Wallamelon

Nisi Shawl

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Barbecue in the backyard; stereo shoved over by the bedroom window, blasting out “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the MGs: these spells for the enchantments of my childhood gave rise to “Wallamelon.” These spells—plus the responses I got when I answered that perennial question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A magician,” I always replied. Not with a tuxedo, a tall hat, and rabbits, I patiently explained. I wanted to do real magic... 

* * * *

“BABY, BABY, BABY! Baby, Baby, Baby!”

Cousin Alphonse must have thought he looked like James Brown. He looked like what he was, just a little boy with a big peanut head, squirming around, kicking up dust in the driveway.

Oneida thought about threatening to tell on him for messing his pants up. Even Alphonse ought to know better. He had worn holes in both his knees, begging “Please, please, please” into the broken microphone he’d found in Mr. Early’s trash barrel. And she’d heard a loud rip the last time he did the splits, though nothing showed. Yet.

“‘Neida! Alphonse! Come see what me an Mercy Sanchez foun!” Kevin Curtis ran along the sidewalk towards them, arms windmilling, shirt-tails flapping. He stopped several feet off, as soon as he saw he had their attention. “Come on!”

Oneida stood up from the pipe-rail fence slowly, with the full dignity of her ten years. One decade. She was the oldest kid on the block, not counting teenagers. She had certain responsibilities, like taking care of Alphonse.

The boys ran ahead of her as she walked, and circled back again like little dogs. Kevin urged her onto the path that cut across the vacant lot beside his house. Mercy was standing on a pile of rubble half the way through, her straight hair shining in the noonday sun like a long, black mirror. She was pointing down at something Oneida couldn’t see from the path, something small, something so wonderful it made sad Mercy smile.

“Wallamelons,” Kevin explained as they left the path. “Grown all by they selves; ain’t nobody coulda put em there.”

“Watermelons,” Oneida corrected him automatically.

The plant grew out from under a concrete slab. At first all she could see was its broad leaves, like green hearts with scalloped edges. Mercy pushed these aside to reveal the real treasure: four fat globes, dark and light stripes swelling in their middles and vanishing into one another at either end. They were watermelons, all right. Each one was a little larger than Oneida’s fist.

“It’s a sign,” said Mercy, her voice soft as a baby’s breath. “A sign from the Blue Lady.”

Oneida would have expected the Blue Lady to send them roses instead, or something prettier, something you couldn’t find in an ordinary supermarket. But Mercy knew more about the Blue Lady, because she and her half-brother Emilio had been the ones to tell Oneida about her in the first place.

“Four of them and four of us.” Oneida looked up at Mercy to see if she understood the significance.

Mercy nodded. “We can’t let no one else know about this.”

“How come?” asked Alphonse. Because he was mildly retarded he needed help understanding a lot of things.

Oneida explained it to him. “You tell anybody else, they’ll mess up everything. Keep quiet and you’ll have a whole watermelon all to yourself.”

“I get a wallamelon all my own?”

“Wa-ter-mel-on,” Oneida enunciated.

“How long it take till they ready?”

They decided it would be at least a week before the fruit was ripe enough to eat. Every day they met at Mizz Nichols’s.

Mercy’s mother had left her here and gone back to Florida to be with her husband. It was better for Mercy to live at her grandmother’s, away from so much crime. And Michigan had less discrimination.

Mizz Nichols didn’t care what her granddaughter was up to as long as it didn’t interrupt her t.v. watching or worse yet, get her called away from work.

Mercy seemed to know what the watermelon needed instinctively. She had them fill half-gallon milk bottles from the garden hose and set these to “cure” behind the garage. In the dusky hours after Aunt Elise had picked up Cousin Alphonse, after Kevin had to go inside, Mercy and Oneida smuggled the heavy glass containers to their secret spot. They only broke one.

When the boys complained at being left out of this chore, Mercy set them to picking dried grass. They stuffed this into old pillowcases and put these underneath the slowly fattening fruits to protect them from the gravelly ground.

The whole time, Mercy seemed so happy. She sang songs about the Blue Lady, how in far away dangerous places she saved children from evil spirits and grown ups. Oneida tried to sing along with her, but the music kept changing, though the stories stayed pretty much the same.

There was the one about the girl who was standing on the street corner somewhere down South when a car full of men with guns went by, shooting everybody. But the Blue Lady saved her. Or there was a boy whose mom was so sick he had to stay with his crazy aunt because his dad was already dead in a robbery. When the aunt put poison in his food he ran away, and the Blue Lady showed him where to go and took care of him till he got to his grandparents house in Boston, all the way from Washington D.C.

All you had to do was call her name.

One week stretched, unbelievably, to two. The watermelons were as large as cereal bowls. As party balloons. But they seemed pitiful compared to the giant blimps in the bins in front of Farmer Jack’s.

