East is East

It was the golden hour of the day, the sun gone soft as A big dab of butter, and Olmstead White, the grandson of the son of a slave who was the son of a slave who was a free man of the Ibo tribe in West Africa, was fixing supper. He was sixty-eight years old, his limbs as dry and sinewy as jerky, his face baked hard by the morning sun flashing off the sea. He’d been born, raised and schooled on Tupelo Island, and in all his life he hadn’t been to the mainland more than two dozen times. His garden stood tall with corn and staked tomato plants, he raised hogs, fished and crabbed and shrimped and oystered, and he did odd jobs for the white people at Tupelo Shores Estates when he needed a bit of pocket money for a chew or a drink or a new battery for the vanilla-colored transistor radio that brought him the Braves games in the cool of the evening. His brother, Wheeler, with whom he’d lived through all the mornings, afternoons and evenings of all his bachelor days, lay six months buried in the family plot out back of the garden.

On this evening, while the Braves game whispered huskily through the tinny speaker, Olmstead White sliced a cucumber and tomato, fixed a side dish of poke greens and was deep-frying a dozen sweet fresh oysters, shucked and floured and dipped in corn-meal and cayenne pepper. He wasn’t thinking of Wheeler particularly, or of his nephew Royal, Eulonia’s boy, with whom he sometimes watched the hilarious antics of MTV late into the night—oh, the haircuts, he loved the haircuts—nor was he paying much attention to the announcer’s dead and buried voice as the Braves blew yet another one. He was thinking nothing, really, his mind in a state of suspended animation as the grease crackled, the birds called in the trees and the screens glowed with the sun. As usual, and without thinking, he prepared a small plate for Wheeler. Later, in the twilight, when Gant and Murphy and Thomas and the rest of the bush leaguers had rolled over and played dead against the indestructible New York Mets, he would set the dish on his brother’s grave and retrieve the empty one from the night before.

Like his friends and neighbors at Hog Hammock, Olmstead White spoke in the Gullah dialect of his ancestors, a dialect rich in borrowings from the Hausa, Wolof, Kimbundu and Ibo of West Africa. Along with the dialect came the dim linguistic memory of that faraway continent and the tribal rites and superstitions that had bloomed there in the eternal days. Olmstead White was deeply superstitious, as who wouldn’t be in a world without reason or explanation, a world seething with spirits and hexes and voices in the night? He believed in haunts and specters, believed in hoodoo and juju and spells and curses and hags who put the mouth on you and made you wilt like a stalk of celery left out in the sun. He did his best to placate Wheeler’s spirit with gifts of clothing, a deck of cards, the odd magazine and a choice bit of his evening meal, each and every night. The plate was always on the ground the next morning, and it was always licked clean. Was it the raccoons, the opossums, the hogs, the hounds, the crows that gorged on that food? Maybe so. But only Wheeler knew for sure.

Well, the bacon fat sizzled and popped and the sweet oyster smell made a fancy Charleston kind of potted-palm restaurant out of the two-room clapboard shack—painted blue and with a blue pyramid slashed on the chimney to ward off hags—and Olmstead White thought nothing and the stirring fork moved in his hand as if by its own volition. The room was hushed. A fly buzzed at the screen. It was then, as the fly struggled and the world slowed down like a worn old carousel, that he came to himself and sensed another presence inhabiting the hazy space of the room. His back was to the door, his hand stirring, the radio whispering and Dale Murphy going down on strikes and nothing had changed, nothing at all, but as sure as he knew he was alive and breathing he knew there was someone—or something—there with him.

He moved like a man coming out of a coma, like Br’er Rabbit stuck to the tarbaby, his hands trembling as he remembered Varner Arms and how he was found dead in his own kitchen, blood spattered on the walls and hag’s hair—wild black hanks of it—scattered across the linoleum like a greeting from the darkest pit. His shoulders were rigid, his neck like a flagpole planted deep in the earth. But slowly, ever so slowly, he swiveled his gray-bristling chin till he presented his profile and one wild eye to whatever or whoever stood in the doorway behind him.