| Melvin Sterne: Writer, Teacher, Editor, Photographer |
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Superstition (originally published in Furrow)
“You must remember something,” Kyle said. He’s my twelve-year old. He and Katy, my nine-year
old, pestered me with questions all the way from Cincinnati.
“Leave your Mama alone,” Ray said. He’s my husband. “It was a long time ago since she left
home.”
“How long?”
“Lemme see…” Ray was never fast at math. “Your mama was eleven, so that makes
about…twenty-seven years.”
Kyle said, “I can remember what I did when I was eleven.”
“But that was last year.”
“But she must remember something.”
I remember going fishing with my brother Zayah. He was maybe, twelve, and I was nine or ten.
He fixed me a cane pole with a cork and worm and cast it for me. I could never bring myself to hook
the worm. I couldn’t stand the way they squirmed. All I could think about was this poor little thing
that hadn’t done me any harm, and now he was gonna die. “It don’t hurt the worm none,” Zayah said.
“They don’t feel things like we do.” I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t think about anything but that
worm with a hook in him, dying cold and scared, alone in the water.
“Why don’t you think about something else for a while?” Ray said.
Kyle said, “Like what?”
“Like what you want for a souvenir for to take home.”
“I already know what I want.”
“What’s that?”
South of Atlanta Ray had got tired. The kids were cranky and we pulled off the interstate for
some coffee and something to eat. We found a little roadhouse that served bar-b-que, and across
the road was a fruit stand. Ray couldn’t wait to buy peaches, so he and Kyle ran over and came back
with a quarter basket. At the produce stand Kyle latched onto some tourists coming back from
Florida.
“I want one of those hats,” Kyle said.
Ray said, “What hats?”
“You know, one of those hats with the fake doo on it that says Damn Seagulls.”
“Listen here,” Ray said, his voice rising, “just ‘cause some ignorant cracker wants to spend
good money to look like a fool don’t mean you got to do it.”
“But you axed what I wanted.”
“’Nuff foolishness outta you! You keep that talk up and I’ll give you a knock so hard you won’t
need no hat. We’ll paint yo’ head red and stick a visor over yo’ eyes. And if you want doo, I reckon
there’s plenty around the farm, right Izzy?”
I nodded, yes. We’d been driving south since supper, passing fields and small towns, patches
of piney woods and peach orchards. At that moment we came around a bend and I saw a wide
expanse of water, dark and smooth as glass, the last rays of the setting sun reflecting off it like a
black mirror. A rocky outcrop stuck out on the far side, and I could see a gap in the hills where the
lake drained away in a slow, weed-choked creek that ran down to a cypress swamp.
I remember that lake.
“I remember that lake,” I said.
“There now,” Ray said, “I told you it would come back.”
“I used to fish it with my brother. There was a big catfish, down by the swamp end, but we never
caught him. Didn’t nobody fish that lake much in those days. There was a superstition said it was
haunted.”
Katy woke up and rubbed her eyes. She’d been asleep since dinner. “Are we there yet?” she
asked.
Ray turned a hopeful eye to me and I nodded. “A mile to go,” I said, and I turned towards the
window and looked out across the fields.
When I was a little girl there used to be a old bare-boards cabin in that field. I lived in it with
Grandma Lizzie and my brother Zayah. I remember inside, the way the morning sun shone through
the windows, the glass so old it was opaque, white with age. And I remember an old rockin’ chair
with a pillow for a seat and a quilt folded over the arm to warm Lizzie’s legs. There was a wood-
burning cook stove, and a old, squat, pot-bellied black coal-burner Lizzie stoked in the winter. I
remember the way the heat used to feel on my skin, and how the smoke used to hang in the rafters.
I remember the way it smelled in the morning, with bacon frying, and biscuits—Lizzie used to make
her biscuits with lard—and I remember my mouth watering, watchin’ them rise in the oven. And I
remember huddled up in a bed stuffed with feathers she’d plucked herself off the chickens she
raised in her yard. She was poor as a old Georgia widow could be, but she had a real featherbed. I’d
sink down into that mattress and the feathers would rise up all around me and I’d be warm as toast.
I couldn’t have slept better on a cloud. I didn’t know we were poor until I went to the orphanage.
I stared out over the field, but I couldn’t see much in the dusk. The house might have fell down by
now, but I would have thought the chimney was still standing, unless somebody come along and
stole it for the bricks.
“Zayah done pretty good for hisself, didn’t he?” Ray asked.
“Yeah” I said. “He done all right.” My Ray was born and raised in Cincinnati so he’s a city boy.
He wanted to make the trip, and he wanted me to come, but he was still a little fearful about visiting.
I think he’s cute when he’s fussy. He wanted to know all about, the farm, whether Zayah had a
outhouse, a henhouse, pigs and goats in the yard, what we would eat, where we would sleep. Ray
hadn’t been south before. All he knew about Georgia came from books and movies, and all I ever
heard him say about it was he didn’t care much for “crackers.”
“Tell me about the haunted lake,” Kyle said.
He doesn’t miss much. “The Indians told a story about a girl who drowned. They said when the
moon was full, and the lake was still, you see her floating beneath the surface, looking up at the sky.
They said if you asked her a question, she could tell you the answer.”
“Could she do my homework?”
“Not that kind of question.”
“What then?”
“They said she could tell the future, or the past.”
Ray slowed down and flashed his high beams to see the numbers on the mailboxes. “There it
is,” he said, and as he turned into the drive the porch light came on and I watched his face relax
when he saw that it was just a house like any other. There was a mongrel old shepherd dog barking
in the front yard, and Zayah and his missus, Glenda, came to the screen door and waved at us and
shouted at the dog to hush up. Kyle and Katy piled out of the car and ran to the steps. Ray turned to
me and asked if I was O.K.
Am I O.K ? I haven’t seen my brother since I left home.
* * * * *
In the morning I came out on the porch and sat on the steps with a cup of hot coffee. The dog
came out of the field, jumping a low spot in the fence. He had mud on his face and paws. He looked
like a dog what had been up to no good. He shook the dew off his back and gave me a innocent
look, then a hopeful look, but when I didn’t have nothing to feed him he got disinterested and
trotted around the house to the back yard. Glenda was frying bacon and baking biscuits in the
house, the smell was heavenly, and I could hear Kyle inside pesterin’ Zayah about the lake.
“Mama says there’s monster catfish in there.”
“Tha’s right,” Zayah said. I had forgotten how sweet his voice was.
“You gots to sit still, Izzy, ‘cause them fish can see better than anything. And you gots to be
quiet, too, ‘cause they can hear.”
“How can they hear when they ain’t got no ears?” I asked.
Zayah plunked his line in the water and grinned at me. “Kin you hear when you sticks your head
in the tub?”
“’Course I can.”
“Well, so can the fish, only, since they underwater all the time, they got their ears on the inside
so they don’t fill up with water. They hear good, too.”
“Can they hear us talkin’?”
“I reckon. They can hear the bees buzzing, and the flies humming, and when we throw a line in
the water, they can hear that, too. That’s how they eat. When a fish hear something fall in the water,
he thinkin’ ‘tha’s my dinner.’ So you gots to be quiet when you fish, otherwise we won’t catch no
supper.”
We watched our corks bobbin’ in the water, and then I forgot all about being quiet. I said
“Bomby Sosher said he saw a stranger camped out in the cypress swamp last week.”
Zayah looked at me and bit his lip. “Bomby’s skeered of his shadow,” he said. “He ain’t seen
nothing over in the swamp. He don’ even go in the swamp. What was he doin’ in the swamp,
anyway?”
“His mammy sent him over to see if the mayhaws is ripe yet.”
“Well, I reckon he’s just trying to skeer folks off so he can keep all the mayhaws for hisself.”
“I bet he isn’t. He was so skeered he ‘lowed his mammy couldn’t wup him hard ‘nuff to make
him go back.”
“Shoot,” Zayah said. “How’d he know he was a stranger?”
“’Cause he hadn’t seen him round here before.”
“And how’d he know he was campin’ in the woods?”
