Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the king

The women joined in, a fiery bellowing of low notes, their altos and Ms. Zelma’s tenor filling the church hall so that soon it was packed to its rafters with sound. Mrs. Jeremiah started clapping and the other women joined in and then there was only song and the sounds of their hands moving. Some of the sorrow that had sunk into the room began to lift, to ride the women’s voices. After they’d gone at the hymn hard and then soft, the white candles flickering at each end of Avril’s picture and the evening dropping down into night, they were together, bonded by lyric and melody. When Mrs. Jeremiah felt the air begin to settle, she slowed down the hallelujahs and brought them to a close. The women sat together in the buzzing quiet, some whispering “Amen” and other sounds of assent, some dabbing their brows and necks, all retreating into the private place where their own dead were with them.

And then, Mrs. Jeremiah spoke.

“We are gathered together this night and for the ones to come to send home the spirit of our sister Hyacinth’s daughter, Avril. We call upon our most high God now and ask Him to wash His faithful servant Avril in the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We rebuke every evil thing that stomped out her spirit in life and any evil thing that might want to trap her spirit here now. We call upon and claim this space as her final resting place. We say to our sister Avril that your workday is done and it’s time now to go be with your Father in heaven. And to Hyacinth we say with heavy hearts that your tears are our tears, your sorrows are our sorrows, your fears our fears. We know as well as you do that joy comes in the morning, but that the nights can be long and hard. We will watch these nights with you.”

Hyacinth looked up at Mrs. Jeremiah, at her black dress that hung loose at her knees, and the long chain for spectacles that hung from her neck. It was strange to hear the words she’d spoken to other grieving women now spoken to her. She looked at the picture of Avril again and the song that was on her heart came out of her.

When peace like a river descendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say

The hill women’s chorus swelled as they sang, “It is well/It is well/With my soul.”

And then Hyacinth heard a smaller voice behind her, and felt a tap on her right shoulder. She turned around to see Phaedra. She didn’t shoo her home or ask what had happened to Dionne, whom she’d left at home in charge of things. She tried to draw Phaedra onto her lap, but she was too big for that. Phaedra wriggled off and settled into the empty chair beside Hyacinth. She closed her eyes and slipped into the heave and flow of the women’s song. By right, children shouldn’t be at a nine-night. But there was no one brave or silly enough to try to stop Hyacinth or anyone who belonged to her from doing what they were determined to do.

Phaedra felt the next song begin inside her chest. Since her mother died, melodies haunted her at odd times of the day. When she was brushing her teeth or washing the dishes, dusting the coffee table. The hardest part of losing her mother was that there were minutes and hours and almost whole days that would go by when Phaedra would forget that Avril was dead. And then she would remember. At these moments, there was the fact of her mother’s irreversible absence and then also the music that her mother loved. Avril was never religious, but she loved to sing and her voice when it soared gave her flight above her pain.

“Jesus loves the little children,” Phaedra started in a tiny voice that hardly passed her lips. When joined by Hyacinth and the other women, Phaedra’s voice grew wings.

“Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world,” they sang, and all wanted so much to believe.

PHAEDRA TURNED HER BACK to Jean and felt his fingers and measuring tape indent her skin. Jean was the darkest shade of chestnut; he had close-cropped hair, a lanky frame with arms that stretched almost to his knees, and thick, plum-colored lips. In another place, outside the hill, he might have been called beautiful, but here he was Buller Man Jean, and the son of his mother, Trixie, and neither allowed space for anything beyond a kind of grudging tolerance. To be the son of a whore, born into sin, was one thing. To be a homosexual, to choose a life of sin, was something else entirely, a way of sloughing off the obligations of common decency and flaunting the shame that was his birthright. The hill, like every place, had its deviants, and like other small places, what it demanded of them was sublimation. Phaedra could feel Jean’s sadness behind his tough exterior, and experienced it as a kind of gravitational pull. Phaedra didn’t complain about the rough, quick way that Jean calculated the length and width of her. She knew that, like her mother, beneath Jean’s sandpaper exterior lay a tender, bruised heart.

Before they left New York, Avril told Dionne and Phaedra to give her love to Jean. Once they were safely out of their mother’s earshot, Dionne said that she wasn’t giving any love to her mother’s faggot friend. But the cost of making fast friends with Jean’s cousin Saranne was that Dionne had to see Jean every day when she sought escape from the heat and Hyacinth’s rule in Trixie’s air-conditioned shop. Over time, Dionne’s initial iciness toward Jean, who she thought was eccentric in a way that reminded her of Avril, thawed. Dionne still believed that Jean’s problem, and Avril’s too, was that they held too tightly to their status as outsiders, which Dionne couldn’t understand, given how much she wanted a normal family, a normal life, and how little their being different had profited them.

Dionne and Saranne were usually the only people in the shop where Trixie sold detergent and other sundries; the hill women only patronized her when either rain or desperation forced them to produce something for her besides scorn, and even then they would make only the barest of greetings and point to the things they wanted with their mouths. Phaedra, on the other hand, visited Jean often, finding pleasure in his easy way, a respite from the demand for good behavior and idle chatter that she found everywhere else on the hill. While Jean took her measurements, Phaedra admired the bolts of fabric that lined the walls of Jean’s sewing studio, which was really just his bedroom, off to the side of his mother’s shop. Since Avril had died, Hyacinth’s house pulsed with reminders of her — her school pictures, the clothes Dionne unearthed from her closet and hung all over her room in a kind of tribute, the rocking chair where Phaedra liked to read and into which Avril had carved her initials, in every new crease and crag in her grandmother’s face. It was a relief to be somewhere with bright things, things that were not Avril’s. She pointed to the fabric that she liked, yellow cotton with red hibiscus stamped on it.

“That’s what I want,” Phaedra said.

“That kind of thing don’t wear to funeral,” Jean replied.

“Why not?”

“People wear black or white or purple. You have to respect the dead.”

“But Mommy’s favorite flower is hibiscus.”

“That’s true. That makes me think. Have you ever seen pictures of your mother from when she was younger?”

“Only a few.”

Jean took the needle that was parked in the corner of his mouth and stuck it on a pincushion. He reached under his neatly made bed, which became a seating area for clients during their fittings, and then opened a red faux-leather photo album over his knees.