library computer.
Despite her grumbling, she seemed happy and I sensed a deep affection between her and her grandmother, Essie.
At the end of the road was a tiny community of clapboard houses surrounded by piles of tires, abandoned cars and a hodgepodge of rusted appliances. The structures were all single-story and lifted above ground on wooden pilings.
As we walked past the first place, I saw a girl of about fourteen staring at us from the shade of a sagging porch. When Rhapsody waved, the older girl got up and hurried inside the house.
“That’s Tay-Tay,” Rhapsody explained. “She doesn’t like for me to look at her.”
“Why not?”
“She’s afraid of me.”
“Why would she be afraid of you?”
“Granny’s a root doctor and I’m the only girl left in my family,” she said mysteriously.
Essie muttered something under her breath—an admonition, I suspected—which Rhapsody blithely ignored.
“Tay-Tay claims I put something in her Pepsi to make her hair fall out, but I didn’t. Could of if I wanted to, though.” She tossed back her own glorious mane with all the hauteur a ten-year-old girl could muster. Which, in Rhapsody’s case, was quite a lot.
“Some li’l gal gwine tuh bed widout’uh suppuh tuh’night,” Essie warned.
“Sorry, Granny,” Rhapsody said contritely, but she shot me a cagey grin as she kicked a rock toward Tay- Tay’s house.
As we passed by the next house, a tethered mutt in the front yard let out a bloodcurdling yowl. Essie lifted her hand and the dog fell silent, much as I’d done back at the cemetery.
“That’s Granny’s house over there.” Rhapsody pointed to a tiny white cottage at the end of the road. It was easily the prettiest in the neighborhood, with a well-tended garden and fresh laundry flapping on the clothesline.
They led me up a set of concrete steps, across the porch with its plank flooring and blue ceiling—the sky color a Gullah tradition to keep away wasps and ghosts—and into a narrow hall that smelled of sage and lemon verbena. I noticed three things at once: a mirror that hung backward on the wall, a straw broom just inside the doorway and an arrangement of angel-wing seashells laid out across a small bench.
Essie bustled off to the kitchen, leaving Rhapsody to show me around the cozy parlor where every inch of table space was decorated with the most gorgeous sweetgrass baskets I’d ever seen. When I complimented them, Rhapsody said with an indifferent shrug, “Those old things? Granny makes them all the time.” She couldn’t have been less impressed.
She waved a hand toward a wall of fading portraits. “Those people are my kin, but don’t ask me their names. They passed a long time ago. Granny says we Goodwines have a habit of dying young. Except for her, I reckon. We’re probably cursed or something.”
Her granny, she told me, was in fact her great-grandmother. Her father and Mariama had been first cousins, but were more like brother and sister on account of they’d both been raised by Essie.
“What did you mean when you said your grandmother is a root doctor?”
“She’s a witch,” Rhapsody said with that same crafty smile I’d seen earlier. “And since I’m the only girl left in the family, I get to be her helper. That’s why I’m here for the summer. So I can start learning how to cast.”
“Sia! Tie yo’ mout’, gal!”
Essie had come up so quietly that Rhapsody and I both jumped and spun toward the door. She carried a tray with a pitcher of sweet tea, three glasses and a plate of sesame-seed cookies. Before either of us could offer to help, she turned and disappeared down the tiny hallway. A moment later, I heard the screech of the screen door.
Rhapsody and I followed her outside to the front porch where she settled herself in an ancient cane rocker and poured us each a glass of tea, taking a moment to swat Rhapsody’s hand when she reached for a cookie.
Essie offered me the plate and I took one because I had a feeling it would be a terrible insult if I refused. Besides, I liked benne wafers and they were said to bring good luck.
I sat down on the top step while Rhapsody perched precariously on the flimsy railing. I could taste honey and lemon and the barest hint of orange in the tea. Like my mother’s, it was sweet and delicious.
While Rhapsody and I nibbled on the wafers and sipped our drinks, Essie watched the sky. The sun had finally come out, and as the breeze died down, the heat index soared. I held the cold glass against my face and wondered how to broach the subject of Shani.
After a bit, I began to feel a little woozy in the syrupy heat. I leaned over to place my empty glass on the tray Essie had set beside her chair, and when I straightened, the porch started to spin. I gasped and clutched the newel post for support.
Rhapsody hopped down from the railing and came to squat in front of me, peering into my face. “What’s wrong?”
“I feel dizzy…”
She put a hand to my forehead. “She don’t look so good, Granny. Maybe you should give her a dose of Life Everlastin’.”
Suddenly, I felt an urgent need to get away from there. I tried to rise, but the porch spun faster.
Rhapsody placed her hands on my shoulders and pressed me back against the floorboards.
Seventeen
I swam up through a pounding headache.
It was only with a great deal of effort that I managed to open my eyes. Blurry faces peered down at me.
“She’s coming to,” someone said. I thought it was Rhapsody.
I tried to get up, but instead sank deeper into whatever softness had cushioned my fall.
“Are you sure she’s seen her, Granny?”
“She see huh all right.”
I recognized Essie’s voice and strangely, I could now understand her just fine. Whether she’d altered her manner of speaking or I was becoming accustomed to her Gullah-influenced words, I didn’t know.
“Can you cure her?”
“No, chile. No root can fix dis gal. She ent hexed. She ben on tuddah side. She crossed t’rue dat veil and back, and now her spirit don’ know weh it b’long.”
“Is that why she can see Shani?”
“I reckon it is.”
There was a long silence during which I had the impression of movement, like someone waving a hand back and forth in front of my face. I smelled something sweet, something acrid, then nothing at all.
“What’s wrong, Granny. What do you see?”
Another pause. Another strange scent.
“Somebody uh-comin’ for dis gal. Somebody with a soul black as midnight. Somebody dat walk with the dead.”
I tried to ask her what she meant by that, but I couldn’t speak. My tongue felt too thick and I couldn’t make my lips work.
My eyes closed and the voices faded.
When I roused the second time, I was fully alert, with only the faint throb of a headache to remind me that I’d been unwell.
I knew instantly where I was—in Essie’s house, lying on a bed in a room that had once been Mariama’s.
Propping myself on elbows, I glanced around.
The space was cramped with only a mahogany wardrobe in one corner, the iron bedstead in another. I lay atop a handmade quilt in a pattern that had probably been handed down from the Underground Railroad years.