Obviously, their original estimate was off. Alphonse begged and whined so much, though, that Mercy finally let him pick and open his own melon. It was hard and pale inside, no pinker than a pack of Wrigley’s gum. It tasted like scouring powder.

Oneida knew she’d wind up sharing part of her personal, private watermelon with Alphonse, if only to keep him from crying, or telling another kid, or a grown-up even. It was the kind of sacrifice a mature ten-year-old expected to make. It would be worth it, though. Half a watermelon was still a feast.

They tended the Blue Lady’s vine with varying degrees of impatience and diligence. Three weeks, now. How much longer would it take till the remaining watermelons reached what Oneida called “The absolute peak of perfection?”

They never found out.

* * * *

The Monday after the Fourth of July, Oneida awoke to the low grumble of heavy machinery. The noise was from far enough away that she could have ignored it if she wanted to stay asleep. Instead, she leaned out till her fingers fit under the edge of her bunk’s frame, curled down and flipped herself so she sat on the empty bottom bunk.

She peeked into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was still asleep; his holstered gun gleamed darkly in the light that crept in around the lowered shade. She closed the door quietly. Her dad worked hard. He was the first Negro on the police force.

Oneida ate a bowl of cereal, re-reading the book on the back of the box about the adventures of Twinkle-toes the Elephant. Baby stuff, but she was too lazy to get up and locate a real book.

When she was done, she checked the square dial of the alarm clock on the kitchen counter. Quarter to nine. In forty-five minutes her mother would be home from the phone company. She’d make a big breakfast. Even if Oneida wasn’t hungry, it felt good to talk with Mom while she cooked it. Especially if Dad woke up; with Royal and Limoges off at Big Mama’s, the three of them discussed important things like voting rights and integration.

But there was time for a quick visit to the vacant lot before then.

The sidewalk was still cool beneath the black locust trees. The noise that had wakened her sounded a lot louder out here. It grew and grew, the closer she got to the Curtis’s. And then she saw the source, an ugly yellow monster machine roaring through the lot, riding up and down over the humps of rubble like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. And Kevin was just standing there on the sidewalk, watching.

There were stones all around. She picked up a whole fistful and threw them, but it was too far. She grabbed some more and Kevin did too. They started yelling and ran toward the monster, throwing stones. It had a big blade. It was a bulldozer, it was pushing the earth out of its way wherever it wanted to go. She couldn’t even hear her own shouting over the awful sound it made. Rocks flew out of her hands. They hit it. They hit it again. The man on top, too.

Then someone was holding her arms down. She kept yelling and Kevin ran away. Suddenly she heard herself. The machine was off. The white man from on top of it was standing in front of her telling her to shut up, shut up or he’d have her arrested.

Where was the Blue Lady?

There was only Mizz Curtis, in her flowered house dress, with her hair up in pink curlers. No one was holding Oneida’s arms anymore, but she was too busy crying to get away. Another white man asked what her name was.

“Oneida Brandy,” Mizz Curtis said. “Lives down the street. Oneida, what on Earth did you think you were doing, child?”

“What seems to be the problem?”

Dad. She looked up to be sure. He had his police hat on and his gun belt, but regular pants and a tee-shirt instead of the rest of his uniform. He gazed at her without smiling while he talked to the two white men.

So she was still in trouble.

After a while, though, the men stopped paying attention to Oneida. They were talking about the rich white people they worked for, and all the things they could do to anyone who got in their way. Kevin’s mom gave her a crumpled up Kleenex to blow her nose on, and she realized all the kids in the neighborhood were there.

Including Mercy Sanchez. She looked like a statue of herself. Like she was made of wood. Of splinters.

Then the white men’s voices got loud, and they were laughing. They got in a green pick-up parked on the easement and drove off, leaving their monster in the middle of the torn-up lot.

Her father’s face was red; they must have said something to make him mad before they went away. But all Dad did was thank Mizz Curtis for sending Kevin over to wake him up.

They met Mom on the way home. She was still in her work clothes and high heels, walking fast. She stopped and stared at Dad’s hat and gun. “Vinny?”

“Little brush with the law, Joanne. Our daughter here’s gonna explain everything over breakfast.”

Oneida tried. But Mercy had made her swear not to tell any grown-ups about the Blue Lady, which meant her story sounded not exactly stupid, but silly. “All that fuss about a watermelon!” Mom said. “As if we don’t have the money to buy one, if that’s what you want!”

Dad said the white men were going to get quite a surprise when they filed their complaint about him impersonating an officer. He said they were breaking the law themselves by not posting their building permit. He said off-duty policemen went around armed all the time.

Aunt Elise brought over Cousin Alphonse. They had to play in the basement even though it was such a nice day outside. And Kevin Curtis and Mercy Sanchez weren’t allowed to come over. Or anybody.

