From inside his knapsack he took out his paperback copies of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Everyone he knew was reading Kerouac’s On the Road. He found he preferred The Dharma Bums. He’d done some research and learned that dharma was an important concept in Hindu and Buddhist religions. It meant one’s spiritual place in the universe, or what a person must do in order to do his spiritual duty.
Lately there was a lot of interest in eastern religions. Siddhartha was about Buddha’s journey to become … well, Buddha. Buddhism interested Mike but he wasn’t sure he quite understood it. It seemed to him it might take a lifetime to fully get it right.
Mike liked to think — or hoped, at least — that coming here to Mississippi was part of his spiritual duty.
Everything was up for grabs these days. Dylan’s latest album said it all: The Times They Are A-Changin’. At least he hoped they were. He had come all this way to Mississippi to be part of that change. It might improve his karma — or maybe it was his dharma. He wasn’t sure, but he was hopeful.
He sat on the porch, thinking these things, letting the fan wash over him. Remembering why he was awake, he stood and walked to the edge of the porch, scanning the miles of cotton fields for any sign of movement. He offered silent thanks to the moon for giving them such a well-lit night.
Turning back to the chair, he noticed again the beat-up record player on the table. The record on it was as worn and old looking as the player, but was probably even older. His grandmother had owned records like it. It was a collection of songs by a female singer he’d never heard of. Delilah Jones.
Curious, he turned it on, quickly lowering the volume so he wouldn’t wake anyone. Immediately a bluesy jazz voice filled the night, singing of a lover who got away.
Slowly he sat, transfixed by the soaring voice that cut through time and space to reach him as nothing else had ever reached him before.
Louisa Raymond sat on the porch of the same house she’d lived in as a very young child, rocking and fanning herself. The young man walking up the dirt path to the house had parked down on the road. Squinting into the sunlight, she tried to see him more clearly. Lately things had become a bit blurrier than they’d once been, though in her estimate forty-seven was far from old. She was sure others, especially young people, would disagree. Fishing in the pocket of her cotton dress, she pulled out cat’s-eye-shaped spectacles and held them to her eyes.
Right away, she knew his business.
He was one of those voter registration kids from up North. It was written all over him: the plaid cotton shirt, the slightly longish hair, the clipboard, and the way he moved, so crisp and alert.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he addressed her with one foot on her bottom step. “I’m Mike Rogers. I was wondering: Are you registered to vote?”
“No, young man, I am not registered nor do I wish to be,” she replied.
“Would it be all right if I asked why not?” he said politely.
She smiled slightly. These young volunteers had such a cordial way of talking. She admired that. Someone had coached these kids well. “Yes, you may ask. I do not wish to register to vote because there’s trouble enough in this world without provoking it.”
“What about your rights as an American?” he asked.
“As a what ?” she asked, her voice rising into a hoot of derisive laughter.
The young man didn’t smile. “You are an American, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I am, but I have always considered myself a citizen of the world. It’s here in the United States that I must endure the indignities of second-class citizenship.”
“And doesn’t that make you angry?” he prodded.
“Where do you go to school, young man?” she countered, preparing to point out the great cultural gulf that divided them, how clueless he was about her life and what it was like. “Do you spend your weekends singing ‘All Hail Harvard’ or ‘Yippee for Yale’?”
“I attend Princeton,” he replied.
“So it’s ‘Pip! Pip! Princeton,’ then.”
As she spoke, the world tilted, actually seemed to lurch to one side. She gripped the sides of the chair to keep her balance.
In a bound, he was beside her. “Ma’am, are you all right? Can I get you anything?”
“Would you get me some water from inside?” she requested. “There are clean glasses in the dish drain.”
Licking her lips, she scowled across the sun-bright fields. What was that? she asked herself. It might have been some new manifestation of the cancer in her breast, but she didn’t think so. It felt like something else. Yes, it was something else and she realized what it was in a sudden flash of understanding.
Mike Rogers returned quickly with a glass of water. “Is it the heat?” he asked, crouching to hand it to her.
As she sipped the water she studied his hazel eyes and brown curly hair. “Have I met you before?” she asked.
“I don’t believe so. I’m not from around here.”
“I just experienced the most overwhelming déjà vu. Do you know that expression?”
“You felt that you’d lived through the exact same moment before?” he offered.
“Yes — just back when we were talking about Princeton. It was amazing.”
His eyes grew larger. “I felt it, too.”
Was he making fun of her?
He continued. “When you spoke those words, a picture came into my head. You were saying the same thing to me. You had a big black cat with you. Weird, huh?”
Louisa grabbed the walking cane hung at the side of her chair and stood abruptly. This time the world spun once, then twice. She gripped his arm as it spun again.
And then everything went black.
He laid the woman on the couch in her living room. He wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to do, but he couldn’t leave her outside in the heat. Hurrying back to the kitchen, he found a clean dishcloth, soaked it in cold water, and returned to the living room to lay it on her forehead.
