Tina Mcelroy Ansa (25 page)

“You mean to tell me ya’ll were Maroons in Florida?” Lena felt as if she had stepped into a history lesson.

“Well, when my folks run off they headed south ’cause they’d been listenin’ and payin’ ’ttention. And they knew how close Spanish terr’tory was. Soon after they took off, my pa and my ma, they met up with a band of Indians, Seminole is what they was. Huh, honest people.

“Did you know Seminole mean ’runaway,’ Lena?” he asked.

“Anyway, they had had some experience with runaways from other plantations, and they welcome my family. Ma had her first child right there on the Seminole settlement.”

“So, you weren’t born in Georgia?” Lena asked as if she had just met Herman at a cocktail party.

“Naw, Lena, I was born in Flor’da, not here in Georgia, but I ain’t got no sand ’tween my toes. I got pine needles and cypress beads. We lived in a settlement in the nawth part of Flor’da in the swamps. Ain’t nothin’ but a made-up line separate ’em—Flor’da and Georgia.

“Then, after the war and ema’cipation, I traveled on back up this way, doin’ this, doin’ that. Kinda settled ’round here in Mulberry.”

Herman looked at Lena and smiled. “Sho’ am glad I did.” Then, he continued.

“Naw, baby, my daddy warn’t no slave. My mama neither.” Herman paused. “Naw, baby. They was warriors!”

And Lena just nodded her head.

“The Indian tribes ’round down south, you know, they didn’t play, neither. Seminoles waged three wars wid this country fo’ they freedom. But, Lena, everythang they used in everyday life, they made it pretty. Remind me a’
my people.
Them Indians and us black folks was good to each other. But ya’ll don’t know nothin’ ’bout that, do ya’ll?” Herman sounded sadder for humanity than exasperated with local black folks.

She remembered a poem she had written in college during the height of the black awareness movement in the sixties and asked Herman, “Want to hear a poem I wrote in college?”

“Sho’,” he said with a surprised smile on his face. “I’d be honored.”

Lena put the dish towel on the counter and stood up straight like a schoolgirl in Catholic school.

“That’s a good poem, Lena. You put words up against each other real good.”

Lena smiled “thank you” and took a little bow there in her kitchen next to the African violets blooming on the shelf over the sink.

“I wonder how many people think about that? You know, the ties and the connections?” Herman mused.

It sounded like a rhetorical question so Lena did not answer. She kept clipping the ends of the flowers at a forty-five-degree angle and listening to Herman talk. He had a nice voice, strong, unhurried, southern. He talked sort of like Lena Home, if Lena Horne had bass in her voice.

Lena wondered how long it had been since he had last spoken.

He stopped his talking of the ties between black people and red people to answer her question.

“Lena, I ain’t spoke in a hundred years. Ain’t had no throat, ain’t had no mouth, ain’t had no tongue. But I’m happy to say I do now.” And he smiled and looked at her so it actually made her blush.

“Why you think that?” he asked. “I’m talkin’ too much?”

And she chuckled at his unshielded forthrightness. It spoke of another century, another time when folks didn’t spend so much time explaining and dissembling. Lena felt she always had to think twice before she opened her mouth. She thought she was going to like this Herman’s frankness.

“Naw, Herman, you’re not talking too much at all.”

It was the first time she had said his name aloud to him and the sound of it was so intimate, she lowered her eyes and blushed again.

“It’s interesting,” she reassured him. “You are right. I hardly ever think about Native Americans in a real sense. And I got their stuff all around here.

“Humph, isn’t that something?” she said seriously as she gave Herman the big vase of flowers.

“Where to?” he asked, happy to be of help.

“Wherever
you
want them,” she said, and immediately felt as if she had just conferred a blessing on Herman because she felt the warm holy feeling flood back over her like the welcome heat from the fire. He smiled and took the flowers to her bedroom and placed them on the linen and mudcloth-covered table by her bed.

She leaned on the sink and watched Herman stride out of the kitchen. When she remembered that he was hungry, she hurried into the dining room to set the table, throwing one of her mother’s damask tablecloths on first. Then, she took down her simple gold-rimmed bone china from one of the white pine hutches in the Great Jonah Room.