“’Cause he said he walked into his camp and there wasn’t nobody around, and he kinda looked
around a little bit, and all of a sudden he looked up and seed this man a walkin’ towards him.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Bomby said he was tall and scrawny and had wild hair and hadn’ shaved and looked like he’d
been sleeping in the woods for a while.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Bomby said he didn’ stick aroun’ to find out. He dropped everything and run fo’ his life.”
Zayah’s cork bobbed once, twice, then it went under, and Zayah gripped his pole to set the
hook. But then the cork come back up and we saw that big cat roll over in the water, real slow.
“He’s laughin’ at us,” Zayah said, and he pulled his hook outta the water and saw that the worm was
gone. “Come on, we might as well go home. We won’ catch ‘im today.”
When I was a little girl that seemed like the longest mile, from the lake to the cabin. The road
wasn’t paved, it was just old red Georgia clay, and we were barefoot, hot and thirsty. I remember
the way the clay felt between my toes, how hard the ground was in summer, how soft after a rain. I
remember the way the little stones felt under my heel, and watching out for stickers. I knew when
we got home we wouldn’t have nothin’ but bread and gravy for supper, with maybe some peas or
green corn. That was the longest walk.
I said to Zayah, “I’m sorry for spoiling yo’ fishin’.”
“Tha’s all right,” he said, and he put his arm around me while we walked. Then he stopped and
looked at me real serious and said, “Izzie, don’t you be talkin’ to no strangers you see around here,
you unnerstan’? If you see a stranger in the woods you run away. You run home jus’ as fas’ as you
can, you hear?”
* * * * *
Ray came out on the porch with his plate piled high with bacon and eggs and grits and biscuits.
The smell set my mouth watering. He took a deep breath and said something about how good it felt
to be out of the city. It would get hot in the afternoon, but the morning air was crisp and felt good on
my skin. The air was clean and the sun was bright, it sparkled off the dew on the grass in yard. The
air tasted good, there wasn’t a freeway or factory for miles, and it was quiet, too. Glenda asked if I
wanted to come to the table but I said I’d just sit on the steps for a bit, so she brung me my
breakfast. A few minutes later, Zayah came out and sat down beside me, then Kyle and Katy, and
finally Glenda, too, though she grumbled about not eating at the table like proper folks.
“Uncle Zayah’s gonna take me fishing,” Kyle said.
Katy said, “Me too. I’m gonna catch a catfish!”
Zayah is a good-looking man, with thick lips and big hands, almost always a smile on his face. He’
s tall and strong. I remember him as skinny—he was all arms and legs as a boy. His hair used to be
thick and curly, but he’s gone bald early, and what hair he has left is about half-gray. He’s got a big
bald spot right on the top of his head, shiny as a bowling ball. He looks like a Irish monk. I started
giggling and Zayah asked me what I was thinking and I said, “You look like a Irish monk.”
“Humph!” Zayah said. “Ain’t no Irish in me.”
When he called I like to fell off my chair. “How did you find me?” I asked.
Ray came home and found me cryin’. He’s always been good to me, Ray has. He knows how
scared I get when we visit his folks. He always holds my hand and stays real close. He never asked
too many questions. When I told him I couldn’t remember he looked at me and nodded. It was
enough for Ray that I told him the truth.
“It don’t matter,” Zayah said.
When Zayah asked if we could get together, Ray put his arm around me and said, “Maybe it’s
time you found out.”
* * * * *
“Why did you come back?” I asked. I set my plate on the step and looked at Zayah. “Why here?”
“I dunno. I guess it’s all the home I got.” He slurped his coffee and thought for a while. “I think I
was waiting for you.”
“What happened to the old place?”
“I heard some kids burned it down. When I come back, there wasn’t even a bare spot. It was all
growed over. Some cracker even hauled off the bricks and the stoves.”
* * * * *
I remember in the winter I’d scruntch up under the covers and wait for Lizzy to get up and light
the fire. Grandma Lizzy would get up, grumbling about her arther-itis, and I’d hear her stump across
the floor in her socks and come back from the coal bin with a few lumps for the fire. I remember the
screech the grate made when she swung it open, and Lizzy poking at the ashes to rake the coals
raked in a pile. There would be frost on the inside of the windows of the house like rock candy, and
Zayah once told me it was rock candy, and I froze my tongue to the glass tasting it to see if it was
true. Lizzy had to pour warm water on my tongue to get it un-stuck, and Zayah had to fetch hisself a
switch and then take a licking with it.
Lizzy would build a fire and put on a pot of coffee and maybe some grits to boil, and when it
warmed up a bit me and Zayah would get up and race to go roust the chickens and see if we had any
eggs for breakfast. We always claimed the eggs we found for ourselves, and Grandma Lizzy always
said she fixed ‘em for us like that, but how she scrammeled ‘em in the skillet and kept ‘em separate
I never knew.
I remember one morning watching the sun melt the frost off the windows, and Zayah was out in
the garden diggin’ worms to fish, and I crawled into Lizzy’s lap and asked her to tell me about my
mama.
Lizzy was a jet-black, blue-gum African woman, wide as a church door, her lap big an’ sof’ as the
bottom forty. She’d worked her whole life as a field hand and a cook, and she didn’t have nothing to
show for it but bad knees and a achin’ back. When my mama died, Lizzy took me and Zayah in and
did the best she could. She gleaned fields. She took in sewing. She drew a little pension.
Sometimes the church folk would bring her a basket of food or some coal. She kept chickens and a
milk goat in the yard, and me and Zayah kept her in fish most of the summer, when we wasn’t in
school.
Lizzy eased herself down into her rockin’ chair and took me up in her arms. “Yo’ mama,” she
said, “was the beautifulest wom’n that eve’ liv’. The sun always shined on her and the wind was
jealous on account of how graceful and pretty she walked. And when she used to sing…well all the
church folks knew that God heared they prayers ‘cause when yo’ mama sang, even God stopped
what he was doin’ an’ listen’.”
* * * * *
Kyle and Katy come around the side of the house with a shovel and a bucket, the mongrel dog
in tow. “Where do we dig for worms?” they asked uncle Zayah.
Zayah shoved the last biscuit into his mouth and handed his plate to me. “Come on,” he said,
and he took the kids back around the house. Glenda poured me some more coffee and took the
plates. Ray came back whistling down the road and sat down beside me. Across the highway an old
farmer in a tractor pulled a flatbed out into a field of watermelons.
“I remember picking watermelons,” I said. “I got a dollar a day and a melon to take home.
‘Course, me and Zayah used to sell our melons alongside the hiway. We could always sneak back at
night and get more, as long as Grandma Lizzy didn’t find out.”
Zayah, Kyle, Katy and the dog came around side of the house with a bucket of dirt and three
cane poles. Katy ran up and opened her hand for me to see. A fat night crawler wriggled on her
palm. “I found this one myself,” she said. “Uncle Zayah says it’ll catch fish, for sure.”
“Is he going to put it on the hook for you?” I asked. She is my sensitive child, she can’t stand to
see something hurt.
“I can do it,” she said. “Uncle Zayah says it doesn’t hurt them. You want to come along?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Zayah said, “We’re going back up to the lake.”
“Do you ever go back to Mooseman’s Pond?” I asked.
“Bunch of rich white folks from Albany bought all that land and developed it. It’s private now. I
heard they got it stocked with bass, but they got a gate up, and they don’t let no colored folks in,
‘cept to cut the grass and clean their houses.”
* * * * *
Mooseman’s always was the white folks’ pond. I remember walking over with Zayah and findin’ a
bunch of white boys fishing there, and them tellin’ us we couldn’t fish it. Zayah said that was OK
with him, but if they didn’t mind, he’d just rest a while and watch, seein’ as how we’d done walked
so far and it was so hot out.
Them white boys said they didn’ mind us watchin’, so long as we was quiet and didn’t stay. So
we sat down with our backs against a willow tree, and after a while Zayah says, “What ya’ll fishin’
with, anyhow?”
One of the white boys answered, “What’s it to you, nigger?”
An’ Zayah said, “It’s nothin’ to me. I jus’ don’t see you catchin’ anything, and I wondered what
you was fishin’ with, that’s all.”
