they done took me back to slave times, oh Death. But then he gets a-hold ’a his composure, realizes that he bein borne along by the chain gang. He can hear they chains a-rattlin, he can hear they voices a-singin, ’n he can feel where it is he headed. So he musters all his strength, ’n he wadn’t no small man now, ’n straight pushes that coffin-top clean off. Breaks it off like it were a feather or somethin. Now he in the open air ’n the mens jus lookin at him like he Christ returned. Don’t nobody touch him, not even the authorities. He jus walk off nice as you please. He come back next day, finds the girl whose daddy had him such a lucrative business, ’n he tells her how he done lived through death. She laughs at his story, tells him the real news: e’rybody who had managed not to die had lived through the end-time, the Great War was over, it was safe to come out into the light again. So then he proposed to her, fell to his knees.”
“And then he divorced her. Moved on some more, to Alabama, where he finally married your great granny, settled hisself down. Crazy nigger,” Granny said.
“Language.”
Granny sniffed, then started back in: “Your gramps a natural storyteller, he know what to put in, what not to. But me, I done forgot my manners.”
“How did you forget your manners, Granny?” Kia asked.
“Got old. Got smart,” Granny said.
“Isn’t Gramps older than you?” Dea wondered, in her delicate voice.
“Yes and no,” Granny said, “Yes and no.”
“Why yes?” Kia asked. She twisted her beatific face into an expression of sheer beatific puzzlement.
“Because he was born in ’27 whereas I’s born in ’32,” Granny answered with thinning patience.
“Why no?” the twins asked in one voice.
“Because he ain’t made use of the head-start God given him.” She closed her eyes halfway and leaned back in her chair: “Don’t try to reason it out.” Her half-closed eyes were big and warm and sad, and golden-brown in the kitchen half-light. The skin around those eyes was wrinkled, worn slack, like God had patched her face of crumpled brown-paper bags. The twins counted the decades and the years on their hands and both came to the silent conclusion that their granny shouldn’t look so old at fifty-seven.
Touissant had already sneaked out of the living room. He was such a quiet, to-himself child that he could come and go and people would rarely notice his presence or absence. They only became aware when they wanted him for something. Since he was six years old they only wanted him around to give him gifts and since poor people could only give each other so many gifts their awareness of him fluctuated with their income. He drifted in and out of the lives of his grandparents and aunts and uncles, and even his sisters, without much notice: they hardly knew him, not that there was much to know just yet, and he hardly knew them. He thought of these people like fogged and sporadically illumined ghosts of an intense dazzling dream: they spoke fast and elaborate, retelling tales too old for him to comprehend; they sang and danced and showed-out; and they gave him what they had, their money, their food, their love. He loved them back in the uncritical way that people love when they are young and the world is given to them, before they grow up and look backward and measure their memories against their scars.
So he didn’t see the wrinkles around his granny’s eyes, he didn’t hear the weariness in her voice. Instead, he explored the house. Its construction was that of a slithering country snake, its head wide and densely packed, its body a slim, tortuous tunnel of fine skin, small pores and cuticles open and closed, locked and unlocked: these doors led into rooms that were the site of his exploration. Some rooms were too uninviting even for his curious mind. A makeshift tool shed that he was afraid to enter for fear that he would bump into something and his gramps’s vast store of tools and supplies would come raining down on his forehead—aside from the physical pain, how would he explain it when they heard the crash and came running? There was a room across the way from the tool shed that was equally ominous, though he chanced entrance here. The room had no lights so far as he could see and he had to stumble around inside it to find its treasures. Old dismantled rifles, a baseball bat with an incomprehensible signature scrawled across it, black mote-crusted books that looked too ugly to open; magazines with sleek naked women splayed along their worn-thin pages. Then, the grandparents’ room: a low bed and bedstand; a picture above the bedstand of them looking fine on their wedding day; a stained and tattered Bible opened to its first page where birth and death dates of Freemans familiar and unfamiliar to his eyes were scrawled in confusing combinations, and relations that may have made good common sense a long, long time ago now seemed as disordered as a dream to his young eyes. He looked until he found his father’s family line and name.
Sabine married R.W. Freeman 1833—New Orleans
Bore R.L. 1833
R.L. married Landine 1853—Slidell
Bore Diamond 1853 Crystal 1855 Quannis 1857 Alfonse 1858 Toussaint 1859
Immacula 1861
Quannis married Melva 1880—Slidell
Bore Hill 1879
Hill married Estrella 1917—New Orleans married Fern 1918—Jackson
married Celie 1919—Tuscaloosa
Bore L.A. 1917
L.A. married Ruth 1941—Tuscaloosa
Bore Hilda 1946 LaLa 1948 Ferna 1950 Celia 1951 Bobby A. 1954
He knew something was not quite right about the dates, numbers, names and places. Something was mixed up, wrong, but he didn’t know quite what. He felt that the dates, numbers and names were the vestiges of some older truth he would never be able to touch, never be able to know.
Placing the book back where he’d found it, he went exploring further. There were rooms and more rooms stretching off seemingly without end. He wondered if the house was really built invisibly up into the sky or down beneath the earth because looking at it from the outside it seemed so small and limited to him; he didn’t know how except by magic what seemed so little on the outside could be so vast on the inside. And behind all the rooms, back at the very end of the snaking house, there stood a screen door and then the yard. In the nights, the backyard looked haunted, the leaves of its trees over-wrapping it, branches splaying out like arms and hands arranged all crazy, grass grown high and too wild to tame. There were animals living in that wild garden whose night sounds he could hear, sounds like songs, a singing that broke out of the darkness, a strange night music. His senses were overwhelmed with it. He reached up and began to unlatch the door. Unoiled, the knob gave out a metallic creak as he turned it. Then he heard his mother calling for him: “Touissant. Touissant! Touissant!”
Her voice was an unwanted sunshine blinding him from premonition.
Later, in the dark, he could hear Dea and Kia’s riffing, one voice dancing light along the heavy, fragrant air. It was never hard to get away from them when they were concentrated on their singing: neither cared to look after him to begin with and they came up with every excuse they could think of to escape that chore. He was still too young to appreciate them, too young to see them as sisters and not restrictive roads forcing him back to his mother and the table and dinnertime.
He expected to hear his
