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ONE
Savannah, Georgia—August 1932
“The old woman couldn’t a picked a hotter day to get herself buried,” Jesse Wills whispered as he wiped his brow. A nervous smile came to his lips. The secrets of living and dying would forever remain a mystery to him, but he knew one thing for certain, and that was if his grandmother were alive to hear him speak of her as “the old woman,” she’d be chasing him around this here boneyard with a willow switch. “Sorry there, Nana,” he mumbled under his breath, not so sure he shared his wife Betty’s Christian certainty as to the final disposition of the human soul. If anyone could figure out how to hold on to a piece of this world after passing, it would be his grandmother, Tuesday Jackson.
She’d been a tough old gal right up to the end, his nana. Barely five foot tall and light enough for a good wind to topple, Nana Tuesday had been tough enough to best Joe Louis in any fight. A fool might have messed with Tuesday Jackson once, but he’d never do it twice. Jesse himself had tried her patience more than that, of course, but he was not just any old fool; he had been her favorite grandbaby.
Now she was gone. Being placed in Laurel Grove South Cemetery’s earth, one grave over from where Jesse’s daddy lay. Right next to the plot his mama had reserved for herself. It wasn’t the old way. Used to be his daddy would lie with his own people, near the grave of his own mother, but his daddy’s mama had been buried out on St. Helena Island. And Jesse’s mama wanted her husband near, where she could visit him. Besides, the world had changed. At least in some ways.
Jesse’s cousins had invited their minister, young Pastor Jones, the preacher at Wildwood Congregational, to officiate a graveside service. Nana had never darkened the church’s door in her life, so it didn’t seem right dragging her in there now, when she no longer had any say over the matter. No, Nana Tuesday had never been a churchgoing lady. When visiting out on Daufuskie or Hilton Head, she would go to the woods to do her praying, or on the rare occasion, to a Praise House. For the most part, she had preferred to keep her religion between herself and her maker, not seeing it as being anyone else’s business.
It did no harm, though, in Jesse’s eyes, to let the fiery preacher bring comfort to those members of his family who couldn’t reconcile his nana’s beliefs and practices with their own faith. Could’ve been worse, anyway. His cousin Joe had gotten all caught up with Father Divine. Ended up handing over everything he had to the man ’cept the very clothes on his back. No, Pastor Jones was certainly the lesser of those two evils. Still, Jesse began his own private prayer that the young fellow would be fast about burning off the steam he’d built up.
Jesse and his little family hung back on the periphery, ceding the area nearest the grave to his uncles, aunties, and cousins, the combined mass of them forming a swaying and waving mostly white-clad circle around it. He loved his nana, as much if not more than any of them, but there’d been no love lost between his wife and grandmother, and the whole family knew it. Best to keep Betty back where her comments stood a better chance of going unheard or at least unheeded.
“Oh, this heat ain’t natural weather,” Betty said, fanning herself with one hand and shielding her eyes from the morning glare with the other. Those clear hazel upturned eyes sparkled from her coppery oval face. That face was framed by hair straightened by means of Madam Walker’s pomade, then curled into finger waves. She’d stained her lips red; her eyelids wore a powdery blue.
Even after all these years among his people, even after marrying him and bearing him children, the way Betty spoke—so slow and with a slight twang like the inland buckra, the whites—bore witness to the fact that she had never become one of his people. “This here heat is hell openin’ its mouth,” she continued, “to swallow the old woman’s black soul.” She looked away from his nana’s grave and scanned the cemetery. “I can’t see why any good Christian graveyard would take her bones anyhow. I mean, this here place is for burying good God-fearing people, not witches.”
“She was no witch,” Jesse said, a burst of anger causing his voice to come out low and sharp. “She was my grandmother. My mama’s mama.” His gaze drifted for a moment to his mother, May Jackson Wills. Her eyes had nearly swollen shut from crying. She bobbed at the knees, then rocked slowly back and forth with her arms drawn up tight around her bosom. “And you will show her the respect she deserves.” Jesse couldn’t bear to see his mama like this. He was her only child. He wanted to go to her and take her in his arms. Calm the low wailing that sounded from her breaking heart. But he couldn’t risk leaving his wife for fear she’d get something stirred up in the few moments he was gone.
The sight of his mother’s pain hurt him too deeply, so he focused instead on his wife. “ ’Sides, you’re a fine one to brag about being a good Christian.” He said it to hurt her, to punish her, but he regretted it the next instant. Betty’s glance met his for a sharp moment, but then she cast angry eyes down at that hot sandy soil and pursed her full lips into a little-girl pout. The same pout that had helped win his heart in the first place.
He stood there, for the moment transfixed by a sentiment from their younger days. Betty shifted from one foot to the other, as if she were growing weary under the weight of his continued stare. When her eyes flashed up to his, the hard defiant look had smoothed into a calm, knowing smile. She knew him too well. She knew he couldn’t give her up, any more than he could give up that d
ark brown—way too dark to be his—baby girl she’d recently birthed. He looked over to see his two natural daughters, Opal and Poppy, standing near the fence that marked the cemetery’s edge. The girls held back, even from him and their mama, without any prompting. They seemed to share his sense that it would be best for them to keep to the periphery of the gathering.
Opal looked like her mother, except for the unfortunate addition of his ears. Poppy was the dead ringer of his mama, who in her youth had been as beautiful as Betty, maybe even more so seeing as how his mama’s beauty never relied on any manmade artifice. The little one, squirming in her big sister Opal’s arms, didn’t resemble any of them. And still, he loved her as surely as he did the ones who bore his likeness.
The sun was heading up in the sky, and the fresh heat it brought was unforgiving. His starched white shirt felt like a plaster cast, what with the sweat that ringed his underarms and banded the back of his shoulders where the garment pulled tight. “You keep Jilo in the shade,” he called out, and Opal moved out of the sun, taking shelter beneath the canopy of an ancient live oak.
Betty had it right, of course—he could forgive her infidelity; in truth, he could forgive her for just about anything. He loved that headstrong woman to her core. Besides, she still had the power to make him stop dead in his tracks and stare after her, just like that day he’d first laid eyes on her in Atlanta, outside her daddy’s store where he’d worked while putting himself through school. For her part, Betty hadn’t shown much interest in him until her daddy out-and-out forbade the courtship. If they took up together, her daddy had shouted out loud enough for the entire city to hear, she’d be marrying poorer. She’d be marrying darker. She’d be marrying down. Still, take up with each other they did, and one fine morning around twelve years back, Jesse and the then fifteen-year-old Betty eloped, leaving Atlanta behind and settling in Savannah, where Jesse himself had been raised.
“Forty acres and a mule,” a cousin of his called out, then laughed, making Jesse realize how far his thoughts had drifted from his nana’s burial. The knowing chuckles from those gathered told him he wasn’t the only one who wished the preacher would be done with his business. Pastor Jones was still talking, but that wasn’t going to stop the rest of them from eulogizing Nana Tuesday in their own way.