So the white boy says, “Red worms,” and Zayah kinda nodded his head. Then them white boys
get to looking kinda antsy, and findly one of ‘em says, “Look here, nigger, you see sompthin’
funny?”
And Zayah says, “No, sir. I shore don’. I was just thinkin’ to myself how las week, down at
Miller’s Store, I heard this pond was all fished out of fish what eats red worms, and everybody
knows ol’ man Miller knows more ‘bout fishin’ than anybody else hereabouts. And I was just thinkin’
that if I shared my nightcrawlers with you, you might catch some fish, ‘specially since these here is
special nightcrawlers, and seein’ as how they gots to die anyhow, on account of I dug ‘em up en all.
But ya’ll probably don’ want no nightcrawlers what a nigger brung, anyhow.”
“See here, nigger,” says the white boys, “what’s so special about yo’ worms anyhow that you
think they kin catch fish when our’n can’t.”
And Zayah says, “I raised these worms myself in a pile of ol’ horse manure. It’s a powerful bad
smellin’ ol’ pile, and a heap of trouble to keep, but the worms is the bes’. They strong, and the ol’
fish can’t seem to leave ‘em alone. But I reckon’ you boys don’ want my worms, so I’ll jus throw ‘em
out by the road on the way home and let the birds have ‘em.”
The white boys looked from one to the other and talked kinda low among theirselves. Then one
of ‘em says, “Ain’t no sense throwin’ out good worms, nigger. You give us your worms and we’ll
give ‘em a fair try.”
“Suppose,” Zayah said, “I give you half my worms. You s’pose me and my sister could fish over
there on to the other side of the pond, over by that oak what hangs out over the bullrushes?”
The white boys huddled up fo’ a minute, then one of ‘em up and sez, “S’pose you give us all
your worms, and we give you wat’s lef’ o’ our’n, and then you kin go fish over to the other side of
the pond.”
Zayah kinna himmed and hawed and drew in the dirt with his finger. Then he got up and traded
worms with the white boys, and we walked around to the other side of the pond. Zayah opened up
his tackle box and he took out a ball of what looked like clay and started to break it up. “What you
got there, Zayah?” I asked.
“I got a piece of cheese I kept buried in a clay bank. Old man Miller tol’ me once that if the fish
ain’t bitin’ worms, try some ripe cheese on ‘em.” So I set this aside for jus’ such a occasion.
‘Sides,” he added, “this time ‘o day, all the fish are goin’ to be hidin’ in the bullrushes where it’s
cool.”
Zayah and me caught a string of bluegill that afternoon while the white boys watched us and jus’
steamed. We traded some at a farmhouse down the road for a peck of new peas, and we ate all we
wanted for dinner.
* * * * *
Glenda came out on the porch wiping her hands on her apron. “You OK, hun?” she asked.
“I’m all right,” I replied, but I had my knees drawn up to my chin and my hands clenched so tight
my nails left marks in the skin.
She sat down on the step next to me. “Is it what you expected?”
I don’t know what I expected. I said, “Things change, I suppose.”
“Zayah sure does love you.”
“I know.”
“He looked awful hard to find you.”
“I know.”
“He said that when they took you, it like to broke his heart.”
When they took you.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head.
“It’ll come back.” Glenda patted me on the arm. “Just give it time.”
I said, “I think I’ll go for a walk.”
* * * * *
Zayah told me the church burnt down, the old whitewashed frame building we prayed and sang
in when I was a little girl. I remember standin’ there and the steeple looked as high as the moon.
Bomby Sosher said he climbed up it once, but Bomby Sosher said a lot of things. The Mt. Zion
Baptists built another one out of brick in the same place.
Zayah said he was on the building committee. He wasn’t much for church when he was a boy,
but he said Glenda got him right with the Lord. He don’t drink, he don’t smoke. I never heard him
cuss. He and Glenda raised two girls and as far as I heard they were straight as an arrow. They both
go to college in Louisiana. Church is their life, just like it was Lizzy’s.
I remember hearing that Lizzy was so old, her parents had been born slaves. She must have had
children besides mom, but I don’t remember them. Maybe she was my great-grandmother, I
don’t know.
It was hot and I forgot to bring water. I found a spigot outside the church and drank from the
tap. I splashed water on my face and wiped the perspiration away. A truck roared down the highway
on the other side of the fields. I looked back and watched the afternoon heat rise in shimmering
waves. A covey of quail burst from the field, the beat of their wings and sharp cries breaking the
afternoon stillness.
We were gathered around a grave. There was no coffin, but they had turned the earth just the
same and put up a headstone. The deacon was preachin’, but the strangest thing was that the choir
couldn’t bring themselves to sing.
I wished I had brought flowers. I meant to pick some along the way, but I forgot, and there were
none to be seen around the church. I look at the names on the headstones. Lizzie. Rachel. There is
no last name. How can a person live and die in America with no last name? The stones are green
with moss. I kneel on the grass, it feels cool on my knees. I reach out my hands and brush the moss
away from the names. The stone crumbles. The edges are rounding out. In a few years the letters
won’t be legible. The moss stains the tips of my fingers green and it reminds me of flesh, rotting.
After the funeral I asked Lizzie, “Tell me about my daddy.”
That night she held me in her arms and rocked me to sleep, her big hands brushing the hair
away from my eyes. I remember the scratchy feeling the calluses on the tips of her fingers left when
they touched my face, the way her skin hung slack under her arms, and how she smelled like an old
woman. But it was a good smell, earthy, like smoke, and moss, and crumbling stone. I remember
Zayah, all arms and legs, huddled up on the bed with his eyes as big as the moon. “Tell me about my
daddy,” I said.
Lizzy said, “Did you evah hear da story ‘bout Romeo and Juliet?”
I shook my head, no.
“Well, they was white folks, but some things is the same. Romeo and Juliet lived far away in
some kinna castle or somepin’. And Romeo was from one fambly, and Juliet was from anotha, and
they famblies couldn’t get along. They was always fightin’, and wheneber the one fambly would see
da otha one, dey would go for dey swords and have a big set-to. But Romeo was a boy, and Juliet
was a girl, and dey met at the market or somethin’, an’ they fell in love. But when dey foun’ out dey
couldn’ be together, it was jus’ too much for dem to bear, so Romeo ran off an’ joint da army and
neva saw Juliet ag’in.”
Across the field I heard Kyle and Katy shouting. They were walking with Ray and Zayah. They had
all caught fish.
* * * * *
Glenda herded us to the table that evening and we feasted on catfish and hush puppies, turnip
greens, and sweet potato pie. We sat over coffee long after the children went to bed.
“You s’pose he’s still alive,” I asked, meaning the catfish.
“I reckon,” Zayah said. “They live a long time.”
Zayah was always gonna catch that fish. I remember him standing in the doorway with our cane
poles, Lizzy pushing me out of her lap and shooing us out of the house. “Don’ ya’ll be foolin’ aroun’
wid dat catfish. Ya’ll gwine over to Mooseman’s and brin’ back a mess of crappie, you hear?”
Me and Zayah started out, but when we reached the fork in the road to Mooseman’s, Zayah kept
on walkin’. “Ain’t we goin’ over to Mooseman’s,” I asked.
“No,” Zayah said. “I reckon I’ll catch that big cat this mornin’.”
“If Lizzy finds out, she’ll wup both our hides.”
“But I guess if I catch that big cat, we’ll have fish enough to smoke, an’ then she won’ mind,
now will she?”
“I reckon not. But suppose you don’t catch that cat, and somebody was to see us and tell where
we’d been?”
“Well, if you scared to come, then you go on over to Mooseman’s, and I’ll catch up wid you by-‘n-
by. Just don’t fall in. Now I gots to go catch me that big cat, so you run along, an’ I’ll see you in a
hour or so.”
The sun was shining and it was warm. I knew the way. I had been there lots of times before, and
I didn’t think nothin’ of walking by myself. I’m sure I had walked alone some time or another, to see
a friend or whatever. So that morning Zayah took the left fork in the road, and I took the right. I was
listening to the meadowlarks sing, and watching the butterflies, and thinking to myself, maybe
singing a little girl song, and after a while I come up over a little rise in the road and ran into a man I
hadn’t seen before.