After about eighty innings of “Ding-Dong, Delivery,” Oneida felt like she was going crazy with boredom. She was sorry she’d ever made the game up; all you did was put a blanket over yourself and say “Ding-dong, delivery,” and the other player was supposed to guess what you were. Of course Alphonse adored it.

Mom let them come upstairs and turn on the t.v. in time for the afternoon movie. It was an old one, a gangster story, which was good. Oneida hated gangster movies, but that was the only kind Cousin Alphonse would watch all the way through. She could relax and read her book.

Then Mom called her into the bedroom. Dad was there, too. He hadn’t gone to his other job. They had figured out what they were going to do with her.

They were sending her to Detroit, to Big Mama. She should have known. The two times she spent the night there she’d had to share a bed with Limoges, and there hadn’t been one book in the entire house.

“What about Cousin Alphonse?” she asked. “How am I supposed to take care of him if I’m in Detroit?”

“You just concentrate on learning to take better care of yourself, young lady.”

Which wasn’t a fair thing for Mom to say.

After dark, Oneida snuck out. She had stayed inside all day, exactly as she’d promised. Now it was night. No one would expect her to slip the screen out of her bedroom window and squirm out onto the fresh-mowed lawn. That wasn’t the kind of thing Oneida ever did. She wouldn’t get caught.

The big orange moon hung low over Lincoln Elementary. Away from the streetlights, in the middle of the ravaged vacant lot, it made its own shadows. They hid everything, the new hills and the old ones. It was probably going to be impossible to find the watermelon vine. If it had even survived the bulldozer’s assault.

But Oneida walked to the lot’s middle anyway. From there, she saw Mercy. She stood stock still, over on Oneida’s left, looking down at something; it was the same way she’d stood the day they found the vine. Except then, the light had come from above, from the sun. Now something much brighter than the moon shone from below, up into her face. Something red and blue and green and white, something radiant, moving like water, like a dream.

Oneida ran towards whatever it was. She tripped on a stone block, stumbled through the dark. “Mercy!” she shouted as she topped a hill. Mercy nodded, but Oneida didn’t think it was because she’d heard her. She ran on recklessly, arriving just as the light began to fade, as if, one by one, a bunch of birthday candles were being blown out.

Oneida bent forward to see better. The light came from a little cave of jewels, about the size of a gym ball. A blue heart wavered at its center, surrounded by tiny wreaths of red flowers and flickering silver stars. As she watched, they dwindled away and were gone. All that was left was a shattered watermelon, scooped out to the rind.

Magic! Oneida met Mercy’s eyes. They had seen real magic! She smiled. But Mercy didn’t.

“Blue Lady say she can’t take care of Emilio no more. He too big.” Emilio had been thirteen last New Year’s, when he left with Mercy’s mom. Mizz Sanchez hadn’t been so worried about him; bad neighborhoods weren’t so bad for bad boys. But now...

Mercy looked down again at the left behind rind.

Oneida decided to tell Mercy her own news about going to Detroit Saturday and being on punishment till then. It was difficult to see her face; her beautiful hair kept hanging in the way. Was she even listening?

“You better not go an forget me, ‘Neida.”

What was she talking about? “I’ll only be there until school starts! September!” As if she wouldn’t remember Mercy for ever and ever, anyway.

Mercy turned and walked a few steps away. Oneida was going to follow her, but Mercy stopped on her own. Faced her friend again. Held out her hand. There was something dark in her pale palm. “I’ma give you these now, in case—”

Oneida took what Mercy offered her, an almost weightless mass, cool and damp. “I can sneak out again,” she said. Why not?

“Sure. The Blue Lady, though, she want you to have these, an this way I won’t be worryin.”

Watermelon seeds. That’s what they were. Oneida put them in her pajama pocket. What she had been looking for when she came here.

She took a deep breath. It went into her all shaky, and came out in one long whoosh. Till September wasn’t her whole life. “Maybe Mom and Dad will change their mind and let you come over.”

“Maybe.” Mercy sounded as if she should clear her throat. As if she were crying, which was something she never did, no matter how sad she looked. She started walking away again.

“Hey, I’ll send a card on your birthday,” Oneida yelled after her, because she couldn’t think of what else to say.

* * * *

Wednesday the Chief of Police put Dad on suspension.

That meant they could drive to Detroit early, as soon as Dad woke up on Thursday. Oneida helped her mom with the last-minute packing. There was no time to do laundry.

Dad didn’t care. “They got water and electricity in Detroit last time I checked, Joanne, and Big Mama must have at least one washing machine.”

They drove and drove. It took two whole hours. Oneida knew they were getting close when they went by the giant tire, ten stories tall. There were more and more buildings, bigger and bigger ones. Then came the billboard with a huge stove sticking out of it, and they were there.

