Eden: A Novel

TO GOD, THE ANGELS FOR ROUSING ME OUT OF MY SLEEP TO

WRITE THIS NOVEL, AND THE CHILDREN OF INDEPENDENCE

MIDDLE SCHOOL FOR SHARING THE HAPPINESS WITHIN THEM,

DURING MOMENTS WHEN MY HEART WAS IN A GREAT FLOOD.

DO YOU THINK YOU SHALL ENTER THE GARDEN OF

BLISS WITHOUT SUCH TRIALS AS THOSE WHO HAVE

PASSED BEFORE YOU?

—THE KORAN

EDEN

chapter

one

One Sunday morning, during Bible study, I took a tube of Aunt Pip’s fire-engine-red lipstick and drew a naked lady over the first page of Genesis. Her chest was as flat as a man’s, her face blank and clear. The language was loose around me, as I remember the sound of Mama’s voice and the question that came along with it, the one that counted: Don’t you know that blood and milk is the same? She shook me between her words. They can’t sit out long before the world get wind o’ ’em and the next thing you know they caught in the tubes and the devil come out and you end up titty sick; ’cause he be red, red like this here mess you done made.

The clouds were dark. I sensed that it would, indeed, rain because of the birthmark on Mama’s forehead. It was a long, winding, tornado-shaped birthmark below her widow’s peak. It was a red stirring of her soul. She always pulled it back before the storm to witness its color change in the mirror.

I keep at you, Maddy, said Mama as she pulled a bucket of collard greens between her legs and took a small batch of them between her thick, round fingers. Ain’t nothing going to waste now. It’s all a part of itself.

She worked the garden behind our house barefoot. I walked behind her sometimes to measure the weight of my bones in her footprints: the imperfect arch, the heel curved into the marrow of an athlete’s laughter—where the side of his face is flat at the jawbone like an old habit, wide, invisible. Every now and then, she’d laugh and hold her chest and tell me that my hips were as clear as Jesus’.

Yes, ma’am, I said.

Grandma passed away years earlier. Sometimes a gust of wind drifted through the screen door and I could smell her wrinkled, pale body when she had taken off her panties to draw a bath. And the green lizard in her hands that she’d kept in a mason jar for hours at a time because it was the closest thing to the earth and the people in it.

The house was warm. I once heard that whatever god a person believed in, that god would look just like him. But something was wrong with the gods in my house. None of them looked like me. They were blue-eyed and dirty-blond. Upright, narrow-jawed. Those same gods I saw during communion where there was no wine or cracker if I didn’t first praise Him and believe that He gave me life. I did until I went to take Miss Hattie Mae, the neighbor, a bowl of sugar for her potato pone. There I saw, for the first time, a black God.

Miss Hattie Mae, a widow who never let anyone inside her house, walked forward with the bones in her hands covered by a thin layer of ointment. It’s the arthritis, she said. Put the sugar on the kitchen table. I saw Him there behind her, His arms on the cross, His orange eyes. Miss Hattie Mae was a thin, cautious woman with the scent of bananas trailing a pattern throughout her house. Go on, she said as the fumes of the ointment made my eyes watery. Go.

Mama wiped the sweat from her forehead with a table napkin. It was white with blue horizontal lines going through it. She walked over to the kitchen sink and paused. All that flesh to haul around weighed down on her. She hated being a big woman, being out of breath all the time with that loose fat draining all of her energy. Reckon your Daddy be home soon?

Yes, ma’am, I said. He’s been out since Thursday.

Now it was Saturday. He had gone to Morgan City, Louisiana, to slaughter a hog that he’d fattened. Everyone in town knew that it didn’t take three days to kill no hog. He lied. He told Mama that it took so long because he and the boys had to bless the meat.

I’m wishing we had the killing, said Mama. It’ll go right nice with these here collards.

She had traded her life for him. I had seen her in pictures at sixteen before the fatness of her body swallowed her. One arm wrapped around Daddy’s throat from behind, the laughter on her face as light and delicate as lint on a child’s clothes. Because her belly was flat then and there were no babies to swell her. Because she loved him the way he was and had taught him the vocabulary of the liquor labels, the clear from the dark. She had fallen in love with an illiterate man, her fingers now mocking the shapes of caterpillars from hard work, a maid’s work. Because she knew that there would be times when she’d drop him off at Mr. Sandifer’s, his boss at the scrap yard, and his feet would never touch the ground.

I smell Grandma, I said.

Again she paused, looking out at the empty hog pen, remembering the night that Grandma chopped off Daddy’s arm with the ax because he smelled like thievery. Thievery to Grandma was anything less than Mama and nothing greater. The blood stayed in the house for three days. She made him step over it every morning on his way to work. It seemed like forever before the smell of blood and maggots cleared the air.

