1
When Gullah people die, babies in the family get passed over the coffin so the dead person won’t come back from the beyond to take them away.
No one did that today with me and my twin brother, Jay, of course. We were about to turn eleven years old, and that was too old to get passed over the coffin. Instead, me and Jay stood next to Mama and my uncle, Doc Buzzard, in that graveyard, listening to the pastor say lots of good things about Gran. The noonday sun beat down on the back of my neck and beads of sweat dotted my forehead. Heat pressed in on me like an aunt I didn’t want to hug. Every so often, a rush of breeze blew in off the ocean and across the marsh. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me, cooling my hot skin.
A huge, deep rectangle was dug into the moist, black dirt, and we all stood around it in a circle. Me, Jay, Mama, and Doc were in the front, and behind us stood other people from the island. Over my shoulder, I saw many of the people who weren’t family but came to pay their last respects to Gran standing nearer the shade of the huge evergreen trees lining the cemetery’s edges.
Everyone was sad and crying, even those people who weren’t related to us. Gran had been the best rootworker for miles around, and she had helped all of them at some point. She could make potions to give folks luck to win a court case or to make their boss less angry. She could create compresses to draw out the poison in snake bites. Some people thought rootwork was from the old school, or even fake, but everyone who knew Gran and Doc knew better. Even the pastor said it was a great loss to the community that Gran was gone. He said it must have given her some peace to hear President Kennedy’s speech earlier this summer, on the radio. It called for all people in America, including Negroes, to have equal access to jobs and public school education. While Gran wouldn’t be here to see it, she’d left this world knowing that better days were coming.
I looked at all the people here to celebrate Gran’s life. But my life felt like a puzzle I didn’t know how to put together. On one hand, I missed Gran so much, I wished she would come back and things would return to the way they were before she died. But on the other, I wanted better days. And I knew Mama wanted something better for all of us, something better than . . . well, just about everything that had happened since Daddy left.
Early that morning, Mama wove palmetto leaves into roses for us to wear at the funeral. She tried to show me how to do it, bend and twist and pull the long, flat leaves into the spiral flower shape, but my fingers were too clumsy and I couldn’t get the leaves to do what I wanted. She had to take mine away and weave the rose herself. Then she pinned it onto the front of my dress like a piece of jewelry.
Mama was in her best Sunday outfit: a black short-sleeved dress, white gloves, and black patent-leather heels. A wide-brimmed hat covered her black hair, which she had pressed straight with a hot comb off the stove that morning. She was patting the tears off her smooth brown cheeks with a starched white handkerchief. Doc, however, wasn’t doing any of that. He just held his good hat in his hand and let the tears run down his face and into his bushy salt-and-pepper beard.
I couldn’t cry. I felt so much hurt inside, but it wouldn’t come out. Like the time I fell out of the big live oak tree near our house and couldn’t breathe. Mama said I just had the wind knocked out of me, and I would feel better soon. I hoped I’d feel better soon about losing Gran. Emptiness opened up in my heart, and I wondered if it would ever be full again. Her stories of Br’er Rabbit’s tricks on the other animals always made me laugh. She even told good scary stories, about haints and spirits, creatures that she said roamed around the South Carolina marshes where we lived. Some of those creatures used to be people; others were things that no one understood but everyone knew to stay away from. I loved her stories about boo-hags best. They were night creatures with blue skin that they could remove before slipping under doors and through keyholes. When I trembled, she would hug me tight and tell me she would always keep me safe from them. I hugged her back and told her that I knew they were only stories and not really real.
After the pastor finally finished talking, the pallbearers lowered the wooden coffin with my gran in it into the huge rectangle in the ground. Each one of the family members in turn threw a handful of dirt into the grave after saying goodbye. First Doc, then Mama, then Jay.
“Your turn, Jezebel,” Mama whispered, smoothing her hand over and down one of my pigtails. In the heat of late summer, the scent of her bergamot hair pomade was like sweet, sun-hot oranges.
I walked up to the great big hole in the earth and looked inside. Sunlight reflected off the polished wood, almost blinding me. It wasn’t only a hole; it was Gran’s final resting place. The place I would have to come back to if I wanted to visit her.
In the pocket of my good Sunday dress, the black-and-gray-striped cotton one, I felt for the doll Gran gave me and squeezed it. She’d made it out of crocus, a gunnysack fabric, and used scraps of bright cloth to make a dress and headwrap for her. Then, just before she died, she breathed into the doll and pressed it into my hand. She was too tired to do any more than that before she fell back on the bed. Later, Doc told me that Gran’s breathing into the doll gave it some of her spirit, and it would be a way she could be with me even after she was gone.
I named the doll Dinah.
Everyone was waiting for me now, so I crouched down and grabbed a big handful of dirt and sprinkled it onto the coffin. The dirt hitting the box sounded like heavy raindrops falling on the roof of our house. It sounded like an ending.
“Goodbye, Gran,” I whispered, sobs clogging my throat. “I miss you already.”
Only then did I finally cry. Tears hotter than the air around us ran down my face and neck, wetting the collar of my dress. But I didn’t care. These tears were the last things I’d ever be able to give my grandmother, and I wanted her to have all I had.
Once the grave was filled in, we left small gifts on top of it. Jay brought Gran’s favorite cup, the one with a tiny chip in the rim from when he dropped it on the floor. I tied a strip of fabric from her apron around the handle, and we set it on the mounded dirt. Mama left a shell, polished smooth from the ocean water running over it. Doc kissed a tiny bottle of some liquid he pulled from his pocket and pressed it into the dirt.
After the repast lunch the people at church made for us, we walked home along the hard-packed dirt path that led from the cemetery all the way to our house. We lived on a Sea Island called Wadmalaw, about twenty miles from Charleston, the biggest city in South Carolina, and our house was right on the water, next to the salt marsh. Our family had a part of those marshlands that was just ours and nobody else’s. We’d catch food there, like fish and shrimp and blue crabs. It was also a place for me and Jay to run and play. Our neighbors around us had their own parts of the saltwater inlet too, where they would also go fishing. We all respected each other and would always ask permission before going onto someone else’s land to catch food.
I could taste the salty breeze from the ocean on my tongue as we got closer to home. Me and Jay walked side by side, a respectable distance behind Mama and Doc.
“I don’t wanna start school again tomorrow,” Jay said. “I miss Gran, and I ain’t ready for summer to be over—”
“Shh,” I replied, pointing at Mama and Doc. We were close enough to hear what they were talking about.