Grandmother replaces the photograph on the table as the water comes to boil. “She has her eyes almost squinted shut in that picture, you know?” she asks me as she returns her hands to her hips. “It’s as though she could see what was coming, could see it was too terrible to be borne…” She moves across the room and pushes open the door to stare out from the frame. I tear the blossoms from their stalks and drop them in the pot.
“Grandmother,” I whisper. “I know you miss her the most this time of year.” Grandmother comes out of the doorway and turns to me with a smile so artificial she only succeeds in crafting a fraction of it.
“I’m all right, little girl,” she says as she sits. “Go on, and get the cups for our tea.”
“Maybe I should have altered a plant somebody else made,” I say as I ladle. “Like your sister’s hypergrain – I’ve been thinking of trying for a version that boils more quickly…” Grandmother stares into her tea. Brewed lightly, it’s the color of twilight; the longer you steep it, the more it approaches dusk.
“You did right. Your other grandmother would have been so proud.” She inhales the scent, closing her eyes and drawing in her breath slowly as though the fragrance might have come from my other grandmother’s wrists or nape. “I was thinking – if we start our Telling now and have the energy to stay awake until morning to finish it, we’ll know your flowers work. That’s all we can do until you replant to test for fertility.”
There is a knock at the door, and Grandmother gets up to answer it. On the other side is a couple a generation older than she with traveling bags at their feet. Both the man and the woman have long hair that same rare white that tends towards neither blue nor ivory, but the woman’s is pulled back in elegantly arranged dreadlocks while the man’s is as flat as undisturbed water. Grandmother reaches out her hand.
“Welcome, Auntie. Welcome, Uncle,” she says. I rise to shake the strangers’ hands as well before setting out some groundnut cakes. I glance at the old woman’s earrings. Threaded wampum seashells the soot-violet of procrastinating thunderclouds drift just above her shoulders telling me she comes from a village set on a river. The seashells don’t start until inches beneath her lobes though, clicking mildly against each other from under the strung porcupine quills that come from the north. The floating quills and wampum descend from disks made of interwoven small, round, bone beads. Every other bead on the perimeter is coated with ochre. Red Creek Village.
“You’ve come a long way,” I tell her in the Red Creek language. “Will you and Uncle stay with us tonight?”
“May we?” she asks my grandmother. “We still have another day and a half’s traveling before we get to our oldest daughter’s family. Going to stay with them for the Ghost Homecoming.”
“You are welcome,” my grandmother replies. While the old couple eats, my grandmother reads their robes.
In the beginning, she was walking the road alone – there, over in the Far Continent. She was a merchant, on her way to do business, and they kidnapped her from the road… Her grandson worked in the mines. The first time he talked back, they pulled all of his teeth. The second time he talked back, they impaled him on a metal hook and left him to die. His dying lasted many days… In the beginning, the Forest Grandmother was running on her way to become trees. She tripped over a large stone and bled into the water turning the creek red…
We, on this island Where There Are Many Shells, are a people who were once two peoples. The island is one of our homelands. The Far Continent is our other. Half of our ancestors were made, in the beginning, from this earth, and it is on this ground they were colonized five hundred years ago by people who came from beyond the sea. The conquistadors stole our land and exterminated most of the people it belonged to, driving those who survived into the west, and they stole our other ancestors from the Far Continent to work as their slaves. We rebelled as one people before we became one people, and we drove the Sea People away. They stayed gone for centuries until my grandmother’s lifetime.
Like their ancestors, that new generation of pink folk stole our gold mines with a haste bordering on instinct. They forced our men to excavate them until they emerged from the earth dusty and shining like the resurrected. We learned their language Macaulay because their whips could not distinguish between noncompliance due to incomprehension and defiance. The words for our island were “terra nullius,” unused land belonging to no one. Once more we managed to send them back. But they shattered our world like a dropped mirror before they left it.
Our antipodal ancestries are why we are all the browns and blacks of wood, of metal, of earth, why our hair may or may not consent to curl around your finger, accept and hold a braid, or part at the behest of a fine tooth comb. And each of us has a story of how, within our own lineage, those from there and those from here became one. The symbols in our robes make legible our blood.
This is so fluid and seamless…and reads almost like a song. Wow.
‘Brewed lightly, it’s the color of twilight; the longer you steep it, the more it approaches dusk.’
‘The photograph is sepia. Loss seems intrinsic to sepia to me. I imagine if you looked at a sepia photograph of someone still living, it would seem marked by the past perfect tense.’
‘There is a riddle to photographs. Some make their subjects look as though they are caught behind glass, inaccessible and silenced.’
Those lines are really, really beautiful and vivid.
Well done. I really enjoyed reading this.
D’accord! This is writing at its most rarified. Very exquisite level of delivery and a mastery in the rendering.