Tina Mcelroy Ansa (45 page)

Lena heard Herman singing the most unlikely things. Sometimes, it was a nursery rhyme put to music or a song from a game Lena had played as a child.

Herman found pleasure in simple things, quiet endeavors. He had looked at a few shows on television when he first came. But if Lena never turned the TV on, he never bothered with it.

“I can’t stand that noise on all the time,” he said.

Mostly, at night, if they didn’t go fishing, walking or stargazing, on the lookout for Venus in the sky, Herman liked to sit out on the deck with Lena and just let night fall. He could pick a tune pretty good on a box. And, of course, Lena had wanted to run out and buy him a handmade acoustic guitar from Tennessee, but Herman demurred.

“Lena,” he said with a laugh in his voice, “I ain’t all that good. Just go down to a pawnshop and pick me out som’um that’ll be even wid my talent.”

Lena had picked a rather plain shiny guitar from the ones on the wall at the pawnshop. “If the man can’t get his box back, least somebody’ll be playin’ it,” Herman whispered in Lena’s ear and strummed the guitar one time as she got in her car with the instrument in her hand.

After that, she heard Herman’s guitar music all over the place, all times of day. First thing in the morning, she awoke to notes and half notes playing all on the covers around her. In the late morning, while she prepared supper for Herman, he sat in his favorite white pine chair, watched her and played. At midnight, Herman stood outside her bedroom window and serenaded her, with the frogs and crickets playing backup.

Some evenings, they’d have music outside on the deck—a little song from back before the turn of the century like “Don’t Let the Devil Ride.”

Sometimes, Lil Sis would join in the song.

One day in early October, Herman stopped his strumming to say: “You know, Lena, you really freed me up to do some thangs I like anytime I want to. Thank you, ma’am.”

“I freed
you up?!”
Lena whooped.

Lena felt that Herman had unlocked doors all along the route to
her
freedom. With just a suggestion or even a look, Herman had made Lena question so many things that she had found it impossible not to change.

By the time the weather had started getting a little chilly, he had stopped saying, “God don’t want burned offerin’s, Lena, He want mercy,” because she had finally gotten the message and taken herself off the altar. She had discovered that with one phone call she could delegate a chore to one capable person she was paying to do the job anyway and stop worrying about the outcome of the job at the same time. Sometimes, she didn’t even have to make the phone call.

“Don’t worry ’bout the mule goin’ blind, Lena, baby,” rang in her ears.

As the two of them tromped through the woods, Herman would mutter to himself every now and then, “It sho’ feel good to roam free. It
still
feel good.”

Herman helped Lena
claim
her land, her spot of earth as her own. She thought she had already claimed it—plotting the buildings, surveying the land with Mr. Renfroe, keeping as many people out of her inner sanctum as possible. But Herman showed her she hadn’t really
claimed
it. She couldn’t do that until she
knew
the land and the spirit under it.

Then, back inside the house, winded and exhilarated from a hard fast ride on Goldie and Baby to the end of her property nearly ten miles away and back, he would set about helping her claim her soul.

Most evenings, Herman shared a recitation with Lena. He prided himself on his memory and recitation. He loved to recite poetry he had learned over the years … all the years. Some nights, it was Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar; other nights, it was Sonia Sanchez and Mari Evans.

“I really like verse from the last twen’y-five, thir’y years, Lena,” he said.

Spying a rare American eagle in the sky over the Ocawatchee River, Herman would quote the Temptations
and
Nikki Giovanni, “I mean I can fly like a bird in the sky.”

He was impressively familiar with a wide range of verse.

Back in the spring when Herman first appeared, Lena would walk through her big comfortable house worried about somebody who was about to be evicted and arrested for bad checks and mutter to herself, “Life is real and life is earnest.”

And Herman would yell from some other part of the house, “ ’And the grave is not its goal,’ Lena, baby. ’Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.’”

He always remembered Lena’s recitation that first night they loved each other, and it became a tradition for her to stand and recite “The Stars” before the night was out.

Other nights, Herman told stories. Some stories Lena had never heard. Stories about animals mostly and how they got to be that way. Why a rabbit hops. How God made butterflies. Why the mockingbird is away on Friday.

