III

SIN-SIN WAS SORRY to see Raisin go. He would’ve liked to help her, but didn’t really know...

He could help Raisin.

He sat back down under a tree whose leaves were starting to change color. Green leaking out like blood from a body, one dark body, turning soft and pale.

He closed his eyes and thought about Raisin. Thought about the smallness of her, the softness beneath her wrinkled skin. He thought about her lips against his, the tongue water in her mouth. A curious pleasure rose from his toes and crept up his legs. He shook his head, jiggled his body. He was not here for this hardness. He needed to figure out how to help a friend.

He opened his eyes and looked deep into his hand-eye, as far into the core of Raisin as he could look in order to feel her mother.

* * *

Red. Black. Old blue-black. New red running. Waves. A burning swirl of water. At the bottom, the hot sea-bottom, a child. Floating. Pulsing inside a sack without sound. Farther back, a girl still smelling of her mother’s milk, rounding. Spilling forth with light. Something like a shadow moves around her, seeps inside her, glows. She knows no mother’s love. Knows no mother’s love. She is lost, adrift in the radiance of her shadow-lover. He holds her against a tree. She holds him against a tree. Climbs, wraps herself around the trunk. She is gleaming, incandescent in the tree-black night. She pulls light from the shadow, soft watery light. The shadow draws light from her. Long, thirsting, pull.

Sin-Sin stopped his feeling of Raisin’s mother. A cold wet finger of air moved along his spine. Blue would’ve said someone walked across his grave. It was a man-spirit, whispering words Sin-Sin could barely hear, calling out to Raisin like she belonged to him. “Baby girl ... Baby girl.” Sin-Sin looked around him, peered steadily, quietly into the trees. He didn’t see anything, hear anyone. And yet he was sure if he wanted to, he could reach behind and wipe wetness from the skin on his back.

Whose voice was getting inside his head?

“You can’t put a name on me.”

Sin-Sin’s head felt heavy. He shook it to clear the roar growing inside.

“You can’t shake me loose, less I wanna be shook.”

Sin-Sin felt the wetness on his skin again.

“You wanna know about Raisin and her mama and daddy?”

Sin-Sin’s eyes closed, though he struggled to keep them open. All around him was water, thick black water. Deep. He was far inside another world. Gasping. Choking. Water flowing through his nose like air. The more his legs fought the wetness, the further he sank. Into a bottomless pitch, the black at the beginning of the world.

* * *

“Some things you gotta leave alone, boy,” Blue told him later. “There’s things you ain’t ready for, got no idea how to handle.

“You wanna know about your daddy?” Blue asked.

Sin-Sin thought of the tests he had passed so Blue would think he was ready to know his manhood and would willingly give him his own knife.

“You gotta be able to keep standing, boy,” Blue had said. “No matter how rough it get, no matter how many times life knock you down. You gotta get back up on your feet. That’s what’s gonna make you a man.”

He did not question Blue. Not the time he had to stand in the woods in the same position, the same place, all day and way into the night. Not the first time Blue had told him he needed to make himself pure and had given him the hateful yellow brew in the black wooden bowl to drink.

“To help you learn how to see inside yourself,” Blue had said.

Sin-Sin had not questioned Blue when Blue brushed his body with wide green leaves that came from a tree Sin-Sin had never seen before. Not when he had to lay in the woods on a mat all night and stay awake watching the blinking, fading stars. He had never questioned Blue.

More than anything, now, especially now, Sin-Sin wanted to be a man. He wanted to know about his daddy.

But it was getting so he didn’t know if things he was feeling were real things, or dreams. The faceless man inside the orange cloud who had visited his mother, the voices inside his head. Was that real?

“Your body. Listen to your body,” Blue had told him. “It’s how we come to remember. Your body holds the memories inside. Inside, where can’t nobody see. But I see and I know.

“What happened to my daddy ain’t no different from what happened to yours. All of ours. Same thing happened to our mamas, but in a different way. Things in life’ll wear on you. Push you till your strong parts get weak. Get you wanting to give up every last piece of yourself. Once you lose yourself, you lose your soul.

“All they need is one little hole, just one crack, and the soulcatcher’s in. Once they catch your soul, it’s gone. The soul gets confused and can’t find its way back cause of all the confusion inside you and all around in the world. Get you so you change your ways and ain’t the same somebody the soul come back looking for.

“Yeah, my daddy went down in the water, plenty folks around here did. What else could we do, what would you do somebody try to take away the Ones who made your world, your ways, your name, your very self and try to turn you into something not human?”

Blue looked deep inside Sin-Sin. He sighed and said, “You gotta know other folks’ stories to find your own. Here’s mine, I’m passing it to you cause your daddy can’t, like my daddy didn’t. It’s yours now, too. If you take it, no soulcatcher can steal our story again.”