Gone like yesterday, p.29
Gone Like Yesterday, page 29
“You know where we’re from, don’t you?” she finally asks.
Zahra considers that word—from. It’s not descriptive enough, could mean anything, two years ago to 1619, though she’s recently heard that Africans were brought here long before that. Either way, Zahra could say she’s from Decatur or Marks, Mississippi, or the Gold Coast or most correctly, a labyrinth of origins for which there are no bread crumbs other than DNA, shortsighted beyond biology.
“Africa?” she says, not knowing what Gram is looking for.
Gram laughs. “And after that, Mississippi,” she says. “I figure, now, I haven’t told you enough about it. Got you in this world running around with your head chopped off.” Zahra brings a hand to her neck, feeling the delicate lifelines of it, the fullness of her skin.
“You know, we called my mom Mother, but I don’t talk about her much because it feels like there’s nothing to say.”
Zahra nods.
“Tell us now,” Derrick says gently.
Gram clears her throat. “They say Mother dreamed of bodies in water, faces swollen until they came up, still and silent; deadly, that Mississippi.” Gram’s taken on a new form, a new voice too, struggling to get it out, as if she’s got rocks in her throat. “Rose, Mother’s twin, heard Mother screaming throughout the night, she was so bewitched, but then Mother was never the same after Father died; none of us were. I remember looking facedown in a well, seeing my skin skip off the cool water and knowing it was far down there, a long way, and I imagined never coming up for air. That well was as stifling as the Mississippi heat, just like life then, tied like an army knot. You know they sent Uncle Richard Senior to Germany, right? Mother’s older brother. He was twenty-one, and there wasn’t nothing Mother could do to stop it. Praying hadn’t been enough, or maybe Mother was doing it wrong.
“Senior came back and said they don’t tell you what it’s like to see a man’s head explode and a million tiny things shoot out of it like worms wriggling to freedom, what it’s like to see his neck twitch as if he’s still alive, and then you feel your own neck, wondering if you’re alive, because maybe you already died and this is hell. And every day after that, you check to make sure your head’s still there, but maybe you lost it a long time ago, because thinking is different than it used to be and ain’t no way you’ll find your way home like this.”
Zahra doesn’t know how Gram remembers it all, where she’s been storing it. Now, Gram’s eyes are trained on one of the bedroom windows, and they don’t move an inch as she goes on.
“They don’t tell you that when you come back from the war you’ll still be a nigger, and you can’t run from your yellow-black skin like you ran from bombs. And their spit will feel like bullets. A million tiny things, a million bread crumbs, a million names for a nigger, but don’t no one know where Senior gone. Poof, disappeared inside his own body. There but not there,” Gram says, pointing to her mind, as if Senior lost it. “If Mother wasn’t near her breakdown before that, it wasn’t too much after. Still, she up and moved to Atlanta with little more than a nickel and a dime.”
It’s like the room’s been sucked free of sound, no one even breathing but Gram coming up for air. There’s a lot for Zahra to process, a lot of questions on her mind, like why is Gram just now telling them all of this? Zahra has only the vaguest idea of how stories can hurt, how it can be easier to forget them and act like things never happened. White people forget what they’ve done every day; there’s no saying why the burden of remembering should be on Black folks alone.
“Maybe these people aren’t Mother or Rose or Senior, but there’s something about all of them, something that brings yesterday back like it was never gone to begin with.”
It’s enough for Zahra to drop it. She sees how tired Gram looks, eyes as heavy as a box of books, one shoulder slumped like a lopsided lampshade.
“That settles it,” Zahra says, rekindling her pragmatism. They’re random photos, left from way before they came to Atlanta in the 1950s. Derrick must have gotten a hold of them as children. Now he draws them from memory. Strange, but really, there’s nothing unexplainable there. She’s let Sammie and Derrick make her think there’s something bigger going on, but it’s just too far-fetched.
“It doesn’t settle anything,” Derrick says.
“You heard, Gram. They’re not family.”
“So?” Derrick says. “They need us or something.”
