CHAPTER TWENTY
When Ti’Mama Coinpenny answered the door of the Wise Owl Child Development center, she was confronted with a horrible sight. Two stern-faced white people, a man and a woman, stood before her holding clipboards.
The woman stepped forward and flashed a badge.
BOND AGENT was printed across the gold shield in capital letters. Ti’Mama had seen badges like that but couldn’t remember where. So many agencies and authorities. It was hard to keep track.
The white man stood back. That meant the woman was in charge. A sure sign these bond agents were social policemen. The man held his badge over the woman’s shoulder. He made a zipper motion over his mouth.
To remind Ti’Mama of her right to silence? Usually they read from a laminated card like the ones deaf people trade for handouts. Maybe this white man didn’t need a list. Maybe his crazy eyes and his zipper motion were good enough.
“I’m agent Bible and this is Agent Collins.” The woman consulted the papers on her clipboard. Her lips moved slightly as she reviewed the case against the Wise Owl Center.
Nurse Coinpenny didn’t try to read her lips; words on official papers are written in a language only lawyers and politicians understand. Fine print. Much too fine for nurses of Haitian ancestry.
These agents didn’t ask for identification. That was a good sign. Maybe they’d decided there were enough African faces looking through the bars of the county jail. Maybe these bond agents had come to check for safety violation, to count fire extinguishers and see if registrations were in order.
Ti’Mama gestured for the agents to come inside. Better to communicate with gestures since anything she said could be used against her. Policemen hit you then arrest you for your bruises. They shoot you and then get a paid vacation. If there was one thing Ti’Mama Coinpenny understood completely, it was the futility of resisting white people with badges.
“We need to see the nursery right away,” the woman told her. “Urgent police business.”
Ti’Mama led the white bond agents to the babies. She walked at an agonizingly slow pace, like a rheumatic tourist on a hiking trail with a steep incline. That was another thing Ti’Mama learned over the years. When white people want to hurry, it is best to move slowly. So you have time to think. To change course before they stampede you into a trap.
The police never answered questions, but the time had come for Ti’Mama to ask one. “What are you looking for?” She affected a Creole accent that didn’t really belong to her. It made her sound exotic, and perhaps a little dangerous.
“A baby,” the woman cop answered.
“We have five of those.” Ti’Mama opened the door to the nursery enclosure. “Yesterday we had six, but baby boy MT186 was placed in a permanent home.”
The bond agents inspected the babies. The man stood away from the children while the woman took their pictures with a cell phone.
That reminded Ti’Mama; she should call Mr. Luna right away. He never answered his telephone, but she could leave a message. Mr. Luna should know what the bond agents were doing at the Wise Owl Center. Police and babies didn’t mix.
“Andrew Tiger isn’t here,” Sarah told Robert. All the babies in the nursery were chronically malnourished and nervous. They had raw red spots on their lips and crusty green secretions in the corners of their eyes.
Robert backed away as far as he was able and held his clipboard in front of him, like a shield against the babies’ tragic lives. “Maybe Andrew was baby boy MT186.” He lowered his clipboard long enough to make eye contact with Sarah.
She moved from infant to infant taking pictures and clucking her disapproval of man’s inhumanity to man, like a fussy time and motion engineer evaluating the final days of the planet Earth.
“Maybe we should look at the Center’s records,” Robert suggested.
Sarah would have thought of that eventually. She knew all about records of abandoned children. They contained pictures and blood types, accounts of illnesses and vaccinations, racial profiles, hair color, eye color. Everything that could be measured or weighed or described in twenty words or less. Almost nothing about the desperate conditions that led to such records being kept. Her own DHS record was at least an inch thick. Robert’s must be as heavy as an urban phone book.
Ti’Mama had worked with Child Services long enough to understand how all the alphabetized agencies argued among themselves. Pissing contests. It was never a good idea for a citizen to be caught in the middle of a pissing contest.
Nurse Coinpenny knew a lot about HIPAA regulations and patient confidentiality, but not enough to wrestle policemen over the made up rights of unwanted babies. Bad things happened to nurses who accepted such responsibilities. Her boss, Mr. Luna, was the one who should be deciding about the babies’ records. He wasn’t exactly white, but he was a political man. That was almost the same thing.
“Mr. Luna might say you need a warrant.” Ti’Mama looked at the floor as she spoke. She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and back again. Her ankle bracelet of mercury dimes jingled like a pocket full of small change, reminding her of her heritage. Descended from African queens and kings. Stolen by Arabs, sold to Europeans, but the African gods still watched over her.
“This the man you know as Mr. Luna?” The woman bond agent showed her an Oklahoma drivers’ license.
Ti’Mama didn’t want to look. Policemen could be tricky. They had access to things like false documents and drivers’ licenses. This one had a picture of Mr. Luna, but it said his name was Hashilli Maytubby.
“Indian Name,” Ti’Mama said. She directed the statement to the male cop even though the woman was clearly the person in charge.
