse himself had been raised.
“Forty acres and a mule,” a cousin of his called out, then laughed, making Jesse realize how far his thoughts had drifted from his nana’s burial. The knowing chuckles from those gathered told him he wasn’t the only one who wished the preacher would be done with his business. Pastor Jones was still talking, but that wasn’t going to stop the rest of them from eulogizing Nana Tuesday in their own way.
Jesse had missed whatever prompted his cousin’s comment, but that phrase would always make him think of his nana. “Forty acres and a mule,” she’d shout out in those moments when the distant past grew sharper in focus than the everyday world around her. “That’s what they promised us, forty acres and a mule.” Then she’d laugh, as if she found humor in her own youthful naiveté.
The buckra cursed William Tecumseh Sherman as the Yankee devil who’d burned a swath through the South, torching everything right up to Savannah’s back door, then giving the city to his president as a Christmas present. To the newly freed people like Nana Tuesday, Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 must have made him seem like the second coming of Christ himself. Old No. 15 granted the freedmen ownership of a good bit of the South Carolina coast. Other promises granted them the Sea Islands from Seabrook to Cumberland.
Even today, nearly seventy years later, the white folk around here still cursed Sherman for his fiery march, but the promises Sherman made to Jesse’s people barely lasted a full trip around the sun. No. 15 was overturned before Lincoln was cold in his grave, and any land that hadn’t been purchased outright by the former slaves was returned to the hands of their erstwhile masters. Nana had spent pretty near her whole darned life in Yamacraw, the area just south of the river and west of West Broad Street, but the only land she’d ever owned was the dirt left on her shoes by Yamacraw’s dusty lanes.
Now, the rich whites were nibbling away at the Sea Islands, or in some cases trying to swallow them whole like that Coffin fellow did twenty years back with Sapelo. Just stepped in and bought up every inch the black folk there couldn’t prove they owned. Even built his mansion over the foundation of the old slave master Spalding’s house. Jesse had to wonder if it was possible to build your home on the same foundation without fostering the same ambition in your heart.
The sound of Betty clicking her tongue caught his attention. “Cups and spoons and broken plates,” she started in again, shaking her head as she surveyed his family. “These people done brought half the kitchen out here. She getting buried, not setting up house. She ain’t got no more use for these things where she done gone.”
“It’s my people’s way.”
“Well, y’all people got some mighty funny ways,” she said, as if she were a disapproving stranger, not a woman who’d made her home among them for a dozen years.
Jesse’s family didn’t keep up too much with the old ways, at least not here on the mainland. They seemed to have two separate ways of living, two distinct languages, the one bound to the “sweet” water of the mainland, the other seeming to spring from the salt water that cocooned the islands. In their everyday lives, they were so careful, so intent on avoiding behavior that might draw the white man’s attention, or worse, his ire. But they were so much freer on rare visits to Daufuskie or St. Helena, and their speech buzzed with words remembered from tongues spoken clean on the other side of the ocean. Jesse had enjoyed explaining his family’s customs to Betty early on in their marriage, but he had realized he would never be able to surmount her contempt for their traditions. Now he repeated the same tired explanation he’d given her many times over the years. “These things were special to Nana. Things she used. Bits and pieces of her life. They’re memorials, nothing more. You know that.”
“What I know is that it don’t matter one whit what people put on your grave if you weren’t right with Jesus when you died. It’s too late for that old gal now. This here heat is proof enough of where she went. We need to finish putting her in the ground and get on with things.”