“And Derrick’s pictures are almost exact replicas. Look at her eyes. There’s no mistaking them,” Sammie says.
“Maybe he saw those photos when we were a kid. Someone probably left them here a long time ago.” Zahra wants to close this case. There are bigger ones at hand, like the house.
“But what if we were meant to find them? What if they found us?” Sammie argues.
“It’s unlikely.”
“What if the voices never stop until we listen?” Derrick reasons. He’s cool and calm as he says it, his arms crossed, face almost expressionless. “We should go back to the creek. That’s where I hear them the strongest. And I saw someone there, too. I think she was—”
“Absolutely not,” Zahra interrupts him. “It’s like nine at night. Way too dark. You’re both wildin’.”
* * *
—
Trey would probably kill her if he knew that she was taking his niece out in the middle of the night, traipsing through trees, streetwalking in Decatur’s dark hiding spots. It’s some white-people shit, and she knows it. Trey would probably be more confused than anything. Surely, he’s of a more standard variation of Black, someone who knows that you don’t seek the answers but let them find you. A noise in the yard, and you close the doors. Shouting in a neighbor’s house and you shut your blinds, mind your business.
Zahra checked in on Trey not too long ago, and he was still in bed asleep. Gram says it’s probably just a twenty-four-hour bug, but Zahra thinks it could be more. The timing seems odd; everything does these days. Coincidences feel more impossible than the alternative—destiny, fate, divine intervention.
“Last time I went to the creek, Rashad seemed to know something. What if we invited him?” Sammie says.
“Who’s Rashad?” Zahra asks.
Sammie looks at her incredulously. “Your next-door neighbor. He’s my age. Or close, a couple of years younger.”
Zahra’s confused. No one has lived in that house for years. Growing up, the neighborhood joked that the house was haunted. Folks moved in and out every few months, returning the purchase, back to sender. But no one could tell you who owned it. Online records showed that it belonged to a Mr. Tyrell Young, but the whole block knows he lost that house in 2001, due to a bankruptcy.
“He said he knew you, Derrick,” Sammie says.
When Zahra turns sharply to her brother, he only shakes his head, confused. But she wants answers. Not this half-cooked bullshit Derrick has been serving since he got home. She sees it now, the resemblance between Sammie and Derrick, not a physical thing but something more spiritual, protruding from the inside out like a broken bone, a discernible pheromone. Zahra won’t let what happened to her brother happen to Sammie. She’ll rip up every photo they’ve found, knock down every fucking cobweb that’s grown in the house. She’ll kill every last moth on the East Coast if she has to. She sees that there are parts of Sammie that mimic both her and Derrick, and if nothing else, she’ll save Sammie from herself.
THIRTY-TWO
Zahra stomps ahead of them, a hurricane with feet. Zahra says it’s all too wild to be true, a house so invested in its occupants that it’s begun haunting them, a neighbor who’s not really a neighbor at all. Sammie knows it’s only because Zahra hasn’t opened her mind to other possibilities. She must think she can will her way through the world, that her fortitude can overcome centuries of oppression. Sammie knows better. She knows that most things are bigger than her, even bigger than her understanding of them. She’s still waiting for the world to show itself. “Slow down,” she calls out.
Sammie has never been more comfortable in the night. Like most teenagers, she’s assured in her self-righteousness, her presumed invincibility. She has no foresight to see that ghosts, spirits, ancestors can eat her from the inside out, that harm doesn’t have to be wished for it to be done, that needy voices can pull you underground like quicksand or the rapidly rising levels of the Chattahoochee. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be here one day and gone the next, how easily life can be plucked from you, how fragile, the knee to the neck or one stray bullet through the brain, like a lamp with a string switch. One quick pull, and all goes black.
It’s dark out, even with streetlights and the occasional headlights. It’s quiet too, save for the sound of crickets, squirrels scampering, and every now and then, a speeding car. Some people sit outside on old lawn chairs, but even they don’t seem to have much to say, just whispers and half-empty cans of Coke between them.
