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“So you have to get what he has,” pastor/priest said, shaking his little dreadlock in a way that
made me laugh.
“I can’t! I can’t just get love,” I slurred. “If it was that easy, we’d all have it!” I raised my hands and nearly fell out of my seat.
“Whoa!” the woman with the cigarette said, pulling me back to the bar. “Well, you’re in the right place. This is New Orleans. We can all have whatever we want here.”
The pastor/priest traded sharp eyes with the woman. He started wiping the bar again. Shaking his head.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know where you can go to make your trouble go away,” the woman said.
“Go away?” I looked up into the ceiling like I was watching my problems rise with the smoke in the bar.
“Go anywhere you want. You pay and it’ll happen,” the woman said.
“Pay who?”
“Don’t tell her,” pastor/priest jumped in. “She’s in no condition to deal with—”
“No! I want to know! I need to know,” I said. “I want to fix everything. Make it go away.” I remembered Ian’s back to me. His words.
“Well, if you tell her, I don’t want no part of it.” Pastor/priest walked to the other end of the bar.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“He’s not from here. He don’t understand the ways of the people here. I was raised in the Quarter. Been running in this swamp since those old bells used to ring in the graveyard. People like him don’t know those times. They only know what they see on TV. What they hear.” Her voice was so mysteriously seductive. Wickedly inviting.
“Tell me how I can make my problems go away. What I have to do.”
“You go see Tante Heru in the back of the Quarter. In her old shack. You tell her what you want. You make an offering. She’ll see that it happens.”
“What? Tan-what?” I laughed. “You trying to send me to some psychic? A fortune teller with a crystal ball? I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“She ain’t no fortune teller. And she ain’t no psychic. She’s a roots woman. Been working ’round here longer than time. She born in Treme—in Place Congo—right in the dirt. She has the power of the ancestors in her pot. She can make any magic she wants to.” She blew a puff of smoke in my face. “You go on and see her, sweetheart. She’ll make you all right.” She poured me another glass of bourbon and the next thing I remember, before I blacked out, was being carried through the bar—the pastor/priest and his bullring under one arm and the naked fat woman in the chaps under the other.
“Take her to Tante Heru!” the cross-eyed woman yelled and cackled all at once. I was sure she was a nightmare and I’d wake up in my loft in Atlanta. Maybe everything was a nightmare.
I felt like I was sleeping in a plastic bag and had just taken my last breath. There was no air. And something heavy was pushing into my chest. No. My face. All over my face. Like a warm pillow or balloon. One of those flat plastic water bottles Grammy Annie-Lou used to have hanging over the bathroom door. If I didn’t fight back, this thing would suffocate me.
I jerked forward and realized that I must’ve been lying flat on my back because I couldn’t move my legs. I tried to push back with my arms, but they were being held in place. I tried to open my eyes, but the warm covering that I now thought was flesh—that belonged to the hands holding me down—were completely blocking my view.
“Let she go now, Kete,” an aged and mysterious voice said. “She go die if you don’t.”
“I will, Tante Heru, if she stop fighting me so.” This second voice was closer to me. Right near my ear.
“Baybee, you gon’ haf stop ye fight, hear ya ma?” A soft, shaky hand was at my head. “Rest easy now. Relax, baybee. Ya wit ya Tante Heru now. Ya come look fa mi? Ya fine mi.”
I just stopped moving with that soft, shaky hand on my head. Then the hands over my arms slackened a little and the darkness around me disappeared as the covering over my face lifted. I peeked at two huge brown breasts that parted down the middle like ass cheeks and looked something like two smoked turkey butts. The farther they got from my face, the bigger they got. A dingy white peasant blouse that looked like it was worn more to showcase the ample breasts than to clothe them was a second thought right at the nipples. A face that was young and cute, fat and simple with brown freckles over the top of the nose sat on the neck above the breasts. She had stringy black hair and baby blue feathers in her ears. She smiled.
“C’est ça, baybee, rit. Nah, relax nah,” I heard, and remembered the hand at my head.
I rolled my eyes to the top of my head. “Tante Heru?”
“Good, so wi know who I is.”
From upside down and flat on the table, I saw a whole head of bushy white hair that extended on the chin and over the top lip of a blue black face that looked so ancient I was almost sure I was dead. Nothing like her could still be alive. Her eyes were almost gray. Almost. So many colors that it was clear whatever color they originally had been had long ago been washed away with time.
