Excerpt: The Lost Memoir of Orina Tureaud

The day I learned that my mother was not crazy the way everybody said she was, I was 9. It was an evening in June while Mandeville Street was still wet from fleeting showers and the air smelled like the Mississippi river had been scrubbed clean. A woman came to our door that I didn’t know, but my maman seemed to know her. The woman stood on the bottom step of our stoop wearing a long, cotton, deep purple shawl and from beneath that the folds of a full, green African print skirt stopped just shy of her ankles . At least, I thought the print was African. On the skirt were strange symbols in emerald green against a pastel lavender background, and on her feet were some kind of cloth shoe with a hard sole. The shoe top looked like brown potato sack cloth, but it wasn’t.

She had at least a hundred long black, skinny dreadlocks with touches of gray that glimmered as the setting sun’s light hit them. Her locks went from her head to a little past her waist. About a fourth of them had a thin strand of gold ribbon twisted through from root to end. So, in the orangey glow of sunset after a summer rain, it looked like she wore a flowing black and gold crown. Not matching the touches of gray in her hair, her skin, clear and brown like shelled almonds, looked as smooth as a magazine model’s face while her amber eyes looked almost as gold as the ribbons ‘round her locks.

My heart jumped at the sight of her but I didn’t know why. All my insides seemed to hum. And while she looked strange like someone from a fairy tale, she wasn’t scary like a witch or scowling like some old women who watch you walk by their porches in that way that huffs you don’t belong. She looked beautiful like a queen and never did I think a queen would visit our house. I knew my maman knew her because when she opened the door and saw her, she called the woman by one of those motherly names people call real grandmothers or pretend aunts. “Mama Dee!” she said, and the woman outside smiled a little, and then my maman asked, “Is it time?”

I walked to the door and stood next to my maman. While the woman stood on the steps, Maman started doing that thing she does when the people say she’s overwrought, something she’s done when she gets nervous for as long as I remember. She looked at the woman outside through blank eyes like someone had sucked the brains from her skull. With her right hand she grabbed the fingers of her left and rubbed each one in the same direction toward her wrist, stroking each finger back, going over them one by one like she was trying to keep them attached to her body—pinkie, next, middle, index, thumb, pinkie, next, middle, index, thumb--and then she started mumbling phrases that never connected.

“He didn’t see her. He don’t know. … She is like a tagged pigeon. The red ribbon is on her ankle but he can’t see. You make him blind. I know. You make him blind.”

The older woman with dreadlocks was taller than Maman, who I came up calling Tutu like everybody else up and down the street and like family over in Holly Grove. Holly Grove people are the only family I know, but when I visit it’s like they must learn me again. “And who are you?” They ask whenever we show up for a holiday, but when I say my name, they seem a little put off, yet say, “Oh, oh. Yes. It is you.”

Most of them are short and dark-skinned with tightly kinked hair that a lot of them wear in locks like the woman at the door. They are not like me. I am taller than their children who are my age, my cousins, and my skin while not light is not as dark as theirs. I am middle brown, and my hair is shiny and loosely curled. Mrs. Abernathy, my third grade teacher and some of the girls who spoke to me used to say I had good hair, but I didn’t know what that meant. I only knew my hair was somewhere in between the shape of straight and it wasn’t what the mean girls called Brillo Pad. It also grew faster than other people’s hair, and so I asked Tutu where did my hair come from because it was not like hers either. She had the Holly Grove family hair and skin. All she told me was god my father gave me my hair to make him happy.

I could see as soon as the queen woman stepped over the doorsill and into our two-bedroom shotgun that she knew more than my maman about why my hair was shiny and my skin was lighter and maybe why I was smart and not like my mother. This queen woman placed a hand on Tutu’s shoulder the way I’d seen a old woman place a hand on a younger woman whose son got shot in Holly Grove one Christmas. I saw the people screaming on the sidewalk and the small lawn as I skated down the street with my cousins, and we slowed, nearing the crowd. We all had new skates that year, and I love to skate, but mostly I remember that woman because she was quiet while everybody else cried and hollered except her, and I knew she was the shot boy’s mother because Canaan, my cousin, asked somebody he knew on the sidewalk and told me.

Tutu and I live down in what is called Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans. Not as many shootings there. So, I never saw a woman put a hand on another woman again like the old woman did the young woman on Christmas until the queen lady touched my maman. But was anyone shot?

Tutu said somebody blessed us because we lived in the Marigny where crime didn’t make blood flow like the Mississippi, and the flood waters from Hurricane Katrina didn’t drown hope, but stopped at the top of the first step, the bottom of three leading into the house where the queen woman had stood before came inside.

That was the one thing I was always happy about, that we had a house. I knew some girls who were like how I used to think I was who still lived in trailers even three years after the city flooded. They went to public school like I used to and while you’d think they might be jealous because I had a house and they only had a trailer or because teachers and visitors would tell me I was pretty or smart and say nothing to them as kind that they’d be jealous, but they weren’t . They said they’d rather be dumb, ugly and dead than have a mama as crazy as mine.

But that evening, when the queen woman came, I learned the truth about Tutu. Well, at least part of the truth. I knew that if a woman like the woman in the purple shawl had come to get me and tell my maman that I should live with her until I was ready for Academy, then my maman might know some special people. Not gods like she said, but special people who had a place in the world that I never dreamed to have.