He was tall, and his hair was long and brown, and he hadn’t shaved. He looked like he’d been
sleeping out in the woods. His shirt had the sleeves cut off. His arms was scrawny, strong like a
kudzu vine, and covered with pictures. I remember a blue eagle, and a naked woman, and another
one of a knife through a heart dripping blood. I remember all this ‘cause I saw it real good, and
close.
I got up from the table. “I’m going for a walk,” I said.
Ray paused, a fork full of pie in his hand. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
I said, “I’d want to be alone.” I stopped outside and leaned against the car. My breath came in
gasps and I was afraid I might hyperventilate. I almost went back, but then I heard Ray and Zayah
and Glenda talking in the kitchen over the clatter of the dishes.
Glenda said, “She’s been like this all day.”
Ray said, “She’s been like this since you called.”
* * * * *
A quarter mile this side of the lake was a fork in the road with a big iron-gate I didn’t remember.
The road, that used to be clay, was now asphalt. Over the rise I knew there were rich people’s
houses, maybe a golf course, and Mooseman’s Pond, stocked with bass for the white folks to catch.
I figured the woods had been cleared of underbrush, and I pictured in my mind elegant young girls
from private schools cantering horses along shaded paths, maybe a jogger or two out running for
their health.
I remember flying down that road as fast as my bare feet would carry me. I remember everything
about that morning, the pale blue dress I wore, a little silver chain my mother left me rattling around
my neck. I screamed for Zayah and he came running across the fields up from the lake. He gathered
me in his arms and I wrapped myself around him, buried my face in his chest and cried.
“Izzy,” he said, “did you get bit by a snake?” and I said “No.”
“Then what is the matter?”
After a while I stopped sobbing long enough to tell him, “I met the stranger that Bomby Sosher
saw.”
“How did that stranger look?” Zayah asked.
“He looked just like Bomby Socher said. He was wild and his hair and beard was growed out,
and he had him a pack, and he looked like he’d been sleeping in the woods.”
“Did that stranger say anything to you?”
I tried to remember what the stranger said.
“He said he wanted to give me something.”
“Did he touch you?”
I looked down at my feet and started to cry. “He helt me in his arms,” I said, “an run his fingers
thru my hair, and he tol’ me over an’ over how pretty I was.”
I looked at the gate and it was tall and wrought iron. It opened with a motor by remote control,
but it wasn’t nothing but a gate, and I had no trouble climbing it.
Zayah carried me down to the lake where he left his things. He opened his tackle box and stuck
his filletin’ knife through the loop on his coveralls. He hid the box and his pole in the bushes, and
we started back up the road to Mooseman’s Pond. We come over the rise and I showed him the
place by the side of the road where I had thrown away my fishin’ pole. The stranger was gone.
We walked on to the pond, and them same white boys was fishin’, and they waved to us and
asked us if we heard about one-eyed Jake Palmer. Zayah said he hadn’t, but he wanted to know if
the white boys had seen a stranger around. The white boys said they hadn’t, but if we did we should
call the police, because they heard a stranger took a fire poker to Jake’s head that morning and kilt
him. They said the police had heard there was a stranger about town askin’ for Jake, and they
reckoned it was him what did it.
Zayah and me headed home, but before we got over the rise we heard dogs, and then a black
and white come down the road and the police got out and asked Zayah if we had seen anybody.
I shook my head, “no,” but Zayah jerked me by the arm, and I saw the police kinda look at each
other side-a-ways. Then one of ‘em came and set down in front of me and said, “Look-a-here little
girl, if you seen something, you best tell us now, ya’ hear? ‘Cause this here man we’re looin’ for
done kilt a white man, and he’s in some baaad trouble.”
I didn’t say nothin’, but Zayah said, “She saw this here stranger what’s been hangin’ around,
but he skeered her up something awful. I kin show you the spot, if you like.”
One of the police jumped in the car and grabbed the radio, and the other took me by the hand,
and Zayah walked ahead of us up to the clearing by the side of the road. He hunted around in the
grass for a little while, and after a while he bent down and held up two silver dollars. “Well, he said,
will you look at that.” An he put the money in his pocket.
A few minutes later another police car came, and a truck with a couple of fellas with hound dogs
and rifles. They turned the dogs loose, and in a minute they took to bayin’ and hollerin’, and they
took off at a trot, with the police close behind. Zayah and me walked home. Wasn’t long before we
heard a shot in the woods.
I laid down on my back in the grass by the side of the road and watched the full moon rise until
it was high in the sky. I heard Ray and Zayah in the distance calling my name, but I didn’t answer,
and they didn’t come. After a while I got up.
When I was a little girl Grandma Lizzy used to tell me that the Indians said the lake was haunted
and they wouldn’t fish there. She said they told a story about a maiden who lost her lover and
drowned herself. And when the moon was full, and the lake is smooth as black glass, she said you
could look down in the water and see her there, and she will tell you your past or your future.
I walked to the lake, and then around to the far side, climbed out on the rock and looked down into
the depths, and the moon was reflected off the water. Off in the trees I could hear an owl hoot, and
its mate reply from swamps behind me. I heard the splash of a frog startled into jumping, and then
everything went quiet. The heat faded, and I felt the dew begin settled onto the rock. I heard the
trees, the grass, the lily pads, the bulrushes rustling in the shallow part of the lake. I took a chill.
And then I saw the shadow in the water below, reaching up to touch my face. Her body was thin and
her eyes glittered. Her dark hair fanned out around her shoulders like a black halo, and I knew she
was not an Indian. It was my mother who haunted that lake. I looked down and asked her my past,
and she told me the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Once upon a time there was a white boy who lived on a farm, and a black girl who lived in a
cabin across the road, and they grew up together, and played together, and they didn’t think
anything about it. And the white boy loved the black girl, but their families had been feuding for a
long time, and so they couldn’t be together. But some folks knew about it anyway, and you know
how people like to talk. And they made it hard on the white boy and the black girl. After a while
there was a war, and the white boy joined the army to fight in Korea. And Romeo never knew Juliet
was with child.
While Romeo was gone, some other white boys caught Juliet walking down the road, and they
had heard how she had loved a white boy before, so they grabbed her and dragged her into the
woods. And when they were done she was with child again. And she wanted to press charges, but
nobody cared because, after all, since she had loved one white boy, she might as well love them all.
And when Romeo came home from the war and found out what happened, he beat one boy half
to death, put his eye out. The judge sent Romeo to prison. And while Romeo was in jail the boy who
lost his eye came back and killed Juliet. He wrapped her body in chain and threw it in the lake, and
even though the police dragged the lake they couldn’t find nothing’, and without a body they
couldn’t charge him with murder, so he went free. They used to have a saying about it, “Just like a
nigger to steal more chain than she could swim with.”
When Romeo got out of prision he came home and found the man who killed Juliet. He beat him
to death with a fire poker. And on his way out of town he met a little girl on the road. This girl was
not quite his daughter, but was the child of the woman he loved. Romeo wanted to tell the little girl
how much he loved her mother, but the little girl was scared, she didn’t know who he was. And the
man said he wanted to give the little girl something, the only thing he had left in the world—two
silver dollars—and he pressed the money into her hand and then gathered her in his arms and held
her. But the little girl screamed, and when the stranger dropped her, she ran away.
I remember the man with the scrawny arms wrapped around me, the tattoos, the smell of
campfire smoke in his hair, the wild look in his eye, desperate as a treed coon. “You are as beautiful
as your mother,” he said. There was dried blood on his coveralls.
Sometime, alone in the dark night, that old catfish turned over on the water and looked at me.
His back was black and shiny as a beautiful woman, but when he rolled I could see his belly, white
as a white man. He is mixed, mixed up like me, and I wonder if I will ever be whole again.
There is a moon above and a moon below and a thin column of white light flowing in between.
The ripples on the lake rise and seem to me as high and inaccessible as the distant mountains of
Asia. They are lines of black and white rolling in the moonlit night. In a mirror world beneath the
water my mother presses her dead fingers against the sky and waits for her lover to return. I reach
my fingers towards hers and the shock of cold water breaks the spell. I watch for a moment,
confused about what I see. And then I whisper in a little girl’s voice, “Mama, it’s me, remember…”
“You must remember something,” Kyle said. He’s my twelve-year old. He and Katy, my nine-year
old, pestered me with questions all the way from Cincinnati.
