ONE
Savannah, Georgia—August 1932
“The old woman couldn’t a picked a hotter day to get herself buried,” Jesse Wills whispered as he wiped his brow. A nervous smile came to his lips. The secrets of living and dying would forever remain a mystery to him, but he knew one thing for certain, and that was if his grandmother were alive to hear him speak of her as “the old woman,” she’d be chasing him around this here boneyard with a willow switch. “Sorry there, Nana,” he mumbled under his breath, not so sure he shared his wife Betty’s Christian certainty as to the final disposition of the human soul. If anyone could figure out how to hold on to a piece of this world after passing, it would be his grandmother, Tuesday Jackson.
She’d been a tough old gal right up to the end, his nana. Barely five foot tall and light enough for a good wind to topple, Nana Tuesday had been tough enough to best Joe Louis in any fight. A fool might have messed with Tuesday Jackson once, but he’d never do it twice. Jesse himself had tried her patience more than that, of course, but he was not just any old fool; he had been her favorite grandbaby.
Now she was gone. Being placed in Laurel Grove South Cemetery’s earth, one grave over from where Jesse’s daddy lay. Right next to the plot his mama had reserved for herself. It wasn’t the old way. Used to be his daddy would lie with his own people, near the grave of his own mother, but his daddy’s mama had been buried out on St. Helena Island. And Jesse’s mama wanted her husband near, where she could visit him. Besides, the world had changed. At least in some ways.
Jesse’s cousins had invited their minister, young Pastor Jones, the preacher at Wildwood Congregational, to officiate a graveside service. Nana had never darkened the church’s door in her life, so it didn’t seem right dragging her in there now, when she no longer had any say over the matter. No, Nana Tuesday had never been a churchgoing lady. When visiting out on Daufuskie or Hilton Head, she would go to the woods to do her praying, or on the rare occasion, to a Praise House. For the most part, she had preferred to keep her religion between herself and her maker, not seeing it as being anyone else’s business.
It did no harm, though, in Jesse’s eyes, to let the fiery preacher bring comfort to those members of his family who couldn’t reconcile his nana’s beliefs and practices with their own faith. Could’ve been worse, anyway. His cousin Joe had gotten all caught up with Father Divine. Ended up handing over everything he had to the man ’cept the very clothes on his back. No, Pastor Jones was certainly the lesser of those two evils. Still, Jesse began his own private prayer that the young fellow would be fast about burning off the steam he’d built up.
Jesse and his little family hung back on the periphery, ceding the area nearest the grave to his uncles, aunties, and cousins, the combined mass of them forming a swaying and waving mostly white-clad circle around it. He loved his nana, as much if not more than any of them, but there’d been no love lost between his wife and grandmother, and the whole family knew it. Best to keep Betty back where her comments stood a better chance of going unheard or at least unheeded.
“Oh, this heat ain’t natural weather,” Betty said, fanning herself with one hand and shielding her eyes from the morning glare with the other. Those clear hazel upturned eyes sparkled from her coppery oval face. That face was framed by hair straightened by means of Madam Walker’s pomade, then curled into finger waves. She’d stained her lips red; her eyelids wore a powdery blue.
Even after all these years among his people, even after marrying him and bearing him children, the way Betty spoke—so slow and with a slight twang like the inland buckra, the whites—bore witness to the fact that she had never become one of his people. “This here heat is hell openin’ its mouth,” she continued, “to swallow the old woman’s black soul.” She looked away from his nana’s grave and scanned the cemetery. “I can’t see why any good Christian graveyard would take her bones anyhow. I mean, this here place is for burying good God-fearing people, not witches.”
“She was no witch,” Jesse said, a burst of anger causing his voice to come out low and sharp. “She was my grandmother. My mama’s mama.” His gaze drifted for a moment to his mother, May Jackson Wills. Her eyes had nearly swollen shut from crying. She bobbed at the knees, then rocked slowly back and forth with her arms drawn up tight around her bosom. “And you will show her the respect she deserves.” Jesse couldn’t bear to see his mama like this. He was her only child. He wanted to go to her and take her in his arms. Calm the low wailing that sounded from her breaking heart. But he couldn’t risk leaving his wife for fear she’d get something stirred up in the few moments he was gone.
