Kaitlyn Greenidge - We Love You, Charlie Freeman

But Charlie kept crying. He would not be comforted by any words they said.

My mother was a Star of the Morning. My father was a Saturnite. I was first an Infant Auxiliary Star, and then I was a Girl Star, then a Young Lady Star, and three years ago, right before Mumma and Pop drank a jigger of cyanide each, I became, in my own right, a full-blown Star of the Morning, Fifth House, Second Quadrant Division, North Eastern Lodge of the colored hamlet of Spring City in the town of Courtland County, Massachusetts.

After my parents committed suicide I declared, if only to myself, that I was no longer a Star of the Morning. But even now, three years on, I can’t stop wearing my pin. During the day while I’m teaching class, it’s hidden under my shirt collar, pinned right up close to the front of my throat. At night, after I’ve dressed my hair and put it in its cap, after I’ve rubbed my face first with cold cream and then a worn, oily piece of chamois, I do what Mumma showed me. I stand in front of the mirror, my skin all greasy and soft, and I take off the pin while staring at my reflection. A Star of the Morning is never allowed to look directly at her pin. My pin is a small brass knot filed down to look like a burst of light, with a rusty garnet in the middle. When I was an Infant Star, I would stand in the mirror beside Mumma, watching our reflections’ fingers at work unfastening our pins and I was filled with love. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Mumma told me it was better than a diamond.

Stars of the Morning always take off their pins before they sleep, and always before their evening prayers, so as not to make a false idol out of it. Now when I take off my pin, I place it on my nightstand, and then, if I was to follow what Mumma taught me, I am supposed to reflect on my moral failings during the day and recite the Lord’s Prayer because Stars of the Morning are good Christian Negro women. But no one, if they could read my thoughts, would call me a Christian anymore, and besides, I don’t believe in prayer, so during this bit of the routine I try to just sit quiet on my bed. But after years of ritual, I can’t help myself. Even when I’m dumb, the blood in my ears pounds out the rhythm of “Our Father, who art in heaven.” To drown out these pious cadences, in my head I sometimes chant the obscene version I learned as a girl: “Our Father, who farts in heaven, whorish be his name.”

I am a thirty-six-year-old unmarried, orphaned Negro schoolteacher, in charge of a room full of impressionable young colored minds and every night, I sing a dirty nursery rhyme to help me go to sleep. It is enough to laugh, if I did not always feel like weeping.

The time for prayer over, ready for bed, the last thing I do before I lie down and blow out the light is to stand before the mirror again and pinch the pin between my fingers and very carefully stick it to the lace collar of my nightgown. I’ve slept with the pin for as long as I can remember. At the base of my neck, just below the collarbone, is a livid red line from its sharpest end drawing on me.

MY BEST MEMORY is of Initiation. I was seven years old. We stood in front of the church basement door, on a lawn so bright you could see the green even in dusk. My mother was the most powerful Star in Spring City so I was the head of the line, even though I didn’t want to be. I was terrified. An older girl had once told me that to become an Infant Star, they set your hair on fire. Her friend said the big women Stars made you shake a dead lady’s hand, the hand of the very first Star who ever lived. “The big women Stars keep it in a special box,” she said, “and when you shake it the bones crunch and the dust gets on your fingers. The dead lady’s dust is what makes you a Star.”

I had asked Mumma about all of these rumors and she told me they were nonsense and those girls were just jealous. Their mothers were loose women and the girls had proven themselves unruly and so they could never become an Infant Star like me. But I remained uneasy, and when I pressed Mumma, she still wouldn’t tell me exactly what happened at Initiation. All my life I thought we had no secrets between us. The year before, when our tabby Dina birthed a litter, she told me frank and true how cats and people were made. She told me how the universe came to be, and where our earth stood in it, and that God did not live in the sun but in the breath and air and dust around and within us. “The sun is just a very bright ball,” she told me. Which was more than the other mothers told their children. But she wouldn’t tell me about becoming a Star, as many times as I asked her.

For Initiation, I wore a white lace dress and patent leather shoes Mumma ordered special from Boston. Nine little girls pressed against my back, all breathing heavy. We had to fast for a day and a night before Initiation. According to the bylaws of the Stars of the Morning, Infant Stars are supposed to consume only milk and honey, and they have to chant “I am a vessel for the light of our Lord” before they drink it. But no one in Spring City could afford honey, so we drank our milk with raw brown sugar instead. I breathed the rotten sweetness of it on the other children’s spit and in their girlish sweat.

I squeezed my eyes shut very tight and kept them that way until I heard the basement door of the church rumble open. I heard the girls behind me breathe quicker, talk faster. I felt something brush against my hand. The dead woman, I thought, but the hand that took mine was fat and warm and it led me very carefully down the steps and into the church basement. Once I was there, it smelled the same as it always had, like earth and the moths that ate the choir robes and the greening tin of the church collection plate. I almost opened my eyes. But a voice said, “Keep your lights closed, Infant Star.” Right beneath my chin I felt a point of warmth and I knew that it was someone holding a candle close to my face. This comforted me, somehow, to know the light was near. I heard the other girls stumble down the stairs one by one. Most gasped. A few of the very young ones started to cry. Then I heard the basement door rumble shut. I opened my eyes. And I laughed.

I laughed because even though the room smelled just the same, when I opened my eyes I saw it had become the most beautiful place I have ever been in my life, before or since. It wasn’t dark. The earth walls were covered in white paper. What seemed like a thousand candles were lit all around us, in tiny glass and tin lanterns. Strings of white hydrangea were threaded across the top of the room. Clouds hung down from the ceiling and for a moment I thought, Mumma’s brought down the very sky to greet me. But then I saw that it was just tulle, from Miss Vera’s dress shop, doubled up on itself to seem like heaven.

We jumbled ourselves all up until we formed a new line. I was now in the middle. Mumma strode out before us in a long white robe trimmed with yellow. She held a gold-bound Bible in her hands. She opened a page at random, and one by one we had to hover a finger over the Bible, let it fall down, and then read from whichever passage we chose. The passage gave us our secret name, the name only other Stars knew us by.

The poor girl before me chose Herod, and she cried and cried because she was going to have to go by the name of a known baby killer. I thought for certain Mumma would let Herod pick again, but she only looked on sternly as another Star patted the little girl’s back and told her some quickly made-up nonsense about this being a splendid opportunity to restore honor to the name. I was relieved, then, when I picked Nymphadora. My real name is Ellen, but Nymphadora is so much better. I bet you didn’t know there was a Nymphadora in the Bible. There is. Colossians 4:15. Later I found out our Bible was a mistranslation — it should have read “Nympha,” and Nympha should have been a man. It was by some lucky magic that I got so fine a name as Nymphadora of the Spring City Stars.