Ours, p.15
Ours, page 15
When the two returned to Arkansas, Sykes decided to build a small church. With his savings, he contacted a publisher to buy a large set of the cheapest leather Bibles available. Gold letters engraved on the covers and on the binding read: “Bible.” It took a month to finish building the tiny church, which opened its doors October 3, 1857, just outside a town called Ferris that had a population of 175. Sykes named the church Second Coming of Christ Church. No one visited.
One day, a stranger arrived in Ferris with a wagon carrying a large silver bell. Engraved into it were hundreds of petals layered against the curvature of the bell. The stranger said he brought it with him from a trip to what he called Middle-Africa, taken from an abandoned village made up of tiny houses. He believed a “pygmy tribe” lived there, small as ten-year-olds though full adults. The bell hung in the center of the village beneath which lay human and animal bones.
Sykes needed a bell for his church and the asking price was inexpensive. However, the stranger warned that though the bell had brought him good luck, riches beyond his wildest fantasies, several of his spouses spiraled into madness because of it. He had removed the clapper to save himself.
His brief warning to Sykes before departing: “Ring it without speaking and all will be fine.”
Being a Christian, Sykes dismissed the warning as superstition. The first time he rang the bell, he shouted as if anyone could hear him, “You must come to the Lord for the Lord to do work in your life. Nothing else matters but the Lord.” Minutes later, everyone in Ferris, including the pastor of their one other church, came to service. Reverend, not allowed to hear the white Word, was always sent on some distant errand until Sykes had finished giving his sermon.
After several successful services, the congregation’s behavior deteriorated. Sykes noticed that what was once eagerness became drowsy obedience. They didn’t worship. They repeated what he said, dull-eyed, and every service their appearance declined. They looked emaciated, their faces and arms covered in fresh sores. They smelled worse than usual, many of them, and had untidy beards and unclean, lice-infested hair. Days later, laden with fearful curiosity, Sykes told Reverend to visit Ferris and report back any discovery, giving him a pass and an apple.
That Tuesday, upon arrival in Ferris, Reverend was terrified by the calamity taking authority over the town. People copulated in the streets. A woman had carved into her face nearly a dozen crosses. Dogs tore at a living mule’s legs and stomach, maddened with hunger. Reverend turned his mule away but, before he could retreat, a man wearing a white robe tied at his waist lurched toward him. Light emanated from the center of his forehead. Reverend thought the Messiah had come to save everyone in Ferris, but the man stumbled closer to Reverend until he fell face-first in the road. A bullet hole the width of a nickel tunneled straight through his head. Madness had puppeted him through the chaos and straight to Reverend, and the light Reverend had seen was merely sunlight reflecting off a metal surface and beaming through the hole in the dead man’s head. Reverend kicked his mule, and above his escape lightning carved crooked veins into the dark sky.
When he returned to the church, he saw Sykes standing outside with a lantern. A stormy overcast disfigured sunlight into a sullen pantomime of its former self and a strong wind rocked the bell without warning in the direction of the wood post that held it up. It began to resonate. Sykes went pale. Before Sykes could warn against it, Reverend spoke a word of encouragement: “They need God more than ever now. Y’all be fighting for God’s love real soon.” Sykes instantly felt an insatiable desire to pray in collaboration with shedding blood, and not long after his own feelings came to fruition did dust in the distance lift its skirt while, from under the hem, a horde of degenerates ravaged the hilly ground beneath their stampede. All rushed to the church and began violently praying, stomping over those who had fallen to the ground. A woman somehow set herself on fire and called out for God to see the might of her devotion. The fire caught on and soon enough the wooden benches and Bibles began to burn.
And like an angel that has accomplished its task, Reverend disappeared. In what remained of Sykes’s mind he heard the rolling cart and his horse outside. The last thing he saw was Reverend saving Bibles from the flames and leaving him behind. The last thing he heard, that wasn’t the curses and screams of a parishioner burning alive or praying in an unrecognizable language, was the bell’s close keening, then not so close, then not at all.
Reverend took off from Arkansas and arrived at Ours, allowed to make it that far by nature of him constantly praying and the Bibles ringing the bell as they fell into it or the bell singing on its own when the cart bumped about on the uneven landscape. White folks brought him food instead of harassing him. They fed and watered his horse instead of taking it from him. He asked about the north and they pointed him in the right direction instead of robbing him. And each person who helped him collapsed into madness the moment he left. He fell asleep just a few hours away from Ours, waking not even an hour after a bad dream that horrified him to wetting his pants.
None of this explained how he found Ours, why Ours revealed itself to him, but it did explain how he made it there unscathed, safe up until he reached the blue house with the lush garden guarded by sable-eyed twins and thirteen snakes frozen in a woman’s relentless grip.
[2]
You that lady I saw back over that way,” he said, yawning and pointing toward some indiscernible location. Gnats orbited his ripening stink. Before he could say another word, Saint flashed him a look of disgust. A sudden overcast veiled the world gray. His silence followed.