It would probably be best if he just left, but that didn’t seem like the right thing to do, either. What if she didn’t come back to consciousness? He should call a doctor but he didn’t know who to call. He’d give it another minute.
This was the nicest house he’d seen since arriving here, at least of those belonging to the blacks. It was solidly built with polished wood floors. Amber shades kept out the blistering sun, giving the place a golden glow. It was interestingly furnished, too, with pieces from several recent decades and others that had to be antiques.
One glassed-in china cabinet was filled with exquisite pottery: modern pieces like a hand-blown glass vase in swirling colors and a large plate with a Picasso print at its center; an ancient-looking Greek urn, and a whiskey flask from the Civil War era; there was even a blue stone hippo that looked like it was from Egypt.
He spotted a hardcover book on the table: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. He didn’t know the author. Reading the back cover he learned it had been written by a black woman in 1937. The book was falling apart. Checking inside, he discovered it was a first edition and signed by the author.
His eyes slowly adjusted to this dark room. Small fans buzzed softly from bookshelves and whirred from elegant doily-draped tables. It was pleasant there.
On one of the tables was a collection of black-and-white photographs. A woman who was clearly a much younger version of this woman stood in a wedding dress beside a white man with slicked-back black hair. He looked like a gangster in the old movies Mike’s parents liked to watch on The Late Show. There were lots of other pictures of the woman with many different people. Some were signed to Del; that must be her name.
But wait … He checked his clipboard. He had come to register a Mrs. Louisa Raymond to vote. He looked back at the autograph in Their Eyes Were Watching God. It said: To my pal, Delilah Jones. Friends always! Zora Neale Hurston.
Delilah Jones? Where had he heard the name Delilah
Jones before? It wasn’t déjà vu; it had been recently.
As he went to return the book, a photo fluttered from its pages. He stooped to retrieve it and froze the moment he turned it over. It showed this woman at about seventeen: radiant, bold, and lovely in a red satin dress. And at her feet sat a black panther in an emerald-studded collar — the black cat he’d seen in his mind’s eye out there on the porch!
Louisa Raymond — or Delilah Jones, or whoever she was — began to stir on the couch.
“Are you Louisa Raymond?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Who is Delilah Jones?”
“I am … And you’re Bert Brody.”
“No. I’m Mike Rogers.”
She nodded. “Him, too.”
“I’ve gone back to my given first name, Louisa,” she said as she poured him a glass of lemonade. They sat at her kitchen table, the sunlight through the unshaded window making the ice in the pitcher shine. Across the vinyl daisy-print tablecloth, she’d spread out more of the old photographs.
“I saw your wedding picture,” he said. “Is that Mr. Raymond?”
“Lenny, yeah.”
“Is your husband still alive?”
She pushed a photo of Lenny toward him. “Just before the war ended, the men who were his partners back in Chicago had him shot. By then, he was spying for the Allies and they had Axis Power sympathies. They didn’t feel he’d done right by them. The war was horrible but it was good for Lenny. I think for the first time in his life it was clear to him what was right and what was wrong. The war saved his soul.”
“He found his dharma,” Mike murmured.
She didn’t know what he meant. “I know about karma,” she said. “Everybody’s into it these days. The things you do come back to you, right? What’s dharma?”
“It’s hard to explain, and I’m not certain myself,” he replied. “Do you believe in the soul?”
“Mmm,” she murmured thoughtfully. “I suppose I would have to believe in it to say what I’m saying to you right now about having lived before. Do you believe in it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Of course you don’t know,” she said. “Only fools think they have all the answers. The universe and beyond the universe — it’s so vast, so mysterious. How could anyone know everything that’s going on out there?”
“I guess that’s true,” he agreed. “But I can’t remember any lifetime other than this one.”
“Do you remember being a baby, even a toddler?” she challenged him.
He shook his head. “No.”
“But you know you existed.”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Exactly,” she said, “and besides, there are people who do remember other lives, especially under hypnosis. Back when I was a young woman in Paris, I was under the care of a Dr. LeFleur. He brought me back to several lifetimes during our hypnotic regression sessions. In the first hypnotic session I had that day I was talking about, I was a man, a soldier in the Civil War, a Yankee, and a white person.”
Mike nearly sprayed his lemonade out. “You were a man?” he cried, aghast. “Is that allowed?”
This caused her to laugh uproariously. She never could get over it herself. “Apparently so! Male and white! Wouldn’t that make them crazy down at the court house? I can just see it: ‘Officer, I can too sit at the Whites Only lunch counter. I’ve already been white, black, and every shade along the way! I’ve been white more times than you’ve been born! I’m past all that now, so I’ll sit where I please!’”
Mike was laughing now, too. “I would love to see that.”
“Anyway,” she went on, her laughter quieting, “that first session changed my life.”
“How?” he asked.
“The part of that life I remembered most clearly under hypnosis was after the Civil War, opening up a pottery shop. It seems I always loved pottery, but apparently I was so jumpy around fire that I was afraid to work the kiln. So I got myself a partner. While I was hypnotized I could see her face so clearly and hear her talking to me. She was a former slave. It seems I made good on a promise to a friend by finding her after the war.”
