This is the most compassion I’ve ever heard Grammie Atti express toward Mama. I wish Mama could’ve heard it for herself. I doubt she’d believe me if I told her.
“Why do only some people have it?”
She coughs hard, and it takes her a minute to recover. She probably shouldn’t be smokin’ her pipe so much. When the coughin’ fit passes, she acts like it didn’t happen. She covers the pipe’s chamber with her palm, snuffing out the flame.
“How do you think the world would work if everybody could jube? Like anything else in the spirit realm, the select few are cherry-picked to protect the masses. No use cryin’ about it. Just the way it is.”
“Are we… witches?” I ask her.
She stares at me for a second before chuckling. “Who knows? Some people think witches ain’t human. If that’s the case, then you can’t call us witches. Most often, though, when you hear people cryin’ ‘witch,’ it’s just an excuse to hurt or kill somebody they’re scared of. Or somebody that just lives life differently. And these somebodies bein’ accused tend to have cooches.”
“God, Grammie Atti!”
“It’s the truth. Don’t matter what people call ya. They’ll decide who you are regardless of any label you might choose.”
The one thing I know for certain about Jubilation is that there will always be more for me to learn about Jubilation. I take in what she’s sayin’. It’s all useful, but it don’t answer the one question that’s been haunting me since my first run-in with Virgil and his flunkies. “How come I can’t jube when I’m scared?”
She sighs. She seems more tired today than usual. “You can. You just can’t in his presence. Yet,” she says.
So she already knows about him.
“Why?”
“He’s your malcreant. It’s what we call an opposing entity that’s found your Achilles’ heel and exploits it.”
She looks down at me and takes my chin in her hand. Her eyes are sad.
“You mighta given him somethin’ dear to you without even knowing it. Whatever it is, it’s a crucial piece a who you are. As long as he’s got it, the malcreant has the upper hand,” she says.
That feeling of dread returns, pooling in my abdomen, and I’m reminded of what my mother said about him. She said he was a “pestilence” and that what he did to me was “unspeakable.” He does have something of mine, but I didn’t give it to him. He took it.
Grammie Atti lets go of my chin and stares up into the trees again. I watch ripples form on Bottomless Pit’s surface.
“What do I do?” I ask.
When she doesn’t reply after a minute, I look up at her face. Her mouth is set in a hard line, her eyes ablaze. I think she’s angry for me.
“Sankofa. You heard that before?”
I shake my head.
“It’s a symbol from an old African proverb. It means ‘go back and get it,’ ” she says.
“Get it?”
“He took something from you. So take it back.”
I let that settle in my mind. No task has ever sounded so impossible.
“You seen it, though. You just didn’t know what it was. Sankofa symbol is a bird with her feet pointed in the direction she’s going. But her head is looking backward as she holds a li’l egg in her mouth. You can look back without gettin’ stuck there, and you can take what belongs to you. No matter how delicate.”
Grammie Atti’s backward cuckoo bird. I’ve always thought that deformed bird was a mistake, but maybe it wasn’t.
A swift breeze catches some loose strands of her gray hair, and I hear something so soft, but it’s there. It sounds like all the voices of a choir holding on to one, long note. Maybe I don’t hear it so much as I feel it.
“Do you hear that?” I ask her.
“Just spirits in the air. They always around. You probably just couldn’t hear ’em before.”
Spirits. Haints. Guess they could be anybody. I’ve never thought much about who they were when they were alive. Regardless, I don’t feel scared. It feels nice to have them with us.
Grammie Atti reaches into one of the many odd pockets she sews on the dresses she makes and pulls out a cinnamon candy, which she offers to me. I take it and pop it in my mouth. Probably got lint and dust on it from her pocket, but I don’t really care.
She sucks on one too, and we both just stare out at the pond.
“My mother didn’t teach me, either,” she says unexpectedly. “Never had the chance. My grandmother was long gone by the time it hit. Had to teach myself.”
“What… was your mother like?” I ask. I hope I’m not bein’ too nosy. This is the first time my grandmother has ever talked to me about anything personal. Today she’s in a quiet mood, open to talking. But I don’t wanna push her too far. If I do, she might never open up again.
“Oh, so many things,” she says. “She worked a lot. She wept a lot. She was a churchgoer. Like your mother,” she says with a small laugh. “It’s amazing how rigid the patterns of our blood can be.”
I have no idea what that means, but I wanna know more about my great-grandmother.
“Were you… close?”
“I’d say so.” She takes her tobacco pouch from her pocket and shakes more into her pipe. “I was with her when she died.”
This I did not know. What I’ve heard about my great-grandmother is spotty and vague. My mother never talks about her. All I know about her death is that it was too soon.
“Was she sick a long time?” I ask.
Grammie Atti narrows her eyes at me, and I know I misspoke.
“Who told you that?”
“Told me what?”
“That she was sick?”
For a split second I can’t remember how I came to know that. Then it dawns on me that I never heard that. Because no one ever told me what had happened to her, I just pictured