Detroit was the fifth largest city in the United States. Big Mama lived on a street called Davenport, like a couch, off Woodward. Her house was dark and cool inside, without much furniture. Royal answered the door and led them back to the kitchen, the only room that ever got any sunshine.

“Yall made good time,” said Big Mama. “Dinner’s just gettin started.” She squeezed Oneida’s shoulders and gave her a cup of lime Kool-Aid.

“Can I go finish watching cartoons?” asked Royal.

“Your mama an daddy an sister jus drove all this way; you aint got nothin to say to em?

“Limoges over at the park with Luemma and Ivy Joe,” she told Mom and Dad. They sent Royal to bring her home and sat down at the table, lighting cigarettes.

Oneida drank her Kool-aid quickly and rinsed out her empty cup. She wandered back through the house to the front door. From a t.v. in another room, boingy sounds like bouncing springs announced the antics of some orange cat or indigo dog.

Mercy watched soap operas. Maybe Oneida would be able to convince the other children those were more fun. Secret, forbidden shows grown-ups didn’t want you to see, about stuff they said you’d understand when you got older.

Limoges ran over the lawn shouting “‘Neida! ‘Neida!” At least somebody was glad to see her. Oneida opened the screen door. “I thought you wasn’t comin till Saturday!”

“‘Weren’t,’” she corrected her little sister. “‘I thought you weren’t.’”

“What happened?”

“Dad got extra days off. They’re in the kitchen.” Royal and the other kids were nowhere in sight. Oneida followed Limoges back to find their parents.

It was hot; the oven was on. Big Mama was rolling out dough for biscuits, and heating oil. She had Oneida and Limoges take turns shaking chicken legs in a bag of flour. Then they set the dining room table and scrounged chairs from the back porch and, when that wasn’t enough, from Big Mama’s bedroom upstairs. Only Oneida was allowed to go in.

It smelled different in there than the whole rest of the house. Better. Oneida closed the door behind her.

There were more things, too. Bunches of flowers with ribbons wrapped around them hung from the high ceiling. Two tables overflowed with indistinct objects, which pooled at their feet. They flanked a tall, black rectangle—something shiny, with a thin cloth flung over it, she saw, coming closer. A mirror? She reached to move aside the cloth, but a picture on the table to her right caught her eye.

It was of what she had seen that night in the vacant lot. A blue heart floated in a starry sky, with flowers around it. Only these flowers were pink and gold. And in the middle of the heart, a door had been cut.

The door’s crystal knob seemed real. She touched it. It was. It turned between her thumb and forefinger. The door opened.

The Blue Lady. Oneida had never seen her before, but who else could this be a painting of? Her skin was pale blue, like the sky; her hair rippled down dark and smooth all the way to her ankles. Her long dress was blue and white, with pearls and diamonds sewn on it in swirling lines. She wore a cape with a hood, and her hands were holding themselves out as if she had just let go of something, a bird or a kiss.

The Blue Lady.

So some grown-ups did know.

Downstairs, the screen door banged. Oneida shut the heart. She shouldn’t be snooping in Big Mama’s bedroom. What if she were caught?

The chair she was supposed to be bringing was back by where she’d come in. She’d walked right past it.

The kitchen was crowded with noisy kids. Ivy Joe had hit a home run playing baseball with the boys. Luemma had learned a new dance called the Monkey. Oneida helped Limoges roll her pants legs down and made Royal wash his hands. No one asked what had taken her so long upstairs.

Mom and Dad left right after dinner. Oneida promised to behave herself. She did, too. She only went in Big Mama’s bedroom with permission.

Five times that first Friday, Big Mama sent Oneida up to get something for her.

Oneida managed not to touch anything. She stood again and again, though, in front of the two tables, cataloguing their contents. On the right, alongside the portrait of the Blue Lady were several tall glass flasks filled with colored fluids; looping strands of pearls wound around their slender necks. A gold-rimmed saucer held a dark, mysterious liquid, with a pile of what seemed to be pollen at the center of its glossy surface.

A red-handled axe rested on the other table. It had two sharp, shiny edges. No wonder none of the other kids could come in here.

On every trip, Oneida spotted something else. She wondered how long it would take to see everything.

On the fifth trip, Oneida turned away from the huge white wing leaning against the table’s front legs (how had she missed that the first four times?) to find Big Mama watching her from the doorway.

“I—I didn’t—”

“You aint messed with none a my stuff, or I’d a known it. Sall right; I spected you’d be checkin out my altars, chile. Why I sent you up here.”

Altars? Like in a Catholic church like Aunt Elise went to? The two tables had no crucifixes, no tall lecterns for a priest to pray from, but evidently they were altars, because there was nothing else in the room that Big Mama could be talking about. It was all normal stuff, except for the flower bunches dangling down from the ceiling.