The sight of his mother’s pain hurt him too deeply, so he focused instead on his wife. “ ’Sides, you’re a fine one to brag about being a good Christian.” He said it to hurt her, to punish her, but he regretted it the next instant. Betty’s glance met his for a sharp moment, but then she cast angry eyes down at that hot sandy soil and pursed her full lips into a little-girl pout. The same pout that had helped win his heart in the first place.
He stood there, for the moment transfixed by a sentiment from their younger days. Betty shifted from one foot to the other, as if she were growing weary under the weight of his continued stare. When her eyes flashed up to his, the hard defiant look had smoothed into a calm, knowing smile. She knew him too well. She knew he couldn’t give her up, any more than he could give up that dark brown—way too dark to be his—baby girl she’d recently birthed. He looked over to see his two natural daughters, Opal and Poppy, standing near the fence that marked the cemetery’s edge. The girls held back, even from him and their mama, without any prompting. They seemed to share his sense that it would be best for them to keep to the periphery of the gathering.
Opal looked like her mother, except for the unfortunate addition of his ears. Poppy was the dead ringer of his mama, who in her youth had been as beautiful as Betty, maybe even more so seeing as how his mama’s beauty never relied on any manmade artifice. The little one, squirming in her big sister Opal’s arms, didn’t resemble any of them. And still, he loved her as surely as he did the ones who bore his likeness.
The sun was heading up in the sky, and the fresh heat it brought was unforgiving. His starched white shirt felt like a plaster cast, what with the sweat that ringed his underarms and banded the back of his shoulders where the garment pulled tight. “You keep Jilo in the shade,” he called out, and Opal moved out of the sun, taking shelter beneath the canopy of an ancient live oak.
Betty had it right, of course—he could forgive her infidelity; in truth, he could forgive her for just about anything. He loved that headstrong woman to her core. Besides, she still had the power to make him stop dead in his tracks and stare after her, just like that day he’d first laid eyes on her in Atlanta, outside her daddy’s store where he’d worked while putting himself through school. For her part, Betty hadn’t shown much interest in him until her daddy out-and-out forbade the courtship. If they took up together, her daddy had shouted out loud enough for the entire city to hear, she’d be marrying poorer. She’d be marrying darker. She’d be marrying down. Still, take up with each other they did, and one fine morning around twelve years back, Jesse and the then fifteen-year-old Betty eloped, leaving Atlanta behind and settling in Savannah, where Jesse himself had been raised.
“Forty acres and a mule,” a cousin of his called out, then laughed, making Jesse realize how far his thoughts had drifted from his nana’s burial. The knowing chuckles from those gathered told him he wasn’t the only one who wished the preacher would be done with his business. Pastor Jones was still talking, but that wasn’t going to stop the rest of them from eulogizing Nana Tuesday in their own way.
Jesse had missed whatever prompted his cousin’s comment, but that phrase would always make him think of his nana. “Forty acres and a mule,” she’d shout out in those moments when the distant past grew sharper in focus than the everyday world around her. “That’s what they promised us, forty acres and a mule.” Then she’d laugh, as if she found humor in her own youthful naiveté.
The buckra cursed William Tecumseh Sherman as the Yankee devil who’d burned a swath through the South, torching everything right up to Savannah’s back door, then giving the city to his president as a Christmas present. To the newly freed people like Nana Tuesday, Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 must have made him seem like the second coming of Christ himself. Old No. 15 granted the freedmen ownership of a good bit of the South Carolina coast. Other promises granted them the Sea Islands from Seabrook to Cumberland.
Even today, nearly seventy years later, the white folk around here still cursed Sherman for his fiery march, but the promises Sherman made to Jesse’s people barely lasted a full trip around the sun. No. 15 was overturned before Lincoln was cold in his grave, and any land that hadn’t been purchased outright by the former slaves was returned to the hands of their erstwhile masters. Nana had spent pretty near her whole darned life in Yamacraw, the area just south of the river and west of West Broad Street, but the only land she’d ever owned was the dirt left on her shoes by Yamacraw’s dusty lanes.
