Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 464

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie," by Ayana Mathis.

Philadelphia and Jubilee! August said when Hattie told him what she wanted to name their twins. “You cain’t give them babies no crazy names like that!” Hattie’s mother, if she were still alive, would have agreed with August. She would have said Hattie had chosen vulgar names; “low and showy,” she would have called them. But she was gone, and Hattie wanted to give her babies names that weren’t already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching forward names, not looking back ones.

How her babies burned! How they wanted to live! Hattie had thought, when given over to such thoughts, that her children’s souls were thimbles of fog; wispy and ungraspable. She was just a girl—only seventeen years longer on the earth than her children. Hattie understood them as extensions of herself and loved them because they were hers and because they were defenseless and because they needed her. But she looked at her babies now and saw that the life inside them was muscled and mighty and would not be driven from them. “Fight,” Hattie urged. “Like this,” she said and blew the air in and out of her own lungs, in solidarity with them, to show them it was possible. “Like this,” she said again.

Six had preached four times before at Mount Pleasant Baptist church near his house in Philadelphia. The Word had come over him like a fit; it hijacked him utterly. The first time was nearly two years before, during the evening service one Sunday. Just before the call to prayer, Six heard a low flat whistle, like the sound of air blowing through a hollow bone. He felt something—spirit? demon?—coming toward him. When it reached Six, it entered him, not like the dove of the Holy Spirit that the Bible talked about, but like a thunderclap that wakes the neighborhood in the middle of the night. The force of it bent him double. He squeezed his throat with his hand, but that did nothing to stop the Word rising in him. He was so afraid he thought he might vomit. The Word collected in his mouth like a pile of pebbles and pushed itself out through his lips. 

Afterward, the parishioners told him he’d preached like God’s anointed for nearly thirty minutes. Six remembered very little of what he’d said or done. There remained only a lingering euphoria that faded quickly and whose departure left him depleted and confused. At home in his hiding place under the stairs, Six squeezed his eyes shut and tried to summon God, or whatever had come to him, but it was like trying to remember a dream—the longer he thought about it, the further it receded. The preacher had said it was grace. But what was grace if it came on him like a seizure and then left him as frail and hurting as he had been before its visit? There wasn’t anyone to ask about it: Hattie said it was just the same as when the church ladies caught the spirit and spoke in tongues, which only showed they were excitable. August said there were some odd things you just couldn’t explain in this world, and Six’s fits were one of them.

Six wasn’t sure religion was any more than a lot of people caught up in a collective delirium that disappeared the minute they stepped out of the church doors and onto the street. And who could blame them? Who would not want to be carried away by something bright and exalted? But Six wasn’t like the other church people. His experience of God was a violent surge he couldn’t control. He came to believe that, like everything else in his life, his preaching had something to do with his poor health. He could not see that perhaps there was a blessing in it, that some help was being extended to him. In the middle of the night while his family slept and Six was insomniac with body aches and bouts of itching, he knew his Jesus spells were another indicator that he was a freak, not merely of body but of spirit. His soul was susceptible to God’s whimsy, just as his body was susceptible to any opportunistic thing that might hurt it. If he’d known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.

Hattie’s first babies. They fell ill on January 12 and were dead ten days later. Penicillin. That was all that was needed to save her children. They would be fifty-six now, grayed or graying, thick at the waist and laugh lined around the mouth. Maybe they’d have grandchildren. The lives they would have had are unoccupied; that is to say, the people they would have loved, the houses they might have owned, jobs they would have had, were all left untenanted. Not a day went by that Hattie did not feel their absence in the world, the empty space where her children’s lives should have been.

The organ thrum stopped, the congregation’s hum as well. The sanctuary was silent. Hattie pulled her granddaughter down the center aisle. She couldn’t allow it. She had lost Six to the altar. She sent him off to Alabama with nothing but a Bible, and he had become a womanizer and an imposter. By the time she understood the depth of his unhappiness, it had been too late to save him. Her twins were dead. She had given Ella back to Georgia. It was too late for Cassie, whom Hattie had also sent away. And it was too late for Hattie, who was a fraud in Christ and had shown Sala the ways of fraudulence. She couldn’t bear that the child was already so broken she was driven to the mercy seat. There was time for Sala. Hattie didn’t know how to save her granddaughter. She felt as overwhelmed and unprepared as she had when she was a young mother at seventeen. Here we are sixty years out of Georgia, she thought, a new generation has been born, and there’s still the same wounding and the same pain. I can’t allow it. She shook her head. I can’t allow it. 

They arrived at the pew, where August was waiting. “I don’t know why you done that, Hattie,” he whispered. Of course he didn’t. August’s faith was simple and absolute. He had aged into a sickly old man who prayed and loved the Lord. And if he understood more than he let on, if he was wiser than he acted, he kept it to himself. It’s easier to play the fool, Hattie thought, and August always did what was easy. She felt a spark of her old anger. But they were past all of that—it hadn’t served her when she was young and wouldn’t serve her now. Hattie looked around at the disapproving faces of the congregation. Their indignation would pass—everything passed sooner or later—and if it didn’t, she would give up the church too, this dear comfort of her old age. She was not too old to weather another sacrifice. 

Hattie put her arm around Sala and pulled her close; she patted her granddaughter’s back roughly, unaccustomed as she was to tenderness.