EARLY ONE MORNING, EJ AND FELICIA GO RUN DOWNTOWN to talk with a restaurant owner, so Henrietta comes by to watch little Miss Cassie. She’s sitting at the kitchen table trying to finish up on some paperwork when Cassie comes a-running by like the speed o’ lightning. That child’s buck naked as a jaybird and got her clothes thrown out all over the floor.
“Cassandra Mae White, you come here and put your clothes back on this minute!” Henrietta don’t hear nothing back. Me neither. It’s real, real quiet, and that ain’t what you wanna hear when a baby’s naked in the back of the house. “Cassie? Cassie, come back here!”
Henrietta gets up to look for her. She walks on in to Cassie’s room and peeks ’round the closet door. Then she looks over in her mama and daddy’s room, but the girl ain’t nowhere. Then she sees the bathroom door—it’s shut tight. Retta smiles and walks up real slow, trying not to let the floorboards creak. Then she grabs on the doorknob and turns it real quick.
“Boo!” Henrietta yells, pushing it open. Cassie squeals, jumping ’bout a foot in the air. Then Retta notices there’s the hole in the ground next to the commode. And over by the tub is a big white loose floor tile. Cassie looks just like the cat what ate the canary sitting there naked next to it and holding a little black book marked Leona.
“Whatcha got there, honey?” Retta asks her. The baby smiles and hands it over, hoping she won’t get no spanking.
“Well, my goodness,” she says, opening up the pages and flipping through ’em. “Looks like you found your great-great-auntie’s diary.” That’s when my stomach sinks. Lord, I remember it now.
Back in the early 1940s, there was this real bad outbreak o’ flu bug to hit Charleston. Lots of folks was dying from it, sure ’nough. There was plenty o’ root doctors coming out the woodwork, too, ’cause when people is dying, folks call on every power they got. There was something they used back then called “Life Everlasting.” I guess it was called that ’cause when you used it, you’d get life everlasting one way or the other, either down on Earth or up here in heaven.
Well, Auntie Leona, she got the flu real bad and was awful sick—terrible sick, so she found a way to get hold of some of that root medicine. Well, what she thought was pure juice, turned out to be chest rub instead, made with Life Everlasting plus whiskey, lemons, and turpentine. She drank lots of it so it’d work faster on her, but in two days, poor Leona was dead.
Well, after Auntie died, Mama and I was cleaning out her belongings, and I come ’cross this little book o’ hers. Had all sorts of potions and chants and instructions on doing her New Orleans voodoo. It told her secrets ’bout the magic she done, even ’bout putting Mama and Daddy together. So I tucked it up under my shirt and carried it on home. I ain’t never wanted that thing to fall into the wrong hands, so I pulled up a loose floor tile in the bathroom and buried it there. I tell you the truth, I forgot about it all them years ’til now. And the one person I ’spect I’d never wanted to find that book done found it now, sure ’nough. Henrietta don’t know it yet, but she’s the most powerful person in Charleston and Mount Pleasant, hands down.