At Pinkster, we crowned a King Charles, who was in charge of the festivities. We built him a grass hut, and he teased the children and paraded for the old. Usually, it was one of the church ushers, who would dance and twirl around town. But that year, because of his miraculous recovery, it was unanimously decided that Ben Daisy should lead the celebrations.
On Pinkster morning, I and the other girls in Sunday school woke up early, when the day was still cold. All week, we had been gathering rushes from the fields, setting them out to dry, and pounding them flat. We had been weaving the strands into thick walls, the green of the grass fading to a fragile brown. And now, we pieced them together, finishing the huts we were to celebrate in.
When we were done with the largest hut, the girls sent me to find Ben Daisy and lead him to it. He was standing in the crowd with the others, our neighbors and friends, waiting for the celebration to begin. I took his warm hand in mine and brought him into the enclosure.
The day was one of those sharply cold sunny ones, where you panted in the light but any bit of shade chilled you. It was even cooler in the largest hut, under all the grass. Ben Daisy stood peering out onto the churchyard. The old ones, already gathered in the hut, sat in a corner, skeptical of a newcomer having the place of honor.
The drums pounded, and everyone started dancing. I ran out of the hut as soon as I could, to spin in a circle with the other girls, their hands soft and slipping through mine as we tried to hold close, and to run up and down the yard. Pinkster was the only holiday when everyone tried a little cider—every other celebration we kept temperate. But on Pinkster, because the old ones celebrated it, a beer or two was allowed. Which is to say that someone may or may not have slipped Ben Daisy a sip of something that afternoon.
At the height of the day, when all our bodies were still humming from the dance, Ben Daisy stood in the doorway of the hut, paper crown pushed back on his head.
“A yup, a yup!” he called. He was getting into the spirit of it. Some others began to clap, a syncopated rhythm, to his name.
Ben
Day
Zee
Ben
Day
Zee
“That’s me,” he called over the din. “That there’s my name. And soon you will meet my Daisy, too.”
One of the children laughed. “Truly?” the child said.
“Truly,” he said. “Daisy came to me just the other day. I wish y’all could have seen her. She’s here right now, in fact. But she’s shy.”
Some people laughed louder, thinking he was playing.
“I tell you, she looks marvelous now. She’s got long curly hair all the way down her back, and she’s got a pink silk gown.”
“Oh really? Where’d she get that from?”
“She’s got a silk gown,” Ben Daisy continued. “It’s pink and white, like nothing you’ve ever seen. And on her finger, one diamond ring so bright. Oh, I can’t wait for y’all to see her.”
“So where is she now?” someone else called, giggling.
“She’s on her way. She came to visit me just last week, but she couldn’t stay. But she’s coming back, to live with me and mine. You hear that, Hannah?” Ben Daisy called. “You gonna have to make room for my Daisy.”
I turned to look for Miss Hannah in the crowd. She was listening, her face stricken.
“To Daisy,” he cried, holding up his hand in benediction, and the children chanted it back to him. I myself joined in, chanting and laughing till my voice was hoarse, even though I knew I should be scared.
So I made sure to whirl myself harder, dance faster, the rest of the night.
As night came, the old ones remembered Pinksters past: who was known for the freshest oysters and the sweetest bread, who could be counted on to stay awake the longest, who was the best dancer. They did not, of course, mention that they had celebrated all these feats while enslaved, that the whites had banished Pinkster and stopped observing it with them once they gained their freedom. The old ones spoke of it as its own day of release, as if it existed outside of time, and none of them mentioned how it used to end—with the men and women and children tearing down the grass huts and returning to their masters, saying goodbye to their loved ones owned by other men, with sometimes nothing but a blade of grass tucked away to remember them by, until they met again the following year, if they were lucky.
Miss Hannah came to Mama the next day, crying in her reception room. “You didn’t fix him,” she said. “He’s as bad as ever. He really thinks that dead heifer is coming to live with us.”
“He can’t believe that,” Mama said.
“He does. He really does,” Miss Hannah sobbed. “You’ve only made it worse.”
The next week, at church, Mama called to Ben Daisy, “How about you come and see me again.”
“I haven’t got time for that, Doctor,” he said. “I need to buy some things for Daisy, to make her comfortable.”
And he left Mama to go ask Miss Annie, who headed the church’s auxiliary club, to bake him some cakes. “Little ones,” he said. “Dainty ones, because Daisy eats like a bird, you know? But they’ve got to be pink and white. That’s what she told me. Have to be pink and white.” Miss Annie grumbled about it, but she agreed to
