Gloryland (10 page)

I remembered how his hands felt when they held me, and all the other things they held in his life, and what he’d said about hands, about me, but he didn’t talk about that now. He said, “Elijah, you nearly killed your mama gettin here, and you’ll probably do the same by goin away, but you gotta go away. I just want to tell you that it was a blessin as a father to hold you while you was here.

“And I want you to remember what we told you, your mama and Grandma Sara and me, cause we won’t be there to remind you. What you can do for us is remember how to be a good person, and if you do that, then we’ll always be together.”

He paused.

“I ain’t finished, Elijah. About your walk.” He thought for a minute. “I’d steer clear of the main roads and move mostly at night. You can take my Lefever. You always was a better shot with it, so you can get some meat when you think it’s safe to shoot and not draw too
much notice. Your mama and Grandma Sara taught you plenty bout findin plants you can eat. And you strong, so when you can’t find any food, you can work for it. You’ll be all right, but be careful.”

Then Mama came up to me and held me the way that took me out of myself, and she started to cry, but there were no tears, no water, just her face and her eyes so deep you’d fall into them if you weren’t careful.

“Elijah,” she said, “you didn’t nearly kill me when you came into this world. I was just so happy bout you bein here that your daddy thought I was dyin. You know how I am. I don’t talk as much as he do, but that don’t mean I ain’t got somethin to say.

“Elijah Yancy, I’m happy you leavin us now, cause it means you won’t die, at least not here. And it won’t kill me, you leavin. I’m happy cause you got a chance to be you, the you God meant you to be and not half a man like you’d end up here in Spartanburg. And I ain’t sayin your daddy is half a man, cause he always standin up for this or that, likely to get himself killed. He just lucky so far, and so am I. I won’t say don’t worry bout us cause it’s only human if you do, but I’m goin to smile a long time, knowin that you round somewhere in this world causin trouble!”

Then Mama put her hands on my head and softly rubbed it, like she used to when I was a little boy.

“Elijah,” she said, “your brother Oliver—” she paused, “my son, he was a good boy like you, always smilin and laughin,” and Mama smiled too, and then she was looking at me no more but at someone else. “But when he got older, he didn’t laugh so much and then he hardly spoke, and when he did, it was always questions bout . . .”

She stopped, like there was something she hadn’t thought about in a long time. “Bout why things was the way they was, and I could never give him an answer that satisfied him. Such a pretty smile on that boy, but he stopped smilin and acted angry at everyone and everything and started talkin foolishness. We tried to talk to him, but nothin we said seem to do any good, and one day he was gone.”

Mama held one hand balled up in the palm of the other, squeezing her fingers and hand, massaging them like they’d been in the cold too long and had lost all feeling.

“He was gone,” she whispered. “My baby . . .”

She started to cry and her body got all slack, like a rag draped over a hook. Daddy just looked at her, and Grandma Sara had her eyes closed off from something she didn’t want to see. I couldn’t tell what it was cause my eyes weren’t working too well either.

By then we were all crying, talking or trying to talk through something that was too strong for words, even Mama and Daddy’s words. I remember us standing and holding on to each other, holding each other up, and Grandma Sara was in the middle cause she couldn’t move much.

She looked at me and winked. I ain’t ever seen her do that before, and it was kind of scary. She pulled me closer and whispered in my ears, whispered something she said one time when I was younger.

“Remember this, Elijah. Hands don’t lie!” Her hands gripped me with a strength that pushed all the air out of my body, and I had to stop crying cause you need air to make tears.

 

I left a few days later, but Daddy was wrong about one thing. He thought me leaving was about catching up with myself someplace else, but part of me could never leave that cabin. Hell, I’m there right now, where and when I used to be a little boy named Elijah Yancy.

I left when I became a man.

I
had a dream the night before I left home, before all that walking, before the road began to eat into me with every step, and me becoming just like those roads out of the South, dry or muddy, hot or cold, always empty of something gone so long you couldn’t even remember what name it had.

What I dreamed was my mama’s doing. I remember her telling me about the slave ships that brought her people to this place, and how so many of them never even made it to America, how they was lucky to never know nothing but Africa. Remembering the sadness in Mama’s eyes when she was talking about my brother and saying good-bye made me think about those mothers and fathers she spoke about when I was barely a child, women and men whose brothers and sisters and children did not walk away and become lost, but were stolen.

