House of Rougeaux(20)

Now many children went to school houses and learned letters. And sometimes, those who could not go to school had a chance to learn anyway. Such as at the estate where Abeje still lived. Many mornings she sat with the children on a rise that overlooked the Sea. Young Miss came walking up the hill with books and a slate and pieces of chalk. She was the granddaughter of the Monsieur’s son, the one Abeje had helped to heal after the hurricane.

Young Miss taught the children; she sang songs about letters. Each letter was a friend who danced. They captured the letters on the slate with chalk, and they made them into words, and these words spelled out their future.

Freedom meant old Mémé could come and go as she pleased. She often went down to the bay, with her slow step and her walking cane. She went in the cool of evening, to sing and rest. One night she dreamt of her brother as a boy, a boy just becoming a man, with clear skin and hard white teeth and eyes black as wet stones. Her heart marveled at his beauty, and the sharpness of his mind. His young face floated before her, as he talked on all about the animals. The calves that followed him, and how he would not be outsmarted by that mean old nanny goat. He smiled and rolled his eyes at the admiration of the old woman, always his little sister, little Abeje.

Just a few days later the Holy One brought a new boy to her, one marked by Spirit, sure enough. He arrived alone and asked to see her. She was outside her hut with a basin of water, washing roots dug from the Grove. He stood before her, small but robust, shirtless and barefoot, wearing torn sackcloth trousers.

“I have a toothache,” he said. Abeje saw no swelling, nor any crick in his form that would belie pain. When she didn’t answer he tried again. “Well,” he said, “it’s my ankle. I turned it very badly.” He made a show of limping in a small circle.

Abeje dried her hands on her skirt.

“Tell me why you are really here,” she said.

He shrugged, then pursed his lips to keep from smiling.

“I just am,” he said.

His name was Silas, but she called him Awon Okun, Iya’s name for sea turtle, because in his eyes she saw the tranquil Sea. He slept on a mat in her hut, ate from her cooking pot and learned very quickly. In time he was no longer a boy, but a man. A healing man, who didn’t need Mémé to teach him anymore. His song was strong and bright. And he was a kind man, just as her brother was, and helped old Mémé in most everything she did. When he learned from her she sang her song for him, her last apprentice. Then she gave him her story.



* * *



Now, on the rise overlooking the Sea, sits old Mémé Abeje, under the great tree, her skirts spread about her in a wheel. Her Awon Okun will be down below at his hut, taking care of ailing people, and Abeje can be at ease. She is the tree who spreads the canopy, and she is the one who sits beneath, as if she were her own mother, and her own child. And she just wonders.

Children gather around her in a loose ring. Some lie with eyes closed, but she knows they are awake, ready to hear a story. The hot breeze carries the Sea, the scattered shadows of the leaves moving over their quiet forms.

“There now, children,” she says, “let us take our rest.” Abeje breathes, her eyes travel to the horizon, to the beginning and end of the world, and then back to the children.

“Now I will tell you the story of how my mother became a star. How she rose up on her wings into the Heavens.

“Most stars rise and set together in pictures, you see–the Hunter, the Serpent, the Lion, and so on. But this star follows her own path. She is the one that we see sometimes in the evening and sometimes meeting the dawn. She is the brightest. The Waking Star, mother of us all.”





Book II





2





Nelie and Azzie





Philadelphia, 1949





One o’clock on a sunny Sunday afternoon finds Cornelia Montgomery and Azalea Hubbard on their knees, bent over an early flower that has pushed its way up through a crack in the sidewalk. The clack of heels on the pavement and laughing voices surround them. Folks are still trickling out of church, shaking hands and paying respects, after the post-service social hour.

It’s a tiny thing with velvety red petals and an interesting yellow sprout in the middle, made all the more curious that, despite the sun, it is not yet spring. But here comes an adult voice, Cornelia’s mother to be exact, saying Get on up, because they aren’t little girls anymore, and their mothers (who are sisters) didn’t wear out their fingers stitching those Sunday coats and dresses so they could ruin them playing on the ground.

Between them Nelie and Azzie have a passel of brothers and sisters, but none are as close as they. Now they stand brushing off their hands on their skirts, one pink and one mint green, smiling slyly at each other and saying, Yes ma’am.

Azzie’s little brother Junior sidles up to them, holding a piece of cake in a napkin. It’s his curse to need eyeglasses, in thick black frames, frequently askew as they are now, having been knocked to the side by a squeezed-past elbow or handbag. The girls reach out as one to straighten them.

Nelie and Azzie skip to school each morning with their arms linked. They trade dolls and candy and hair ribbons. They whisper secrets, make up rhymes, find the same things funny and suffer the other’s indignities as their own. Azzie is a little bolder, Nelie’s singing voice is a little better and her coloring is lighter and decorated with a few of her father’s freckles. But not much disturbs their harmony. It is said that, like twins, the two share a soul.