“Then I foun these.” Big Mama held out one hand as she moved into the bedroom and shut the door behind herself. “Why you treat em so careless-like? Leavin em in your dirty pajamas pocket! What if I’d a had Luemma or Ivy Joe washin clothes?”

The seeds. Oneida accepted them again. They were dry, now, and slightly sticky.

“Them girls don’t know no more about mojo than Albert Einstein. Less, maybe.”

Was mojo magic? The seeds might be magic, but Oneida had no idea what they were for or how to use them. Maybe Big Mama did. Oneida peeped up at her face as if the answer would appear there.

“I see. You neither. That niece a mine taught you nothin. Aint that a surprise.” Her tone of voice indicated just the opposite.

Big Mama’s niece was Oneida’s mother.

“Go down on the back porch and make sure the rinse cycle startin all right. Get us somethin to drink. Then come up here again and we do us a bit a discussin.”

When Oneida returned she carried a pitcher of iced tea with lemon, a bowl of sugar and two glasses on a tray. She balanced the tray on her hip so she could knock and almost dropped it. Almost.

It took Big Mama a moment to let her in. “Leave that on the chair seat,” she said when she saw the tray. “Come over nex the bed.”

A little round basket with a lid and no handles sat on the white chenille spread. A fresh scent rose from its tight coils. “Sea grass,” said Big Mama in answer to Oneida’s question. “Wove by my gramma. That aint what I want you to pay attention to, though. What’s inside—”

Was a necklace. Made of watermelon seeds.

“Aint everybody has this in they backgroun. Why I was sure your mama musta said somethin. She proud, though. Too proud, turn out, to even do a little thing like that, am I right?”

Oneida nodded. Mom hated her to talk about magic. Superstition, she called it. She didn’t even like it when Oneida brought books of fairy tales home from the library.

“How you come up with these, then?”

“I—a friend.”

“A friend.”

“Mercy Sanchez.”

“This Mercy, she blood? Kin?” she added, when Oneida’s confusion showed.

“No.”

“She tell you how to work em?”

“No.” Should she break her promise?

“Somethin you hidin. Can’t be keepin secrets from Big Mama.”

Her picture was there, on the altar. “Mercy said they came from the Blue Lady.”

“‘Blue Lady.’ That what you call her.” Big Mama’s broad forehead smoothed out, getting rid of wrinkles Oneida had assumed were always there. “Well, she certainly is. The Blue Lady.”

Oneida suddenly realized why no one but Mizz Curtis and Dad had come to her rescue when the white men tried to arrest her. For the Blue Lady to appear in person, you were supposed to call her, using her real name. Which Mercy and Emilio had never known.

“What do you call her?”

“Yemaya.”

Oneida practiced saying it to herself while she poured the iced tea and stirred in three spoons of sugar for each of them. Yeh-mah-yah. It was strange, yet easy. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Yeh-mah-yah.

She told Big Mama about everything.

“Hmmph.” Big Mama took a long drink of tea. “You think you able to do what I tell you to?”

Oneida nodded. Of course she could.

Big Mama closed the curtains and lit a white candle in a jar, putting a metal tube over its top. Holes in the sides let through spots of light the shape of six-pointed stars. She made Oneida fill a huge shell with water from the bathroom and sprinkled it on both their heads. Oneida brought the chair so Big Mama could sit in front of Yemaya’s altar. She watched while Big Mama twirled the necklace of watermelon seeds around in the basket’s lid and let it go.

“Awright. Look like Yemaya say I be teachin you.”

“Can I—”

“Four questions a day. That’s all I’ma answer. Otherwise you jus haveta listen closer to what I say.”

Oneida decided to ask anyway. “What were you doing?”

“Divinin. Special way a speakin, more important, a hearin what Yemaya an Shango wanna tell me.”

“Will I learn that? Who’s Shango?”

“Shango Yemaya’s son. We start tomorrow. See how much you able to take in.” Big Mama held up her hand, pink palm out. “One more question is all you got for today. Might wanna use it later.”

They left the bedroom to hang the clean laundry from the clothesline, under trellises heavy with blooming vines. In the machine on the back porch behind them, a new load sloshed away. Royal was watching t.v.; the rest of the kids were over at the park. Oneida felt the way she often did after discussing adult topics with her parents. It was a combination of coziness and exhilaration, as if she were tucked safe and warm beneath the feathers of a high-soaring bird. A soft breeze lifted the legs of her pajama bottoms, made the top flap its arms as if it were flying.

* * * *

Mornings were for housework. Oneida wasted one whole question finding that out.