Herman stirred the food and heaped it up in big serving bowls, using whatever china struck his fancy. When he put his choices on the table next to hers, it looked like a marriage of opposites. The delicate crème china looked right comfortable with the heavy red vintage mixing bowl full of turnip greens and the big yellow soup tureen from her grandmother’s friend Miss Zimmie’s kitchen full of lean stew meat and potatoes with carrots and onions. Herman had wrapped corn muffins in a striped dish towel and set them in a basket he had found hanging on the wall.

There were already candles burning everywhere, on the dining room table, on the buffet and on top of the old rolltop desk she used for a small bar. She placed two lit tall green tapers from Christmas in the center of the table. That’s when she saw the amaranth-colored hyacinth bloom lying by her plate.

She picked it up and bringing it up to her nose, inhaled deeply.

“Thank you, Herman.”

“My pleasure,” he said proudly. “Yo’ pleasure
is
my pleasure, Lena.”

Lena was as pleased as she could be with the situation.

Then, pulling out the dining room chairs her mother and father had occupied, they sat down to eat.

“You want to say grace, Lena?” he asked, stretching his hand out to take hers as if they were in church.

She took hold of his hand, the first time they had touched all night, and felt the rough calluses on his palms and the tips of his fingers.

“You believe, Herman?” she asked.

“Believe?” he said, then laughed. “Shoot, Lena, baby, you can’t be dead and not believe in God.”

She looked at Herman and smiled at the thought of them sharing faith.

“Well, then, Herman, you go ahead.”

Herman bowed his head and closed his coal-black eyes. Then, he lifted his broad head and looked right at Lena, then, he bowed his head again, his thick wild hair framing his sweet dark face like a halo, closed his eyes again and said, “I do thank you, Lord.”

He squeezed Lena’s hand and then let it go.

As she served up the thick slices of stew meat in gravy, she paused and, looking to Herman, asked, “You eat red meat, Herman?”

Herman just chuckled.

“Lena, you ever had what they calls Apalachicola oysters, shellfish from the long skinny top of Flor’da, the Gulf side?” he asked. “They some little sweet oysters.”

“Oh, yeah, Herman. We can get some shipped in. Same day,” Lena leapt to suggest.

Herman just smiled.

“Lots a’ mens say those little oysters taste like a woman to them. But me, to me they taste like freedom.”

“Freedom?!” Lena asked with her own smile at the image of the moist-wet mollusk Herman raised before her.

“When I was growing up in Flor’da, oh, I was ’bout eight the first time the grown folks let me go. They’d round up parties and we’d
forage on the coast to harvest us some of those little sweet ones from the waters there. It was only partly dangerous, I guess. We was all dressed alike, our scoutin’ party, travelin’ the backwoods the mens knew.

“We eat all kinds a’ thangs in the woods, Lena. That’s why I laughed when you asked me if I eat red meat.”

Lena just smiled at the story, remembering how her father, Jonah, had relished good mealtime conversation. Her father had been like Herman: He would eat anything! But she did wonder at how a question about red meat led to a story about eating oysters.

“Funny thang ’bout freedom, baby. It seem to have a lot a’ extra arms and limbs to grab hold a’ thangs. It ain’t always the thangs you want to grab holt of either.”

When they finished eating, Herman leaned back in her father’s chair at the big dining room table and patted his hard flat stomach and said, “Uh, I feel like a new man!”

Lena saw him reach for her plate and his, but she stopped him.

“That’s okay. James Petersen will get those in the morning.”

Herman got up in time to pull Lena’s chair out for her.

“You want to wait awhile and take a swim, Herman?” she asked, thinking of ways to entertain him.

She walked into the pool room and trailed her hand in the water.

“Water’s still warm,” she said enticingly. Lena sure did want to see him without any clothes on. He had not left his spot by the fire, so, she came back in and sat on the sofa near the fire, too.

“Maybe later, Lena, but I want to do som’um else right now,” he said, standing in front of her. His hips were right about at Lena’s eye level, and she kept trying to keep him from seeing her inspecting his old-fashioned buttoned fly.

She held her breath as she waited for him to speak or move.

H
erman stood there before Lena in the middle of her Great Jonah Room a second, turning a bit, his hands hanging comfortably at his side, leaning back in his strong-looking legs, his head tilted to the side like an animal listening.

