She pulled Hueylene’s travel bed in front of the fireplace. She stared into the flames for a moment, then reached for the book of “Divine Secrets.” It fell open to a florist card that read, “Happy Anniversary, Ya-Yas! Love from the Ya-Ya Husbands.” Wild. But that’s the way it was: every year the Ya-Yas threw themselves a party to celebrate another anniversary of their friendship. And the husbands actually brought gifts! Sidda remembered more about Ya-Ya anniversaries than she did about Vivi and Shep’s.
A flier from the grand opening of the Southgate Shopping Center in Thornton was tucked in next to a handwritten recipe for a cheese soufflé. The recipe had been crossed out, and a note to the side read: “Forget it! Fix a drink and go out for hamburgers!”
Next she ran across a photo of a younger Caro holding an infant in her arms. Caro was making the A-OK sign with her fingers, and wore a jaunty little beret. The infant was tucked in the crook of her arms, and they seemed to be standing in front of a statue. Which one of us wild children was that? Sidda wondered.
As she turned to the next page, what looked like pieces of walnut shell fell out of the book. Sidda imagined her mother years ago snacking on the nuts while pasting things into the scrapbook. Sidda thought about throwing the remnants away, but changed her mind. Gathering the shards up off the floor, she tucked them back into the book where they had been for God knows how long.
Sidda thought about nuts, how they are food and seed at once. How they hold fertility magic in one tight, tiny space. Her mind ran to rich symbolic imaginings, but still she could not guess the enchantment those particular walnut shells contained.
As the smells of sweet woodruff and alder burning and lake water wafted about her, so did the essences of her mother’s stories. Not in the way Sidda wanted, but in the way of hidden things that mysteriously reveal worlds unsuspected and longed for.
Vivi, 1937
Mother won’t let Caro and me play in the new hammock until we rub the face off the Blessed Virgin statue Father brought back from the island of Cuba.
“This turpentine stinks,” Caro says. “I don’t see why we have to do this.”
“Rub hard,” I say. “Then Mama will let us try out the hammock.”
The statue is sitting on our front porch, right where it got delivered in a wooden box, alongside Father’s luggage. Father is just back from Cuba, where he went to the Tennessee walking-horse show with his rich friends. He stayed in a big hacienda with servants. Cuba is paradise, Father says, with white beaches and orange flowers growing everywhere and wild parrots and all the people happy. His rich friends run the whole island, and Father said he will take me with him next time. He said Mother dresses too much like hired help to take her. If Mother would take the kerchief off her head and the dust rags out of her pockets, I just know she’d be beautiful.
Father bought the Cuban Blessed Virgin for Mother. The statue was gorgeous, with brown skin! She had earrings and a necklace, and the brightest colors of any Mother Mary I had ever seen. Big red lips and a violet color on her eyelids like she was ready for a fiesta. Mother just hated her.
The first thing Mother did after Father left for the office this morning was to unscrew the gold hoop earrings and take all those pretty red and yellow necklaces off the Virgin’s neck and drop them in a pile over by the hen-and-chicken planter. The whole time she was doing it, she shook her head like that statue had gone and done something bad.
“The Blessed Virgin is not a Negro,” Mother said. “It is just like foreigners to try to turn the Mother of God into a gaudy tart. That statue needs to be cleaned up! Imagine what Father Coughlin would say if he could see this statue.”
Mother listens to Father Coughlin on the radio. If Father Coughlin says something, then it’s like Moses brought it down from the mountain.
“You listen to that radio priest more than you do your own husband,” Father tells her.
She says, “If Demon Rum wasn’t stalking your soul, then I might listen to you more.”
Mother says that Father spends too much time with his horse friends, and he has turned his back on God. Mother will not go to any horse shows with him, so I get to take her place. I love all the ladies in their jodhpurs and boots, and the picnics with vodka gimlets for the grown-ups and pink lemonade for me, and everyone all dressed up. Father’s Tennessee walking horses, Passing Fancy and Rabelais’s Dream, take prizes right and left. Every time those horse people get together, it’s a party.
