“Very little, really. Rumors, feelings, a great disturbance in the currents of ashe, warnings from the orishas. Is it his child?”
“No.”
I converse with Ortiz, about Yoruba, about Africa, avoiding the details of my Olo vacation, making no commitments. I don’t tell him about the okunikua, so that there are still, to my knowledge, only two people in North America who know what it is. He suspects that I am holding something back, I see it swimming in his black eyes. These fixed on me, boring in, he says, “You know, the simple people think that we, I mean we santeros, have power over the santos, but we both know that isn’t true. We have learned to open ourselves, that’s all. The truth is, we are in their hands.” Here he clenches both of his hands into fists. “It’s frightening to be in the hands of the santos, isn’t it? We love to think we’re in control. But we do it because we know they love us and they know we love them. Even Shango, who’s so terrible when he comes. They are of God in the end, a path to God.”
I am nodding like one of those cheap dolls that people install over the backseats of their cars. I can’t stop myself. My face feels stiff. Do I have a phony smile on? He says, “But you know, there are other kinds of spirits in the orun besides orishas. The simple make the mistake of thinking that everything spiritual is good. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Ajogun,”I say.
His eyes close briefly and his lips move. “Yes, them. The orishas help the ashe flow and fill our hearts with peace. But the ajogun eat it. Greedy things, the ajogun. I hope you have never yourself …”
“No, never. But he has.”
“Of course. But he’s not just a brujo, is he?”
“No. I don’t know what he is. Something no one has seen in a long time, not even in Africa. I should go. I didn’t want to involve anyone in …”
He reaches out and gently grasps my hand. “We are people of the santos, so of course we are involved already. Listen to me, senora. Pay attention to what the orisha says. That’s the only thing now. Pay attention! Come to the ile!”
But I can’t think of anything just now save escaping. It is hot and humid in pets and I can feel sweat trickling down my sides. It’s hard to breathe the thick ammoniac air. In a second I will be fainting, or falling at his feet crying, “Save me!”
Luz skips back and asks if she can have a baby chick. I am about to say no when the santero says a few words I don’t quite catch to the woman. She goes out and returns a minute or so later with a paper bag punched with holes and the top stapled shut. Luz and I peer into the holes. She is delighted.
A yellow bird.
Outside again, in the waning heat of the day, the afternoon’s rainstorm turned back into humidity, Luz announces that she is hungry, and so we go next door to the Cuban coffee place for a couple of flat fruit pastries and a chocolate milk, and I have a cafe con leche. I am in a dilemma. I must make the sacrifice, I must find my allies, but in order to do that, it seems I will have to go to a Santeria ritual, and if I do that, I will light up the m’doli like a fireball and he will know I am alive, for sure. Ulune could tell when someone he knew died, even if it was far away, and perhaps my husband has learned that trick too. Maybe all this running and hiding has been completely useless. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to me yet, and was waiting until chance brought him here to Miami. I sense large forces, thunderheads closing in, huge and hard like millstones. I will be ground to powder, unless Ifa is right, and I get the right allies. Magical allies, a concept unknown to mere objectivity. When you venture into the unseen world, the allies weave a circle of protection around you, a kind of sorcerous space shuttle. They don’t have to do anything, or even to know that they’re allies. This chicken probably doesn’t have the faintest idea that Ifa has picked her to guard my white ass. But you have to trust Ifa, and you have to pick them right. Not a trivial task.
“I’m going to call my chicken Peeper,” says Luz. “That’s her name.”
Some Proustian circuit closes in my head once again?the strong flavor of coffee, the heat, the peeping of the chick, a line from Ellison: “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” That’s from Invisible Man, and I reflect, not for the first time, that what I have been doing these last few years is a lot like what the anonymous protagonist of Ellison’s book did after his experiences on the front lines of our race wars.
In my mind, I’m in Chicago again, on the back veranda of Lou Nearing’s apartment, the top floor of a gigantic Victorian on the South Side, Fiftieth or Fifty-first, off Michigan, near the university. It was summer, hot in the afternoon, a white sky overhead, and I was looking down into the backyard, an overgrown tangle of ailanthus and honeysuckle and bindweed, with birds cheeping, and I was holding a drink, Kahlua and cream on ice, which was my drink that summer. Lou always threw a big party on July Fourth, which was what this was. I was not, I recall, much of a party person myself at that time?this was a couple of years after my return from Siberia. I preferred to stand back and observe, sucking on drinks until oblivion approached and I could slip into an acceptably louche persona. Then I would go fairly wild, which is how I got together with Lou at another party, at which, if memory serves (and it does not), I removed my underpants during the dancing and threw them up upon a lighting fixture. He was taken in; he thought I was a fun person like him.
Which was why I was standing alone on the veranda, getting my bag on, when Lou came out and said, “Hey Janey, there you are! I want you to meet someone. Jane, DeWitt Moore; Witt, meet Jane Doe.”
The usual widening of the eyes at the name. My eyes must have widened, too, as he extended his hand. There was a definite tingle. The first thing that hit me was his skin, not the butterscotch color of it, but the texture, which was smooth as ivory, like a child’s skin. Lickable skin; it looked like it would actually dissolve sweetly on your tongue. He was a fine-boned, medium-size man, only a hair taller than I was, dressed in a blue-striped button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, chinos, and the same kind of Sperry deck shoes I had on. He was holding a large plastic cup with a Bears logo on it. Our eyes met; his were hazel, intelligent, sardonic, wary, amused, which was exactly the look I was then practicing myself with my green ones. So we had a little something, even before either of us was aware of it. A little too long on the handshake, that was another danger sign. Lou was talking away, supplying background, his canned version of my adventures, and his connection with Witt.
“Old Witt and I went to school together.”
“At Notre Dame?”
“Yeah,” said Witt, “on the football team. We were both linebackers.”
Lou laughed. “No, in high school, in Morristown.”
“That’s right. Lou used his mighty thews to protect me from the racists.”
I looked inquiringly at Lou, but at that moment, a huge chocolate-colored woman strode out on the deck. She was wearing a scarlet and pink print muumuu and a sparkly pink turban and was carrying the kind of box people used to carry 45 records in. She dragged Lou off into the apartment, promising serious Motown.
I drained my drink. Witt made no move to leave, just looked at me, smiling, making me nervous. I said, “That’s interesting. Was racism much of a problem in Morristown? I mean what was it, white gangs …?”
“Yes, everyone assumes that, but these particular racists were black guys. They thought I was being too white. There’s a certain stratum of black society that responds to uppity niggers in about the same way as your basic Alabama ax-handle cracker does. Or did, since we’ve officially solved our racial problems here in America.”
I ignored the theatrical bitterness. “That must have been extremely painful.”
“Extremely. But enough of me. Lou talks about you all the time. Apparently, you’ve had some wild adventures. Central Asia. Maurice Vierchau …”
“Marcel.”
“Right. What’s he like? Lou says the latest on him in the profession is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. A plausible charlatan.”
“Read his book.” My usual line. “Decide for yourself.”
“I was hoping for the scoop. Secrets of primitive rites.”
“Well, you won’t get them from me,” I said coolly. “Marcel is … an unusual man, but I can’t practice his kind of anthropology myself. I prefer a little more distance from the subject. What’s your subject, Witt?”
“Me? I’m in hibernation,” he said, and that’s when I got the Ellison line. We talked about Ellison awhile, and we agreed that it was one of the half-dozen best books of the century. I pressed him a little about what he did.
“I’m a poet. A promising black poet, as the expression has it.”
I was getting irritated with this. “What sort of black poet are you? Very black? Langston Hughes raisin-in-
