Jilo (2 page)

The young man searched her face for a moment, then acquiesced. “Thank you, sister,” he said, taking a step back from the head of the grave.

Jesse’s mama smiled again at the preacher. “You go on, now,” she said, dismissing him in no uncertain terms. “We can handle it from here.” Jones lingered for a moment, as if considering whether he should listen, then nodded and walked away from the grave, passing by Jesse and his family on his way to the cemetery gate. He hesitated a moment when he reached Jesse’s daughters, who watched the young pastor with listless trepidation. Opal shifted Jilo, balancing the baby on her hip. Jones reached out to pat Poppy’s head, but then stopped dead at the sight of Jilo, doll-like in her starched white cap and gown. The pastor pulled his hand back slowly and hurried on toward the gate. Silence fell over the group until he was well beyond the boundary.

“Opal,” his mother called. Jesse’s eyes darted to his daughter.

“Yes’m.” The girl startled and straightened to attention at the sound of her nana’s voice.

“You bring your sister on up here,” Jesse’s mama instructed. “Bring Jilo to me.”

Jesse felt Betty tensing beside him. “You stay right where you are, girl,” Betty said, wagging her finger at Opal, who seemed nearly split in two by her desire to please both her nana and her mama at the same time. “What you need my Jilo for?” Betty took a few steps forward. Jesse couldn’t help but notice that she had moved toward his mother, ready for confrontation, rather than toward her baby, ready to protect.

He knew there was no need to protect Jilo from anything that was going to happen here, so while Betty geared herself up for a shouting matching with his mama, he stepped back and approached the girls. “Let me have her,” he said with a nod to Opal. Her face relaxed in gratitude as she handed the baby over.

Jesse took Jilo in both hands and shifted her into the crook of his arm. He leaned his head over to plant a kiss on her round cheek, then reached out and ran his thumb over Opal’s cheek as well. Over the sound of their mama’s indignant shouting, Jesse winked and said, “Your daddy has the best girls in the whole wide world; you know that, don’t you?” A smile curved on Opal’s lips, and she blinked once before nodding her response.

“And you, my little flower?” he said, turning toward Poppy, who scurried up to him and hugged his leg. He patted her head. “I love my girls,” he said. “All three of them.” When Poppy released him and slid back next to Opal, he closed his eyes for a moment before turning to face the scene unfolding behind him.

“And I,” Betty said, waving her finger in his mama’s face, “am not gonna have my babies take part in any of the old woman’s Hoodoo. You hear me?”

“Jilo,” his mama replied in her calmest voice, even though the angry set of her mouth and the crease that lined the center of her forehead told Jesse she was anything but relaxed, “is the last born. You want to be good and clear of the
old
woman”–her head rocked in indignation–“then we need to pass Jilo over the coffin.”

Jesse had almost reached his mother’s side when Betty caught sight of him. She pushed roughly past the mourners who didn’t have the sense to part between them like the Red Sea at the wave of Moses’s staff. “Gimme the girl.”

Jesse took a step backward and placed his hand over the back of Jilo’s little capped head. “It’s our way.”

“It may be your way, but it ain’t my way, and she’s my child.” Betty now stood within spitting distance of him, her chest and shoulders heaving. She flung out her arms, grasping at the linen of Jilo’s gown.

There was no way he was relinquishing the girl to those clenched and angry hands. “She’s my child, too.” For a moment, Betty’s face froze. Then her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head. Her lips parted, readying to speak the truth that his cousins had been whispering behind his back, the truth his gut already knew. The truth that his own heart told him was the greatest lie of all. But then she stopped. Her tongue darted out of her mouth and licked her lips instead.

She gestured with a wide wave of her arm that included him, his mother, the casket, and the baby. “All right, y’all heathens go right on ahead. Y’all do what you need to do.” She spun around and stomped off, heading toward the gate.

Opal and Poppy started to take off after her, but their mother swung her hand back, signaling for them to stay put. Jesse could read the worry and confusion on their little faces from a hundred paces. “You come up here with Daddy and Nana,” he called to them. They hesitated, keeping an eye on their mother’s receding back. “Come on,” he said and urged them forward with a wave of his free hand. The two girls joined hands and walked forward with some lingering trepidation.

Jesse’s mother positioned herself on the opposite side of the coffin. He shifted Jilo off his shoulder, taking her in both hands. She gurgled with laughter, a bit of drool falling from the side of her mouth. Her black eyes twinkled with such love and intelligence, so much soul. It was like she’d already lived a thousand lives, and held every secret of the universe in her chubby, damp hands. He pulled her in close and placed a kiss on her forehead, then reached her over the casket to his mother.

His mama’s calloused, yet gentle, hands brushed his. As he let Jilo drop into her grasp, his ears were met with a loud pop, and his eyes registered a flash of bluish light. Everyone stood there gaping in silent amazement. Jilo squealed happily and reached her chubby arms across the void of his nana’s grave toward him, a joyous mystery playing in her eyes.

TWO

It was May who had found her mama, and she had covered her mama’s face with a towel before alerting the others, hoping to spare her family from the sight. Her mama hadn’t gone easy. Still, there were those, including her sisters, who’d insisted on laying eyes on their mama before they could accept she was truly gone. Their souls now carried the same burden May’s did.

The mortician, artist though he was, had not succeeded in erasing the look her mama’s passing had left on her face. He had gummed her eyes and sewed her mouth closed, but her features remained a frozen, bloodless gray—her brow raised and creased, her jaw jutting forward, her neck arched in an eternal scream. May and her sisters had agreed it was best to keep the coffin closed to spare the others.