She observed the cart’s contents, scoffing at the Bibles and surveying the bell intensely once she snatched the sheet from its frame. She recognized the bell’s origin right away, though she held no memory of having seen anything like it before. The word “biloko” entered her mind and a wave of heat coursed through her from her skull to the curve of her toenails. The bell was about as tall as a six-year-old, wide as a full-grown man, and surprisingly light. She stood stiff before the intricate metalwork of leaf patterns engraved on the bell’s surface. When a bush rustled, the heat in Saint’s body rushed to her head as she faced the bush with murderous determination. Danger. Danger all around.
Not knowing how she knew what she knew but not questioning her knowledge, she demanded Reverend keep his mouth shut for the duration of his stay until she decided her next move. She ordered him to bathe in her backyard and gave him oversize clothes from a collection of suits worn by her companion.
Saint wanted to test the bell without harming anyone. She gave Reverend permission to speak and asked him about his journey, his history, how he got to Ours, to discover through anecdote what otherwise would need example. She figured out the following:
If the bell rings once without anyone speaking, nothing happens.
If it rings once and an order is given (or something that could be mistaken as an order), those within hearing distance of the bell are compelled to follow the order.
If it rings again with the same order or a new order, those within hearing distance of the bell would have their need to serve the order, old or new, intensified.
The order itself does not need to be heard, only the bell’s ring.
If an order is given but it can’t be completed, madness ensues.
If the bell rings and an order is given but the one who rang the bell leaves, madness ensues.
If the bell rings because of outside forces, such as a strong wind, anyone can give an order.
Ringing the bell once without giving a new order, but after an order had been given during a prior ring, breaks the spell. The spell is not broken this way if an outside force rings the bell.
For some reason, the bell opens the barrier, ruins Saint and her daughters’ senses, and confounds her companion into clarity if it rings within at least a half mile, even if unheard. Senses return after an hour or so. Her companion’s clarity wasn’t tested to see if it dispels on its own.
Saint speculated that the bell being brought to Ours made it more vicious, its new home not fit for its particular defense. She assumed the biloko must’ve been protected from the bell’s effects by some other artifact, maybe a ring they each wore on their hairy fingers, or a gris-gris worn like a waistband. Without anything of the sort, its purpose to protect made it a weapon against anyone nearby.
As a small test, Saint lightly rang the bell and demanded Reverend and the twins jump. She had already given her companion the command to ignore all sound except her own voice. To reinforce her command, she filled her companion’s ears with water-soaked cotton, then wrapped a thick band of wool around his head with the hopes that he would remain unaffected. He didn’t move, and she was thankful, but Naima, Selah, and Reverend began to jump continuously. She rang the bell once more without speaking at all and the spell was broken, but Selah started coughing up smoke again and Naima’s ears began to bleed. Saint rolled her eyes. When she suffered no illusions, she assumed it was because she had been the one to ring the bell. Knowing this information, she decided to destroy the instrument, but she heard her own voice in her head say that it was an impossible deed.
She decided to hide the bell in her home, locked in the back room where she practiced conjure. She sat it on a table beside her throne of bones, which had been rebuilt by her companion, piece by piece, inside a room she kept locked next to the kitchen. She called this room the divining room. The bones had followed her underground like worms from her burned-down house to the new house that she kept secret from her own people with engraving stones. She and her companion built, furnished, and hid the evidence of the new house until preparations were secure.
Saint had seen her original home burn down in a vision some years ago though she had no idea who the culprit would be, just when they would strike. So, she built a second home, better than the first because made by her own devices, and she laid a hard curse over it to protect herself.
Originally, the visions of love and fear that Justice saw when he entered her home were meant to be a trap for intruders because she had lost the ability to sense when someone approached, as evidenced by Aba’s unannounced visit. If anyone unwelcome stepped past the front door, they would have to deal with what they could handle the least in life. Saint didn’t know for herself which was worse: to be confronted by what you loved the most or by what you feared most deeply.
Love has a way of making old hurt and new joys share space, because hope makes a naive shepherd of you. You rear the two together and wonder why the joy gets gobbled up so fast while old hurt licks its fangs in the shadows. Saint expected the worst when she made love and fear share space, something they do naturally; she just offered a little assistance. With her own fears locked close and what she loved destroyed a long time ago, Saint had no trouble experiencing her own curse; everyone living in that house had to go through it as the curse didn’t discriminate.