Now, the rich whites were nibbling away at the Sea Islands, or in some cases trying to swallow them whole like that Coffin fellow did twenty years back with Sapelo. Just stepped in and bought up every inch the black folk there couldn’t prove they owned. Even built his mansion over the foundation of the old slave master Spalding’s house. Jesse had to wonder if it was possible to build your home on the same foundation without fostering the same ambition in your heart.
The sound of Betty clicking her tongue caught his attention. “Cups and spoons and broken plates,” she started in again, shaking her head as she surveyed his family. “These people done brought half the kitchen out here. She getting buried, not setting up house. She ain’t got no more use for these things where she done gone.”
“It’s my people’s way.”
“Well, y’all people got some mighty funny ways,” she said, as if she were a disapproving stranger, not a woman who’d made her home among them for a dozen years.
Jesse’s family didn’t keep up too much with the old ways, at least not here on the mainland. They seemed to have two separate ways of living, two distinct languages, the one bound to the “sweet” water of the mainland, the other seeming to spring from the salt water that cocooned the islands. In their everyday lives, they were so careful, so intent on avoiding behavior that might draw the white man’s attention, or worse, his ire. But they were so much freer on rare visits to Daufuskie or St. Helena, and their speech buzzed with words remembered from tongues spoken clean on the other side of the ocean. Jesse had enjoyed explaining his family’s customs to Betty early on in their marriage, but he had realized he would never be able to surmount her contempt for their traditions. Now he repeated the same tired explanation he’d given her many times over the years. “These things were special to Nana. Things she used. Bits and pieces of her life. They’re memorials, nothing more. You know that.”
“What I know is that it don’t matter one whit what people put on your grave if you weren’t right with Jesus when you died. It’s too late for that old gal now. This here heat is proof enough of where she went. We need to finish putting her in the ground and get on with things.”
“Well you just let Jesus be her judge and mind your own self,” snapped his auntie Martha, who usually pretended to be deaf when in Betty’s presence.
Betty’s eyes flashed, and she rocked back and forth in a show of defiance, but she must have realized she’d been pressing her luck. She held her tongue.
“Amen, sister,” young Reverend Jones shouted out, picking up on Martha’s words, though Jesse felt sure he’d been too deep into his own preaching to have heard Betty’s. “That’s right, Jesus, He is Sister Tuesday’s judge, just as He is the judge of us all.” A smirk formed on Betty’s lips, and in spite of himself, Jesse couldn’t help but return it. Had she been a living spectator to the proceedings, Nana Tuesday would have without a doubt hurled some sharp words at this man of God. While she would have allowed him to call her “Mother Tuesday,” as most of the folk, black and white, around here did, such a young man would get a mouthful for treating her like a little sister.
“Thank you, Pastor,” Jesse’s mama said, placing her hand on his shoulder. Pastor Jones looked at her, Bible still held high, seeming to deliberate whether or not he should shrug her off and carry on. “I do so appreciate you coming out today,” May added in a sincere tone. Jesse knew his mama, though, and despite her calm demeanor, he knew she’d heard enough. The preacher had been given more than enough time to speak of wheat and chaff and wise virgins with well-trimmed wicks. The look on her face was the one she used when placating anyone in authority—usually the buckra, but occasionally one of their own. “We need to be getting the babies and the old folk out of the sun before one of them falls ill.”
The young man searched her face for a moment, then acquiesced. “Thank you, sister,” he said, taking a step back from the head of the grave.
Jesse’s mama smiled again at the preacher. “You go on, now,” she said, dismissing him in no uncertain terms. “We can handle it from here.” Jones lingered for a moment, as if considering whether he should listen, then nodded and walked away from the grave, passing by Jesse and his family on his way to the cemetery gate. He hesitated a moment when he reached Jesse’s daughters, who watched the young pastor with listless trepidation. Opal shifted Jilo, balancing the baby on her hip. Jones reached out to pat Poppy’s head, but then stopped dead at the sight of Jilo, doll-like in her starched white cap and gown. The pastor pulled his hand back slowly and hurried on toward the gate. Silence fell over the group until he was well beyond the boundary.
