Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

There was Ida B. Wells of the Washington Evening Star (“gutsy as hell”), her hair gathered up into a gorgeous pompadour that I’m going to try to copy as soon as my chin will agree to tilt up in just as dignified a way as hers. There was Charlotta Bass, publisher of the California Eagle … she’s still very much alive, that one — Aunt Mia got her autograph and tucked it into the frame along with the picture. There was Robert S. Abbott of The Chicago Defender with his bowler hat on, his eyes stern and kind — when I fell asleep, he was the one who stuck up for me. “It is possible to develop a nose for a good story,” he told Charlotta Bass and Ida B. Wells, when they pointed out that I didn’t have one. He borrowed Dad’s voice to say that, and I liked him all the more for it.

I knew that there was more to be discovered about Aunt Mia’s stomachache, and I followed my nose a little, or tried to, anyway, not wanting to disappoint Robert S. Abbott. On the bus home the next afternoon I asked just one question and Mom looked at me with that quick flash in her eyes, the knife look. “Try to remember that it’s none of your business, Bird.”

Something happened, that much is clear, something bigger than indigestion. But I don’t know if I’m ready to cross Mom in order to get this particular scoop. It looks like Aunt Mia’s feeling better now, anyway. I can return to this matter once my skills are honed. I’ll call that choosing my battles.

In the meantime I’ll be finding out who my enemy is, and what exactly it is he or she has got against me. Proof or deduction, I’m not fussy about how I get there. I don’t know what it’s like to wish someone ill. Sure, I’ve occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he’s told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we’re getting married once we get old enough, so we don’t have to make nice all of the time.

Gee-Ma Agnes (not my grandmother in any biological sense, but… it’s similar to the way things are with Aunt Mia) says I’ve definitely got one. An enemy, that is. I told her what happens to me sometimes, with mirrors, and she said: “Watch out; that’s your enemy at work, trying to get rid of you.”

I don’t think she was trying to be spooky. She was shelling pistachio nuts and she made her words sound as if they were a comment on the color of the nut meat. People assume Gee-Ma doesn’t have anything to say because she’s small and shaky and doesn’t seem to follow conversations very well. But Gee-Ma can get interested in conversation when she wants to. The stories that make everyone else say “Get outta here” are the stories Gee-Ma takes an interest in. We used to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone together, and she’d slap her knee and crow: “He’s right! Rod Serling is right. ” She doesn’t like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie because “Magic is not a joke, Bird.”

Phoebe the housemaid acts like Gee-Ma is too old to move—“You stay right where you are,” she tells her, and dusts carefully around her. She asks Gee-Ma real simple questions, real slowly: “Enjoying that soup, Mrs. Miller?” Phoebe should maybe stop and think of Mrs. Fletcher, my mom’s boss. She’s the same age as Gee-Ma Agnes. Just last year Mrs. Fletcher began living in sin with a bookbinder called Mr. Murphy. I have reason to believe that Mom and Dad interfere with each other pretty regularly; there are those mornings when I find Mom making breakfast and she’s wearing the shirt Dad was wearing just the night before and she hasn’t even buttoned it up, she just uses one of his neckties as a belt. The first moment of seeing Mom like that is always really, really gross, and now it seems that grown-ups just never stop interfering with each other. Me and Mom and probably half of Flax Hill saw Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Fletcher getting all cozy together on a picnic blanket on Farmer’s Green, feeding each other cherries, yet. Their combined age is around one hundred and thirty years, but Mr. Murphy isn’t shy about kissing Mrs. Fletcher’s hand in public. More than once Mrs. Fletcher has laid her head on Mr. Murphy’s shoulder and giggled like she’s never seen a shoulder before. Imagine what those two are like when there’s no one else there. Mrs. Fletcher isn’t even one of the quiet ones, so if that’s the kind of thing she gets up to, then there’s no telling what Gee-Ma’s got up her sleeve.

Gee-Ma’s husband moved back to Mississippi when their only daughter died. “He did invite me along,” Gee-Ma says. “He did invite me along, I’ll give him that.” But she liked Flax Hill better and anyway they hadn’t married for love. She won’t explain what they married for; another thing on my list to find out. She says the main thing is that they didn’t marry for love and neither of them really tried to make it grow, they sort of just expected to love each other after a certain number of years but it didn’t work out that way. All that happened was that she’d be having a nice day until she suddenly realized he’d be back from work in ten minutes, or he’d look at her during a gospel service and the sight of her seemed to get him all upset even though she was wearing a nice dress, and spotless gloves, and a smile.

I’ve seen Gee-Ma’s wedding photos and the “Well, here goes” look her and her husband both had on their faces, but in my head Gee-Ma’s husband is a colored man, not a sort of Italian-looking one. There was a man in Worcester last month… Aunt Mia was walking Mom and me to the bus stop and the man was huddled up in the doorway of a store that had closed up for the night. He drew even farther back into his corner when Aunt Mia tried to put some change into his hand. Words wobbled out from deep inside his beard: “Don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble, don’t want no trouble.” There was a glass bottle in his pocket and he folded his hands around it as it bumped against the wall.

Mom tapped my shoulder to make sure I kept walking and she called out: “Just put the money beside him, Mia,” but Aunt Mia didn’t listen until the man pushed her hand away. Then she dropped the coins at his feet and came running after us. “Gin and pride,” she said. Mom said it was most likely misery that was getting to him, not just gin or pride. Some ways of behaving seem distantly related to others. Now when I think of Gee-Ma’s husband getting all upset just because she smiled at him, he looks like the man in Worcester who badly needed the money in Aunt Mia’s hand and pushed it away.

Grammy Olivia says Gee-Ma Agnes’s husband is weak and Gee-Ma’s much better off without him. But Gee-Ma says that at heart her husband is still a boy from Itta Bena who couldn’t get used to not having to take his hat off whenever he speaks to a white person. “You can’t even say ‘the poor fella’—not really,” Gee-Ma says. “He’s probably really glad to be back to Mississippi, relieved that the world’s the right way up again and there are fountains specially marked out for him to drink from. I guess it’s not so different from those prisoners who get to feeling at home behind bars. I forgive him.” Gee-Ma Agnes talking about forgiving people tends to make Grammy Olivia say: “Indeed!” Especially when Gee-Ma tells people she forgives them before they even realize there’s anything they were supposed to apologize for. But Gee-Ma probably means well when it comes to her husband, the evidence of this being that they’re still married, and she remembers him in her prayers.

What I told her about me and mirrors is this:

Sometimes mirrors can’t find me. I’ll go into a room with a mirror in it and look around, and I’m not there. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but often enough. Sometimes when other people are there, but nobody ever notices that my reflection’s a no-show. Or maybe they decide not to notice because it’s too weird. I can make it happen when I move quickly and quietly, dart into a room behind the swinging of the door so it covers me the way a fan covers a face. Maybe I catch the mirror off guard somehow. It starts to look for me—“look for me” isn’t quite right — I know mirrors can’t see. But the image in the glass shifts just a little bit off center, left, then right, then back again, like it’s wondering why it isn’t reflecting all that stands in front of it. I know a girl just came in; now where’s she at?