Ours, p.54
Ours, page 54
Saint knew the gist of Sebastian’s origin story. Family memories he shared were few. His mother and father lived on somebody’s plantation. They bought his and his maternal grandparents’ freedom. He remembered a grandfather’s grinning face clouded by cigar smoke, a gentle madness in his eyes from having been forced to live old and free without his entire family to enjoy it with. Sebastian’s grandmother, who cherished Sebastian dearly, went missing one day after moseying into the woods and disappearing between a maple tree and a blueberry bush. He went to find her and found instead a second berry bush newly grown.
Grandfather died and Sebastian was alone in that house until he didn’t want to be alone anymore. Coyotes bounding in the yard, skunks wreathing the house with their musk. He stepped out the door one morning, free and ignorant of the world, and decided to learn all he could in the aftermath of his grandparents’ deaths.
He considered himself a lucky child when he thought back on it as an adult, the falling sick on the Mississippi roadside and being found not by someone wanting to enslave him, but by someone wanting to teach him how to speak with the earth and listen for what the earth had to say back to him.
For the rest of his childhood, he lived with a man who went by the name Moon, who wore thick socks and cork-bottom slip-ons as dense as the Bible he kept in every room. Moon had a slow gait, was tall, headstrong, and took nobody’s mess, not even his own, back talking himself if he thought unkind ideas about himself: “Now, Moon, you know that’s not of the Lord,” or “God made you, Moon. Act like it.”
He had four teenagers staying with him who had come from all over Mississippi, and he expected each one to be of, in, with, about, and for the Lord. Amen, amen. Sebastian came smelling like the outside and his grandfather’s cigars and Moon wiped him down, nine years old when he found him, and he scrubbed every edge of his body until his skin shone bright and raw. The other orphans treated him well enough, neither too loving nor too bitter about his arrival. They were half-grown and fully tired of Moon’s overbearing love, heavy as chains, heavy as the cross on Christ’s back.
But Sebastian learned to love the discipline that reciting Bible verses built in him. Prayers kept his mind at ease and off thoughts of his dead grandparents or fruit. He gagged every time Moon made a fruit pie or tossed fistfuls of berries into his mouth. Got so bad Moon took to eating the damn things in his room, but he wasn’t about to let a boy dictate much more than that in his home.
He loved Sebastian ever since he found him on that road. He babied him, fed him the edge of the pan of everything he made because Sebastian loved crust, and made sure Sebastian knew every day that he was important because chosen to be alive. But Moon had issues with his face. He didn’t like his features and playfully called him a “nigger mask,” though his eyes gleamed with an inner sorrow. How to be hugged by someone who, when they pull away, looks upon your face with disgust, a face much like their own? Sebastian never learned how.
Moon mixed his Christian living with other spiritual thinking. He salted his thresholds and read Psalms. He lit black candles and left sweets on a mantel in his bedroom, never saying for whom. He knew the New Testament like the back of his hand and the Old Testament like his own tongue, but heeded shadows darting in room corners not as evil spirits but something that needed tending to on the other side. He taught all his ways to Sebastian, who lived alone with the man after the teens he cared for became adults and took off one by one. Free Negro and poor, Moon prayed that they wouldn’t be intercepted on their way to building a life, and when he passed away, Sebastian took over ownership of his home of seeming contradictions.
That’s when he found hidden beneath a floppy wooden floorboard a collection of books, pamphlets, and letters about root work, Vodou, ancestral communication, the banishing of demons, feeding your protection spirits, and many un-Christian ideas that clarified for Sebastian nuances Moon embodied but for which he left no evidence of how he had learned. “He was a damn priest,” he said to himself, studying every page he found and practicing each recipe and root working that made sense to him, leaving the more lethal-sounding ones in their hiding place. He documented it all in a journal of his own.
Soon, he found other objects hidden in the house: jars full of gemstones on a hard-to-reach shelf, a locked pantry full of dried herbs labeled and organized alphabetically, and vials of liquids labeled with horrific identifiers that were once fresh but needed to be disposed of (cow’s blood, black rooster blood, “cat yurn”). What made sense to keep, like the clover honey and milk of dandelion, he kept.
Eventually, he started making roots for close friends in town and when they were proven to work, he began selling them clandestinely because he wanted no trouble with the church, even though members from the congregation visited him in cloaks at the peak of the night for some of his “magic plants.” He protected himself by protecting their secrets and from then on everybody understood that there was nothing to understand.
It crossed his mind to look for his parents, but the plantation they had been on was seized by a bank and every enslaved African sold at auction. This was a common story, the incompetence of so-called masters, the impervious will of the state to maintain a system that allowed broken people to attempt breaking others.
Because much remained in place to maintain this system regardless of his free status, he had to be careful with his living. He was sure he lived in the only Negro town in all of Mississippi, and that it existed only because of a family of gens de couleur libres who never crossed the Mississippi River to see how their no-name town held up.