“Leave your Mama alone,” Ray said. He’s my husband. “It was a long time ago since she left
home.”
“How long?”
“Lemme see…” Ray was never fast at math. “Your mama was eleven, so that makes
about…twenty-seven years.”
Kyle said, “I can remember what I did when I was eleven.”
“But that was last year.”
“But she must remember something.”
I remember going fishing with my brother Zayah. He was maybe, twelve, and I was nine or ten.
He fixed me a cane pole with a cork and worm and cast it for me. I could never bring myself to hook
the worm. I couldn’t stand the way they squirmed. All I could think about was this poor little thing
that hadn’t done me any harm, and now he was gonna die. “It don’t hurt the worm none,” Zayah said.
“They don’t feel things like we do.” I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t think about anything but that
worm with a hook in him, dying cold and scared, alone in the water.
“Why don’t you think about something else for a while?” Ray said.
Kyle said, “Like what?”
“Like what you want for a souvenir for to take home.”
“I already know what I want.”
“What’s that?”
South of Atlanta Ray had got tired. The kids were cranky and we pulled off the interstate for
some coffee and something to eat. We found a little roadhouse that served bar-b-que, and across
the road was a fruit stand. Ray couldn’t wait to buy peaches, so he and Kyle ran over and came back
with a quarter basket. At the produce stand Kyle latched onto some tourists coming back from
Florida.
“I want one of those hats,” Kyle said.
Ray said, “What hats?”
“You know, one of those hats with the fake doo on it that says Damn Seagulls.”
“Listen here,” Ray said, his voice rising, “just ‘cause some ignorant cracker wants to spend
good money to look like a fool don’t mean you got to do it.”
“But you axed what I wanted.”
“’Nuff foolishness outta you! You keep that talk up and I’ll give you a knock so hard you won’t
need no hat. We’ll paint yo’ head red and stick a visor over yo’ eyes. And if you want doo, I reckon
there’s plenty around the farm, right Izzy?”
I nodded, yes. We’d been driving south since supper, passing fields and small towns, patches
of piney woods and peach orchards. At that moment we came around a bend and I saw a wide
expanse of water, dark and smooth as glass, the last rays of the setting sun reflecting off it like a
black mirror. A rocky outcrop stuck out on the far side, and I could see a gap in the hills where the
lake drained away in a slow, weed-choked creek that ran down to a cypress swamp.
I remember that lake.
“I remember that lake,” I said.
“There now,” Ray said, “I told you it would come back.”
“I used to fish it with my brother. There was a big catfish, down by the swamp end, but we never
caught him. Didn’t nobody fish that lake much in those days. There was a superstition said it was
haunted.”
Katy woke up and rubbed her eyes. She’d been asleep since dinner. “Are we there yet?” she
asked.
Ray turned a hopeful eye to me and I nodded. “A mile to go,” I said, and I turned towards the
window and looked out across the fields.
When I was a little girl there used to be a old bare-boards cabin in that field. I lived in it with
Grandma Lizzie and my brother Zayah. I remember inside, the way the morning sun shone through
the windows, the glass so old it was opaque, white with age. And I remember an old rockin’ chair
with a pillow for a seat and a quilt folded over the arm to warm Lizzie’s legs. There was a wood-
burning cook stove, and a old, squat, pot-bellied black coal-burner Lizzie stoked in the winter. I
remember the way the heat used to feel on my skin, and how the smoke used to hang in the rafters.
I remember the way it smelled in the morning, with bacon frying, and biscuits—Lizzie used to make
her biscuits with lard—and I remember my mouth watering, watchin’ them rise in the oven. And I
remember huddled up in a bed stuffed with feathers she’d plucked herself off the chickens she
raised in her yard. She was poor as a old Georgia widow could be, but she had a real featherbed. I’d
sink down into that mattress and the feathers would rise up all around me and I’d be warm as toast.
I couldn’t have slept better on a cloud. I didn’t know we were poor until I went to the orphanage.
I stared out over the field, but I couldn’t see much in the dusk. The house might have fell down by
now, but I would have thought the chimney was still standing, unless somebody come along and
stole it for the bricks.
“Zayah done pretty good for hisself, didn’t he?” Ray asked.
“Yeah” I said. “He done all right.” My Ray was born and raised in Cincinnati so he’s a city boy.
He wanted to make the trip, and he wanted me to come, but he was still a little fearful about visiting.
I think he’s cute when he’s fussy. He wanted to know all about, the farm, whether Zayah had a
outhouse, a henhouse, pigs and goats in the yard, what we would eat, where we would sleep. Ray
hadn’t been south before. All he knew about Georgia came from books and movies, and all I ever
heard him say about it was he didn’t care much for “crackers.”
“Tell me about the haunted lake,” Kyle said.
He doesn’t miss much. “The Indians told a story about a girl who drowned. They said when the
moon was full, and the lake was still, you see her floating beneath the surface, looking up at the sky.
They said if you asked her a question, she could tell you the answer.”
“Could she do my homework?”
“Not that kind of question.”
“What then?”
“They said she could tell the future, or the past.”
Ray slowed down and flashed his high beams to see the numbers on the mailboxes. “There it
is,” he said, and as he turned into the drive the porch light came on and I watched his face relax
when he saw that it was just a house like any other. There was a mongrel old shepherd dog barking
in the front yard, and Zayah and his missus, Glenda, came to the screen door and waved at us and
shouted at the dog to hush up. Kyle and Katy piled out of the car and ran to the steps. Ray turned to
me and asked if I was O.K.
Am I O.K ? I haven’t seen my brother since I left home.
* * * * *
In the morning I came out on the porch and sat on the steps with a cup of hot coffee. The dog
came out of the field, jumping a low spot in the fence. He had mud on his face and paws. He looked
like a dog what had been up to no good. He shook the dew off his back and gave me a innocent
look, then a hopeful look, but when I didn’t have nothing to feed him he got disinterested and
trotted around the house to the back yard. Glenda was frying bacon and baking biscuits in the
house, the smell was heavenly, and I could hear Kyle inside pesterin’ Zayah about the lake.
“Mama says there’s monster catfish in there.”
“Tha’s right,” Zayah said. I had forgotten how sweet his voice was.
“You gots to sit still, Izzy, ‘cause them fish can see better than anything. And you gots to be
quiet, too, ‘cause they can hear.”
“How can they hear when they ain’t got no ears?” I asked.
Zayah plunked his line in the water and grinned at me. “Kin you hear when you sticks your head
in the tub?”
“’Course I can.”
“Well, so can the fish, only, since they underwater all the time, they got their ears on the inside
so they don’t fill up with water. They hear good, too.”
“Can they hear us talkin’?”
“I reckon. They can hear the bees buzzing, and the flies humming, and when we throw a line in
the water, they can hear that, too. That’s how they eat. When a fish hear something fall in the water,
he thinkin’ ‘tha’s my dinner.’ So you gots to be quiet when you fish, otherwise we won’t catch no
supper.”
We watched our corks bobbin’ in the water, and then I forgot all about being quiet. I said
“Bomby Sosher said he saw a stranger camped out in the cypress swamp last week.”
Zayah looked at me and bit his lip. “Bomby’s skeered of his shadow,” he said. “He ain’t seen
nothing over in the swamp. He don’ even go in the swamp. What was he doin’ in the swamp,
anyway?”
“His mammy sent him over to see if the mayhaws is ripe yet.”
“Well, I reckon he’s just trying to skeer folks off so he can keep all the mayhaws for hisself.”
“I bet he isn’t. He was so skeered he ‘lowed his mammy couldn’t wup him hard ‘nuff to make
him go back.”
“Shoot,” Zayah said. “How’d he know he was a stranger?”
“’Cause he hadn’t seen him round here before.”
“And how’d he know he was campin’ in the woods?”