Of course, Sammie is only beginning to know about secrets. She has no idea that they can run as deep as an ocean with arms and legs that branch off like rivers and wetlands. They are never as straight as streams but loop around themselves and involve all subsidiaries they touch, more contagious than a cough. In all the shades of brick—cream and burgundy and burnt orange—houses they pass, secrets store in ivy-covered yards with resounding rottweilers and Dodge Chargers with leather interior, near pampas grass plumes shading signs that read no trespassing, kept out on the front porch like fresh pies, most prevalent in a community burdened by strict, impossible morality. One misstep, and the whip, judgment, jail, jobless.
Sammie is right about one thing: Secrets are like bacon grease. Stand back, and it won’t stop them from popping you. They find a way to break loose no matter how much you try to squelch them, hide them like some old children’s game. Years later, and there they are, screaming at you to be seen. When the people themselves are the secrets, there’s no running away, only hunkering down and bracing yourself.
Sammie thinks about Rashad, with his smile like center stage, open curtains, lights up. If he doesn’t live next door, then what’s he been doing there, squatting? And doesn’t he always seem like he’s got more to say than he’s letting on? Sammie gets the feeling that he’s used to talking and not saying much at all.
Sammie can hear Derrick’s shallow breaths beside her, and when they go off road, she can hear Zahra up ahead, clearing the path, tree branches swinging lower than Sammie remembers them on her way here with Rashad. Zahra doesn’t say anything, but every now and then Derrick asks a question, “You hear the voices, don’t you?” or “They want us to know something, don’t you think?”
When they get to the creek, they stand in silence, and even a determined Sammie is unsure what they’re doing and why they’re here. But there in the trees from whence they came, she thinks she sees the familiar smile of a beautiful boy.
“Rashad?” she calls out. She catches sight of him, but he backs up, and the shadows swallow him whole. She runs to catch up.
“Rashad,” she says. “Hold up.”
She hears his footsteps, crunching leaves and small branches. Why is he running away from her? What is he hiding? Ordinarily, she’d be too scared to follow someone deep into the woods like this, around oaks and pines that tower above her, well into the night, but Rashad is alluring, and she trusts him, and there’s a feeling of calm that passes over her. She feels free, like a little girl racing after the ice cream truck.
Before long, she realizes she’s lost his steps, and she’s tired. She stops, and Derrick and Zahra pull up behind her, dropping their hands to their knees as if they haven’t run in years.
“Dang, I lost him,” Sammie says.
She can barely see, it’s so dark out, and she finally realizes how deep inside these Georgia trenches she’s led them. “Shit,” she says.
She looks around and sees the land for what it is—alive, resilient. She thinks about Puerto Rico, how Hurricane Maria devastated nearly almost all of its buildings, killing thousands of people, uprooting trees, sweeping through the territory like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Now, more than two years later, Puerto Rico is still rebuilding, the American relief process slow. But the rain forest replenished itself within that first year, the canopy lush and green again, the trees and flora, vegetation and vines as regal as ever. An immaculate revival. Sammie looks around, and this place is no different, green and growing. From Dr. Lawrence’s fifth period on botany and zoology, she remembers that it only takes a seedling, any remnant an opportunity for regrowth. So this is not a place of ghosts at all but an altar, something connecting God and the world’s inhabitants.
There’s a light, just one, near a thick oak tree leaning down, the lower half of it parallel enough to the ground that you could walk along it. She looks at the tree and spots a beautiful caterpillar. Then she sees there are tens, hundreds, thousands of them along the bark, nesting, eating, lounging.
“Look,” she says, and Zahra and Derrick take either side of her. “There must be a million of them.”
THIRTY-THREE
Zahra watches a caterpillar metamorphose into a moth right before her eyes. And then another, two more, more, more. Their pointing is not quick enough. The moment they spot two, ten more are transitioning. Moths with bright white wings. They’re everywhere, at once beautiful, now threatening.