It was the magic that had killed her, May felt sure of that. May didn’t know a thing about working magic, but she’d grown up feeling it try to work her. It was always pushing to break through the dam her mama had helped her build up against it. Always looking for holes in her dreams while she was sleeping, whispering seductively while she was awake, promising her quick solutions whenever her problems grew heavy on her shoulders. But no. Her mama had put the fear of the magic in her, and May was bound and determined never to go down the path her mama had traveled.

The night before her death, May’s mama had come around in the wee hours and let herself into May’s home unannounced, just about scaring her out of her wits. May had roused to find the older woman bent over her, the smell of rum thick on her warm breath. “Don’t you forget your promise to your mama,” her mother said, her lips pressing against her ear. “When your mama’s gone, the magic may come after you good and hard, but you don’t let it touch you.”

Her mama reached down and placed the palm of her hand along May’s jaw. “You hear me?” She released May and lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the mattress.

“Yes, ma’am,” May said, pushing herself up on her elbows. “You okay, Mama?”

“Your mama, she’s just tired. Worn out.” She lay down beside May, and May shifted to make room, wrapping an arm around the frail woman once she was settled. “She’s been fighting those devils too long, but she’s gonna put an end to it now, one way or the other. Even if it kills her.”

May didn’t ask who “those devils” were, or just how her mama planned to handle them. Getting Tuesday Jackson to share more than she had a mind to speak had always been an impossible task. A direct question would have been met with silence. May lay there quietly, hoping the rum she smelled on her mother’s breath might loosen her tongue, but it didn’t. Soon, May drifted off. That morning she awoke, as she always did, well before dawn, only to find her mother had already risen and left the house.

Now that May’s mama was gone, May wished she hadn’t given herself over to sleep that night. She would never lay eyes on her mama again, at least not on this side of the veil.

May knelt beside the filled grave, laying a piece of a broken cup there. Most of the family had already taken off, heading south to May’s house by car or by foot, Jilo’s name on all their lips. They’d be talking for years to come, no doubt, about how May’s youngest granddaughter seemed to have been kissed by the magic. Jesse himself didn’t believe Jilo was his, at least not by blood, so May didn’t know what to make of the spark that had passed from the grave to the girl. In this moment, she had neither the time nor the strength to consider its significance. It was only a short walk from the cemetery down Ogeechee Road to the dirt road leading to her house, so even those relatives inclined to take a more leisurely pace had probably found their way to the turnoff. They all knew the way, even though most of them didn’t live around here.

Her mama had done her darnedest to convince May and her siblings to get the hell out of Savannah, encouraging them to get as far away as they could. She’d succeeded to some degree with May’s brother and sisters, which had left the extended family scattered from Augusta to Jacksonville. “Not far enough,” had been her mama’s staple reply whenever May complained that her sisters lived too far for regular visits. Her brother, Louis, had made it as far as Macon, but he was gone now, too, buried in a plot half a state away, mixed in with his wife Miriam’s people.

May, well, she’d married Reuben, and his job, as well as his inclination, had demanded they stay in Savannah. May glanced over at the empty plot between her husband and her mother, both chilled and comforted by the knowledge that she would one day take her rest there.

But there’d be no rest for her today. Even though many of her kin had come bearing baskets of food to share, she’d have to see to feeding the horde descending on her home before packing them back into their vehicles or pointing them north toward the train station. Family as thick as a swarm of locusts today, and nothing but loneliness to contend with tonight.

The caretaker of the cemetery stood at a distance, leaning on the same rake he would use to scrape the grave clear of the pottery as soon as the last of the family was out of sight. The cemetery belonged to the city, after all, and Savannah had no more room for the family’s traditions than her fool of a daughter-in-law did.

May was surprised to see a young white man approach the caretaker. Even from this distance, which made it hard to get a good look at his features, May could see his suit appeared well made, expensive. His light blond hair caught the light. May wondered what interest this buckra could have in an old black woman’s funeral, his gaze fixed as it was on the dwindling party. She watched as the caretaker nodded his head again and again, like it was on a loose spring. He seemed anxious to convey his understanding of—or perhaps agreement to—the white man’s words. The two conversed for another minute or so, then the white man reached out and patted the caretaker’s back. He turned away and headed toward a shiny black car waiting just outside the cemetery gate. As the buckra drew near, another man, dressed in livery, rushed to open the car’s back door at the exact moment of his arrival.

“You recognize that fellow?” she asked Jesse with a small nod at the car that was already pulling away. An overtired Poppy began crying and tugging on her father’s pant leg.

“No ma’am,” Jesse said, holding out the baby for her to take. She accepted Jilo from him and wrapped her in a tight embrace. Jesse knelt to scoop up Poppy. “Probably just someone looking for the entrance of the white section. We should get back to the house now. Folk are there already, I bet.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but seems to me that a fellow who can afford a car like that would have sent his driver to ask directions, not come on his own. No,” she shook her head, feeling a chill run down her spine, “I think that man wanted to get a good look at us, at what we’re doing here.”

“I recognize him,” her sister-in-law Martha said, drawing near and leaning in like she had good gossip to share. “That there is that Maguire boy. He’s probably come looking for your mama’s help.”

It was true, her mama had occasionally met those seeking her assistance at the cemetery’s entrance. Still, the young man’s presence didn’t sit right with her.

“Help for what?” May found her gaze turning back to the caretaker, who shifted uneasily from foot to foot under the weight of her stare.

“It was all in the papers yesterday. His father, big man Maguire, had a bad stroke the same night your mama passed. Looks like he might not be long for this earth either. Reckon the doctors told the boy they can’t help his daddy, so he came looking to see if your mama could.”

“Well, he came a bit late for Nana’s help,” Jesse said, hefting Poppy up onto his shoulders.

“That he did,” May said, placing her hand behind Jilo’s tiny head and hugging the girl close. “That he did.”