“Did it change your life because it proved reincarnation was real?” Mike asked.
“Yes, but there’s more. I recognized the partner’s face while I was hypnotized. She looked just like my grandmother, Eva Jones, a former slave. My mother dumped me on her as a baby and Grandma raised me until she died when I was about four or five. I was young, but I remember. Plus, I have photos of her.”
“Let me get this straight,” Mike said. “You’re telling me that in one life you were Eva Jones’s business partner — a white man — and then you died and were reincarnated as Eva Jones’s granddaughter?”
“That’s it,” she confirmed. “I have read a great deal on reincarnation and it’s considered quite normal for people to be reborn near other people they know, often in the same family. As the white man, John Mays, I must have felt quite fondly toward Eva, so I came back as her granddaughter in order to continue to be near her. It makes perfect sense if you think about it.”
“It does make sense when you put it that way,” Mike admitted.
“And then, as a young woman, I met you — when you were Bert Brody — and you told me how your grandfather had been the founder of Mays’ Dishware and he had been afraid of fire and had a partner and such. Did some research and discovered that the company had originally, from 1870 to 1910, been called Mays and Jones Pottery — John Mays and Eva Jones.”
“Your grandmother was a partner in Mays’ Dishware?” Mike asked.
“You got it. John Mays died in 1910 and Eva Jones sold her half of the business to his nephew — who was his heir — because she was getting too old to work. She was nearly eighty when she died, leaving no will. No one knew she had any heirs. But, apparently I had a big inheritance coming. By then the government had taken most of her unclaimed money. When I came forward as her granddaughter I was able to claim this house and, hidden in a closet, I found a pile of Mays Dishware stock that was worth a bundle of money.”
Mike put his hands on his head and squeezed.
“Is it too confusing?” Louisa asked.
“So you inherited stock money from the company that you yourself had helped found in an earlier incarnation?”
She shook her head at the sheer incredibility of the story. “Yes! Isn’t that wild? It killed my singing career, unfortunately. Since I no longer needed to work — I didn’t! It’s been a fun life, though — at least once World War Two ended — I’ve been traveling and whooping it up.”
“How did you end up back here?”
“This was Grandma’s house. I couldn’t sell it, and as I got older, it seemed a good place to settle down.”
“Do you have any regrets?” Mike asked her.
“One. I recorded an album of songs. It’s not available anymore. I’d like to hear it again.”
“You said I was Bert Brody.”
“I believe you are, yes.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I feel it. I had a few hypnotic sessions that went into the future, like premonitions. I may have seen you then.”
“Who was he?”
“A songwriter I knew. The songs on the album are written by him.”
“I write songs now.”
“Well, there you go.”
Mike jumped up, knocking the ice from his glass. “That’s where I heard the name Delilah Jones before!” he cried. “I listened to your record last night!”
“Where?”
“It was sitting on an old record player. I thought it was so great that I wanted to tape it for myself. It’s in the trunk of my car. I’ll be right back!”
Mike’s head was spinning as he returned to the sweltering, sun-drenched outside world. Inside, in Louisa’s darkened, cool house, it was easy to believe her. Out here in the hard light of reality he began to doubt. Her story was so fantastic.
He was this Bert
Brody?
She had inherited money from her own past-life self?
He hurried down the steps to his car, his mind working out the various connections. Was everyone’s past so entangled, so connected to a previous lifetime?
He stopped and shook his head. She was just putting him on — having some fun with the naïve, dumb white college kid.
That was it.
It had to be.
She’d probably loaned this record to a friend and knew it was on the turntable at the place they were staying.
Ha-ha! Very funny. Have a big laugh at the do-gooder dope from up North.
He was astounded at his own stupidity.
The woman had really had him going, though. What an idiot he was! What a good actress she was.
His face grew hot from within and he knew he was blushing. Mortified and embarrassed, he got into his car and sped away.
Louisa stood at her window and watched Mike drive off. She’d scared him. It wasn’t his fault. It had taken her more than twenty years to come to terms with the revelations she’d come upon under hypnosis with Dr. LeFleur.
“Humph.” A laugh burbled up inside her. “Imagine, me — a nun. If that doesn’t beat everything.” At first that lifetime had been the hardest for her to believe, but she’d finally come to understand it. Her devotion as a nun to Mary the Virgin Mother of Jesus was totally fitting when she lined it up with the other lives she’d uncovered.
She took a holy card showing a Black Madonna and child from her dress pocket. The image was known as Our Lady of Czestochowa from Poland, and it dated from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Turning it over in her hand, she gazed at the dark-skinned figures. She loved this picture and sometimes wondered if she had loved it when she was Mother Abbess Maria Regina. To her it was Mary and all the other goddesses she had ever revered rolled into one. At any rate, she found it comforting and liked to look at it often.
Someone rapped at the front door. Not waiting for an answer, a woman stuck her head in the door. “Louisa?”