“Take your fingers and rub every bit of that color off the Virgin’s cheeks,” Mother says.
I pour a little more turpentine on my rag and rub in circles to get the rouge off the Virgin’s cheeks.
After Mama goes inside, we can finally talk about our secret plans. Today is the day leading up to the night of our Divine Ritual Ceremony, which Caro and Teensy and Necie and I have been planning and planning.
“Do you think Necie will chicken out?” I ask Caro.
“She thinks we’ll get kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby,” Caro says. “She is scared to go out in the woods at night.”
“I go out in the woods by myself at night all the time.”
“You do not!”
“Oh, yes I do. I go out there all the time. I’m brave as Amelia Earhart. Sometimes I sleep out there by myself.”
“Vivi, you lie lie lie,” Caro tells me.
I just smile.
Mother comes out to inspect our work on the Virgin. “Now,” Mother says, “now she looks more like Mary Most Pure. Well done, girls, the Blessed Virgin is proud of you.”
“We’ve turned her into a white lady,” Caro says, examining the statue.
Mother smiles. “The Blessed Virgin is not a colored person. She is the Mother of God. She is above even white people.”
“Then how come we had to rub all her brown skin off?” Caro asks. Caro doesn’t believe everything grown-ups tell her. Caro makes up her own thoughts.
“Little girls shouldn’t ask so many questions, Carolina,” my mother tells my friend.
“Bonjour!” Teensy calls out, walking up our path, wearing a little sunsuit Genevieve’s cousin on the bayou made her, all out of dishcloths. Necie is with her, and they’re holding hands, coming to play.
“Hey! Pals!” Caro calls out.
“Hello, girls,” Mother says when they reach the porch. She reaches out to pat Teensy’s pretty black curls, but Teensy pulls away. She doesn’t like my mother ever since Mother spanked Teensy’s bottom for taking all her clothes off at my sixth birthday party and dancing around buck naked singing to me.
“Ooh, who is she?” Teensy asks, pointing to the statue.
“That is the Blessed Virgin that these good little daughters of Mary have reclaimed. She was a tacky colored Cuban with rouge like a harpy, but we took care of that, didn’t we, girls?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Caro and I say.
“She used to be a gorgeous brown lady,” I say.
“Well, she sure looks like a spook now,” Teensy says. “How come yall rub off her mouth?”
“What do you think, Denise?” Mother asks Necie.
“Did yall use an eraser?” Necie asks.
My mother laughs. “No, dear. We started with Clorox and switched to turpentine.”
“Can we go play in the hammock now, please, ma’am?” I ask.
“Yes, you may,” Mother answers, “but first come and genuflect in front of Our Holy Mother.”
And so we all genuflect in front of the statue that looks like she saw something scary and lost all her color. Then Teensy spots the jewelry Mother took off the Virgin. She snatches it up so fast that Mother doesn’t see her do it. That Teensy has quick hands, and she loves jewels.
So now it is me and Caro and Teensy and Necie out on the side porch. Harrison, who works for us, just hung the big hammock Father brought me. It’s hanging from the blue ceiling of the porch, just outside the windows of Father’s study.
“None of yall have a hammock like this. This one is Cuban.” I cli
mb into the hammock and lay back facing the street.
Caro says, “Okay, you ready for me?”
“I most certainly am,” I tell her, and she scrambles into the hammock.
“Okay, Necie, now you.”
Necie starts to climb in. She holds her dress so we can’t see her panties.
“Necie, who do you think is going to look up your dress?” Teensy says.
“I don’t know,” she says, and rolls her eyes.
Then Teensy turns away from us, and lifts up her dress so we can all see her underwear. She shakes her butt in the direction of the street; she doesn’t care who sees her.
“Panties on the porch!” Teensy sings. “Panties on the porch!” And Necie is blushing. We love to embarrass her.
She’s squinched in between Caro and me with her head at my end. I give her a little kiss on the cheek.
“Good Necie, perfect fit,” I tell her.