Lena thought for a second that he was waiting for a signal from the beyond. But he was waiting for the next selection to begin playing on the CD player.

“Good,” he said as Duke Ellington and his band began playing “Mood Indigo.” “It’s a slow tune.”

Then, Herman turned to where she was sitting before the fire.

“Come on, Lena, baby.” Herman extended his sturdy arm and asked gallantly, sweetly, earnestly,
“Dance wid
me.’”

The gesture reminded Lena immediately of every teenaged black boy she had ever seen at a church social, prom, cotillion, sock hop, basement party or sweetshop coolly, serenely sliding across the dance floor headed for her, his next partner. Then, when he got there, not saying a word, not “Wanna dance?” not “Care to?” not “May I have
this dance?” not anything. Instead, the young swain would throw his hand palm-up into her lap, look off into the distance as if he didn’t care if she accepted or not, and wait for her to take his hand so he could lead her out onto the dance floor for a slow spin.

Lena hesitated a moment as she stared at Herman’s hand. It was one thing to dance by herself over the floor of The Place when she thought no one was looking or to dance alone to Salt ’n’ Pepa naked in her bathroom mirror. Getting up and dancing with a new man—even if he was a ghost—was a different matter.

“Uh-uh, girl,” he said with a serious chuckle. “I done waited a hundred years to dance again! And I get my first dance wid
you
and you sittin’ up there sayin’, ’No thank you.’ Uh-uh. Get up off your pretty butt and dance wi’ me. Come on in my arms, Lena, and dance wid me.”

He sounded almost as if he were singing to her, serenading her, cajoling her, just tolling her out on the floor. It was so seductive. Each time he said it—”Come on, Lena, baby. Dance wi’ me”—it sounded more and more enticing.

Remembering her fiascoes on the dance floor ever since she was thirteen, she still hesitated. She just sat there rubbing her hands together in her lap.

“Aw, Lena, ain’t no need to be shame or scared in front a’ me,” he said, his hand still suspended in the air in front of her. “Anything you do, any way you do it is fine wi’ me.”

Lena just wanted to grunt and say, “Ummm.”

Instead, she rose from the soft leather couch and glided into Herman’s open arms, the fire’s light dancing in her eyes, placed one bare foot between his long strong legs, slipped her right hand into the space at the base of his neck under the bush of his hair, and lay the top of her head softly against the base of his throat where she could hear his heart beat.
Boom-boomp, boom-boomp, boom-boomp, boom-boomp, boom-boomp, boom-boomp, boom-boomp.

Lena and Herman discovered immediately that they loved to
slow-dance together. Herman danced an old-fashioned two-step, but he didn’t move to the music like a country boy, studied and rehearsed. Herman slow-danced like a block boy, like a juker: slowly, sensuously, casually, unhurried. He curled her all up in his arms and hunched his back over her frame just a little bit so that it looked and felt as if she were inside his body, protected, loved, held. He wrapped his hand around her hand, then tucked both hands in the cocoon between their dancing bodies. He rolled his hips slowly and gently against the top of her pelvis and guided her around the floor.

Lena was able to follow him right away. No awkward movements, no bumping into each other, no stepping on toes, no tripping over feet, no missing the beat.

And he moved unhurried, unhurried.

They danced all over her house, past still-burning, half-burned and burned-out candles on plates and ashtrays and one-of-a-kind glazed bowls, out onto the deck, by the foot of her bed, past the pool, around the messy dining room table, back in front of the fireplace in the Great Jonah Room, then back outside to dance under the stars.

“Look, Lena,” he said in her ear, tipping her head back with a gentle touch on her slender chin, “the sky is full a’ stars tonight. There’s the Drankin’ Gourd. There’s the Serpent. OOooo. Is that the Crab? There’s the Virgin. You don’t useshally see her this clear in April.”

Lena had never enjoyed a dance so much. She felt lost in the stars and lost track of the time. She felt they must have been dancing for hours. They danced to Nat King Cole. They danced to Otis Redding. They danced to Marvin Gaye. They danced to Prince. They danced to Smokey Robinson. They danced to Earth, Wind and Fire. They danced to Jon Lucien. They danced to Boyz II Men. So, it had to have been a good long time. But Herman danced as if he had all the time in the world.