“Opal,” his mother called. Jesse’s eyes darted to his daughter.
“Yes’m.” The girl startled and straightened to attention at the sound of her nana’s voice.
“You bring your sister on up here,” Jesse’s mama instructed. “Bring Jilo to me.”
Jesse felt Betty tensing beside him. “You stay right where you are, girl,” Betty said, wagging her finger at Opal, who seemed nearly split in two by her desire to please both her nana and her mama at the same time. “What you need my Jilo for?” Betty took a few steps forward. Jesse couldn’t help but notice that she had moved toward his mother, ready for confrontation, rather than toward her baby, ready to protect.
He knew there was no need to protect Jilo from anything that was going to happen here, so while Betty geared herself up for a shouting matching with his mama, he stepped back and approached the girls. “Let me have her,” he said with a nod to Opal. Her face relaxed in gratitude as she handed the baby over.
Jesse took Jilo in both hands and shifted her into the crook of his arm. He leaned his head over to plant a kiss on her round cheek, then reached out and ran his thumb over Opal’s cheek as well. Over the sound of their mama’s indignant shouting, Jesse winked and said, “Your daddy has the best girls in the whole wide world; you know that, don’t you?” A smile curved on Opal’s lips, and she blinked once before nodding her response.
“And you, my little flower?” he said, turning toward Poppy, who scurried up to him and hugged his leg. He patted her head. “I love my girls,” he said. “All three of them.” When Poppy released him and slid back next to Opal, he closed his eyes for a moment before turning to face the scene unfolding behind him.
“And I,” Betty said, waving her finger in his mama’s face, “am not gonna have my babies take part in any of the old woman’s Hoodoo. You hear me?”
“Jilo,” his mama replied in her calmest voice, even though the angry set of her mouth and the crease that lined the center of her forehead told Jesse she was anything but relaxed, “is the last born. You want to be good and clear of the old woman”–her head rocked in indignation–“then we need to pass Jilo over the coffin.”
Jesse had almost reached his mother’s side when Betty caught sight of him. She pushed roughly past the mourners who didn’t have the sense to part between them like the Red Sea at the wave of Moses’s staff. “Gimme the girl.”
Jesse took a step backward and placed his hand over the back of Jilo’s little capped head. “It’s our way.”
“It may be your way, but it ain’t my way, and she’s my child.” Betty now stood within spitting distance of him, her chest and shoulders heaving. She flung out her arms, grasping at the linen of Jilo’s gown.
There was no way he was relinquishing the girl to those clenched and angry hands. “She’s my child, too.” For a moment, Betty’s face froze. Then her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head. Her lips parted, readying to speak the truth that his cousins had been whispering behind his back, the truth his gut already knew. The truth that his own heart told him was the greatest lie of all. But then she stopped. Her tongue darted out of her mouth and licked her lips instead.
She gestured with a wide wave of her arm that included him, his mother, the casket, and the baby. “All right, y’all heathens go right on ahead. Y’all do what you need to do.” She spun around and stomped off, heading toward the gate.
Opal and Poppy started to take off after her, but their mother swung her hand back, signaling for them to stay put. Jesse could read the worry and confusion on their little faces from a hundred paces. “You come up here with Daddy and Nana,” he called to them. They hesitated, keeping an eye on their mother’s receding back. “Come on,” he said and urged them forward with a wave of his free hand. The two girls joined hands and walked forward with some lingering trepidation.
Jesse’s mother positioned herself on the opposite side of the coffin. He shifted Jilo off his shoulder, taking her in both hands. She gurgled with laughter, a bit of drool falling from the side of her mouth. Her black eyes twinkled with such love and intelligence, so much soul. It was like she’d already lived a thousand lives, and held every secret of the universe in her chubby, damp hands. He pulled her in close and placed a kiss on her forehead, then reached her over the casket to his mother.
His mama’s calloused, yet gentle, hands brushed his. As he let Jilo drop into her grasp, his ears were met with a loud pop, and his eyes registered a flash of bluish light. Everyone stood there gaping in silent amazement. Jilo squealed happily and reached her chubby arms across the void of his nana’s grave toward him, a joyous mystery playing in her eyes.