Some Sing, Some Cry

Some Sing, Some Cry Ntozake Shange &Ifa Bayeza St. Martin’s Press New York 053-44066_ch00_6P.indd iii 7/24/10 6:51 AM some sing, some cry. Copyright 2010 by Ntozake Shange & Ifa Bayeza. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www .stmartins .com Text design by Meryl Sussman Levavi Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Shange, Ntozake. Some sing, some cry / Ntozake Shange & Ifa Bayeza. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978- 0- 312- 19899- 2 1. Afr ican American families—Fiction. I. Bayeza, Ifa. II. Title. PS3569.H3324S66 2010 813'.54—dc22 2010022066 First Edition: September 2010 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 053-44066_ch00_6P.indd iv 7/24/10 6:51 AM 1L The first orange light of sunrise left a flush of rose and lavender on Betty’s hands as she fi ngered the likenesses of her children. Th ere were tears she was holding back and cocks crowing, as well as her granddaughter’s shouts, “Nana, you ready?” Betty sighed and closed the album reluctantly. Time had come for the last of the Mayfi elds to leave Sweet Tamarind, the plantation they’d known as home for gen- erations. Talk was some carpetbaggers had bought all the land and paid the white Mayfi elds a smidgeon of what it was worth and left the poor blacks high and dry. A rough white man, whip and rifl e in hand, had passed by a few days before, warning Betty and hers to be off the land by eve ning of this very day. So off they planned to be, not wanting to know another moment of the whites’ wrath. Th e colored Mayfi elds were famil- iar with what that meant, and with no slavery to hold them back they were off to Charleston, where others awaited them. Th ere was nothing odd about two colored women racing the rhythm of cicadas and the tides at fi rst light, busying themselves with order, a sense of the day to come and dreams of what it might bring, yet this day felt diff erent. Th is day the cicadas were louder, purposely taunting Betty and her grandchild with their steadiness. Betty set her album down for a second and went to the window to be sure what she was hearing wasn’t 053-44066_ch01_6P.indd 1 7/24/10 6:52 AM 2 ^ Ntozake Shange & Ifa Bayeza a band of washboards and gourds being played by some fool- ass folks with tongues in they cheeks. Th ere was no one there. Only the density of Betty’s imagination, the palms, some lily o’ the valley and nightshade- snugglin’ magnolia and giant oaks. Well, music is not a bad omen, Betty thought to herself. Th en she won- dered did God mean for her to hear the glory of Gabriel in the morn- ing machinations of insects, the breeze caressing dew on leaves left to themselves all the dark night, waves breaking how the drum popped if African Jeremiah wanted to change the gait of the ring shout, change the dancers’ direction with three strong beats and a quick run of his palms on the face of the skin before beginning another rhythm demanding other movements, other oblations, and peace in the energies of the spirits spilling from his fi ngers to their bodies through the rings of soft clouds round the dawn moon. Sometimes the drums, fi ddles, and washboards saluted the giant rose- orange sun, taking up the whole of the horizon like nobody had anywhere to go but to the center of the uni- verse. Yes, the Lord’s set the gulls to calling over the ocean’s irrepressible going and coming, midst the cicadas’ crescendo, to let her know to listen to this blessing, before she and Eudora made this wild— some would say this wild and thoroughly foolhardy— change in their lives. Moving to Charleston. Why, on Sweet Tamarind everybody understood everybody else. Th e mélange of Yoruba, Wolof, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and a hint of En glish left the words of men, free or slave, soothing the air from mouth to mouth, left history in place, content with the comings and goings of her children. Nothing was lost, no one madly pounding gainst a vacuum of silence, nothingness that comes of being of nothing, nothing in par tic- ular. When she looked out from her tabby hut, oyster and clam shells ce- mented with sand thick enough to withstand the might of a cyclone, Betty saw the ruins of the Big House of Sweet Tamarind. She kicked something, not knowing what, thinking to herself, I got no call to leave here. I belong right up there. We all do. Belong right here where I stand. And what was to become of the graves, the bittersweet memories of her mother, sisters who had been fortunate enough to pass over to the other world before the rigors of this island beat them down, smashed their spirits, left them but ghosts of themselves before it was time. She would 053-44066_ch01_6P.indd 2 7/24/10 6:52 AM Some Sing, Some Cry ^ 3 have to go to their fi nal resting place before she went anywhere. Sacrilege was not only the province of the white, but could fall upon the unmind- ful of any of God’s children. Th is Betty believed with her whole body, her body knowing no separation from her soul, ever close to the breath, past and present, of all those whose blood was her own. But she would have to hurry to pay her respects secretly and gather strength from the loved ones who were no more. Her grandchild Eudora had no sympathy for any who’d come before and had managed to fi nd some joy in the throes of bondage, those who’d thrown away the rigid color codes and property laws to fi nd warmth, love, passions too rich to suppress, so fertile that Eudora owed her own life to them. Perhaps it was this debt of her very being with which she was yet uncomfortable that led Eudora to reject all Betty held so close. Don’t for the life of me know why. What for? She ’most white, ain’t she? How could all of Africa get so deep in her granddaughter when Mayfi eld blood fl owed just as readily in her veins? How’s all this come to be? And if she not all niggah, why not rejoice in that? Eudora’s cheeks had known the back of Betty’s hand more than once for voicing her defi antly blasphemous thoughts. No matter. Both women were deeply rooted, like Carolinian cypress wondering and mas- sive, to views of themselves that knew no connections other than the words Grandma and chile. Slipping quietly from the house, Betty hid in her bosom her precious album of daguerreotypes and photographs from wandering carnival side- show artists. She’d searched futilely for her apron pockets, but she wasn’t in an apron. She wasn’t going to be cooking in her very deliberate way in her own home anymore. She kept forgetting her future, but refused to forget her ancestors. Betty swept by purple and white globe amaranth that clung to her skirts like weeping toddlers. She pushed further into the wooded areas she knew to be the resting places of her mother and sisters. Of course she didn’t know for sure which of the mounds overgrown with wildfl owers and weeds. Were wildfl owers weeds? Betty’d asked herself that a thou- sand times. Was she a wildfl ower? Was her mother wild? Was she beaute- ous? Was she full of life like good soil, or empty like dirt? Th ere’s a diff erence tween soil and dirt. Th ere’s a diff erence from coming fr om nothing and coming fr om something simply not known. Betty’s mother, Monday, was 053-44066_ch01_6P.indd 3 7/24/10 6:52 AM 4 ^ Ntozake Shange & Ifa Bayeza not known to her but she’d clearly come from something. It wasn’t true that there was an emptiness. She felt her mother in the fi ddle’s melody, in the dried gourds ancient women shook until the spirits of somebody from somewhere drove secret sounds from mouths twisted in foreign shapes, squealing and growling a birth of a soul that had no choice but to shout. Th en those shouts corralled the bent women and young heifers into a circle that shuffl ed along, weaving something like Spanish moss around some unseen skeleton the size of God’s toe. Or she saw her mother possessed under the arch of God’s foot, beating the air with her hips, the soles of her feet afi re with the rhythm of the forbidden. Betty knew about the forbidden, therefore she knew her mother. She’d just picked a grave site and called to her. Ma . When the azaleas or camellias rose up from the earth for the white folks to pick and pretend love of nature, Betty’d covered her mother’s grave with fl ower petals and danced the dance of longing that became sated only when her body fell, fi ngers digging for arms to hold her, digging for a womb to bury her tears. But the grasses cut her face, left her limbs grimy with wishing for the impossible.

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