Memphis: A Novel(2)

Now Wolf stuck her thick head covered in gray fur out the van window and growled, low. She sensed the front door opening before we did. Just as Mama lifted a hand to knock again, the yellow door opened to reveal Auntie August. Her hair was pinned up in big pink rollers, the kind I’d seen in old pinup-girl photos, and she wore a long, cream-colored silk kimono. Embroidered along the front panels were sunset-colored cranes taking off from a green pool. The kimono appeared like it’d been tied in a rush: A beet-purple man’s necktie held the fabric haphazardly together, barely concealing the full breasts and hips aching to break from the folds. My auntie stood blinking at the bright morning light, an expression of resignation and exhaustion on her face that made her look just like Mama.

“What war y’all lost?” Auntie August asked.

My aunt looked like the taller, more regal version of Mama. Auntie August was nearly six feet tall. I had read Anansi stories. I knew that it was the women tall as trees and fiercer than God that ancient villages often sent into battle. If Mama was Helen of Troy, August was Asafo. She seemed to go on forever, seemed to be the height of the door itself. She had hips, the kind Grecian sculptors would spend months chiseling, big and bold and wide. Her skin was noticeably darker, darker than mine even, and I felt a welt of pride. I had always coveted darker-skinned women their color. There was a mystery to their beauty that I found hypnotizing, Siren-like. They were hardly ever in Jet or Ebony or Essence, the magazines we subscribed to, unless they themselves were famous—the mom from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Joyner, Oprah. Most of the Black women the public pronounced beautiful looked like Mama. Black Barbies. Bright. Hair wavier than curly. Petite figures. So, when my Auntie August opened that door, and I saw that her skin was so dark it reflected all the other colors surrounding it—the yellow of the morning light, the yellow of the door, the peach tan of the calico cat weaving in and out of Mya’s short legs—I knew that the aunt I could barely remember was, in and of herself, a small, delicious miracle.

“Got any food in the fridge?” Mama asked.

August opened the door wider, taking in the spectacle before her. “Is the pope Catholic?”

Mama shrugged.

I could hear Wolf growl again over the hum and buzz of the bees and the hummingbirds.

“My word,” August said in a whisper then. “Did it get that bad?”

“I’ll take my old room if I can have it,” Mama said.

Auntie August fumbled into the deep silk folds of her kimono, her face momentarily scrunched in mild annoyance. Like she had an itch she couldn’t quite reach. From out of her robe’s pocket came the unmistakable green-and-white packaging of a pack of Kools, and the relief was visible in Auntie August’s face. That pack of smokes. I felt a pang, sharp in my ribs, like one of them was missing. Daddy had smoked Kools. Would religiously pull out the green-and-white carton and smack it against his knee a few times before removing and lighting a cigarette and asking if Mya and I wanted to hear another ghost story.

In a series of deft movements, August removed a cigarette and positioned a lighter in her other hand, ready to strike. She motioned with her cigarette, first at Mya, then at me. “And them girls?” Her glance seemed to rest longer on me than on Mya.

“Together. In the quilting room,” Mama said, with a sharpness to her voice that almost sounded defensive, but with something else there I couldn’t place.

August, with the quickness of a serpent, reached out her hand and grasped Mama’s chin in her palm, turned her face this way and that.

“The foundation don’t match,” she said.

Auntie August lost her swagger then. A flash of rage quickly turned to tears, and her face broke down like Mya’s when she was told not to open her graham crackers directly in the grocery store. August reached for Mama, and all near six feet of August collapsed, leaned like a weary palm tree into her sister’s arms.

“What hell you been through, Meer?” August asked, sobbing into Mama’s hair.

“Mama, who them?”

The voice was male. Not adult, but on the crisp cusp of it, burgeoning with masculinity. It shocked us. We hadn’t heard a male voice in days except for Al Green’s over the radio and that white man at the gas station a half day’s drive back. It was like a predator had suddenly announced its presence in our new safe haven.

A boy, almost as tall as August but with a body slender and young, stepped into the doorframe, blocking the entry.

He didn’t look like us. He didn’t have the high cheekbones, the slightly upturned top lip, the massive forehead everyone else related to me had. He had a copper hue to his skin that seemed slightly foreign to me, like meeting someone from an entirely different tribe.

But I recognized him. My cousin Derek. And in that split second, I also remembered what he had done to me—a memory I’d forgotten after all these years suddenly coming for me with a force I was powerless to stop.

“Derek,” Auntie August said, exhaling her cigarette, “these here your cousins. That’s Mya,” she said, pointing with her cigarette. “Mya was a newborn last y’all was here. And that there is Joan.”

“Derek, you as tall as your mama. How old are you now?” Mama asked.

“Fifteen,” he said and puffed out his chest.

“A man almost,” Mama said, quiet.