Jilo (23 page)

The woman relented, lowering her head. “All right. But this had better work.”

Jilo stuffed the bills into her own bra. “Like I told you, there are no guarantees. Don’t try my patience. The spirits,” she said, stretching the word out, giving it a sense of fearsomeness, “are taxing enough.” She secured another button on her dress, just to help make the money harder for the woman to retrieve. Jilo would never have treated a buckra woman with such audacity outside her home, but this woman seemed torn between her belief in her own superiority and her fear of Jilo’s mysterious Negro powers. It was as clear as water that the story of what happened here tonight would never be shared with a single soul. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to threaten the buckra with unpleasant repercussions if she were to speak of the secrets she saw here.

“Come through to the kitchen. We can talk better in there.”

She rapped on Binah’s door as she passed by. “Get on out here,” she commanded. “We’re calling on the spirits.” Binah opened the door a crack, her eyes wide and brows arched in a mixture of worry and confusion. Jilo gave her a wink. “The missus here has paid us to approach the spirits on her behalf.”

Binah’s face froze in disbelief, but she quickly recovered. She opened the door fully. “Then I should bring the baby, too. His innocence will protect us from any unclean ones.”

Jilo smiled and nodded. “You are a wise child.”

After leading the way to the kitchen, Jilo pulled a chair—one that faced away from the pantry—back from the table. “Sit here,” she said. The woman stepped into the kitchen, looking around it with wide eyes, filled with a mixture of expectation and fear, as if she might bolt at any moment. Jilo stepped back, giving the woman a clear and unhindered path to the seat. There was a moment’s hesitation, but the woman made the decision to do as she was told. She slid the seat an inch or so farther back from where Jilo had left it, then sat down, tugging on the hem of her skirt as she did.

Jilo decided to move slowly. She wanted the woman spooked, but not spooked enough to flee without feeling she’d gotten her money’s worth. Even if the woman never spoke of this night to a soul, a poor outcome could still lead to some very unpleasant repercussions for Jilo herself. A rich buckra like this could find other ways to strike back.

The woman looked around, taking in the exotic setting in which she’d found herself. “Should we dim the lights? Light some candles?”

“No,” Binah said, entering the room with Robinson in her arms. “Dim lights, dark spirits,” she said. Though she managed not to laugh, there was a twinkle in her eye.

“She’s right,” Jilo said. “The good spirits aren’t afraid of the light.” She nodded at the table, signaling for Binah to join their guest. “But they will only come to us if we provide them with an offering.” She paused. “I’ll only be a moment.”

She took her time crossing to the pantry, but once inside, she attacked the shelves, searching for ingredients she remembered from her first days of her Chemistry I class. On the lower shelf, not far from the front, sat the yellow box that held powdered sugar. The sugar was left over from frosting Nana had made for the cake she baked for Cousin Barney’s funeral, only a couple of months before her own. Jilo shook the box, disappointed that it felt so light, but relief swept over her when she opened it. There were about six teaspoons of the powder left, which should be plenty for her needs.

One shelf up sat another box, also yellow, but with a blue circle circumscribing a hand wielding a hammer. Baking soda. Plenty heavy, nearly a full box.

“Don’t let me down, now, Nana,” Jilo mumbled under her breath. On the top shelf should be a bottle that Nana had forbidden the girls ever to touch. She went up on her tiptoes, her heart falling when she didn’t see the bottle of clear rum she would certainly have sampled if she hadn’t forgotten it until now. She strained, stretching up even farther, and ran her hand along the shelf. There. She nearly cheered as her fingertips found the round glass container. She grasped the body of the bottle, sliding it forward a few inches, and then snatched it by the neck.

After tucking the two boxes under her arms and grasping the bottle, she left the pantry and crossed to the table, assuming an air of solemnity as she placed the ingredients on the table before the woman, whose expression showed marks of skepticism as she stared at the elements of Jilo’s purported offering to the spirits.

Jilo acted quickly to circumvent any questions. “A simple offering for pure spirits. The dark ones, they demand blood,” she drawled out the last word, then flashed a sharp look at Binah, hoping her little sister wouldn’t forget herself and laugh.

But there was no need for worry; her sister proved quite the worthy actress. “No blood, Lord. No blood,” she said, shaking her head as she clutched Robinson close. “Don’t want any evil ones coming in here to lap it up.”

Her manufactured fear served to engender true terror in their visitor. “No,” the woman echoed Binah. “I don’t want to enlist any dark spirits . . .” She hesitated. “Unless it proves absolutely necessary.”

