Memphis: A Novel(69)

And August. Miriam saw her sister awash in vivid colors that belonged only in heaven. The cream of August’s kimono looked like the buttermilk she soaked her chicken in. Joan had even got the plume of August’s cigarette smoke just so; it looked like lace. The pale green of the Kool box was the color of a hummingbird in her sister’s hand.

Miriam turned her head to the right and froze. She saw herself. In soft pastel watercolors. In it, she lay asleep atop a thick medical book. She must have fallen asleep right at the kitchen table after a long shift. And Joanie—bless the child—must have draped that quilt over her. Must have painted away.

August moved to stand in front of her own portrait, and it was shocking to Miriam how lifelike the painting was, how Joan had captured August so perfectly.

“You asked that girl once to name you a famous artist who was a woman, who was Black.” August’s cigarette was out, but her face was set in stone. She hadn’t minded the fact that the cigarette singed her fingers. “Joan Della North. That’s who. If she has to be the first, then so be it. Because she gon’ go to that fancy school overseas, Meer. You hear me? I don’t mean no disrespect. I love you”—she lifted her arms in the air, so elegantly, like a Bolshoi ballerina reaching for something—“like the stars. And I know I shouldn’t be telling no mother how to raise her kids. But I am a mother, too. And Joan. My. They mine, too.”

August’s voice never wavered from this stoic, determined tone. But she stumbled here, just a bit, when she said, “Joan been touched by…” She couldn’t finish. Miriam knew her sister well enough to know she would not, could not mention God.

“She gon’ go to that school, Meer. If she get in, she gon’ go, and she will paint this world. Our Joanie will paint it all.”

Miriam forgot her shower. She stayed in that room, kneeling, until the sun came up. Then, she made the girls grits. Kissing them more than usual but unable even to say “good morning.” Not for lack of trying. She was still so tired. And there was laundry to do, the light bill to pay.





CHAPTER 32


Joan


2003


The storm cleared up thirty miles east of Memphis, near Mason. We’d driven east through Tennessee in heavy hail. We left our neighborhood of pecan trees and Stanley’s deli and saw cotton farms and fields of ripening crop lining I-40. When the hail raining down became the size of biscuits, I pulled the Mustang over, and we waited it out beneath an underpass.

“This tornado weather,” Mya said.

Mya did not like storms. I was amazed she had forced herself along on the trip. She behaved more like Wolf on them, growing quiet and huddling in a corner. But there she was, sitting in the passenger seat of our father’s car, tuning the radio station to K97 and waiting for the storm to end so we could go visit a cousin who’d done nothing but rape me and murder other women.

After a half hour, the blackness of the storm lifted. The hail turned to sheets of rain that turned to drizzle. A dark cloud stretched the entire horizon behind us, and in front of us was brilliant sunlight. Hardly a cloud in the sky. Soft rain misted the windshield of the Mustang, and I told Mya to look in my purse for my sunglasses.

“Andiamo,” Mya said and handed me the pair of dark glasses.

Mya had abandoned her British accent long ago. Now she spoke Italian at random intervals. Where she learned Italian, no one knew, and Mya would not say except in Italian, which no one understood. But she spoke it with such passion, shaking her hands at us in the kitchen, that Mama—tired from overnight shifts—said, “Just let the child be herself.”

I pulled out of the underpass, and the engine roared as I shifted from first all the way to fifth. “You see? You can pop the clutch once you get up to fourth. You don’t have to ease into it as much with first.”

“No, non lo so.”

I laughed. “You’re so fucking weird,” I said.

“And you’re not? You’ve been walking around in some daze like you’re fucking da Vinci. Me and Auntie August been taking bets for when you going to chop off your ear.”

“That was Van Gogh.”

“What?” Mya snapped.

“Van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his lover.”

“The fact you even know who!”

“I can’t believe we skipped school.”

“Why? We make all A’s.”

“That’s because you do all my math and science homework, and I do all your English and history,” I said, checking the rearview mirror so I could pass a slow-moving eighteen-wheeler.

“Ugh, when you go off to London, you still got to help me. Mr. Cook’s fascination with iambic pentameter is…disturbing, frankly. I’m not doing that shit on my own.”

“Shut up. I don’t know if I got in. Don’t jinx it.”

Anger rose in me again. I should have been in school. School was close to the house, and the house was close to the mailbox, and the mailbox would hold the decision that would change the rest of my life.

Mya raised an eyebrow. “You worried about getting in? Why? Figured you and Miss Dawn made some midnight blood oath. Sacrificed a goat. A virgin. Small, innocent child.” She shrugged.

Just when I felt an argument was about to brew with Mya, she’d say something so funny, so ridiculous, I couldn’t help but laugh.