Sundays they went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not to church. “God aint in there. Only reason to go to church is so people don’t talk bad about you,” Big Mama told them. “Anything they gone say about me they already said it.” They got dressed up the same as everyone else in the neighborhood, nodded and waved at the families who had no feud with Big Mama, even exchanging remarks with those walking their direction, towards Cass. But then they headed north by themselves.

Big Mama ended each trip through the exhibits in the museum’s tea room. She always ordered a chicken salad sandwich with the crusts cut off. Ivy Joe and Luemma sat beside her, drinking a black cow apiece. Royal drew on all their napkins, floppy-eared rabbits and mean-looking monsters.

Oneida’s favorite part to go to was the gift shop. Mainly because they had so many beautiful books, but also because she could touch things in there. Own them, if she paid. Smaller versions of the paintings on the walls, of the huge weird statues that resembled nothing on Earth except themselves.

The second Sunday, she bought Mercy’s birthday card there. It was a postcard, actually, but bigger than most. The French lady on the front had sad, soft eyes like Mercy’s. On the back, Oneida told her how she was learning “lots of stuff.” It would have been nice to say more; not on a postcard, though, where anyone would be able to read it.

In fact, in the hour a day Big Mama consented to teach her, Oneida couldn’t begin to tackle half what she wanted to know. Mostly she memorized: prayers; songs; long, often incomprehensible stories.

Big Mama gave her a green scarf to wrap the seeds in. She said to leave them on Yemaya’s altar since Oneida shared a room with the three other girls. After that, she seemed to forget all about them. They were right there, but she never seemed to notice them. Her own necklace had disappeared. Oneida asked where it was three days in a row.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Big Mama answered every time.

Oneida saved up a week’s worth of questions. She wrote them on a pad of paper, pale purple with irises along the edges, which she’d bought at the gift shop:

1. Is your necklace in the house?

2. Is it in this room?

3. Is it in your closet?

4. Under the bed?

5. In your dresser?

And so on, with lines drawn from one to another to show which to ask next, depending on whether the response was yes or no. On a separate page she put bonus questions in case Big Mama was so forthcoming some of the others became unnecessary. These included why her brother had hardly any chores, and what was the name of Yemaya’s husband, who had never turned up in any story.

But when Big Mama called Oneida upstairs, she wound up not using any of them, because there on the bed was the basket again, open, with the necklace inside. “Seem like you learnt somethin about when to hole your peace,” said Big Mama. “I know you been itchin to get your hands on my eleke.” That was an African word for necklace. “Fact that you managed to keep quiet about it one entire week mean you ready for this.”

It was only Oneida’s seeds; she recognized the scarf they were wrapped in. Was she going to have to put them somewhere else, now? Reluctantly, she set her pad on the bed and took them out of Big Mama’s hands, trying to hide her disappointment.

“Whynchou open it?”

Inside was another eleke, almost identical to Big Mama’s. The threads that bound the black and brown seeds together were whiter, the necklace itself not quite as long.

Hers. Her eleke. Made out of Mercy’s gift, the magic seeds from the Blue Lady.

“So. I’ma teach you how to ask questions with one a two answers, yes or no. Bout what you gotta know. What you gotta. An another even more important lesson: why you better off not tryin to fine out every little thing you think you wanna.”

Oneida remembered her manners. “Thank-you, Big Mama.”

“You welcome, baby.” Big Mama stood and walked to the room’s other end, to the mirror between her two altars. “Come on over here an get a good look.” She pulled the black cloth off the mirror, stepping aside.

The reflection seemed darker than it should be. Oneida barely saw herself. Then Big Mama edged in behind her, shining. By that light, Oneida’s thick black braids stood out so clearly every single hair escaping them cast its own shadow on the glass.

“Mos mirrors don’t show the difference that sharp.” Big Mama pushed Oneida’s bangs down against her forehead. “Folks will notice it anyhow.”

Oneida glanced back over her shoulder. No glow. Regular daylight. Ahead again. A radiant woman and a ghostly little girl.

This was the second magic Oneida had ever seen. Mercy better believe me when I tell her, she thought. It was as if Big Mama was a vampire, or more accurately, its exact opposite. “How—” She stopped herself, not quite in time.

“Sall right. Some questions you need an answer.” But she stayed silent for several seconds.

“More you learn, brighter you burn. You know, it’s gonna show. People react all kinda ways to that. They shun you, or they forget how to leave you alone. Wanna ask you all kinda things, then complain about the cost.

“What you gotta remember, Oneida, is this: there is always a price. Always a price. Only questions is who gonna pay it an how much.”

* * * *

No Mercy.

When Oneida got home from Detroit, her friend was gone. Had been the whole time. Not moved out, but run away. Mizz Nichols didn’t know where. Florida, maybe, if she had left to take care of Emilio like she was saying.

Mizz Nichols gave Oneida back the birthday card. Which Mercy had never seen.