“Won’t be necessary,” Jilo said in a steady, reassuring tone. “We’re taking the fix off you. That’s white magic. Good magic. The dark spirits can’t help us with that.” She turned away and grabbed a spoon, a small mixing bowl, and a thick ceramic meat plate, arranging them next to the boxes and rum bottle. Then she lifted the rum bottle and unscrewed the lid. After pausing to nod at their guest, she lifted the rum to her lips and knocked back a shot. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Helps me get in tune with the spirits.” A shot’s worth of rum went into the bowl, too, and then she set the bottle aside. “The fiery water that separates our world from that of the spirits.” She grabbed the spoon and measured out four rounded spoonfuls of the sugar into the rum. “To remind them of the sweetness of the lives they led here on earth. Makes sure we only attract the happy, helpful spirits. Not the angry ones.” She set the nearly empty sugar box aside and clutched the baking soda. “To assure we get only the purest of spirits.” She added one rounded teaspoon of the soda to the bowl and stirred the mixture into a thick paste, which she then scooped into a ball and dropped on to the meat platter.

Jilo laid the spoon on the table and closed her eyes, holding her hands out over the ball of paste. “We call upon you, our guiding spirits. This fine lady has had the fix settled on her by an impure woman, a woman so covetous she wants to take this innocent’s very life.” She paused, pretending to listen to voices from beyond. “Yes. Yes. You must be her judge, but I come to you on her behalf. I do believe her to be worthy.” Jilo opened up her eyes, forcing them wide, and held her right hand out toward the woman. “Do not move. Not an inch. They are here. They have heard us. They must determine if you are indeed worthy of their help.” The woman blanched, but held still. Jilo allowed her hand to tremble and her eyes to roll upward. Slowly she let a smile form on her lips. “Yes. Yes.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again, focusing on the woman. She nodded. “They have deemed you worthy.”

Praying that the box of safety matches in the drawer by the sink wouldn’t be empty, she crossed the room, speaking as she did. “They have agreed to accept our gift to them, and in return, they
will
”—she emphasized the word—“remove the black fix that has been set on you by your rival.” She tugged open the drawer, pleased to see that a red box emblazoned with a blue tiger was tucked in next to a box of fuses. She retrieved the matches and returned to the table. Once there, she pulled out one of the matches, but before she struck it, she pulled the bottle of rum over to her and took another sip. “You must concentrate. Open yourself up to the spirits. Give them your permission to remove this curse.”

“I do,” the woman said, leaning forward. “I do give them permission to cleanse me.”

Jilo flashed the woman her most reassuring smile, then doused the ball of paste with a bit more rum. She struck the match, not hesitating this time, and touched the flame to the white paste.

The woman’s eyes widened as the ball of paste caught flame and then began to darken, expanding, lengthening, and growing into what resembled a small black snake wriggling along.

“There it is,” Jilo said. “That’s the fix. Right there. The spirits done drew it out of you.”

The woman wobbled in her seat, nearly swooning, but caught hold of the edge of the table and steadied herself. Her eyes filled with tears. “You have the gift,” she said, a tone of gratitude overriding her earlier haughtiness. She raised her hand like she wanted to reach out for Jilo, but instead she stood and rushed out of the house, to all appearances a terrified but happy customer.

Jilo and Binah squealed in simultaneous delight, shocking the drowsy Robinson awake. He began to wail in displeasure, but Jilo swept him into her arms and spun him around and around, planting one kiss after another on his face. As his cries lessened, she looked up at Binah. “We’re gonna get by just fine.” She looked down at Robinson and planted another kiss on his cheek.

THREE

April 1955

“You? You the one claiming to be able to work the root?” The woman had only been in Jilo’s house a matter of minutes, but she was already struggling to pull her heavy frame up out of Nana’s haint-blue chair so she could leave. “I ain’t got time for none of your nonsense.”

“I wish you would give me the chance to assist you with your difficulties,” Jilo said.

The woman snorted. “You ain’t got none of the Hoodoo in you, girlie,” she said, laughing, her fat cheeks, mottled with rosacea, rising as her jowls jiggled. “Anybody with eyes can see that.” She huffed and puffed, but couldn’t wrest herself out of the chair on her own.

Jilo’s early optimism about resurrecting her grandmother’s business had faltered quickly. It wasn’t easy finding folk who would place their faith in her particular brand of Hoodoo. She’d done her best to imitate her grandmother, but truth was, she didn’t know the first thing about working the magic tricks that fueled her nana’s act.

Though Jilo sometimes felt remorseful that she was perpetrating out-and-out trickery, not even backed by the belief of those who practiced genuine Hoodoo, Nana had taught her that sometimes a little deception was the best way to free people of the fears and beliefs preventing them from leading happy lives. Jilo had read in magazines about people spending hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to undergo years of psychoanalysis, just to work through childhood traumas that might not—in reality—have ever happened to them. No, she wasn’t claiming to be able to cure disease or help people strike it rich; she was just putting names to their fears, setting up boogeymen only to knock them down.

