Lollie Mae and Sallie Mae quiet out on the porch or stirring hushed in the yard and waiting on their mama to Please hurry up Mama, as they took turns looking at the closed door with arms folded, foot patting, face in a pout while the other walked in circles around the wash pot, but it didn’t help, maybe because Mama was listening so serious to Daddy talking up a blue streak about something their little pitchers’ ears weren’t big enough to be hearing, or, because they were somewhat distracted by the faint sound, and ever worrisome smell, of the smoke and wet ashes from the fire up the hill and at the gin and saw mills from a long time ago. So long ago they didn’t even know how long ago, but back, way back before the States’ Rights War, back when all niggers were still slaves.
It was the sound and the smell, that nobody else but them could smell, that had to do with their never wanting to play at the top of the hill, which would have been a perfect place to play, weaving in and out of the burned columns, or to run up to the top and to roll down from, but they didn’t, without even being warned against it.
The sound, loud enough on some nights to make them sleep with the covers over their heads and their hands over their ears against the jumbled nigger-like whispering and the low whimpering, and sometimes wailing of a white woman, like it was washing down from up the hill, or mumble rumbling from a long, long way, both in distance and time. Either the sound or the smell could come up so strong that, without a signal from either one, it would make them break out singing.
When the odor or the noise came didn’t have anything to do with moonlight or seasons or weather conditions, or any pattern the Mae’s could reckon. It could as likely be broad open daylight or sunset or a Thursday morning.
It was like when Old Skeeter used to just break out barking out at the dark when no-body else heard a thing and he’d keep barking till Daddy hollered at him to Hush up that yapping, Skeeter! And he’d give one or two more woofs like he was getting the last word in, or giving his last warning to what-ever it was he knew was out there—but old Skeeter had one on the Mae’s because even though they heard it or smelled it or both they didn’t have a clue what it was or why it was that they knew it was out there.
The Mae’s had slipped and told of them once or twice but had learned not to speak on it too much, or at all if they could help it (but never about the crying of their would-have-been older brother that miscarried even though the nigger midwife was there in time. Mama and their daddy never spoke of it, though the Mae’s knew of it anyway), but when the sensation did come to them their only defense was to sing, and when they were asked what they were singing about or why, they got that look on their faces like niggers who knew something but wouldn’t admit to knowing it, wouldn’t even, under threat of penalty, admit to knowing anything of it, no matter what.
Whatever, it made their mother nervous as a moth at a lantern, and their daddy go quiet as iron.
Haunted, hell! Some of the rough, barefoot boys at school cussed, bragging under their breaths. They went exploring up at the burnt-down big old house on the hill. Claimed they played tag among the blackened columns, burnt rafters, shattered glass, and busted bricks. The boldest, in direct contradiction to what they’d said earlier, claimed they’d discovered things of so scary and secret of a nature they couldn’t tell, to protect those who didn’t know of such things from the very horror of hearing them. Some nights it was full of haints and spooks, and other nights, niggers doing nigger-what-all up there.
Such as what?
Such as raising the dead, and casting spells on white folks. The carrot-haired one with the scabs swore he’d seen it and lived to tell it. The Mae’s just looked at one another. That wasn’t any more help in dispersing the smell or the sounds than when Mama tried to fan away the heat at church.
It was Mama had once assured them that what they thought they heard was just the wind in the trees or smoke from the fireplace. Yes, ma’am they said, thinking together that there was no wind, just like there was no trees anymore for a wind to be in, Mama. Just hundreds and hundreds of stumps their daddy said he had helped to cut down when they’d quit planting cotton, leaving nothing but little foot-high tables for sprites.
Nobody who couldn’t hear or smell it could explain it or explain it away any more than they, Lollie Mae and Sallie Mae, had even a flickering notion of what they were on the fringe of, in the same way they had never put their ear to a seashell or heard the hum of electrical current through a wire, and wouldn’t have had the words for it even if they had.
They waited. They wanted Mama to hurry up so they could get to church and sing their song about how Jesus loved them and for the preacher to preach, getting in after the devil (like old Skeeter used to snap after fireflies before he got so old, and Daddy said old Skeeter just went off in the woods and wouldn’t be back), and Preacher Rhodes get them others to clapping and dancing and caterwauling and drown out the business of that from-up-the-hill crying and moaning and carrying on.
They waited and sang their Jesus loved them song a little louder, so maybe Mama would hear them, and hurry up please Mama please, hurry up.