Soraya Palmer - The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts

To my parents and their parents before them .

GLORIA ANZALDA

TONI MORRISON

CONTENTS

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH READING THIS I WILL BE DEAD AND you, dear reader, will have forgotten all about me .

You see I am what they call Your Faithful Narrator, found in places the West calls fairy tales, what men call gossip, what children call magic .

Let me tell you a story. This one we call the first. It is a story that sounds like all the others, and yet it is also the one that has allowed for the existence of all that will come afterwardbut well get to that .

In this story, two women sit inside a bar. The first one says, Let me tell you a story. The second says, So, tell me already! Okay, okay, she goes. Once upon a time, there was a girl, she starts and looks into her drink. Her tongue starts to hang out like an udon noodle. Well, go on, the friend says, mistaking her hanging tongue for excitement. Only the girls tongue wont move. The girls breath is fixed in midair. Her lips form the letter O. Her friend pricks the tongue with her fork to see whats the matter, and the tongue falls out and skitters like worms on the ground. The bartender scoops up all the pieces he can find, and they wriggle in his hands. He worries about the mess hes made. He asks the friend to fetch a jar and cap from the top shelf of the bar in order to contain the skittering tongue pieces. He looks down and notices no bloodonly eraser dust .

The bartender thinks this is strange, but he goes to the bar to fetch his needle and thread. He begins to sew the tongue back together for the girl. This is a very difficult job for the man, as the pieces of her tongue keep moving. Like the tongue doesnt want to be caught. Mountains of eraser dust are flying from her mouth, getting all over the floor. Her breath stands before them. The bartender does a good job of mending except that he sews her tongue onto a piece of paper and stuffs it into her mouth. The girl and her friend rejoice as the girl begins to speak again. But every time she tries to tell her story, the words come out backward. The ending changes .

Let me tell you a story. This one will give you hope .

Once upon a time there was a girl. And this girl grew to be a woman. And this woman had the ability to conjure stories from ghosts. Now the conjure woman had three daughters who loved her stories so much that when she died it was all that she left them. Little did they know that these stories had a life before them. That this book had a life before me .

You see, the woman and her family existed in a place called Brooklyn where the maples lined the pavement, and the houses were made from limestone and brownstone that glittered like stars do under moonlight. It must have been divine providence that whitefolks refused to live on these streets, believing they were haunted, therefore leaving the most beautiful houses to be claimed by the descendants of slaves from all across the Atlantic .

Whitefolks were not entirely wrong about the haunting either. If you were to walk down these streets, you might hear the faint sound of steel drum and boom box and chickadee and pigeon. Or you might hear the chattering of ghoststhe spirits of colonialists, Ashanti warriors, slave holders, African griots, mythic creatures, and stories long since forgotten. But while whitefolks may call this a haunting, we know them to be the ancestors. After all, they only want to be able to walk through their homes like they did before their deathsto sit in the kitchen drinking Milo, bestowing wisdom onto their children who are at risk of forgetting all about them .

Now this family lived in the only rose-colored building at the end of Maple Street. The youngest called herself Zora or She Who Will One Day Grow Up to Be a Great Writer Like Her Namesake. She could be found conjuring her mothers words into stories or if not, she could be caught, face flushed with embarrassment, fantasizing about a boy or two .

And then there was Sasha, the eldest, who felt her story should shine brightest for once. Commonly referred to as the Black Sheep or She Who Nearly Disappeared Until She Found Her True Selfthis girl did have spunk. They say the girl had a chip on her shoulder the size of El Tucuche Mountain for nearly everyone, but particularly for her father who, legend had it, defeated a Rolling Calf with only a penknife and the power of his gaze .

Even with the new baby on the way, the family still fought like wolvescunning in their ability to wound each other. The man they called Father moved out one day to live with a woman who didnt expect bread to be baked by stories. New daughters were birthed, several hearts were broken, and the maple trees were cut down and replaced with coffee shops .

At this point we all shouldve known what was coming. The scars that would form, the wounds that would never heal. Its true that Anansi stopped visiting the mans dreams at night. He couldnt tell his stories the way he used to. Images of Anansi, the Rolling Calf, and the purple balloon came and went in spurts. The wife, on the other hand, never stopped believing in magic .

But I will never forget the day that I first arrived in the arms of the sisters. It was the day when my two girls got me as their Christmas present. I was sitting quietly between words, inside the blank spaces of The Anansi Stories waiting to be unwrapped. You see, the book I lived in had been given to them by their mother, who got it from her grandmother, who got it from an Ashanti Priestess, who was there when it got made. Rumor had it that all women who tried to read The Anansi Stories aloud had their throats and tongues cut from their bodies like farm animals. The sisters had no idea the lengths that had been taken to keep these words alive .

But every night they would sit in the kitchen over Milo and go:

I am Nanny, leader of the Maroons, mother of all Jamaicans! The eldest, Sasha, wraps her hair in a pillowcase and holds up a shell, imagining it is an abeng. She speaks to her fellow countrymen .

(Please if you can, imagine you are invited to watch these girls right now. Pretend that you are a part of the enactment. Pretend you can decide how this story will end. *Hint: The setting is a kitchen. The scenes objective is to show two sisters conjuring history.*)

Sister 2 also known as Zora: Yes, you are Nannylady who caught bullets in her behind and farted them out at her enemies .

Sister 1 also known as Sasha: Disgraceful! You are banished from my Maroon settlement!

Zora: Pghaw! (farting noise)

Sasha: I am Queen Nanny, the only African living in Jamaica who was never taken into bondage .

Nanny forced the British troops to allow the Maroons to live in peace .

This pot here represents the cauldron that burns without the use of fire. It lured the British into its waters. (Sasha points to her mothers pot in the kitchen.)

The British troops try to climb up Blue Mountain but they fall right before the peak, breaking their backs in two .

In three! One for the dupes they tricked into becoming one with their militia, two for the bloodhounds that eventually brought them down .

Three for the bastard that killed Nanny .

The one they call Sasha stops stirring. The cauldron turns back into a pot. The air beating beneath it becomes fire. It was yesterday that they picked me up in their textbook and saw it plain: Jamaicas national hero, affectionately referred to as Nanny, is of mythic status. Leading historians do not know how much of her existence has been fabricated by the oral tradition prominent in Jamaican culture. What is known to be true is that she was betrayed and murdered by one of her own, a man they call William Cuffee.