“Mr. Luna is Hispanic. Everyone at the center knows that.” Ti’Mama hoped her statement might shift the agents’ interest to the secretary or the other duty nurse, but that wasn’t going to work. She heard doors opening and closing. She heard cars starting their engines in the parking lot. All the other members of the Wise Owl Center’s staff were taking unauthorized personal time, leaving Ti’Mama alone in with her babies and these agents. Why would the police allow the others to leave? Ti’Mama whispered a prayer asking the Loa for protection from these official intruders. She briefly considered running for the door, but she could not. She was the guardian of the unwanted babies. She changed their diapers, gave them formula and medication. She gave all the love she could spare to the little children with numbers instead of names. She wouldn’t abandon them now, even if it meant going to jail.
But these two agents weren’t arresting her. They weren’t hauling out handcuffs and legal papers. They were arguing for her cooperation, trying to persuade her to show them the records. Ti’Mama was granted an epiphany, perhaps from Sobo, the Loa of strength, or Dumballah, the father Loa who protects women and children.
“Bond agent ain’t police.” She slipped deeper into the Caribbean dialect her grandparents spoke during religious ceremonies. It felt strange on her tongue, unnatural and holy. Ti’Mama had always held the African gods in deep respect. She’d given offerings and requested favors, but she never felt them as a tangible presence until this moment.
“Bond agent is bounty hunter,” Ti’Mama said. “Ain’t given no authority.” She could feel the strength of the Voodoo pantheon seeping into her body from the earth and the air around her. With the help of the Loa, Ti’Mama Coinpenny would delay the intruders until Mr. Luna arrived or until he sent the real police to cart them off to the white man’s jail.
Ti’Mama would have held her ground if her concentration had not been broken by the slow steady drumbeat of heavy leather pads on the floor of the Wise Owl Center.
The thumping approached the place where Ti’Mama made her stand. Had it been a mistake to call on the African gods? Supplicants were known to die, even as their prayers were answered. Crossing the ocean on slave ships had left the African gods bad tempered. They were unpredictable and always hungry for blood.
“Easy to anger and
hard to satisfy.” That’s what Ti’Mama’s grandparents said. Thoughts of death and destruction pushed resistance out of her mind.
Big Shorty lumbered into the enclosure where the babies were kept. He stopped in the center of the room, as still as a hologram, perfectly balanced on his stumps. Ti’Mama stood as still as a rabbit frozen under the shadow of an eagle.
Big Shorty didn’t speak until a hummingbird darted into the room and hovered over his right shoulder.
“Give these people what they want,” he said, as loudly and clearly as a used car commercial on AM radio. He repeated it three times, once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost.
He made a circuit around the room, keeping Ti’Mama in the center of his orbit. The hummingbird kept pace with him in fits and starts. By the time he lumbered out the door, nurse Coinpenny was ready to cooperate. The order came from Baron Saturday himself, the Loa of the dead. Not the most powerful of the African gods, but easily the most frightening.
It took Ti’Mama less than ten minutes to collect a stack of records representing every baby who had passed through the Wise Owl Child Development Center in the past year. She gave them to the woman without a word. She released the folders as soon as the female bond agent held them securely, mindful that magical power can be transmitted through ordinary objects. She crossed her arms over her queasy stomach and whispered the Lord’s Prayer without a trace of Creole accent. Ti’Mama would wait with her babies until Mr. Luna returned. She hoped he wouldn’t be too long.
It was a short, quiet walk from the Wise Owl Center to Riverside Gardens Cemetery. An unasked question fluttered in the air between Robert and Sarah like an imaginary butterfly. Robert was the one who put it into words.
“The hummingbird. Was it Shorty’s great-great-grandfather?”
Sarah didn’t answer. She couldn’t accept the idea, but she couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. She clutched the eighty odd records against her chest and pretended she hadn’t heard.
When Robert tried to ask the question again, Sarah showed him her bond agent’s badge and reminded him of his right to remain silent.
“We’ll talk about it later,” she promised. What was one more broken promise to a man like Robert? He must be used to it by now.
She opened the door to the caretaker’s cottage.
Big Shorty had positioned his kitchen table in the middle of the room where the light was best for examining the Wise Owl records. It took Sarah very little time to locate infant MT186.
“It’s Andrew Tiger.” She sorted through the remaining records and set aside five other likely kidnapping victims.
“Healthy children within normal limits for weight and length. No chronic diseases or medications, no HIV or residual neurological damage from drug intoxication.”
“Now what?” Robert asked.
“First we visit the public library,” Sarah said. “Then we go to Kinko’s Copies. We are going to fax these records, along with everything we know, to the police, the FBI, and to every Indian-owned business we can think of. Hashilli Maytubby’s kidnapping enterprise is about to come to a screeching halt.”
Sarah drummed her fingers on the stack of kidnapped children. There was still a question that troubled her, and there was no diplomatic way to phrase it.
“Who are you, Shorty? Who are you really?”
He showed her his friendliest smile highlighted by dental work from an era when gold was a sign of prosperity.
“Am I some kind of African God?”
Sarah realized this was the kind of question her mother might ask while she was deep into the manic phase of her bipolar disorder. She also realized that she was prepared to accept Big Shorty’s answer as the truth—at least for the time being.
“I’m real enough,” Big Shorty said. “Just a black man from the Cookson Hills hoping to win a wrestling match with death.”
It was the answer Sarah expected, but not the one she desired.