“Now, Teensy, you climb in and just get wherever you can fit.”
Teensy gets in the hammock and just lays on top of us like we are her pillows.
“Hey! Get off me!” I yell.
“Well, you said ‘wherever,’ ” she laughs, and I push her and she pushes back. Teensy always pushes back. If you push Necie, she just says, I’m sorry. She is a relief sometimes after the rest of us.
“Yall cut it out,” Necie says.
“Teensy,” Caro says, “scooch up here by my arm and put your legs over the side.”
Teensy obeys her, snuggling in, and we are lying there like sardines in a mesh can. Through the spaces in hammock netting you can see the porch floor, and through the porch floor you can see slats of sunlight hitting the ground underneath the porch. I pull on the rope that Harrison has rigged so we can swing ourselves without getting up.
“Oh, this is great!” Caro says.
And it is great, like we are in a big cradle together.
“I want a hammock like this,” Teensy says.
“Well, then tell your daddy to go to Cuba and get you one,” I say.
“I will, I’ll tell him this evening. I’ll tell him to get me a Cuban Blessed Virgin too. And I won’t rub her face off either. I’ll glue a pair of Maman’s false eyelashes on her.”
It is around ten in the morning and things are already hot. You can smell the morning sun hitting the grass and bringing up smells like lemon. I lean my head back and smell things, wherever I am. To me, smells are like an invisible person that a lot of people forget is even there. I would rather lose my eyes than my sense of smell.
“I can’t wait till we have our Indian names,” Teensy says.
“Tonight is the night,” Caro says, and she closes her eyes and leans her head back in the hammock.
“Ooooh,” Necie says, “I hope it’s not too dark in the woods.”
“Of course it’ll be dark,” Teensy says.
“It will be dark as velvet,” I say.
Necie’s eyes grow big. Caro reaches out and grabs her like a monster out of nowhere, and she lets out a squeal.
I can smell all Mother’s flowers, and I can hear everything from my spot in the hammock. Someone beating rugs a few doors down, lots and lots of birds, a fly buzzing, and Mr. Barnage’s truck rattling down the street. I know the sound of all the automobiles and trucks in our neighborhood.
Mother’s honeysuckle mixes in with the smell of her gardenia and butterfly ginger, and makes it smell so sweet out here on the porch. The Rose of Montana vine that Mother has trained to climb across the porch ceiling is just dripping with flowers. She takes cuttings other people throw away and puts them into old coffee cans, and pretty soon they take over our porch and yard with blossoms. My mother can grow any flower in the world, and she knows all their names too. Our whole yard is full of camellias, Mother’s pride and joy. And she’s got all kinds of roses and white and purple periwinkles and a potted kumquat that she brings inside during the winter so it won’t freeze. If there is one thing my mama loves to do it is work in the garden. Father and my grandmother Delia make fun of her. They call her a field hand. Necie’s mama always asks Mother to join the Garden Club, but Mother won’t. She says her club is the Altar Society. Most of her flowers end up on the altar at Divine Compassion, not in our house.
In the spring and summer, I live out on this porch that’s surrounded by flowers. Come the warm weather, Mother and Delia’s maid, Ginger, set up two beds at the end of the side porch with the mosquito netting that drops from the ceiling, then Mother sets up a little night table and a boudoir lamp and we all take turns sleeping out here. When my girlfriends come over to spend the night, Mother makes Pete and his pals move back to his room and lets us sleep out here. My favorite nights in the world are the nights I have my girlfriends over. That is when I sleep my best, hardly a nightmare at all when my buddies are with me.
Sleeping on the porch is the best thing in the world. You fall asleep with the sound of crickets, and you wake up with the sound of birds chirping. When you’re still half-asleep, they sound like a waterfall. If Huey Long himself came to visit, the porch is where I’d put him. We don’t have servants fanning us here in Thornton, although sometimes we try to get Ginger, my grandmother’s maid, to fan us with Delia’s vetiver hand fans. But she says, “Go soak your head, that cool you off.”
