The pathway is open, and this journey across the ocean is anointed for me to take. She says that tonight we will prepare a new pouch for me for the States; my child one has dried up its purpose. I touch the soft, faded, light-blue leather pouch. The one my mother don’t know of. I sleep with it under my pillow at night, and it has held every dream I have had since I was nine.
Queenie pulls up her skirt to bring out her own pouch, deep-green-and-silver leather with a cowrie design. Whenever she does this, I feel like I looking up God’s skirt. She have the prettiest legs to me. She starts rolling a spliff of lavender, damiana, marshmallow, and fresh ganja and does a quiet prayer to the spirits of the herbs, asking that they honor her temple. Queenie is beautiful and still look like she did in the pictures in her house from when she was a professional dancer. On our walks in the hills and the country, she moves like a gray-haired teenager, her legs are muscular and smooth with scars and dents that I have memorized and made her tell me each of their origin stories. My favorite scar, though, is the one she got on her cheek when she was being initiated as a young woman. That is all I know about it, but I love it ’cause it make she look real gangsta.
My grandma does only sometimes let me smoke with her after ritual. She says don’t smoke with my Rasta cousins, Episode and them. “Just us old ladies know how to do everything right with ritual and sweetness,” she say with a wink and smile, revealing her back four teeth, which are dipped in gold. Queenie can roll a spliff faster than it take to light the flame. When we first started to take our walks together, I was nine and I used to love to just watch the smoke push wild from her mouth and circle her head into a cloud. Now I is sixteen, and she passes the fire my way and lets the news of my imminent trip sink in.
“I always barefoot and I ain’t wan’ lose my roots. I know I go miss the ancestors. I Aquarian and Oya.” I crying all of these things, and Queenie corrects me.
“Audre, you are a wild nurturing. You are a complicated specialness. You are ancestral perseverance and sacred erotic,” she says, like she praying, holding me close to her. I cry louder.
“Gyal, you been in constant communication with Spirit your whole life and you been taught that Spirit speak loudest when we deep in the water, drowning in trouble and fear.” Queenie suddenly closes her eyes and is quiet and breathing, which I know means she is receiving messages. “And that is when you must let yourself get quiet and still. You must let yourself float above it until you are safe and levitating on the water and beneath the sky and just listen, Audre.” She opens her eyes and looks at me. “And, dahlin’, let me tell you something for truth: America have dey spirits too, believe me,” she say, and she puts out her spliff, rubs my back, and starts humming a song into my spine. It a quiet and low song, and I feel my heart inhale the love of it.
“Audre, I was at a ceremony in Brooklyn in ’84. The brothas and sistas in there, from everywhere—Cuba, Nigeria, Mississippi, Peru, and India—and they beatin’ them drums good, gyal.” I look from the ocean and up at my grandmother and her storytelling. “And I is with Auntie Mahal, who bring she cavaquinho and play it good right with them drums and she almost in a trance. You woulda think we was back in the motherland. But every land is a mother’s land, I discover.” She laughs at this thought. “And I is in there, winin’ and spinnin’ and slicin’ my arms in the air, gyal, ’cause the rhythm find me and hold me. They is in their singing. I swear I was going to disappear, but I can’t stop.” Queenie stands up and starts twirling and twisting she arms in the air with her barefoot drumming on the sand.
I can never cry when Queenie dances.
“And, Audre, somethin’ take over.” She starts to kneel down low, her movements flowing and soft. With each cypher she is lifting and ascending into the air. The sound of drums seems to be coming from my heartbeat. Her feet are flying sand all around her, until I see my grandma rising above me. She is in the rapture of her memory. I lie back and watch her flowy, all-white attire, a cloud of origami, fold and contain and blossom her from movement to movement as she hovers above me several feet in the air. I watch her embrace the sky and the sky lift she up like a child of feather. She whipping in the wind, living in the rhythm of the breeze she create. After she finishes her celestial windup, she starts to descend, stair-stepping on air. Once her feet touch the ground, she crouches down next to me. She is laughing hard, and it rumble the ground beneath me. She fall back and lie on the sand, heart toward the sky.
“Crazy, nuh? I feel I is not in my body no more; I feel I is of some next world. I ain’t know I could do dat until dis day in the States of all places, I tellin’ ya. But, Audre, that is when I begin the journey to figure out my spirit, who I is, for real.” She gets up and moves to sit next to me, and we look on the water together. I lie into she shoulder, wanting to feel the wind and sky she pull down cool my chest and lift up the space my heart is crumpled in.
“Life is strange, and it will break you to help you heal ancient wounds, me dahlin’.” She rubs my back and my head fall into her lap.
My tears fall across her thighs. I really don’t want to leave. I don’t know if I ever going to see Neri again. I feel like I don’t exist if Neri don’t look at me. I miss the pulse of holding Neri’s hand and I caved in with suffering, missing Neri’s body next to mine.
MABEL
I’M TRYING TO SLEEP AND I CAN’T SLEEP. My belly hurts and my hips too. All I can do is lie in bed and think of young Whitney Houston from the eighties. I have her album Whitney next to my bed. I found it at the thrift store last week when I was there with my mama, and I been sleeping next to Whitney every night ever since. My mom thinks it’s cute since Whitney was her idol growing up, and she was inspired by her singing and style and stuff. But I feel like Whitney and I are connected in a special way for some reason. I have loved her since I was a kid, when my mom and I would play her greatest hits and dance to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” At the part when Whitney says, “Don’t you wanna dance? Say you wanna dance! Don’t you wanna dance?!” Mama would pull my dad in. He would do his reliable and raggedy two-step, thinking he is killing the game and she would be in her intricate Afro-modern-hip-hop choreography—which is a lot of shoulder-shimmying, lyric dancing, and old-lady twerking. My mom can dance though, for real, and she could always get my dad to just let go and be goofy.
Anyway, I’m up staring at my ceiling, in my memories and my feels as usual, listening to my “quiet storm” mix (as my dad calls it). It’s all emo and soft music. Soon, I’m thinking of Whitney and her fine self from back in the day again. She just had a lot of layers to her, which is a thing I think I like in people, like Ursa and Jazzy. Even Terrell has layers. I like that sometimes Whitney was graceful and poised like a church lady, but she was really kind of wild and cray, and straight hood, too.
I’m like that, I got a lot of layers too, but I think other kids think I’m just this whatever tomboy Black girl, who always reading and playing ball or working out or something. I basically fit in, which is okay, but sometimes, I wish I felt comfortable to put my layers out there more.