Lena told him stories of her family and her past. She told him of her family’s trip to the Georgia coast when she was seven, and he told her the story of why the porpoise’s tail is on crossways. She told him of meeting a ghost named Rachel on the beach. And he told her the story of his family’s flight for freedom.

Herman’s stories about funeral wagons and about cats wearing diamond rings, showing up after a man’s wife had died wearing the same rings, and sticking their paws into the open campfire to retrieve pieces of sizzling fatback reminded Lena of her grandmama’s lurid tales.

Lena would ask him questions about everything: the afterlife, his own time, how computers worked, had he ever run into her favorite author, Zora Neale Hurston, in the hereafter. She was voraciously inquisitive. He would look up at her and say in wonder, “Damn, baby, ya don’t know
nothing
!
”

“Well, Herman,” she would say, throwing her head back and laughing, “you won’t know if you don’t ask.”

“Yeah, Lena, baby,” he’d say as he pulled one of her braids or reached up under her skirt and tugged at her silk panties, “but you don’t have a clue. A ’oman like you.” But he laughed when he said it—proud that she was learning. Then, he’d break into another story that would answer her question.

Sometimes, the stories he told were of his life and sometimes of his experiences since he’d been dead.

Herman told stories of Africa—West African tales that
his father
had heard from
his father
about the meaning of honor and the creation of the sky. He talked of Geronimo, who had surrendered in 1886 when Herman was nearly thirty. He had heard of the warrior around campfires with other Maroons and Seminoles in Florida. Sitting with Lena in front of the ingenious hearth he had built on the deck, Herman retold all those tales.

He spoke often of his life in and around her own home county just before his death.

“Here in Mulberry, Lena, you could get a room, nice room, for fifty cents a week. Others ain’t so nice cost less. My room down there in yo’ place was the best in the city I ever had. I lived right in that room ’bout two years, Lena.

“Some folks ’round here thought I was a country boy ’cause I was raised out in the wilds of Flor’da. But livin’ the way we lived was different in some ways, some important ways, from just livin’ out in the country. Now, I could find my way ’round in a town, not a big old city like Boston or Atlanta. But Jacksonville, Mulberry, Savannah, Dublin, them towns I can get around in ’thout walking into a buildin’.”

But Herman let her know he wasn’t “citified.” He took pride in being of the earth, in being from Maroons.

“Now, it take some smarts to run off from the plantation and make it. Lena, I never had mo’ respect fo’ anybody in this world than
my ma and pa. To run off like that when both of them wasn’t hardly grown. And my ma just showin’ with my big sister. And my pa not knowin’ nothin’ but the stars and what somebody had told him ’bout freedom bein’ Nawth and South, too.

“My pa didn’t have no fam’bly other than my ma. And she was the same. They’d both been sold off from they fam’blies and they bloodline. My ma—her name was Mae—didn’t know her own ma and pa. My ma said she heard her pa had been a stockman, had a hundred and some-odd children when he died. But she didn’t know if that was true or not.”

The Mulberry stories were some of Lena’s favorite.

“You know where Greenwood Bottom is, Lena?” Herman asked one day as she dressed to make a rare trip into town to tie up some loose ends on a deal she was working.

“Well, now, Herman, it seems I have heard Grandmama speak of Greenwood Bottom,” she said as she slipped into a pair of red tap panties that matched the snug-fitting camisole she was wearing.

“Greenwood Bottom,” Herman explained, “was a section of Mulberry when I lived ’round these parts. A nice section. I wonder if it’s still around.”

Lena made a mental note to research Greenwood Bottom. It seemed to her that her Grandmama and Granddaddy Walter had at one time lived in a section with “Bottom” in its name.

Everything Herman said seemed worth noting, Lena thought. He didn’t always talk so much as a rule, but everything seemed to interest him a bit. And he liked to comment on what was passing by.

“I been ’round, Lena, baby,” he told her.

“I even was able to pop in and hear Robert Johnson play some music, Lena. Couldn’t pat my feets, didn’t have no feets then. Couldn’t even bob my head to the music. Didn’t have no head. That was before you, Lena.”

He smiled at her and continued.

“That blues-playing man died in a place called Baptisttown. You warn’t even born yet, Lena. Shoot, he warn’t much more than a very young man himself.”