Before I went to bed the night before leaving, I started thinking about the last night of those colored people from Africa, my people, their last night before they were caught and taken and put deep into the stink of a slave ship, no more sunrise ever again for those who went down into that hold, no more moonlight ever, no more wind, no more anything that was Africa. I was thinking about all that as I fell asleep and woke, or thought I was waking, by the edge of the sea.

I knew it was the Atlantic Ocean without anyone saying, just knew it. It was angry, full of noise, and there was foam coming up from the waves like the water was heaving up something it didn’t
want no more, like the ocean giving birth to something that didn’t want to get born.

And then I saw them, just their heads first, a few here and there and then hundreds, thousands, bobbing up and down, and their bodies beginning to push them up into air, into sound. It was people, colored people, all of them naked and crying. I could hear no sound come out of their lips, but they were yelling plenty cause I could see it in the veins in their necks and the jut of their jaws, how skin hung tight to the bones of their faces. They were crying, all right, or screaming.

They were coming back. They were being born right in front of me. They were walking out of the Atlantic up onto the beach where I was standing. And they were so silent, thousands of them coming out of the water, walking up on the beach dripping with salt and tears, pulling themselves free from what had killed them or was keeping them quiet.

Still I couldn’t hear them. Thousands and thousands of men who were boys and women who were girls, all slowly getting free of whatever it was that held them down, that was keeping them back, and it looked like water and sounded like water, and there was salt in the air and black clouds heaving over like an ocean wave in the dead of night.

Then I knew who they were and why there were so many. They were all the Africans who had been ambushed, caught, stolen, trapped, and robbed of those things that couldn’t be held in your hand but only in your heart. They were the ones tossed over when they were sick, the ones buried by water before they were even dead. They were the proud ones, the angry ones who spoke up, spit back, curled bones into fists. The ones who had fire for eyes, the ones who set ships ablaze with their tears, who didn’t survive the journey, warriors who jumped into the sea, who breathed deep the sweat of sharks that took them to the next world one by one.

Now the ocean was giving them back, whole and no mark on them I could see, nothing to make you think a shadow had ever
fallen on them. Nothing but their eyes, which gave back the light of here but also the paleness of there, the
there
that had swallowed them up. Eyes that were too full to ever cry again cause no amount of crying could empty the pain, unless there was room for another ocean right here, pushing this one to the side of the sky.

They kept walking out of the ocean, freeing themselves from water, being born here on a different shore, on the other side of the loves they lost, that were taken from them, their families. Their families, my God, they could never let go of what was taken till the day they died, their fathers’ hands, mothers’ hands, brothers’ hands, sisters’ hands all straining to grip through the water, the tears, the blue.

And then it began to change. At first they all were alone, and then one saw a face it remembered, and then another and another. I saw hands grabbing hands, and people seeing people they didn’t expect to see ever again, people they hadn’t known were gone. It kept happening, and it was beginning to be a sound. That sound grew and grew till it overtook the booming of wave after wave hitting the shore, a sound high like a gull cry but easier to take, a sound like laughter but not laughter, cause it wasn’t an easy place for laughter to be.

But whatever it was, the sound started to break up the black clouds over the water. They began to loosen and squirm, and a brightness showed on the ragged edge of the dark. A flicker, a hole in a night barely big enough for a star, but any fool could see that day was coming, even the dead could see day breaking.

Wherever those people were walking to, it was better than the place they’d left behind. All that time walking on the bottom of the sea, through mountains we can’t see and canyons we can’t reach and flats we got no name for, such a long walk, and only now getting to the other side, rising up to a place without a name.

As I stood there staring out to sea, watching the slave-ship dead come ashore, I could feel something in the wind at my back, and I could see something ablaze in their faces. But when I turned round to see what they saw, what moved them to rise up out of death and
cold water, that’s when I woke up, and I never had a view of the place they were heading, all those people Mama said were lost and gone. All I could see was them arriving and then passing by me.

I wanted to have that dream again, wanted to have it so I could turn round and see what was pulling them free, find the light that brought them to where they were meant to be, that made every slave, every human being, every mother, father, son, daughter that was thrown or jumped to the waves wake up and know where to go and begin that walk to freedom. But all I could ever dream again was just a dream of water, of a beach, and me all alone on it.

So the dead didn’t ever rise again from the sea.