This family’s money loosely protected the town. No one knew exactly why they had chosen this project, this experiment of Negro freedom, though it was speculated that that youngest daughter had guilted the patriarch into doing it to offset the sin of owning enslaved Africans. Money carried that kind of power, to relieve sin without prayer or pardon from a priest and without stopping the sinful behavior, but Sebastian knew one day that the money and its power would dry up and the covenant between Negroes and whites would dismantle in flames.
He traveled to Louisiana often, finding willing clients who understood the complexity of roots beyond the fear of what many considered witchcraft, though once during his travels a drifter had called him a “nasty Voodoo priest,” figuring the stones Sebastian wore on his fingers and the staff of snake heads he carried were evidence he deserved such scorn.
A woman who happened to be passing by eyed down the drifter till he moved across the street, then proceeded to vanish into the crowd. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “A particular mind carries particular demons.” Her name was Eloise St. Denis.
Their friendship blossomed necessarily and with good timing, her status in the city one of power and mixed feelings, for she was a woman with money and not of mixed ancestry. He liked her because she was opinionated, had been in love and didn’t want to be in love ever again, and had a powerful mind that frightened him. She laughed at his jokes but didn’t touch him, jokingly called him “my giant” for he was a tall and broad man, complimented his broad nose and full lips, and loved his dark skin that glistened just like hers. Everything he had ever questioned about himself she made him surer of. ‘I need this nose,’ he found himself thinking one morning, looking into a mirror. ‘I need these lips. My God, I need these lips of mine.’
Loving his lips so, he decided to test them on Eloise, and she accepted. He moved his hands from her face to her waist, and she didn’t move. When he moved his hands to her behind, she bit his bottom lip hard, drawing blood. They didn’t speak for almost a month, until walking by her house, angry still but curious about her well-being, he heard from the open window the sound of an untuned piano. He leaned into the window and watched Eloise play around, tapping here and there, then playing chords into a titanic composition. She finished playing, her back turned to the window as she sat at the piano bench, and asked, “Would you like to apologize first, or shall I?”
“How did you know I was here?” Sebastian asked.
Eloise pointed to the grandfather clock facing the window, the glass case subtly reflecting him standing in the window as if he were a ghost trapped inside the clock itself.
He apologized from outside. She accepted and invited him in. He leaned his staff on the clock. They sat on the couch and watched the minute hand make its slow rotations, their arms touching, her hand in his. She didn’t apologize. He didn’t need her to.
[5]
Friendship is not what he wanted with Saint, and when he laid eyes on her he saw marriage right away. He assumed she was no older than thirty years old, but as they spoke, he discovered that she was far more knowledgeable than any thirty-year-old he had ever known. She spoke of the Revolution as though she had experienced it, had seen George Washington leave Philadelphia with his hat on crooked. “I’ve lived longer than even I know,” she said, and he kissed her right away.
She shrugged her shoulders when asked about her past, but he kept asking, savoring each nugget of her lived life that she seldom shared. He learned that for decades she traveled around the states freeing the enslaved because voices in her head told her to. “Started after years of living with the Muskogee. I would be minding my business, resting or roasting fish, and out of the wind I’d pick up someone whispering in my ear everything I needed to know about how to free somebody miles away. And most of the time it felt out of my control. I’d find myself standing up, leaving my home, shotgun in hand, and instructions spilling into my mind, my body moving on its own until I returned to the Muskogee and was stirred awake by the sounds of their and the Negro children laughing. If not for that laughter, who knows if I would’ve returned to my senses.”
“If those voices ever call you while with me, please let me follow?”
“Can you fight?” Saint asked. They laughed knowing the answer was yes.
After four months together, they married, and Saint was with child. But complications ensued. Cramping. Difficulty sleeping. Then after a month, she miscarried. Saint wouldn’t allow Sebastian to touch her for a long time and cried every morning and every night for two months straight. In the void of her sorrow, it rained every day, ruining the garden and sickening the animals.
When her grief dried up, anger remained, and she flashed it about like a knife. Her demands to be left alone increased. Rainless thunder and lightning storms assaulted the town. A mighty drought desiccated crops. It took Sebastian grabbing her by the shoulders and saying with a force she didn’t know he had, “We can try again, but I need to touch you to be able to do that, and you need to let the dead be dead. The baby is dead, Saint. Not you.”
She didn’t like the sure way he said who was and wasn’t dead or how he looked her in the eyes like he wanted to fuck her. He was wearing the wrong eyes for words like that, lids a little too wide, not wet enough, irises like wheel spokes going and going in the wrong direction. But she got herself together, spiteful as a wasp, and for one week more made him sleep in the workshop before returning to her caring self. This time, being forced into his work helped, offering him priceless hours to delve into fertility research, and after they tried a second time with no pregnancy, he suggested he fix her.
“I’m not broken, Sebastian,” Saint said, but she knew what he meant, that he wanted to root her down and get a baby out of her, and she wanted to be rooted down, too, but differently.
What he brought her to drink smelled like a forest and the salve he rubbed on her stomach cooled her skin. He rubbed her head at the temples and massaged her neck and shoulders daily until Saint, without warning, said, “We must try again right this minute.”