The white people’s house next to Mizz Curtis’s was almost finished being built. Everyone was supposed to keep away from it, especially Cousin Alphonse. While she’d been in Detroit, unable to watch him, he had jumped into the big basement hole and broken his collarbone. Even with his arm in a sling, Aunt Elise had barely been able to keep him away. Why? Was it the smell of fresh cut wood, or the way you could see through the walls and how everything inside them fit together? Or just the thought that it was somewhere he wasn’t allowed to go?

No one wanted any trouble with white people. Whatever the cause of Alphonse’s latest fascination, Oneida fought it hard. She took him along when she walked Limoges to Vacation Bible School, and managed to keep him occupied on Lincoln’s playground all morning. From there they walked all the way to the river, stopping at Topoll’s to buy sausage sandwiches for lunch.

So successful was this expedition that they were a little late getting home. Oneida had to carry Limoges eight blocks on her back. Aunt Elise was already parked in front, and talking angrily to Dad in the t.v. room. It was all right, though. She was just mad about the house. She thought the people building it should put a big fence around it. She thought one of their kids would get killed there before long. She thanked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Oneida had enough sense to keep the others away from it.

But after dark, Oneida went there without telling anyone else. Alone.

Below the hole where the picture window would go, light from the street lamp made a lopsided square. She opened up her green scarf and lifted her eleke in both hands.

Would it tell her what she wanted to know? What would be the price?

Twirl it in the air. Let it fall. Count the seeds: so many with their pointed ends up, so many down. Compare the totals.

The answer was no. No running away for Oneida. She should stay here.

Her responsibility for Cousin Alphonse—that had to be the reason. The Blue Lady made sure kids got taken care of.

Would Mercy return, then?

Yes.

When? Before winter?

No.

Oneida asked and asked. With each response her heart and hands grew colder. Not at Christmas. Not next summer. Not next autumn.

When? And where was she? There were ways to ask other questions, with answers besides yes or no, but Big Mama said she was too young to use those.

Finally she gave up guessing and flung the necklace aside. No one should see her this way. Crying like a baby. She was a big girl, biggest on the block.

“Yemaya. Yemaya.” Why was she saying that, the Blue Lady’s name? Oneida had never had a chance to tell Mercy what it was. It wouldn’t do any good to say it now, when no one was in danger. She hoped.

Eventually, she was able to stop. She wiped her eyes with the green scarf. On the floor, scattered around the necklace were several loose watermelon seeds. But her eleke was unbroken.

Yemaya was trying to tell Oneida something. Eleven seeds. Eleven years? Age eleven? It was an answer. She clung to that idea. An answer, even if she couldn’t understand it.

On the phone, Big Mama only instructed her to get good grades in school, do what her mama and daddy said, and bring the seeds with her, and they would see.

But the following summer was the riots. No visit to Big Mama’s.

So it was two years later that Mom and Dad drove down Davenport. The immediate neighborhood, though isolated by the devastation surrounding it, had survived more or less intact.

Big Mama’s block looked exactly the same. The vines surrounding her house hung thick with heavy golden blooms. Ivy Joe and Luemma reported that at the riot’s height, the last week of July, streams of U.S. Army tanks had turned aside at Woodward, splitting apart to grind along Stimson and Selden, joining up again on Second. Fires and sirens had also flowed around them; screams and shots were audible, but just barely.

Thanks to Big Mama. Everyone knew that.

Oneida didn’t understand why this made the people who lived there mad. Many of them wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the street as Big Mama any more. It was weirder than the way the girls at Oneida’s school acted.

Being almost always alone, that was the price she’d paid for having her questions answered. It didn’t seem like much. Maybe there’d be worse costs, later, after she learned other, more important things. Besides, some day Mercy would come back.

The next afternoon, her lessons resumed. She had wrapped the eleven extra seeds in the same scarf as her eleke. When Big Mama saw them, she held out her hand and frowned.

“Yeah. Right.” Big Mama brought out her own eleke. “Ima ask Yemaya why she wanna give you these, what they for. Watch me.”

Big Mama had finally agreed to show her how to ask questions with answers other than yes or no.

Big Mama swirled her necklace around in the basket top. On the altar, the silver-covered candle burned steadily. But the room brightened and darkened quickly as the sun appeared and disappeared behind fast-moving clouds and wind-whipped leaves.

“It start out the same;” Big Mama said, “lif it up an let it go.” With a discreet rattle, the necklace fell. “Now we gotta figure out where the sharp ends pointin,” she said. “But we dividin it in four directions: north, south, east an west.”

Oneida wrote the totals in her notebook: two, four, five and five.

“An we do it four times for every question.”

Below the first line of numbers came four, one, seven and four, then six, zero, two and eight, and three, three, seven and three.

“Now add em up.”