“’Cause he said he walked into his camp and there wasn’t nobody around, and he kinda looked
around a little bit, and all of a sudden he looked up and seed this man a walkin’ towards him.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Bomby said he was tall and scrawny and had wild hair and hadn’ shaved and looked like he’d
been sleeping in the woods for a while.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Bomby said he didn’ stick aroun’ to find out. He dropped everything and run fo’ his life.”
Zayah’s cork bobbed once, twice, then it went under, and Zayah gripped his pole to set the
hook. But then the cork come back up and we saw that big cat roll over in the water, real slow.
“He’s laughin’ at us,” Zayah said, and he pulled his hook outta the water and saw that the worm was
gone. “Come on, we might as well go home. We won’ catch ‘im today.”
When I was a little girl that seemed like the longest mile, from the lake to the cabin. The road
wasn’t paved, it was just old red Georgia clay, and we were barefoot, hot and thirsty. I remember
the way the clay felt between my toes, how hard the ground was in summer, how soft after a rain. I
remember the way the little stones felt under my heel, and watching out for stickers. I knew when
we got home we wouldn’t have nothin’ but bread and gravy for supper, with maybe some peas or
green corn. That was the longest walk.
I said to Zayah, “I’m sorry for spoiling yo’ fishin’.”
“Tha’s all right,” he said, and he put his arm around me while we walked. Then he stopped and
looked at me real serious and said, “Izzie, don’t you be talkin’ to no strangers you see around here,
you unnerstan’? If you see a stranger in the woods you run away. You run home jus’ as fas’ as you
can, you hear?”
* * * * *
Ray came out on the porch with his plate piled high with bacon and eggs and grits and biscuits.
The smell set my mouth watering. He took a deep breath and said something about how good it felt
to be out of the city. It would get hot in the afternoon, but the morning air was crisp and felt good on
my skin. The air was clean and the sun was bright, it sparkled off the dew on the grass in yard. The
air tasted good, there wasn’t a freeway or factory for miles, and it was quiet, too. Glenda asked if I
wanted to come to the table but I said I’d just sit on the steps for a bit, so she brung me my
breakfast. A few minutes later, Zayah came out and sat down beside me, then Kyle and Katy, and
finally Glenda, too, though she grumbled about not eating at the table like proper folks.
“Uncle Zayah’s gonna take me fishing,” Kyle said.
Katy said, “Me too. I’m gonna catch a catfish!”
Zayah is a good-looking man, with thick lips and big hands, almost always a smile on his face. He’
s tall and strong. I remember him as skinny—he was all arms and legs as a boy. His hair used to be
thick and curly, but he’s gone bald early, and what hair he has left is about half-gray. He’s got a big
bald spot right on the top of his head, shiny as a bowling ball. He looks like a Irish monk. I started
giggling and Zayah asked me what I was thinking and I said, “You look like a Irish monk.”
“Humph!” Zayah said. “Ain’t no Irish in me.”
When he called I like to fell off my chair. “How did you find me?” I asked.
Ray came home and found me cryin’. He’s always been good to me, Ray has. He knows how
scared I get when we visit his folks. He always holds my hand and stays real close. He never asked
too many questions. When I told him I couldn’t remember he looked at me and nodded. It was
enough for Ray that I told him the truth.
“It don’t matter,” Zayah said.
When Zayah asked if we could get together, Ray put his arm around me and said, “Maybe it’s
time you found out.”
* * * * *
“Why did you come back?” I asked. I set my plate on the step and looked at Zayah. “Why here?”
“I dunno. I guess it’s all the home I got.” He slurped his coffee and thought for a while. “I think I
was waiting for you.”
“What happened to the old place?”
“I heard some kids burned it down. When I come back, there wasn’t even a bare spot. It was all
growed over. Some cracker even hauled off the bricks and the stoves.”
* * * * *
I remember in the winter I’d scruntch up under the covers and wait for Lizzy to get up and light
the fire. Grandma Lizzy would get up, grumbling about her arther-itis, and I’d hear her stump across
the floor in her socks and come back from the coal bin with a few lumps for the fire. I remember the
screech the grate made when she swung it open, and Lizzy poking at the ashes to rake the coals
raked in a pile. There would be frost on the inside of the windows of the house like rock candy, and
Zayah once told me it was rock candy, and I froze my tongue to the glass tasting it to see if it was
true. Lizzy had to pour warm water on my tongue to get it un-stuck, and Zayah had to fetch hisself a
switch and then take a licking with it.
Lizzy would build a fire and put on a pot of coffee and maybe some grits to boil, and when it
warmed up a bit me and Zayah would get up and race to go roust the chickens and see if we had any
eggs for breakfast. We always claimed the eggs we found for ourselves, and Grandma Lizzy always
said she fixed ‘em for us like that, but how she scrammeled ‘em in the skillet and kept ‘em separate
I never knew.
I remember one morning watching the sun melt the frost off the windows, and Zayah was out in
the garden diggin’ worms to fish, and I crawled into Lizzy’s lap and asked her to tell me about my
mama.
Lizzy was a jet-black, blue-gum African woman, wide as a church door, her lap big an’ sof’ as the
bottom forty. She’d worked her whole life as a field hand and a cook, and she didn’t have nothing to
show for it but bad knees and a achin’ back. When my mama died, Lizzy took me and Zayah in and
did the best she could. She gleaned fields. She took in sewing. She drew a little pension.
Sometimes the church folk would bring her a basket of food or some coal. She kept chickens and a
milk goat in the yard, and me and Zayah kept her in fish most of the summer, when we wasn’t in
school.
Lizzy eased herself down into her rockin’ chair and took me up in her arms. “Yo’ mama,” she
said, “was the beautifulest wom’n that eve’ liv’. The sun always shined on her and the wind was
jealous on account of how graceful and pretty she walked. And when she used to sing…well all the
church folks knew that God heared they prayers ‘cause when yo’ mama sang, even God stopped
what he was doin’ an’ listen’.”
* * * * *
Kyle and Katy come around the side of the house with a shovel and a bucket, the mongrel dog
in tow. “Where do we dig for worms?” they asked uncle Zayah.
Zayah shoved the last biscuit into his mouth and handed his plate to me. “Come on,” he said,
and he took the kids back around the house. Glenda poured me some more coffee and took the
plates. Ray came back whistling down the road and sat down beside me. Across the highway an old
farmer in a tractor pulled a flatbed out into a field of watermelons.
“I remember picking watermelons,” I said. “I got a dollar a day and a melon to take home.
‘Course, me and Zayah used to sell our melons alongside the hiway. We could always sneak back at
night and get more, as long as Grandma Lizzy didn’t find out.”
Zayah, Kyle, Katy and the dog came around side of the house with a bucket of dirt and three
cane poles. Katy ran up and opened her hand for me to see. A fat night crawler wriggled on her
palm. “I found this one myself,” she said. “Uncle Zayah says it’ll catch fish, for sure.”
“Is he going to put it on the hook for you?” I asked. She is my sensitive child, she can’t stand to
see something hurt.
“I can do it,” she said. “Uncle Zayah says it doesn’t hurt them. You want to come along?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Zayah said, “We’re going back up to the lake.”
“Do you ever go back to Mooseman’s Pond?” I asked.
“Bunch of rich white folks from Albany bought all that land and developed it. It’s private now. I
heard they got it stocked with bass, but they got a gate up, and they don’t let no colored folks in,
‘cept to cut the grass and clean their houses.”
* * * * *
Mooseman’s always was the white folks’ pond. I remember walking over with Zayah and findin’ a
bunch of white boys fishing there, and them tellin’ us we couldn’t fish it. Zayah said that was OK
with him, but if they didn’t mind, he’d just rest a while and watch, seein’ as how we’d done walked
so far and it was so hot out.
Them white boys said they didn’ mind us watchin’, so long as we was quiet and didn’t stay. So
we sat down with our backs against a willow tree, and after a while Zayah says, “What ya’ll fishin’
with, anyhow?”
One of the white boys answered, “What’s it to you, nigger?”
An’ Zayah said, “It’s nothin’ to me. I jus’ don’t see you catchin’ anything, and I wondered what
you was fishin’ with, that’s all.”
So the white boy says, “Red worms,” and Zayah kinda nodded his head. Then them white boys
get to looking kinda antsy, and findly one of ‘em says, “Look here, nigger, you see sompthin’
funny?”
