MY MAMA HAD TWO BABIES BEFORE ME. A SISTER AND A brother too, but I never met them. Mama said they had more sense than I did, that they only needed to smell the world to know there was nothing inside it for them. So she was relieved when I came out, when I breathed. She didn’t get close to me anyway, assuming I would catch on too, that I’d be gone any minute, but I stuck around. I held my head up, I sat, I stood, I fed myself cut-up swamp rabbits or fish, I spoke. I ran. And she wiped my mouth and hemmed my skirts; she taught me how to make beds out of dry grass and talk to white folks with my head down and my words dull. But she held on to her heart too; she didn’t let it lead her.
Then one morning she was boiling clothes outside the cabins, and Vera screamed for her to come quick. My mama dropped a wet shirt on her foot and didn’t flinch at the burn. She raced up to the cabin where Vera nursed all the babies too young to hold their heads up. Mama realized then that she was wrong—all the hope she thought she had buried with the other children had been there all along, snaking its way through her. She reached me, and it was too late, I was gone.
Vera closed my eyes, clutched my mama to her, and let her wail.
Still there was no use. Vera alerted Tom and Missus, and they told my daddy to carve a pine box, and Mama said the worst part was that she had let herself be fooled again.
They let her hold the body one night. She had to burn sage to keep the gnats and wasps off me, and she did the only thing she could do: she slept beside me on a pallet on the dirt floor. She was awakened sometime before dusk. She stood, but she said it wasn’t her feet she stood on. They were heavier with calluses and age, the feet of a woman who had worked in fields. She said too that she carried a weight on her she wasn’t accustomed to, and even climbing off her pallet was strenuous. The biggest change was in her mind: it had emptied out and narrowed in a way that relieved her. She knew to make haste for the swamplands. Don’t let the sun rise before you’re back, her mother’s voice sounded in her own mind, the same way she had taught her to stitch moccasins, or cut the watermelon for its rind to rinse her face. That voice was gentle but firm, not like hers, which was heavy as a man’s people said, and she knew.
She reached back just as the night sky was fading. She said a pigeon followed her all the way home. She didn’t have to run. She carried a skirt full of green berries, and she built a fire to boil a tea. I still wasn’t breathing, but she tilted my head and watched the liquid stream down my chin. Call those things which be not as though they were. She could hear her mama’s voice but it was her own trembling fingers that lifted the kettle, tilted the cup. It wasn’t until Vera walked in that I sat up and asked for water. They didn’t give me too much; they were nervous at first, but after I finished drinking, I wanted grits and they boiled them over the fireplace, ladled them with fatback, and let me eat bowl after bowl.
After that, Vera gave me the biggest piece of ham at dinner. I stayed out the fields and just played with Miss Sally all day long; she was the one taught me to read. I started seeing that woman then too, that long brown trail of a woman. She was from another world, but she felt like me; I mean, when she spoke, it felt like the words came out my own mind. Most important though, I got to sit with the Revisioners, sing with them, pray with them. Foresee with them.
THE NEXT DAY, I RUN SOME LAST-MINUTE ERRANDS, GO back to the block for that old photograph of Mama Josephine, alert the power company, pay the balance on my storage, and then there is something that I’ve been putting off long enough. I need to see my mother. I’m always nervous to make that ride, and today is no different. I’ve never lived farther than twenty minutes away from her, but I still don’t visit more than once a quarter. Even then it’s out of obligation, not desire. I’ve been slow to get on my feet. Married the wrong man, majored in the wrong subject. I have a chemistry degree but can’t translate that into a job paying more than $40k, and that seemed like a lot when I was in my twenties and still married, but every time I looked up, there was another girl texting Byron, simple girls who spelled love luv, who sent half-naked pictures of themselves, their titties sky-high. I worked up the courage to put him out, I loved myself enough to risk it, but not three months after he was gone, I’d drained my savings flat. And that’s all right, I guess. I stopped ordering takeout from Martin’s Wine Cellar, started working weekends at Vincent’s. There was a balance scale set up in Mr. Jeff’s office, but he filled only the left side of it, so it drooped. I used to think that was how my life was, that the filled section was the reality and the empty one was my dreams, and I just had to come to terms with it. But whenever I’m about to see my mother, my self-acceptance begins to wobble.
I pull onto her block. She rented an apartment uptown after Katrina, then once she’d gutted all the walls, and replaced the roof on her old house in the Tremé, she insisted on going back. “Home,” she’d said. “Nothing like it,” though her block is all white now, mostly transplants. There’s still Miss Brown and Mr. Davilier on either side of her, but every other house is a short-term rental, and even Miss Brown is considering selling to developers.
I hear gospel music from the inside.
Give me You, everything else can wait
She doesn’t lock her door anymore, and instead of knocking, I open up. She is finishing one of her sessions. She’d owned her law firm for twenty years, ran it out of the Poydras Center, and she did well on divorces and slip-and-falls primarily, but when I went off to college, she closed up shop, decided to take classes to become a doula. That was around the time she stopped putting ham hocks and sausages in her red beans, started meditating each morning. I wasn’t surprised. My whole childhood, people would come from all over the city for her counsel. One day I leafed through the top drawer of her dresser and found, amid old obituaries and worn stones, scraps of paper asking for me to get the part in the play, for the client to win full custody. All those things had happened, and I was just then seeing her fingerprints.
She said working with the girls had changed her life, and I see the changes sometimes. She’s slower to anger, I confide in her more, matters I’d normally keep to myself, like how I felt when my divorce papers went through. Now her clients, about seven girls, circle around her with their eyes closed, their palms faceup on their thighs. My mother doesn’t look at me, just nods in the direction of the living room, and I know enough to remember what that means: sit down and shut up, and I oblige.
The girls start chanting as I sit, incoherent sounds but the blend of them together is like tasting my mama’s potato salad, the old version with the real mayonnaise. I close my eyes too. As much as it unnerves me to see her now, I miss this part, how sturdy she could be, how sturdy I was on account of growing up beside her. She would walk me to school every morning and tell me things with her hand in mine: three squeezes, for instance, stood for I love you. She taught me to visualize a white light encasing me, protecting me from harm. “Nobody evil can get through that light,” she’d say. “Nobody,” she’d repeat. And people tried. The kids always had a bone to pick with my color; my daddy didn’t come around but once every blue moon, but I got by all that. It didn’t break me, because there was at least a small chance that that white light she mentioned was blooming from inside me.
“Just breathe,” she says to the girls now. “Just breathe. Whatever comes up through the breath is okay. We don’t have to turn our back on it, we don’t