After her first go at “magic,” Jilo had called upon her nana’s faithful clients to tell them she was taking up the mantle. Word began to spread, especially after she cleared herself and Robinson out of Nana’s old room and returned it to the calling room it had been in the heyday of Nana’s business. But after a handful of visits, the trickle of callers had dried up. Nana had a touch that Jilo did not seem to have inherited.

So desperate was she for customers, Jilo had actually been happy to welcome this vile woman into her home. It was midday, so she had turned Robinson over to Willy’s care before leading the visitor into the haint-blue room. Though Willy was a few years younger than Binah, he’d left school long ago. He could read. Some. He could write. A little. It had been almost a year since the government had proclaimed white schools had to be open to black children, but Savannah was having none of it. And with only a handful of schools in the city open to black students, no truant officer would ever come looking for Willy. Jilo wasn’t his mama, even though it was sure starting to feel like it, so she didn’t force him to go.

“Don’t just stand there like a natural-born fool, girl.” Her visitor’s forehead had bunched into a concertina of angry wrinkles. She was holding out an arm for help out of the chair, probably had been for some time. Jilo hated the thought of touching the woman’s pasty, sweaty flesh, but she realized that helping the rotund old woman rise would be the only way to get her out of the house. Besides, she’d faced plenty worse in her nursing days. Bracing herself, she wrapped her fingers around the woman’s clammy wrist and pulled until the woman managed to shift her heft from her haunches to her feet.

“Naw, girl. You ain’t got none of the root in you. Just look at you.”

“I’ll have you know my grandmother was Mother Wills, and her mother was Mother Tuesday Jackson . . .”

“ ‘I’ll have you know . . .’ ” The woman parroted the words back to her and cackled, her small gray eyes peeping out through curtains of flesh. “Listen to you. I don’t give a damn who whelped you. You walk around here puttin’ on airs like you somebody. But you don’t know nothin’ about the root, you just another uppity Negro, done got yo’self a bit of learnin’ on how to talk fancy. Think you smart enough to pull the wool over folks’ eyes, but I done seen through you, girlie.” The woman ambled toward the door, then turned back. “I don’t fault you none. I saw those diapers out there drying on the line. I know you ain’t got it easy.”

Something about the woman’s sympathy angered Jilo more than her insults ever could. She didn’t want this woman’s compassion. “I think perhaps you should leave.”

A yellow, snaggletoothed smile broke out on the woman’s face, and the red patches on her sallow jowls seemed to catch fire. “I’m already on my way, girlie.”

Jilo turned away, lunging toward the window she had painted over in a color similar to, but not quite the match of, her grandmother’s haint blue. She opened the window, wanting to banish the woman’s scent, then turned and followed her out of the house. Standing on the porch, she watched the woman’s back as she trod away, her steps leaving heavy impressions in the sandy soil.

When the woman was far enough away that Jilo felt sure she wouldn’t turn back, Jilo went and sat on the porch swing, giving herself the gift of listening to the silence. The quiet felt peaceful for a moment, then due to what she could only guess was her burgeoning maternal intuition, it struck her as worrisome. In an instant, all thoughts of her disgruntled visitor faded. She pushed up from the swing, feeling it slip back away from her, and pushed her way around the argumentative screen door. The house was utterly silent, which only alarmed Jilo further. Willy wasn’t prone to silence.

She almost called out, but instinct told her not to. She passed through the front room, then crept down the hallway, ears straining for the slightest sound. Perhaps both Willy and Robinson were sleeping? She slid up to the bedroom door and wrapped her hand around the doorknob, which she turned ever so carefully. The mechanism still clicked, but it was a soft, nearly unnoticeable sound. She eased the door open, relieved to see the baby sleeping on the bed, surrounded by pillows to prevent him from rolling off. She craned her head around the door, where, unaware of her presence, Willy stood before the mirror, admiring himself in the dress she’d once worn to the Kingfisher Club. The night she’d met Guy, her mind reminded her, though she was quick to alert the part of her mind that considered that an important fact to shut the hell up.

“Willy,” she said, stepping into the room. “What in the world are you getting up to in here?” she asked as if she didn’t already know the answer to her question. As if she hadn’t always known the answer.

Shock turned Willy’s face into a nearly comical mask—his eyes wide, his mouth open and working like a fish trapped on dry land. “I didn’t mean no harm. I didn’t.”

Jilo felt herself flash hot and then cold. She bit her lower lip as she considered the situation. “You get out of that dress,” she said, each word a command in itself, the path she was going to take becoming clearer as she stepped onto it. “Then you get your clothes on, and get out of this house.”