It seemed Selah and Naima had no fears, nothing rich enough to be reflected back at them, but when they both shared with Saint that it was she whom they saw as their love, she didn’t know what to do with the information. And the confessions were different. Selah said she saw Saint as her love, but Naima said she saw both Saint and Selah. For this reason, Saint pulled Selah aside, spoke words for which she had no evidence, only a confident inkling. “Your sister’s younger than you even though she born first. She come out the womb first to make sure everything was safe for you to come into the light and dark of this world. You sent her out into possible danger and because of her devotion to you she went on and did it. You are the elder sister. Now it is your turn to watch over Naima.” Saint’s words had nothing to do with love, but love wasn’t the objective. She wanted Selah to feel a sense of duty that if absent could put them all in jeopardy. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” Saint held Selah’s gaze in her own. Selah nodded, then ran off outside. ‘Girl will kill us all with her indifference,’ Saint thought, and prepared a meal for the three to eat.
[3]
Earlier that day, when she saw blood seep through her companion’s shirt, she knew the fearful bell needed to be kept hidden. But now a new fear tapped her on the shoulder. She had been feeling it for some time, its approach draping itself over everything she did with a thick syrup that slowed down her very thinking. Its shape was limitless, more a pulsing that grew stronger each day. She felt tired more than usual. Her future visions weren’t as frequent. So, she went off and got her some twins to protect herself, knowing that twins, especially girls, are the strongest gris-gris there is. Still, the lingering ennui, the trepidation soiling the air.
Saint closed her eyes to sense it with unrivaled focus, but whenever she tried, a pain in her stomach struck her to bending forward. She blamed her weakening conjure on the approaching omen’s influence over her, and if her conjure couldn’t stand up to whatever approached, then she and the entire town were in trouble. The dread had neither name nor face, arrived as pure feeling. Whatever it promised, it advanced with great speed and if she had been asked to look into her own life, she still would’ve had no way to predict the most terrifying thing in her house was a bell and eventually, after that, another woman’s touch.
Part Two
• CHAPTER 9 •
Monsters
[1]
Joyelle Arceneaux was born February 18, 1835, to a mother of mixed descent, Rita, and a French father, Henri. She grew up in Desmarais, a town southeast of New Orleans, right off the Mississippi River, that was officially part of the city but had been relegated to nearly mythological existence because of the region’s poverty as documented by the 1840 census. If a place could be so shameful that its presence was wiped from history, memory, maps, and tongue, then Desmarais would be that place.
Joyelle, called Joy, grew up understanding that she was what people called a quadroon, which held an importance to others around her that she never understood and rebuked as a child and for the rest of her life. She was much darker than her mother, which stunned Rita and humiliated her father more than the substantial gambling debt he accrued over the years since marrying Rita. Believing Rita unfaithful, he beat and verbally abused her until Joy, age eight and with a blank face, stabbed him several times in the gut and side.
Amelia Chandonnet and Eloise St. Denis ran a boardinghouse in New Orleans on Orleans and Dauphine Streets, where Rita and Joy escaped to after Joy stabbed Henri a final time, killing him. Eventually, Rita would return to Desmarais to bury her husband’s body and never return, leaving Joy with the two women as a daughter they were forced to adopt by a shared sense of moral obligation.
“Tell us the story again,” Eloise would say, combing her hair with an ivory comb hand-carved by her late husband. Eloise was the older of the two women, dark-skinned and regal. She bitingly joked that she was mulatto and to her entertainment many believed her because of what they claimed was the red undertone of her skin.
“Please don’t make the girl tell us again how she murdered her father,” Amelia would say, severe and white as ivory. She was a self-proclaimed quadroon, tremendously aware of it, and relatively wealthy because of it, though she hid her small fortune—obtained through sex work, assisting Eloise with the boardinghouse, and miscellaneous accountancy contracts she managed for women who concealed their money from their husbands—from the world with great precision.
Amelia taught Joy every word under the sun, including “egalitarian” and “impudent,” and how to read and write. She demanded the girl avoid considering a future in sex work and, instead, take to cleaning houses to build humility alongside her natural pride. Eloise taught Joy how to cook, clean, and calculate large numbers very quickly. She also taught Joy how to paint, mainly in the still-life genre. Joy relished the time spent with them and soon forgot about Rita altogether.
The Picayune newspaper reported a string of murders. At least once every other week a man was found killed, unmolested except for the wound that delineated the death blow. Blunt force to a skull. Gunshot to the head. Throat slashings. Extra watchmen were placed around the city at night to catch what they believed was a serial killer because three things linked them all: they were all men, they were never robbed, and all damage had been inflicted above the shoulders.
That the murders happened at all, let alone with such frequency, baffled journalists. Much of the attention these killings spawned was because many of the men were well known and white. The few coloreds who were found dead were also of high repute, most of whom owned slaves. When Joy learned that there were people as dark as her who owned others as dark as them, she laughed, thinking it a lie. How could anyone who could easily be a slave also enslave? She was a precocious eleven-year-old at the time of hearing this news and Amelia, the news breaker, grew livid at Joy’s reaction. She cursed Joy out more violently than Joy ever remembered Henri doing and sent the girl to her room without supper. Eloise knocked and, with a plate of warm food, entered Joy’s room, finding her weeping into her pillow. She sat near Joy and brushed the girl’s hair with her hand.