I smell her too, she said.

There fell a moment of silence between us.

Mama looked at her hands and moaned. She was made of a glass vase. Her throat was sharp and fragile, her lips clear, smooth. She picked up a porcelain paragraph filled with the words of Jesus. Grandma always said that an object in a woman’s hands was the way she chose to lose a headache. She said this, that women who did not use their words caught a headache of the mind and spirit. If a woman was too weak to use her voice, her vocabulary got trapped in her temples and formed a blood clot. And with this came the disaster of silence.

She was thinking of Aunt Pip now, the evening the church folk came by for a cold drink of lemonade and a helping of potato pone, the moment she noticed that Daddy and Aunt Pip were missing and found an empty bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table. She was a woman with a need for moving things in her life. My father was her balance. He was her baptism. Before long, she was turning away from the voices, the gravity of gossip in the front yard, only to find Daddy’s fingers going up the hole in Aunt Pip’s vagina. She said nothing. She knew the difference between a man wanting her and needing her. What could she have done? She was a maid for damn near every white man in Pyke County. And men loved Aunt Pip. She knew how to walk with her shoulders up. She was a thin woman, useful. Mama thought of many things: the time she caught Daddy at the pool hall with that Jefferson girl, when she broke his collarbone in two places and no doctor would fix it because of his reputation, Jesus. She did nothing. Just stood there in the backyard for hours holding the tube of fire-engine-red lipstick that Aunt Pip had left behind, crying silently.

Eventually, she spoke. Daddy had been at a cockfight all evening. And for some reason, he forgot that Mama was a woman who didn’t forget things. He thought her words would stay pinned up in her head. But I knew that she didn’t forget things: iron the sheets, stretch the towels out on the line, stop by the post office, remember the numbers. Lord, have mercy. Don’t ever forget the numbers. Never get a white man’s mail mixed up with a Negro’s. No man’s numbers were ever the same. His numbers were his life. And do those white man’s favors and remember to use that weariness against your sister. Remember to curse her out for sleeping with your husband. And don’t ever listen. Curse until your lungs close in on you and shut you down.

I could still hear the words, the cursing Mama put on Aunt Pip. She didn’t know words like that. Not Mama. She was a quiet woman, useful to the world. She didn’t curse. I told myself a lot of things. A lot of wrong, but rational things to keep from killing them like the dead bird that I’d found in the road: the eyes covered by a white film, the dark pupil underneath, circular. On that particular day, the day Mama chose to use her voice, I brought the dead bird home and threw it against my bedroom mirror until the eyes closed and it knew nothing else of the world. It did not stop the sound of the voices; my grandma held her chest and stretched her arms out to Mama and Aunt Pip, ordering them to stop hollering inside her house. The sound of the screen door slamming and the flies buzzed over a piece of sliced watermelon on the front porch. Grandma clenched her blouse and mumbled, Y’all gone kill me. A couple of days later, Aunt Pip sent me in the house to get Grandma. But I told her that she was too sick to get up. In her place, she had given me a green garden lizard to put inside Aunt Pip’s hands, saying: This is my home. I left my heart here.

Yeah, it was a man who had separated Mama and Aunt Pip. Daddy had met them both at the pool hall. He was a young, well-built man with an odor on him. I’d heard men from Morgan City ask him about his fingers, if the smell of pussy was still on them. They said that he’d push his fingers so far up a woman’s stomach that he pulled the cord out. And when she went to pee, blood came from her. He had used his fingers to embarrass. This gave him power.

The rain’ll be here the reckon, said Mama. Get the clothes off the line.

The spring air floated upward. My fingers were wrinkled from the bucket of water, the collard greens. I missed the hog. I liked having something active around. The night before Daddy took the hog to Morgan City, I walked over to the gate and opened it. The hog licked her fur in the corner of the pen. She was afraid of me that night. Something kept her there. I opened the gate to free her. She didn’t move. The men will kill you, I said. They will eat you and take your fur. I hadn’t used my fingers enough to touch her. I was human. She didn’t trust human hands. Humans killed. They killed and ate what they killed. She felt that as I stared into her eyes and found myself there dying to find the part of me that belonged, that wasn’t green and afraid. I saw love in her eyes. She knew how to love. A hog who ate and loved what loved her. I slowly walked backward to find her so afraid of freedom that when the gate was completely open, she found herself cradled inside the sharpest corner of the pen, licking her private parts.

