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In these impoverished rural communities [they’re talking about Malawi], which lack electricity, running water, adequate food, education and medical care, peasant farmers are accustomed to being battered by forces they cannot control or fully understand. The sun burns crops, leaving fields withered and families hungry. Rains drown chickens and wash away huts, leaving people homeless. Newborn babies die despite the wails of their mothers and the powerful prayers of their elders.
People here believe in an invisible God, but also in malevolent forces—witches who change into hyenas, people who can destroy their enemies by harnessing floods. So the notion of vampires does not seem farfetched.
Rev. Blount laid the paper down on the pulpit and slammed his hand down over it, as though he were nailing it down. “And I’ll just add this. It especially don’t seem farfetched if you seen them with your own eyes! If you had neighbors who was vampires. If you seen the syringes they left behin
d them when they was all full of blood and sleepy. Cause that’s what these vampires use nowadays. They don’t have sharp teeth like cats or wolves, they got syringes! And they know how to use them as well as any nurse at the hospital. Real fast and neat, they don’t leave a drop of blood showing, just slide it in and slip it out.” He pantomimed the vampires’ expertise.
“Gospel, I’m sorry,” Ms. McLeod admonished, “we are going to have to leave. Right now. Children, put your coats on. The Reverend is getting into matters that we had agreed we wouldn’t discuss in the context of Brotherhood Month.”
“Vampires are real, kids,” Reverend Blount boomed out, sounding more like Verizon than ever. “They are real, and they are living here in Minneapolis! If you just look around you will see them in their white suits and their white dresses. And they are laughing at you cause you can’t see what’s there right under your nose.”
Before she got up from her folding chair to follow Ms. McLeod out of the tabernacle, Tawana took one of the bulletins from the stack on the window sill next to her. It was the first time in her life that she had taken up any kind of reading matter without being told to. Maybe she wasn’t a kid any more. Maybe the words of Gospel Blantyre Blount, D.D., had been the water of her baptism, just like they’d talked about at the Catholic school. They said if you were baptized and you died your flesh would be raised incorruptible. That’s how she felt leaving the All-Faith Tabernacle, incorruptible.
In April the Governor declared the ten counties of the Metro area a Disaster Area and called in the National Guard to help where the roads were washed away and in those areas that had security problems, especially East St. Paul and Duluth, where there had been massive demonstrations and looting. In Shakopee, six African-American teenagers were killed when their Dodge Ram pickup was swept off Route 19 by the reborn Brown Beaver River. An estimated twelve thousand acres of productive farmland were lost in that single inundation, and the President (who had vetoed the Emergency Land Reclamation Act) was widely blamed for the damage sustained throughout the state.
Despite all these tragedies there hadn’t been one school day canceled at Diversitas, though the bus service was now optional and rather expensive. Morning after soggy morning Tawana had trudged through the slush and the puddles in her leaky Nikes, which she had thrown such a scene to get when Aunt Bima had wanted to get her a cheaper alternative at the Mall of America. Now Tawana had no one but herself to blame for her misery, which made it a lot more of a misery than it would otherwise have been.
It was only the left Nike that leaked, so if she were careful where she stepped, her foot would stay dry for the whole thirty-four blocks she had to walk. Sometimes, if it wasn’t raining too hard, she’d take a slightly longer route that passed by the CVS and other stores that had awnings she could walk under, making an umbrella unnecessary. Tawana hated umbrellas.
That longer route also took her past the All-Faiths Tabernacle and the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Cooperative on the ground floor.
There, on the day after the Governor’s declaration, the “Well-Dressed People” display had been taken down and a new display mounted. The sign this time said:
ENTERTAINMENT IS FUN—
FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
The same white-faced mannikins, in the same white clothes, were seated in front of an old-fashioned tv set with a dinky screen, and gazing at a tape loop that showed a part of a movie that they had all had to watch at school in the film appreciation class. You could hear the music over an invisible speaker: “I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. I’m singing and dancing in the rain!” The same snippet of the song over and over as the man on the tv whirled with his umbrella about a lamp post and splashed in the puddles on the street. Maybe it was supposed to be fun, like the sign in the window said, but it only made Tawana feel more miserably wet.
The next day it drizzled, and the same actor (Gene Kelly it said at one point in the loop) was still whirling around the same lamp pole to the same music. Then, to Tawana’s astonishment, a door opened behind the tv set and a real man (but dressed in a white suit like the mannikins) stepped into the imaginary room behind the window. Tawana knew him. It was Mr. Forbush who had been the music and dance teacher at Diversitas two years earlier. His hair was shorter now and dyed bright gold. When he saw Tawana staring at him, he tipped his head to the side, and smiled, and wiggled his fingers to say hello. Then he turned round to get hold of a gigantic, bright yellow baby chick, which he positioned next to the mannikins so it, too, would be looking at Singin’ in the Rain.
When Mr. Forbush was satisfied with the baby chick’s positioning he began to fluff up its fake feathers with a battery-powered hair dryer. From time to time, when he saw Tawana still standing there under the awning, wavering between amusement and suspicion, he would aim the blow dryer at his own mop of wispy golden curls.
“Well, hello there,” said a man’s voice that seemed strangely familiar. “I believe we’ve met before.”
Tawana looked to the side, where the Reverend Gospel Blantyre Blount, D.D. was standing in a black dashiki in the shadows of the entrance to the Tabernacle.
“You’re Tawana, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Would you like something to eat, Tawana?”
She nodded again and followed the minister up the dark stairway, leaving Gene Kelly singing and spinning around in the endless rain.
Rev. Blount poured some milk powder into a big mug and stirred it up with water from a plastic bottle, added a spoonful of Swiss Miss Diet Cocoa, and put the mug into a microwave to cook. After the bell dinged, he took it out and set it front of Tawana on what would have been the kitchen table if this were a kitchen. It was more like an office or a library, with piles of paper on the table, and two desks, lots of bookcases. There was also a sink in one corner with a bathroom cabinet over it and a pile of firewood though nowhere to burn any of it. A pair of windows let in some light from the back alley, but not a lot, since they were covered by pink plastic shower curtains, which were drawn almost closed so you could only get a peek at the back alley and the rain coming down.
“Nothing like a hot cup of cocoa on a rainy day,” Rev. Blount declared in his booming voice. Tawana concurred with a wary nod, and lifted the brim of the cup to her lips. It was more lukewarm than hot, but even so she did not take a sip.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I called you here.”
“You didn’t call me here,” Tawana said matter-of-factly. “I was looking at the crazy stuff inside that window downstairs.”
“Well, I was calling, sending out a mental signal, and you are here, so figure that out. But you’re right about that window. It’s crazy, or something worse. Aren’t you going to drink that cocoa?”
Tawana took a sip and then an actual swallow. Before she set the mug back down she’d drunk down half the cocoa in it. All the while Rev. Gospel Blantyre Blount kept his eyes fixed on her like a teacher expecting an answer to a question.
Finally he said, “It’s the vampires, isn’t it? You want to know about the vampires.”