Herman loved the blues.

“So, ya’ll gon’ just go on and lose the blues music altogether,” he came right out and said to her one night as they listened to a newly released CD of Johnson.

“What you mean by that, Herman?”

“Well, if you don’t ’ppreciate som’um, you lose it.”

“And who are you talking about?”

“You know, Lena, black people in this country.”

“Herman, you trying to say we don’t care nothing about the blues?”

“I ain’t tryin’. I’m sayin’ it. Ya’ll gon’ lose it. Gon’ look up, and it ain’t gon’ be part a’ us no mo’. It gon’ be a part of somebody else, and we ain’t gon’ have nobody but ourse’fs to blame fo’ it. Shoot, if it wa’n’t fo’ that trumpet-playin’ boy from New Orleans, ya’ll woulda lost Louis Armstrong. Lena, you gotta claim stuff to make it yo’s. But we black folks gon’ mess around and lose the blues. You watch.”

Herman was serious about his music.

Music had always been a part of Lena’s life. A part of her family’s life, a part of her community’s life. It infused every event, crisis, decision, love affair, heartbreak, everything.

Herman felt that way about music, too. It was a part of his natural life.

Out of the clear blue, he would look right into Lena’s eyes and sing, “Do I love you? Oh, my, do I! Do I? ’Deed I do.”

Herman sang to her like he was singing for his supper. And Herman loved to eat.

He’d start off singing to her from across the bedroom or the Great Jonah Room or the barn.

“Do I love you?
Oh, my, do 1?
Do I? ’Deed I do.”

Then, he’d move closer to her, singing the next chorus.

“Do I want you?
Oh, my, do I?
Do I? ’Deed I do.”

Then, he would come even closer, his face inches away from hers, and sing:

“Do I need you? Oh,
my, do 1?
Do I? ’Deed I do.”

He would take her in his arms, strong country hundred-year-old arms, and kiss her all over, her face, her neck, her back, her stomach, her thighs, her feet, pausing to nuzzle her throat with a gnawing sound, then, he’d turn her around and bite her on her butt.

Herman serenaded Lena with bawdy songs from every decade of the last century. Seamlessly, he moved from performing some thoughtful domestic chore like washing the dishes in the sink to doing some erotic, raunchy song and dance from some vaudeville show right down to an achingly slow and suggestive bump and grind.

He had no shame.

He would sing an old blues number like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and Lena would be moved to roll down her silk bikini panties, slip them off and throw them at him as if he were on a stage.

Herman’s voice was a soft baritone, like Brook Benton’s or Jerry Butler’s. And it would just insinuate its way into Lena’s heart. She would close her eyes and see the eighth notes and the quarter notes float from his lips and drift toward her in a wave. The fluttering little notes, each one carrying his love for her, would rest on her chest, then disappear into her heart.

He saw how natural and happy she was with him, and it brought him close to hubris.

“You know what, Lena?” Herman said casually one day. “Every time I come near you like I did just then, you open yo’ legs to me. Look, just like that.”

Lena was more than mortified at Herman’s revelation. “What business a ghost got lyin’?” he said often. She looked down at her legs where Herman was pointing and saw that she had indeed opened her legs as he approached.

Every image of every nun she had ever known came back to her from grammar school to college, speaking of Mary-like dresses and
occasions of sin, which were mostly women, and their clothes and their smells and their breasts and their lacy underwear.

The principal at Blessed Martin de Porres School had explained it quite vividly: “Girls,” Sister Louis Marie said in her thick Irish brogue, “your chastity, your virginity, your very virginal essence, is like a magnolia blossom. The beautiful creamy white flower of the South, so fragrant, so sweet. Yet!!! If you dare to lay a finger on that pure white chaste blossom it is
forever
marked!! Oh, girlies, there’s no getting away from the truth.

“Well, you might as well throw it away, throw it in the trash heap. What good is it now, this once pure blossom, I ask you? All sullied and bruised? Might as well throw it away.”

For a fleeting moment, Lena felt like one of the nun’s allegorical flowers. Have I really become so carnal, she pondered, so lustful, that I can’t even keep my legs together in this man’s presence?