As the queen woman touched maman’s shoulder, Maman calmed enough to stop pushing her fingers, and Mama Dee guided her to the brown canvas sofa, the one that came new off the truck as a gift from somebody I didn’t know Christmas before last. Tutu looked up into the queen woman’s amber eyes while lowering her body to the cushions and caressing Mama Dee’s arm through the purple shawl . With each level of descent toward the sofa, her hands traveled a few inches down the tall woman’s arm, until she was seated and holding Mama Dee’s hand. By then Tutu only repeated one saying, “You make him blind. You make him blind. You make him blind.”

The light from the little lamp on the end table by the sofa’s arm cast a false kind of sunlight almost the color of the after-shower evening sun on the street, that same deep goldenrod glow that settles on a beach while the sun sinks on the horizon, and it played tricks on my eyes, I thought, looking like it passed through Mama Dee and shone out from her head and shoulders. Moments after Tutu sat, she quieted her tongue for a minute, stopped her mumblings about blindness, and then fell into that stranger talk she did in her sleep that never made sense to me. She started to rock gently back and forth like children do sometimes after a fruitless crying fit. “Eesay um botondu baranda qui la si etto maruvet.”

I had never known the meaning and thought it was sleep gibberish, but there she was speaking in a crazy tongue, wide awake. Mama Dee looked at me and with only a slight curving of the corners of her lips upward, she said, “Get your maman some water, Orina.”

I didn’t expect her to say my name and stepped back, feeling that my legs slipped into weakness, but I made myself stand straight and not fall as I turned and walked to the back of the house, to the kitchen.

You’ve got to see this now, how a shotgun house is made. I walked straight through room to room, no hallway. They call it a shotgun because if you were to aim one from the front door and shoot it, the bullet would go straight through every doorway and out the back door, never hitting a wall. And so from the living room, I entered my maman’s room with its bed dressed in blue against the window opposite my path, and from there I went into my room with its pale orange walls, where the bed was dressed in dark green against the wall adjacent to the one with the window, the first wall on the other side of Maman’s room, and then I passed the only room that looked like it had a hall, the one that some modest person had walled off on the side to make the bathroom private. And then I was in the kitchen.

Some days Maman didn’t know me, but she kept a clean house, and I helped. Each night I cleaned the kitchen, and while I had not yet washed the dinner dishes, the kitchen still looked clean, smelling like a mix of bleach and vanilla from the candles Tutu liked, cheap votives from a thrift store on Rampart Street. Even in the vanishing light of evening, the kitchen was a cheerful place. The people who lived there before us had wall-papered it with a yellow and white gingham check pattern, and the stove, refrigerator, and scant counter tops were white like the old double porcelain sink by the double window which was dressed in plain yellow curtains. The room was large enough for a table that seated six people and stood opposite the window. You had to walk into the kitchen and then around this table with its yellow, vinyl table cloth and plain wooden chairs to reach a small utility room with an ancient, olive-colored washer and dryer set. From there you could head out the back door and into the back yard, which was only slightly wider than the narrow house and barely 30 feet deep.

I didn’t need to go that far for water. In the kitchen I took two mason jars from the floor-to sealing white shelves beside the stove, opened the refrigerator and popped six ice cubes from an ice tray, three for each jar, dropped them in place and went to the sink where I filled the jars two thirds full with water. All the while I strained to hear what the queen woman was saying to Tutu, but I couldn’t make out the words. Snatching two napkins from the napkin holder on the kitchen table, I walked back to the living room.

Tutu kept drink coasters on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and I put one before the queen woman and one near Tutu and then placed each mason jar before its recipient.

“Thank you,” said Mama Dee as she moved from the center cushion near Tutu to the other end of the sofa. “You sit here, next to your maman.”<

I did as I was told and sat between the two women. Mama Dee sat straight and formal with her knees toward us. I felt safe in her presence and didn’t flinch when she reached toward my head with her right hand and stroked a few of my curls.

“Has your maman told you anything about where you would go one day, Orina?”

I shook my head to say “no,” thinking that Tutu didn’t tell me anything but strange stories about how god had come to her smelling of sandalwood, how he had taken her from the house of pink paint peeling on the edge of Gert Town by Holly Grove, brought her to his silver castle on Lake Pontchartrain and made me. There was a house on the edge of Gert Town in New Orleans where she grew up. It had pink with lavender shutters. Aunt Elisha, Tutu’s oldest sister, told me that their mother died in her sleep there one night, and that when she passed Tutu began telling everyone that their mother had risen up to heaven, that she’d seen her spirit in a shimmering blue robe fly up to the sky. She kept saying this and no one could make her shut up, and whenever Aunt Elisha told the story, she looked as mortified in the present as she must have been in the past. A nurse who worked at Flint Goodridge Hospital, the old one for Negroes, lived down the street and had given Aunt Elisha pills to make Tutu sleep, but the night before the funeral, Tutu upped and vanished. Nobody knew where she went or how she’d left drugged in a white cotton slip, and no one saw her go. Five months later she appeared at the pink house with lavender shutters smiling so much she showed all her teeth, talking gibberish that sounded almost like a language, carrying me in her womb.

Submittted by Nordette Adams
http://bigsole.blogspot.com/search/label/writing