* * *
It is evening and we all play cards after supper out on the porch with Pete and Mother. Father has business tonight, and so he didn’t come home for supper again.
My brother, Pete, teases us all the time. He keeps making up names for us. He calls Teensy “Tinky,” and calls me “Stinky.” Caro he calls “Karo Syrup.” And Necie he calls “Knee-sie” and points to his knee and then his eyes like he’s playing charades. Pete is two years older than us and big and strong, and has foxtails that fly from his bicycle.
After four hands of Crazy Eights, Mother says it’s time for bed. We all say goodnight and put on our gowns and Mother comes out to make sure the mosquito netting is draped around our beds on the porch. She puts out a little pissoir so we won’t have to troop all the way inside and up the stairs to powder our noses.
We act so good and quiet that Mother thinks she has saints on her hands.
“Did yall thank the Holy Lady for helping you through the day?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” we all call out from our beds.
Mother is standing there on the other side of the mosquito net, already fingering her evening rosary. “Well, then tell your guardian angels goodnight.”
“Goodnight, angels,” we say.
“Goodnight, little girls,” Mother says.
We lie silently and watch her cross the gray planks of the porch and head back into the house.
When she is out of sight, Caro says, “We’re not little girls, we are Royal Indian Maidens.”
“Maybe instead of thanking the Holy Lady, yall should apologize for wiping her face off,” Teensy says.
That makes us giggle.
“Yall scrubbed off her lips and turpentined her skin,” Teensy says. “Imbecile. I bet those Cubans would have never sold that statue to your father if they knew yall were going to ruin her looks.”
“Shhh!” I say. “Mother might be in the living room listening. If we’re quiet, then she’ll think we’re sound asleep and go on upstairs.”
We get quiet and just lie there for a moment, with our bundles of supplies stashed beneath the beds.
“Now are we going into the dark woods?” Necie murmurs.
“No,” I whisper, “we have to wait till the whole house is asleep.”
“How will we know?” she asks.
“I can tell,” I say. “Houses sleep like people sleep. I can tell.”
After a while, I climb out of bed to check. “The coast is clear!”
We pull out our stash from under the beds, lift up our nightgowns, and take turns rubbing a raw onion all over our bodies so the mosquitoes won’t carry us away. We’re lucky it’s been a dry summer so far or we’d never be able
to go into the woods at night without getting bitten to death.
Then we sneak off the porch and into the backyard.
“Stealthily!” Caro says.
We cut across the Munsen’s alley, walk a few hundred yards, take a deep breath, and then slip into the woods.
We have Pete’s flashlight and a half-moon for light. I finger the piece of paper in the pocket of my nightgown. It holds our tribal story. I am the Mistress of Legend tonight.
“What if we run into a camp of hobos?” Necie asks.
Caro is holding the light since she’s the tallest. She also carries a rucksack with some pieces of wood in it. She’s the Mistress of Fire.
“The hobos are closer to the railroad tracks,” I say.
“Father says his friends at the police station have already run all the hobos out of Thornton,” says Teensy. “Maman and he got in a big fight about it.”
“Mama fed some hobos a few days ago, right on our back steps,” Necie says. “But I am not supposed to talk to hobos, just feed them.”
“Hobos keep coming round your house because your mother won’t erase the hobo mark, even though the Mayor told everyone they should,” I say. “Mother only feeds them once a week now, or else she says we’ll end up joining them, as much as Pete eats.”
Necie is the only one of us who knows how to cook, so she has brought fudge in a paper sack. She is the Mistress of Refreshment. Teensy, the Mistress of Dance, has got four empty oatmeal boxes in her sack for our drums. And I’ve got the needle.
We keep walking until we are on the edge of the little bayou that runs back behind Teensy’s house. We all help Caro build a small fire. Caro is a swell fire builder, good as a boy. Mr. Bob taught her and she taught me.
When our fire gets going, we all sit around it.
I gaze into its flames and begin my telling the story of the Divine Tribe of Louisiana Ya-Yas.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE LOUISIANA YA-YAS