Grandma had walked clean out the back door with Daddy’s arm in her hand. I remember the commotion, the loud voices, Daddy telling Grandma to shut her old ass up. Phrases, secrets that went right over my head. Mama crying for Grandma to stop before her heart stopped working. I chop my own wood, said Grandma. I’ve always chopped my own wood! She was a strong woman. She hated the weak. It’s all right if you can’t see my heart from the inside, she said. My child is my business. It’s her heart they stare at when you can’t pay the bills. She called on God. Her heart is on the outside now. You took her pride. It’s not even her pain no more. Now she belong to the world. She yelled those words over and over again as if she’d rehearsed them. Daddy said something. Next thing I know, Daddy’s screaming and there’s a pool of blood on the floor.

Everything was so blurry. Mama hanging over Daddy’s chest and pushing me against the walls. Her saying that Daddy’s life was missing. Grandma took his life. The backyard covered in a blanket of blue. The eye sees most when it’s not looking, as I witnessed the shape of my grandma’s crawling hair marching out to the hog pen with Daddy’s arm in her hand. She didn’t just turn around. She stayed there awhile with Daddy’s arm in one hand and an ax in the other. Daddy’s arm: the radius of a complete body, the portion of a man that every man needed, his trouble, a six-sided dice throw against the wall, an acoustic guitar’s whine, half his life. Grandma dumped it into the trough. I was sure of it. That’s why my daddy hated that hog so much. After that night, he fed it anything he could get his hands on. That hog had eaten his arm, his manhood, his work. Yeah, he fattened that hog up real nice before he drove all the way to Morgan City to kill it, because it had lived too close to his memory, so close to his house to have owned his house, owned him.

I gathered a load of sheets in my arms before going back into the house.

Are they sour? Mama asked.

I smelled them. No, ma’am.

The rain came pouring down. I went to my room to listen to it, to become a part of my God, to leave behind the quiet silence between a mother and child who didn’t know how to talk to each other, how to fully communicate about the dead, the cheating, the alcoholic father, the whispers in town about a sinful child with no respect for God’s house, His rules.

I always had my encyclopedias. I hated history. If it hadn’t been for that one subject, I would have been an honor student. I read everything. Paid more attention to Negroes than they had to themselves. I knew why that hog didn’t come to me too. I read things about those white scientists and how people, animals, were conditioned to a sort of used to type of living. That hog was so used to being locked up that she didn’t know how to move or break the rules. She lay there like that because she was used to being confined, eating slop. I mean she was so used to eating slop that my daddy’s arm went right down her throat, fingers and all.

I got a telegram today, said Mama. I folded my arms and leaned my head to one side as her shadow grew larger over the edge of my bed. Finally, she sat down. The pot on the stove was boiling over, full. Pip’s sick.

I heard that line over and over again in my head. That Pip’s sick and there was something she wanted me to do about it, something I, a fourteen-year-old child, was supposed to do about it.

Pack your things, she said. You going to Commitment.

There was a nerve of electricity in her mouth, a tiny movement of activity riding the side of her jawbone as if a parasite had gotten trapped inside.

What kind of sick? I asked.

She went for the door again. Her shadow halted. She had not seen Aunt Pip since Grandma’s funeral. Even then, they did not say one word to each other.

Graveyard sick, she said.

Later that evening, we drove to the outskirts of Pyke County. Aunt Pip lived on Commitment Road with one other lady who didn’t belong to any church for miles around. And she used her social security check to pay her bills. She, like Miss Hattie Mae, was a widow.

Maddy, said Mama, pulling her Goodwill hat over to one side and giving me the eye in the rearview mirror. Make sure that if you and Pip leave the house, you put on some underclothes. Never know what could happen these days.

There were tiny holes in the floor panel. When she drove, the dirt road underneath my feet reminded me of time and its passing. After Grandma died, the folks at the funeral home sent word that Mama needed to bring her some more comfortable shoes to be buried in. Only the oldest child was allowed to see the dead. Nobody else. The telegram said that Grandma’s feet were swollen. I sat in that very seat, drawing the letters of my name on the windows, looking down at Grandma’s shoes, hoping that she’d come alive in them. It was muddy that day. The sky didn’t have a color in it.

Yes, ma’am.

Two church members followed closely behind us in the rearview mirror. A woman in a white hat threw her hands up. Every so often, her husband, in his brown suit, would take one hand off the wheel and bring it to his forehead. The wife was holding a Bible up now. They were like Adam and Eve discussing sin. Whose voice mattered most I did not know. The husband, his face microscopic, lit a cigar.

The road was wet as leaves of thick, fat pine trees grazed the windshield. Mama slowed down, complaining about the car’s hanging muffler. Lawd, she said, the only good your daddy give me was a nine-month-old seed.

Even that doesn’t count, I said.

She didn’t understand me. We didn’t understand each other. What? she said.

Women hold babies for almost a year, I said. And when it comes out, they have to start all over again. My nose itched. That’s not fair.

Well, said Mama, "some babies come out early. You was so small