I nod, holding the rag. I feel a li’l bad for trespassin’, but also annoyed. She is always at least five steps ahead of everyone else in the world.
To avoid any further calamities, Mama quickly tells Grammie Atti about what happened when we visited Daddy. At first, the idea of attempting to strangle a white man—a white man in law enforcement at that—even gives my grandmother a momentary scare. It’s subtle and it’s fast, but I see it. But then she laughs so hard, tears roll.
“It ain’t funny,” Mama warns her.
“The hell it ain’t,” she argues, instantly snapping back to a scowl. “We was trained to be all polite and deferential with it, but that’s a load a shit! Jube ain’t polite. Jube ain’t deferential. Jube ain’t a goddamn ice cream social! It’s our survival!” she bellows. The walls tremble. I bet they’re afraid of her too. But Mama doesn’t back down.
“We don’t need to rely on our magic to survive no more,” she argues. “Progress is slow, but times have changed.”
“Oh, have they? Wonchu go tell that to Mamie Till1? Bet she coulda used some magic.” Grammie Atti stares my mother down, and Mama shrinks in her seat. I’m floored by this. I never imagined that that was what Grammie Atti meant by “survival.”
“Regardless,” she begins again, softening her tone ever so slightly, “the girl needs to learn control. Discipline. The rest is up to her.”
“I agree,” Mama sighs.
“Why not teach her yourself? Afraid White Jesus won’t be your friend no more?” Grammie Atti asks her.
“I’m too long outta practice,” Mama mutters.
“Right,” Grammie Atti says with more than a little acrimony.
“How comes I can’t jube when I’m scared?” I ask. They both look at me as though they forgot I could speak.
“You can. You just don’t know how to yet,” Grammie Atti says.
“Can you show me that first?”
“Hush,” they both say.
“Your impatience will be your ruin, you ain’t careful. One thing at a time,” Grammie Atti lectures.
Inside I’m mad and cussin’, but on the outside, I simply nod and stare straight ahead. My eyes land on a gris-gris bag adorned with a tiny silver skull. I wonder what it’s like to have a regular grandmother, who bakes cookies and sews quilts and indulges her grandkids with presents. I will never know.
“Okay. I got it,” I say. I’m in a chair, blindfolded, and my grandmother is makin’ me find things and touch them with my mind.
“No, you don’t. Do it again,” she commands.
She wants me to “see” her ugly cuckoo clock on the wall behind me, and I do. They built it wrong: the bird’s facin’ backward, and his feet are goin’ forward. It looks ridiculous. It’s one of them things that you see once and you can’t ever unsee.
“I see it.”
“No. You don’t. You see your memory of it. Quit bein’ lazy! See it. Right now.”
Of all the ways I could be spendin’ a Saturday afternoon, this has to be the worst. I’d rather be in school. I’d rather be at the damn doctor! She sent Mama home a while ago. Said she could get more done if she was alone with me. I feel like Helen Keller.
“Now?”
“Don’t sound too sure a yourself,” she taunts.
“Now. I see it now.”
“I don’t believe you.”
This crazy old woman! One of these days, I swear to Christ Jesus, Imma—
I jump when I hear a metallic sound like a spring bein’ stretched past its limit and then a dull thud. And then nothin’.
“Grammie? Grammie Atti?”
“Take it off,” she says quietly.
I remove the blindfold.
“Turn around and look at my clock.”
When I see it, I think I’m halluncinatin’. The cuckoo is gone. Like he done flew away. And the spring he was attached to is stretched and stickin’ straight out in the air, ready to impale somebody. I open my mouth to speak but can’t think of any words.
“Now turn back around,” she tells me. So I do that, too. I look up, and there he is. The backward cuckoo bird’s smashed into the wall with both his face and his ass stickin’ out. Guess there was too much friction for him to keep flyin’.
“Um…”
“Yes. That is your doing.”
“Sorry.”
“You know what your problem is.”
“What?”
“No, I’m tellin’ ya. You know what your problem is. So you know you got work to do.”
I scratch my head and gaze up at the bird’s ass. I have no idea what my problem is, but I ain’t foolish enough to tell Grammie Atti that.
“Fix it.”
“Huh?”
“Fix my clock. You broke it. You fix it.”
Great. Like I know how to fix a daggone cuckoo clock! I try to stand, but she stops me. Literally. I can’t move.
“Stay there,” she says. “Fix my clock.” This time it sounds like a threat.
I don’t know what to do, and she won’t help me. My eyes move all over the room while I ponder what I should do. I find myself looking again at one of her shelves of whosie-whatsits—more gris-gris bags, candles, poppets, spooky dolls—wishing I knew how to make some a this junk work for me.
“You might as well settle in, cuz you ain’t goin’ nowhere till you do it,” she informs me. This makes me mad as hell. This makes me wanna break things. But I know that when I get angry, bad shit happens.
So what’s that mean? I can never be angry? That’s impossible.
“Don’t be a dummy,” she grunts. She’s starin’ out the window. Maybe she’s wonderin’ if she got enough garbage decoratin’ her yard yet.
“Ain’t about stoppin’ up your emotions. It’s about how you use ’em.”
I wish she’d stop readin’ my thoughts.
“Wish in one hand, piss in the other. See which one gets filled up the fastest,” she says, not missing a beat.
Damn. How I use ’em. Shit. All right then. I give more thought to the clock and the wall and how it got to be that way. I resign myself to the obvious fact that this ain’t gonna be easy, and