North was fifteen, south was eight, east was twenty-one and west was twenty.

Big Mama shut her eyes a moment and nodded. “Soun good. That mean—” The brown eyes opened again, sparkling. “Yemaya say ‘What you think you do with seeds? Plant em!’”

Oneida learned that the numbers referred to episodes in those long, incomprehensible stories she’d had to memorize. She practiced interpreting them. Where should she plant the seeds? All around the edges of her neighborhood. When? One year and a day from now. Who could she have help her? Only Alphonse. How much would it cost? Quite a bit, but it would be worth it. Within the Wallamelons’ reach, no one she loved would be hurt, ever again.

* * * *

Two more years. The house built on the vacant lot was once again empty. Its first and only tenants fled when the vines Oneida planted went wild, six months after they moved in. The house was hers, now, no matter what the mortgage said.

Oneida even had a key, stolen from the safebox that remained on the porch long after the real estate company lost all hope of selling a haunted house in a haunted neighborhood. She unlocked the side door, opening and shutting it on slightly reluctant hinges. The family that had briefly lived here had left their curtains. In the living room, sheer white fabric stirred gently when she opened a window for fresh air. And leaned out of it, waiting.

Like the lace of a giantess, leaves covered the housefront in a pattern of repeating hearts. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, sibling plants, self-sown from those she’d first planted around the perimeter, arched from phone pole to lamp post, encircling her home. Keeping it safe. So Mercy could return.

At first Mom had wanted to move out. But nowhere else Negroes could live in this town would be any better, Dad said. Besides, it wasn’t all that bad. Even Aunt Elise admitted Cousin Alphonse was calmer, better off, here behind the vines. Mom eventually agreed to stay put and see if Dad’s promotion ever came through.

That was taking a long time. Oneida was secretly glad. It would be so much harder to do what she had to do if her family moved. To come here night after night, as her eleke had shown her she must. To be patient. Till—

Then.

She saw her. Walking up the street. As Yemaya had promised. And this was the night, and Oneida was here for it, her one chance.

She waved. Mercy wasn’t looking that way, though. She kept on, headed for Oneida’s house, it looked like.

Oneida jerked at the handle of the front door. It smacked hard against the chain she’d forgotten to undo. She slammed it shut again, slid the chain free and stumbled down the steps.

Mercy was halfway up the block. The noise must have startled her. No way Oneida’d be able to catch up. “Mercy! Mercy Sanchez!” She ran hopelessly, sobbing.

Mercy stopped. She turned. Suddenly uncertain, Oneida slowed. Would Mercy have cut her hair that way? Worn that black leather jacket?

But who else could it be?

“Please, please!” Oneida had no idea what she was saying, or who she was saying it to. She was running again and then she was there, hugging her, and it was her. Mercy. Home.

Mercy. Acting like it was no big deal to show up again after disappearing for four years.

“I tole you,” she insisted, sitting cross-legged on the floorboards of the empty living room. One small white candle flickered between them, supplementing the streetlight. “Emilio axed me could I come help him. He was havin trouble...” She trailed off. “It was this one group of kids hasslin his friends...”

“All you said before you left was about how the Blue Lady—”

“‘Neida, mean to say you aint forgot none a them games we played?!” Scornfully.

The price had been paid.

It was as if Oneida were swimming, completely underwater, and putting out her hand and touching Mercy, who swore up and down she was not wet. Who refused to admit that the Blue Lady was real, that she, at least, had seen her. When Oneida tried to show her some of what she’d learned, Mercy nodded once, then interrupted, asking if she had a smoke.

Oneida got a cigarette from the cupboard where she kept her offerings.

“So how long are you here for?” It sounded awful, what Mom would say to some distant relative she’d never met before.

“Dunno. Emilio gonna be outta circulation—things in Miami different now. Here, too, hunh? Seem like we on the set a some monster movie.”

Oneida would explain about that later. “What about your mom?” Even worse, the kind of question a parole officer might ask.

Mercy snorted. “She aint wanna have nothin to do with him or me. For years.”

“Mizz Nichols—” Oneida paused. Had Mercy heard?

“Yeah, I know. Couldn make the funeral.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the bottom of her high-top, then rolled the butt between her right thumb and forefinger, straightening it. “Dunno why I even came here. Dumb. Probably the first place anybody look. If they wanna fine me.” Mercy glanced up, and her eyes were exactly the same, deep and sad. As the ocean. As the sky.

“They won’t.” The shadow of a vine’s stray tendril caressed Mercy’s cheek. “They won’t.”

* * * *

A disclaimer: the system of divination Big Mama teaches to Oneida is my own invention. It borrows heavily from West Africa’s “Ifa,” and it also owes a bit to China’s “I Ching.” To the best of my knowledge, however, it is not part of any authentic tradition.