And Zayah says, “No, sir. I shore don’. I was just thinkin’ to myself how las week, down at
Miller’s Store, I heard this pond was all fished out of fish what eats red worms, and everybody
knows ol’ man Miller knows more ‘bout fishin’ than anybody else hereabouts. And I was just thinkin’
that if I shared my nightcrawlers with you, you might catch some fish, ‘specially since these here is
special nightcrawlers, and seein’ as how they gots to die anyhow, on account of I dug ‘em up en all.
But ya’ll probably don’ want no nightcrawlers what a nigger brung, anyhow.”
“See here, nigger,” says the white boys, “what’s so special about yo’ worms anyhow that you
think they kin catch fish when our’n can’t.”
And Zayah says, “I raised these worms myself in a pile of ol’ horse manure. It’s a powerful bad
smellin’ ol’ pile, and a heap of trouble to keep, but the worms is the bes’. They strong, and the ol’
fish can’t seem to leave ‘em alone. But I reckon’ you boys don’ want my worms, so I’ll jus throw ‘em
out by the road on the way home and let the birds have ‘em.”
The white boys looked from one to the other and talked kinda low among theirselves. Then one
of ‘em says, “Ain’t no sense throwin’ out good worms, nigger. You give us your worms and we’ll
give ‘em a fair try.”
“Suppose,” Zayah said, “I give you half my worms. You s’pose me and my sister could fish over
there on to the other side of the pond, over by that oak what hangs out over the bullrushes?”
The white boys huddled up fo’ a minute, then one of ‘em up and sez, “S’pose you give us all
your worms, and we give you wat’s lef’ o’ our’n, and then you kin go fish over to the other side of
the pond.”
Zayah kinna himmed and hawed and drew in the dirt with his finger. Then he got up and traded
worms with the white boys, and we walked around to the other side of the pond. Zayah opened up
his tackle box and he took out a ball of what looked like clay and started to break it up. “What you
got there, Zayah?” I asked.
“I got a piece of cheese I kept buried in a clay bank. Old man Miller tol’ me once that if the fish
ain’t bitin’ worms, try some ripe cheese on ‘em.” So I set this aside for jus’ such a occasion.
‘Sides,” he added, “this time ‘o day, all the fish are goin’ to be hidin’ in the bullrushes where it’s
cool.”
Zayah and me caught a string of bluegill that afternoon while the white boys watched us and jus’
steamed. We traded some at a farmhouse down the road for a peck of new peas, and we ate all we
wanted for dinner.
* * * * *
Glenda came out on the porch wiping her hands on her apron. “You OK, hun?” she asked.
“I’m all right,” I replied, but I had my knees drawn up to my chin and my hands clenched so tight
my nails left marks in the skin.
She sat down on the step next to me. “Is it what you expected?”
I don’t know what I expected. I said, “Things change, I suppose.”
“Zayah sure does love you.”
“I know.”
“He looked awful hard to find you.”
“I know.”
“He said that when they took you, it like to broke his heart.”
When they took you.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head.
“It’ll come back.” Glenda patted me on the arm. “Just give it time.”
I said, “I think I’ll go for a walk.”
* * * * *
Zayah told me the church burnt down, the old whitewashed frame building we prayed and sang
in when I was a little girl. I remember standin’ there and the steeple looked as high as the moon.
Bomby Sosher said he climbed up it once, but Bomby Sosher said a lot of things. The Mt. Zion
Baptists built another one out of brick in the same place.
Zayah said he was on the building committee. He wasn’t much for church when he was a boy,
but he said Glenda got him right with the Lord. He don’t drink, he don’t smoke. I never heard him
cuss. He and Glenda raised two girls and as far as I heard they were straight as an arrow. They both
go to college in Louisiana. Church is their life, just like it was Lizzy’s.
I remember hearing that Lizzy was so old, her parents had been born slaves. She must have had
children besides mom, but I don’t remember them. Maybe she was my great-grandmother, I
don’t know.
It was hot and I forgot to bring water. I found a spigot outside the church and drank from the
tap. I splashed water on my face and wiped the perspiration away. A truck roared down the highway
on the other side of the fields. I looked back and watched the afternoon heat rise in shimmering
waves. A covey of quail burst from the field, the beat of their wings and sharp cries breaking the
afternoon stillness.
We were gathered around a grave. There was no coffin, but they had turned the earth just the
same and put up a headstone. The deacon was preachin’, but the strangest thing was that the choir
couldn’t bring themselves to sing.
I wished I had brought flowers. I meant to pick some along the way, but I forgot, and there were
none to be seen around the church. I look at the names on the headstones. Lizzie. Rachel. There is
no last name. How can a person live and die in America with no last name? The stones are green
with moss. I kneel on the grass, it feels cool on my knees. I reach out my hands and brush the moss
away from the names. The stone crumbles. The edges are rounding out. In a few years the letters
won’t be legible. The moss stains the tips of my fingers green and it reminds me of flesh, rotting.
After the funeral I asked Lizzie, “Tell me about my daddy.”
That night she held me in her arms and rocked me to sleep, her big hands brushing the hair
away from my eyes. I remember the scratchy feeling the calluses on the tips of her fingers left when
they touched my face, the way her skin hung slack under her arms, and how she smelled like an old
woman. But it was a good smell, earthy, like smoke, and moss, and crumbling stone. I remember
Zayah, all arms and legs, huddled up on the bed with his eyes as big as the moon. “Tell me about my
daddy,” I said.
Lizzy said, “Did you evah hear da story ‘bout Romeo and Juliet?”
I shook my head, no.
“Well, they was white folks, but some things is the same. Romeo and Juliet lived far away in
some kinna castle or somepin’. And Romeo was from one fambly, and Juliet was from anotha, and
they famblies couldn’t get along. They was always fightin’, and wheneber the one fambly would see
da otha one, dey would go for dey swords and have a big set-to. But Romeo was a boy, and Juliet
was a girl, and dey met at the market or somethin’, an’ they fell in love. But when dey foun’ out dey
couldn’ be together, it was jus’ too much for dem to bear, so Romeo ran off an’ joint da army and
neva saw Juliet ag’in.”
Across the field I heard Kyle and Katy shouting. They were walking with Ray and Zayah. They had
all caught fish.
* * * * *
Glenda herded us to the table that evening and we feasted on catfish and hush puppies, turnip
greens, and sweet potato pie. We sat over coffee long after the children went to bed.
“You s’pose he’s still alive,” I asked, meaning the catfish.
“I reckon,” Zayah said. “They live a long time.”
Zayah was always gonna catch that fish. I remember him standing in the doorway with our cane
poles, Lizzy pushing me out of her lap and shooing us out of the house. “Don’ ya’ll be foolin’ aroun’
wid dat catfish. Ya’ll gwine over to Mooseman’s and brin’ back a mess of crappie, you hear?”
Me and Zayah started out, but when we reached the fork in the road to Mooseman’s, Zayah kept
on walkin’. “Ain’t we goin’ over to Mooseman’s,” I asked.
“No,” Zayah said. “I reckon I’ll catch that big cat this mornin’.”
“If Lizzy finds out, she’ll wup both our hides.”
“But I guess if I catch that big cat, we’ll have fish enough to smoke, an’ then she won’ mind,
now will she?”
“I reckon not. But suppose you don’t catch that cat, and somebody was to see us and tell where
we’d been?”
“Well, if you scared to come, then you go on over to Mooseman’s, and I’ll catch up wid you by-‘n-
by. Just don’t fall in. Now I gots to go catch me that big cat, so you run along, an’ I’ll see you in a
hour or so.”
The sun was shining and it was warm. I knew the way. I had been there lots of times before, and
I didn’t think nothin’ of walking by myself. I’m sure I had walked alone some time or another, to see
a friend or whatever. So that morning Zayah took the left fork in the road, and I took the right. I was
listening to the meadowlarks sing, and watching the butterflies, and thinking to myself, maybe
singing a little girl song, and after a while I come up over a little rise in the road and ran into a man I
hadn’t seen before.