“Let’s go,” Zahra says, and they walk slowly, conscious of the roots underfoot. Zahra is mesmerized by the moths in a way she has never been before.
“They’re safe, right?” Sammie asks, and it seems they’re all considering this same question.
Zahra’s not sure, doesn’t answer out loud, but she’s alert of the moths’ growing numbers, how they’re swarming, swarming, swarming, thicker and thicker like a rainstorm.
“Run!” she screams, assessing the new threat.
They go back the way they came, their fear guiding them, arms pumping, leaves crunching.
“Faster!” Derrick screams, but Zahra is tired, no longer acquainted with this sort of cardio, and she falls behind.
She closes her eyes, the steps intuitive. Home isn’t a house but a thought, a memory, a smell, a sound. She knows where she’s going. Not too slow, but steady, like driving through fog.
* * *
—
They’re all panting when they get back to the creek, Zahra the last of them. She’s still catching her breath when Sammie starts laughing. Derrick looks at her for a beat but then joins in. They’re both delusional.
“What’s so funny?” Zahra says through breaths.
“God, grab a sense of humor,” Sammie says. “We were just chased out of the woods by a swarm of moths.”
“We could’ve been hurt,” Zahra says.
“How?” Sammie laughs even harder.
Zahra drops the worry, relaxes her shoulders. It is so absurd that she almost laughs too. Amid their relief, the moths are still here, flying, looming, laying their eggs.
The transformation is a thing of improbable possibility. It gives them pause; they are as still as mannequins, as breathless as deep-sea divers. In the blink of an eye, with the quickness of the flash of an old disposable camera, the moths turn into beautiful humans, all shades of black and brown. Zahra spins around, looking for what? She’s not sure. Maybe a way out. Maybe a weapon. But Derrick, slack-jawed and staring, unblinking, sits down on the grass—crisscross applesauce as if he’s here to watch a movie. Sammie rubs her eyes in disbelief and follows suit. Feeling they’ve left her no choice, Zahra is the last of them, on the cool grass, dew seeping through her jeans.
There is a boy at the creek, throwing rocks instead of skipping them. The rocks make loud kerplunks in the water, and the boy does not seem to mind how the water bounces back at him, splashing his shirt. He is the only one singing, and it’s a resounding voice, one where he tilts his whole head back on the runs. Zahra doesn’t know the song, but it sounds like gospel.
To his left are a group of twentysomething-year-olds playing cards, and Zahra knows their outfits well, colorful shirts with wide lapels and checkered flare pants that match the look and style of their hair, the times, the sixties. Zahra remembers the outfits and the faces from the photo of a photo on her iPhone. Gram’s siblings. Near them she spots Warren and Minnie and Natasha, Mother and Rose and Senior. What are they doing here?
Far down, behind the house where a white family used to live, Zahra spots a soul train line. People do the bump, the jerk, the twist. The cabbage patch, the Bankhead bounce. They drop it low and bring it back up again. They rub against each other like sandpaper to wood. They twerk, hands on knees. They whine, hips loose like warm Jell-O. Women throw one leg over male counterparts, one arm in the air as they gyrate. Two men kiss passionately, like long-lost lovers, while musicians beat talking drums and water drums, steel drums and bongo drums. They shake maracas and gourd seeds.
Panning to the left, on the neighbor’s patio, a man strikes a woman hard across the face, and she stumbles back against the patio’s railing. She’s hurt, but that doesn’t stop him. He begins to choke her, two big hands around one fragile neck.
“Hey!” Zahra calls out. “Hey!” She gets up without any idea of how she’ll fight a man twice her size, but Derrick pulls her back down.
“You can’t do anything,” he says, and she searches his face for what she’s missing. She wants to object because Derrick doesn’t always know everything, and dead people are still worth saving, but a group of women, middle-aged, stone-faced, catch her eye before she can say anything.
The women’s arms are lined with muscles that help them carry heaping piles of linens that travel toward the sky like precarious beanstalks. One woman holds a poster in protest. She sings to the others, and their loads come tumbling down like parachutes.