She conceived twins, and Sebastian couldn’t have been happier. They named them Maria and Nala. Two weeks later, Maria died and a day after that Nala followed. Saint cried every morning, daydreamed all afternoon, and cried again at night. Sebastian dove into his research with more depth, sleeping in the workshop without needing to be told, calculating, measuring, enduring. When he returned to bed, his hands were cold.
[6]
They both decided to throw themselves fully into root work, devoting energy better spent for lovemaking on developing serums and powders meant to make easier the lives of others. Saint took abundant notes, for her memory couldn’t hold it all in and he tutored her through everything she needed to know.
“We must work on your emotions. You make weather with your feelings. You can feel however you want, but you can’t go flooding the world with your heart,” Sebastian said. And they managed an agreement that Saint made with the universe: she would learn to detach her gift from her feelings and how to bring rain whenever she pleased. She failed each time, and each time she feared Sebastian would leave her like Essence had. But he stayed, fascinated that she was “so close to God,” he said. “Between your storm making and stonework, my love, my love . . .” He would shake his head, proud, amazed, and as her fear and shame lightened, so did her lack of control. No, she couldn’t “do weather” at will like Sebastian wanted her to, but she could stop herself from doing it when her feelings overtook her.
Sebastian had to take a trip a few miles south and asked Saint to stay and watch the house. “Someone coming to pick up that order over there on the table. Could you make sure they get it? It’s already paid for.” He headed out, book of notes in hand, and waved goodbye as the horse ambled down the road.
Hungry for study, she returned to the workshop and ground rosemary and coal. Midway, she forgot the next step and opened her book of notes. Surprised that her handwriting was not her own, she squinted as if that would change the script, then realized Sebastian had taken her notes with him and left his own behind. She flipped through his writing to find the proper root and read a bit of something unfamiliar. Her lips trembled as she closed the book and returned it to where she had found it.
They argued that night about what she had seen: notes on the human body, intricate sketches of the main organs of the body (she had no idea he could draw), an estimate of how much blood the body holds, and the effects of sunlight and soil on the skin—these intrigued her, and she wondered why he never shared this with her.
He reached into his pocket for the notebook he hadn’t used since leaving and noticed for the first time that he had Saint’s notes and not his own. She watched his cheeks tighten. Wind stirred outside. ‘We were doing well by each other,’ she thought, ‘how quickly the roses close.’
Saint then flipped hurriedly to a page where she found the word “sembie.”
“What is a sembie, Sebastian?”
In the notes, the inked shapes had lifted from the page like bats and entered her mind: “resurrection,” “revivification,” “logic of Christ upon the cross and spirit of Christ beyond the veil of the tomb,” “defiance of both heaven and hell,” “interruption of the chronology of God.” A drawing of a person lying in a circle reminded Saint of Essence’s attempt to get her “energy” under control. Even the arrows drawn counterclockwise—a sun moving from east to west, life to death then back again through the underworld to begin once more—followed Essence’s pattern. Sebastian added a drawing of a tree as the vertical dividing line of the top half of the circle and a wavy line representing water as the horizontal line halving the circle. Written across the chest of the drawing of the human figure was the word “sembie.”
Human flesh symbolized as treetop and its vein-patterned roots; as the sky and underwater; as north, south, east, and west; as the rising and setting sun; as the blur between the living world and the Otherside: Saint tried to follow the complex patterning, the disregard for the laws of nature, laws that Sebastian himself had instilled in her, a betrayal beyond her understanding as she lifted the drawing up to Sebastian’s face, forcing him to look upon what he had created and kept away from her. She shoved the drawing into his face. “The world don’t spin slow enough for you so you gotta give it a second go round?” Saint asked.
Sebastian snatched the notes from her. “This is theory, Saint. Not a practice. Not something that should ever be done.” He looked at the notes and his look melted into the pages. “And these notes are not my own. I copied and expanded on what belonged to Piya de Nuestros Dioses Zurdo and he got this knowledge from an African man in what they call Belize. The man didn’t even share his name for fear of what may happen to him if discovered sharing this.
“I no more have the talent to accomplish this than I have the interest. I do not have the interest, Saint.” Saint glared at him. When she saw him crying, the notes torn from the notebook and crumbled in his fist, she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe you.”
[7]
Sebastian wanted to introduce Saint to Eloise. He hadn’t seen his friend since marrying Saint in 1828. Now it was 1830, and he thought it a shame that the two didn’t know about each other. He told Saint all about how they met, about how she procured patrons for him in New Orleans, kept his name out of the mouths of those who would sully his reputation with superstitious ignorance.
When Saint asked if he had ever been romantic with Eloise, he said he tried once, and she bit him. Saint howled with laughter, imagining blood staining his mouth, and kissed him. “Then she can be a friend to me, too.”
When they reached Eloise’s home, the door was already partially open and blood tracked from just outside the doorway to inside the house, leading back to Eloise’s bedroom upstairs. Sebastian rushed inside. Saint followed and stood petrified when she saw the body of a woman lying in a pool of blood. Sebastian opened his bag and pulled out strips of linen. “Please douse my instruments in alcohol,” Sebastian said, and Saint went about cleaning his instruments. “We will need boiling water and towels next,” he said, and Saint took on the new tasks without question.