He was tall, and his hair was long and brown, and he hadn’t shaved. He looked like he’d been
sleeping out in the woods. His shirt had the sleeves cut off. His arms was scrawny, strong like a
kudzu vine, and covered with pictures. I remember a blue eagle, and a naked woman, and another
one of a knife through a heart dripping blood. I remember all this ‘cause I saw it real good, and
close.
I got up from the table. “I’m going for a walk,” I said.
Ray paused, a fork full of pie in his hand. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
I said, “I’d want to be alone.” I stopped outside and leaned against the car. My breath came in
gasps and I was afraid I might hyperventilate. I almost went back, but then I heard Ray and Zayah
and Glenda talking in the kitchen over the clatter of the dishes.
Glenda said, “She’s been like this all day.”
Ray said, “She’s been like this since you called.”
* * * * *
A quarter mile this side of the lake was a fork in the road with a big iron-gate I didn’t remember.
The road, that used to be clay, was now asphalt. Over the rise I knew there were rich people’s
houses, maybe a golf course, and Mooseman’s Pond, stocked with bass for the white folks to catch.
I figured the woods had been cleared of underbrush, and I pictured in my mind elegant young girls
from private schools cantering horses along shaded paths, maybe a jogger or two out running for
their health.
I remember flying down that road as fast as my bare feet would carry me. I remember everything
about that morning, the pale blue dress I wore, a little silver chain my mother left me rattling around
my neck. I screamed for Zayah and he came running across the fields up from the lake. He gathered
me in his arms and I wrapped myself around him, buried my face in his chest and cried.
“Izzy,” he said, “did you get bit by a snake?” and I said “No.”
“Then what is the matter?”
After a while I stopped sobbing long enough to tell him, “I met the stranger that Bomby Sosher
saw.”
“How did that stranger look?” Zayah asked.
“He looked just like Bomby Socher said. He was wild and his hair and beard was growed out,
and he had him a pack, and he looked like he’d been sleeping in the woods.”
“Did that stranger say anything to you?”
I tried to remember what the stranger said.
“He said he wanted to give me something.”
“Did he touch you?”
I looked down at my feet and started to cry. “He helt me in his arms,” I said, “an run his fingers
thru my hair, and he tol’ me over an’ over how pretty I was.”
I looked at the gate and it was tall and wrought iron. It opened with a motor by remote control,
but it wasn’t nothing but a gate, and I had no trouble climbing it.
Zayah carried me down to the lake where he left his things. He opened his tackle box and stuck
his filletin’ knife through the loop on his coveralls. He hid the box and his pole in the bushes, and
we started back up the road to Mooseman’s Pond. We come over the rise and I showed him the
place by the side of the road where I had thrown away my fishin’ pole. The stranger was gone.
We walked on to the pond, and them same white boys was fishin’, and they waved to us and
asked us if we heard about one-eyed Jake Palmer. Zayah said he hadn’t, but he wanted to know if
the white boys had seen a stranger around. The white boys said they hadn’t, but if we did we should
call the police, because they heard a stranger took a fire poker to Jake’s head that morning and kilt
him. They said the police had heard there was a stranger about town askin’ for Jake, and they
reckoned it was him what did it.
Zayah and me headed home, but before we got over the rise we heard dogs, and then a black
and white come down the road and the police got out and asked Zayah if we had seen anybody.
I shook my head, “no,” but Zayah jerked me by the arm, and I saw the police kinda look at each
other side-a-ways. Then one of ‘em came and set down in front of me and said, “Look-a-here little
girl, if you seen something, you best tell us now, ya’ hear? ‘Cause this here man we’re looin’ for
done kilt a white man, and he’s in some baaad trouble.”
I didn’t say nothin’, but Zayah said, “She saw this here stranger what’s been hangin’ around,
but he skeered her up something awful. I kin show you the spot, if you like.”
One of the police jumped in the car and grabbed the radio, and the other took me by the hand,
and Zayah walked ahead of us up to the clearing by the side of the road. He hunted around in the
grass for a little while, and after a while he bent down and held up two silver dollars. “Well, he said,
will you look at that.” An he put the money in his pocket.
A few minutes later another police car came, and a truck with a couple of fellas with hound dogs
and rifles. They turned the dogs loose, and in a minute they took to bayin’ and hollerin’, and they
took off at a trot, with the police close behind. Zayah and me walked home. Wasn’t long before we
heard a shot in the woods.
I laid down on my back in the grass by the side of the road and watched the full moon rise until
it was high in the sky. I heard Ray and Zayah in the distance calling my name, but I didn’t answer,
and they didn’t come. After a while I got up.
When I was a little girl Grandma Lizzy used to tell me that the Indians said the lake was haunted
and they wouldn’t fish there. She said they told a story about a maiden who lost her lover and
drowned herself. And when the moon was full, and the lake is smooth as black glass, she said you
could look down in the water and see her there, and she will tell you your past or your future.
I walked to the lake, and then around to the far side, climbed out on the rock and looked down into
the depths, and the moon was reflected off the water. Off in the trees I could hear an owl hoot, and
its mate reply from swamps behind me. I heard the splash of a frog startled into jumping, and then
everything went quiet. The heat faded, and I felt the dew begin settled onto the rock. I heard the
trees, the grass, the lily pads, the bulrushes rustling in the shallow part of the lake. I took a chill.
And then I saw the shadow in the water below, reaching up to touch my face. Her body was thin and
her eyes glittered. Her dark hair fanned out around her shoulders like a black halo, and I knew she
was not an Indian. It was my mother who haunted that lake. I looked down and asked her my past,
and she told me the story of Romeo and Juliet.
Once upon a time there was a white boy who lived on a farm, and a black girl who lived in a
cabin across the road, and they grew up together, and played together, and they didn’t think
anything about it. And the white boy loved the black girl, but their families had been feuding for a
long time, and so they couldn’t be together. But some folks knew about it anyway, and you know
how people like to talk. And they made it hard on the white boy and the black girl. After a while
there was a war, and the white boy joined the army to fight in Korea. And Romeo never knew Juliet
was with child.
While Romeo was gone, some other white boys caught Juliet walking down the road, and they
had heard how she had loved a white boy before, so they grabbed her and dragged her into the
woods. And when they were done she was with child again. And she wanted to press charges, but
nobody cared because, after all, since she had loved one white boy, she might as well love them all.
And when Romeo came home from the war and found out what happened, he beat one boy half
to death, put his eye out. The judge sent Romeo to prison. And while Romeo was in jail the boy who
lost his eye came back and killed Juliet. He wrapped her body in chain and threw it in the lake, and
even though the police dragged the lake they couldn’t find nothing’, and without a body they
couldn’t charge him with murder, so he went free. They used to have a saying about it, “Just like a
nigger to steal more chain than she could swim with.”
When Romeo got out of prision he came home and found the man who killed Juliet. He beat him
to death with a fire poker. And on his way out of town he met a little girl on the road. This girl was
not quite his daughter, but was the child of the woman he loved. Romeo wanted to tell the little girl
how much he loved her mother, but the little girl was scared, she didn’t know who he was. And the
man said he wanted to give the little girl something, the only thing he had left in the world—two
silver dollars—and he pressed the money into her hand and then gathered her in his arms and held
her. But the little girl screamed, and when the stranger dropped her, she ran away.
I remember the man with the scrawny arms wrapped around me, the tattoos, the smell of
campfire smoke in his hair, the wild look in his eye, desperate as a treed coon. “You are as beautiful
as your mother,” he said. There was dried blood on his coveralls.
Sometime, alone in the dark night, that old catfish turned over on the water and looked at me.
His back was black and shiny as a beautiful woman, but when he rolled I could see his belly, white
as a white man. He is mixed, mixed up like me, and I wonder if I will ever be whole again.
There is a moon above and a moon below and a thin column of white light flowing in between.
The ripples on the lake rise and seem to me as high and inaccessible as the distant mountains of
Asia. They are lines of black and white rolling in the moonlit night. In a mirror world beneath the
water my mother presses her dead fingers against the sky and waits for her lover to return. I reach
my fingers towards hers and the shock of cold water breaks the spell. I watch for a moment,
confused about what I see. And then I whisper in a little girl’s voice, “Mama, it’s me, remember…”