PROLOGUE
We outsmarted oblivion seven times in a row
and made it look like jazz with no chains,
like shaking our butt with no shame.
We moonwalked past the ghosts of this living world.
We decided.
To free ourselves out of the estranged,
strangling of this reality.
We swan-dived and centered in our magic.
We found an eternal life that couldn’t understand prisons or any other enslavement.
We was not at the frequency that could catch or contort our souls.
It wasn’t easy, but destiny is destiny.
Our bodies
levitated by the stardust of the ancestors in our bones.
Our ecstasy
got divined in limitless existence.
This is how we figured it out.
—Heard on an echo of a breeze, in a playground somewhere in the future, where kids is feeling free and they are double-dutching, singing, gardening, and twerking in the radiance of their ancestors’ laughter.
CANCER SEASON
season of Yemeya
our bottomless dark
deep wet healer
warrior of our waters
and conductor of our tides
the moon shines on you
you are floating on her waters
she is pleasure immersive and she soaks you to heal
and rocks you to sleep
she is the constellation
of the armored warrior
of water and sand
she protects softness
she a shelled thing that scamper away
and hide and protect
protecting the pearl of sacred sensuality
a mango seed, an intuitive lover
the heavy and healing waters
of your motherlands
and eternal shades of the moon
AUDRE
“YUH FAS’ AND ARROW AND SENSUAL AND MANGO,” Queenie tells me, “so, Audre, please put some molasses in yuh feet for dis walk, it ain’t supposed to go fas’,” she says, as we walk through the woods. I is crying so hard, my body is shudder and breath and wet with tears. My glasses fog up and I wipe them with my shirt so I can see through them and see the back of my grandma, my guide. My heart feeling like it get bus’ up for calling somebody mother a jagabat.
Queenie is pure light and sweetness and obsidian skin. She smell like spicy earth things, like sandalwood and cinnamon and dirt itself. She is strong and warrior, moving through the trees like a river, carving her way through mud, elegant, dark and slow like the molasses she say we should invoke for this journey. She have on a long white dress, with a white scarf wrap around she short white hair and shoulders like a woman in prayer. The woods are a green and quiet bush between her house and ocean that I know very well. Too well. I have cover every part of them bush, with the bottom of my feet and the eyes of my soul since I young.
Queenie got silver bangles ’round she wrist like broken Saturn rings, jingling each of her movements through the forest. She moves with her walking stick made of bamboo and mahogany and wrapped tight in thin copper, rose quartz, and citrine, so it could be strong and light and absorb power. She takes the lead on our journey and let me cry in her wake.
Queenie stops quick and backs me up with her forearm. She looks up and reads the air. She smiles. She points and I see leaves whisper at us, shimmying with breeze and speaking Spirit. She looks at me to see if I am reading the signs. I barely able to lift my head, so soaked am I in my own river and ocean, my eyes cloudy. And to be real, I ain’t want to see the full story yet.
I’m already feeling a change. I’ve been soaked in the feeling of Spirit’s song since we started walking into the bush and up through the hills by Queenie’s house. When Spirit speak to Queenie, she says she sees it first, and it feel like life become a dream and has a whisper of iridescence, “like the world get soft before I get revelation.” For me, it is different. The only way I can say it feels is like a tingle, a feeling, from the earth through water, and I is surrounded in a power that’s bigger than me. Queenie can shape her magic like she feels, but I feel like mine shapes me, controls me. I can sometimes feel what anyone else feel, but I never know when or why I have to feel it.
I look at her, and my body still trembles. She pulls me up in her arm, while she holds us steady. She ain’t afraid of my bawling, and she kisses me on both my cheeks and forehead, blessing me with my own tears and her Queenie love. She turns forward and keeps walking. My sob follows us and is whisper, then wail. We move into the curve of the hill like we’re walking into heaven, then the path bends down and we are walking easier and I is feeling it, the pull of Our Water Mother, in my skin. I keep crying, following Queenie to the sea.
* * *
• • •
Queenie swing an orange blanket onto the ground. She grab dried cocos, big rocks, and shells to secure the blanket into the sand. I is numb and just looking at the ocean and feeling like I is going to fall over. Queenie sit me down and pull out her machete and start busting fresh cocos she bring.
“Drink dis, nuh. I sure you did dry yourself out, with all of that crying and grieving of love, my dahlin’,” she say, handing me a coco. “Your first tabanca is a heartbreak that feel like a bit of death, yes. It hurt me to see you going through all of this hurt for love and your mother is totally out of place—” She stop talking before she finish that thought and she look like she is hurting too.
“I know how it does feel, yes.” She sucks she teeth, and I find it hard to believe Queenie ever was hurt for love like I is now.
We is on sand between edge of water and forest, and she asks for me to pull out my pouch. I hesitate, hoping that I can deny what I already feeling is true by not doing a reading. Still, I pull up my skirt and untie the pouch from my thick and dark-brown thigh. This is where I hide it from my mother and the world when I is traveling. Queenie asks me to drop my shells. I take them from the pouch and hold them in my hand. I feel the smooth indigo shards until I hear their song in my marrow. When their pitch is ripe, I throw them on the mat of lavender silk, raffia, and leather we use for reading our castings. The shells tumble around and reveal their message. Queenie nods and then looks up at me with her blue-rimmed brown eyes. She smiles, showing her ivory teeth with a gap twice the size of mine, but her eyes are sad. We can both read the confirmation.