“But I got nowhere to go. My pa. He said he’d kill me if he ever laid eyes on me again.”

She hated it. She had known. She had always known. But seeing it with her own eyes had made it more real. She cast a glance at her still-drowsing son. “I’m sorry, I can’t have you around Robinson.” She started to turn away.

“I love him. I wouldn’t hurt him. I wouldn’t.”

She stopped and turned back. “I’m not saying you’d hurt him.” She felt her heart reach up into her throat. “I know you’d never hurt him. But I can’t have you around him. I can’t have him learning”—she waved her hand in wide circles in his direction—“this.”

“But I didn’t learn this. Ain’t nobody taught me.” Fat tears burst from his eyes. “If it was something I had learned, don’t you think I would’ve done all I could to unlearn it?”

Damn.
Jilo wanted to turn her heart to stone as she watched Willy’s head fall forward, his body, still dressed in her old blue cocktail dress, racked with sobs. She fought her own instinct to step forward and put her arms around the sobbing boy, who had lived under her roof for months now. His words and his sincerity touched her, and besides, what exactly was she so worried about? Messed up as Willy must be, she knew he would give his life to protect her son.

Maybe if Robinson had a father, a strong, male figure around to keep him in line? Then a question rose in her mind, one she didn’t like very much. This child before her. With his big heart. When it came down to it, would she rather have Robinson grow up like him or like Guy?

No. It was impossible. She couldn’t have Robinson growing up around a boy like Willy. She couldn’t take that chance.

No
, a very different part of herself spoke up: What was impossible was to send Willy away, especially since he didn’t have anywhere to go. She loved the child too much. Was she hypocrite enough to punish him for this confirmation of what she had always felt to be true?

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, wishing she believed in God, so she could ask for guidance. Instead, she asked her own troubled heart what to do, but to her disappointment, it couldn’t supply her with a definitive answer. The path that had for one moment seemed so clear grew hazy. She crossed the room to Willy and lifted his chin up. His eyes were red, and full of fear.

Why would you want this, boy?
she wanted to ask, but didn’t. It seemed to Jilo there was only one thing in this world treated with less fairness and respect than a black man, and that was a black woman. “You take that dress off. Put on your own clothes.” She paused suddenly, wondering why it should matter so much anyway, but a fearful part of her own heart felt that it must. If it didn’t, why would folk make so much of a fuss over it?

“I haven’t made up my mind,” she said. “I’m not saying you can stay on. Not permanently. But you don’t have to leave today.” He fell into her, wrapping his arms so tightly around her she had to fight to catch her breath. She managed to free one arm, which she wrapped around his back, pulling his sobbing head into her bosom. “Shhh . . .” She comforted him just as she might Robinson. “Shhh . . .”

Jilo laid the hen down on the wide, bloodstained tree trunk they’d been using as a chopping block, her subconscious saying a prayer her conscious mind would rebel against, for the beast about to die at her own hand. She held the bird tight and swung the hatchet hard, doing her best to make sure the hen didn’t suffer. The body kicked a few times, but did not, much to her relief, find its feet and take off running. She’d seen that happen once when she was girl, and it had put her off chicken for nearly a year.

“Willy,” she called out. He came out the back door and down the steps, carrying a pitcher of water and a kitchen towel. Without being prompted, he poured water over her outstretched hands till they were as clean as hands that had just taken a life—of any kind—ever could be. He handed her the towel, and she wiped her hands dry. “You finish plucking her, then singe off the fuzz.” He nodded. “There’re matches and some newsprint in the drawer in the kitchen. You know which one?” He nodded again. Of course he knew. He’d lived with them for nearly a year now. This, she realized, was his home. “You be careful. Don’t burn yourself. And make sure you keep the fire good and far from the house. You hear me?” He nodded a third time. She realized he was afraid to speak lest he say something that would change her mind. She reached out, letting her fingers brush his cheek, and said, “When you’re done, bring it in. I’ll cut it up and get it ready for frying.”

She heard the cry of the front screen door, announcing Binah’s return. Oiling the door never worked, and it occurred to her for the umpteenth time that she ought to have the thing replaced, but at this point it would almost be like losing an old, if annoying, friend. She went in through the kitchen, where Robinson seemed content enough sitting in his high chair and banging a wooden spoon against its tray, and headed down the hall. She stopped before the open bedroom door. Binah sat on her bed, the contents of her book bag spilled out around her. Jilo entered the room and closed the door behind her.

“Please tell me you aren’t in love with that boy.”

“In love with what boy?” Binah looked up at her, one arched eyebrow and a confused smile on her face. Her eyes widened as meaning of Jilo’s question seemed to dawn on her. “Willy?” She began laughing, then her laughter stopped abruptly, and any signs of amusement fell from her face.