My Soul to Keep (African Immortals) Read online

  Why must he always reawaken? Why couldn’t the Living Blood inside of him ever rest?

  At last, when it was nearly dawn, he’d given up and found the strength to grip the rope above his head, hoisting himself up by his arms until the deadly coil released him. He was free.

  Free? Yes, he remembered, enslaved no more. Free with no reason to celebrate his freedom.

  “Was this what you wanted, Adele?” he’d sobbed to her corpse, which remained frozen as though it still hung in the air even after he’d cut her down and rocked her in his arms. “Was this the freedom you followed me to find? I can’t follow you where you’ve gone.”

  He’d become a killer, once again, to blot out his loss. When the Union regiment disturbed his hermit’s camp after Adele died, Dawit’s prayer for vengeance was answered. He was armed for battle with a striped flag, a ragged uniform of blue, and a bayonet, the wicked firearm that doubled as a spear’s tip. He used his weapon well. He watered fields with blood.

  And it was not enough. Never enough.

  This new century, that much closer to the new millennium, had brought him hope. No more killing, he’d told himself. He earnestly tried to preserve his humanity; first through disciplined meditation and study under Khaldun, then by escaping to the mortal pleasures most of his Life Brothers did not care to know.

  But his century of peace, clearly, was over.

  Rosalie had shown him his own frailty. He could no longer navigate his path, imprisoned as he was by his emotions and an immortal’s haughty whims.

  One killing, one loss. One loss, one killing. Maybe loss was his price for Life.

  Dawit smothered a hot sob in his throat, afraid to make a sound. He was not alone, and he could not explain his tears to this woman. That pact was his curse.

  No, Dawit decided, he was not worthy of Ogun’s name.

  Prometheus was a better mythological soul mate. He was in chains, his innards picked at by an eagle, watching with disdain as his flesh, again and again, grew back to be freshly destroyed. Always. Loss had found him again, its talons and beak riving his liver, his heart, his soul. He would be forever stripped, reborn, stripped.

  But reborn, Dawit wondered, as what?

  5

  David’s burn mark had vanished by Sunday, less than a week later. Jessica noticed his bare arms as he slung his starched dress shirt across a chair and went outside in his undershirt, insisting on tuning up her mother’s car after church. No sense paying a mechanic to rip you off, he told her. Searching for a scar—she couldn’t remember if he’d burned his right or left arm—she tried to recall the last time she’d seen the bandage at all.

  “What are you doing, baby?” he asked while she ran her fingertips across his unblemished skin. The day was unseasonably sunny, nearly eighty degrees, so David was clammy with a film of perspiration as he worked beneath the Honda Accord’s hood in the unshaded driveway. Bright sunlight made his skin look brick-red.

  “Your burn is gone.”

  “Maybe it’s a miracle,” he said. “Can you hand me that ratchet wrench on top of the toolbox?”

  The miracle remark stung Jessica. Sunday was church day, and every other Sunday the family met at Bea Jacobs’s house for an early dinner after the eleven o’clock service at New Life Bethel Baptist Church. The church was six blocks from Bea’s house in the hedge-lined middle-class black neighborhood in northwest Dade where Jessica had grown up. The area was now in the shadow of Pro Player Stadium, the Miami Dolphins’s football stadium, with horrific traffic jams on game days; during the football season, it was nearly impossible to make it to her mother’s house on Sundays because of the steady flow of fans.

  David rarely agreed to sit through a service, but he came today because he wanted to be with her and Kira. She’d glanced at him during the sermon for signs of acceptance, some enlightenment, but his face always grew stony in church. Once, she saw him staring at the painting of The Last Supper, especially the bearded Jesus figure in the middle, with nothing short of contempt. She’d seen that look before, prompting her to ask David if he hated God. He paused before answering.

  “If there truly is one God, then it’s God who’s displeased with me,” he said simply. He never answered when she asked why in the world he would say such a thing, claiming it was a joke. But she knew it wasn’t.

  Watching David methodically remove her mother’s old spark plugs with counterclockwise twists of the wrench, Jessica told herself that her husband would never be saved. She would have to accept it. He’d been too poisoned against Christ as a Muslim orphan left to missionaries who were bent on converting rather than consoling him. He did not believe. If she trusted her Scriptures, that meant she would spend eternity without him.

  Jessica had gone to church all her life, in her frilly pinafores and white gloves, but when she was young it was only another place she had to go. Home, school, church. She didn’t really learn what faith was until after her father died, when she stood on her toes to see what was in the rose-colored casket. She didn’t know what to expect, why she’d been so anxious to take her place in the line at the front of the church, clinging to her mother’s hand. There, inside, was the grim, washed-out face of Daddy.

  Daddy was going to stay in this box? And they were going to bury this box in the ground? He had to be somewhere else, like her mother kept saying. That wasn’t him at all.

  On that day, Heaven kept Jessica’s world from caving in.

  David, somehow, lived without believing in a better place. And yet he could still wake up in the morning and carry out his day and go to sleep without being frozen awake with fears of death, of darkness, of nothing. She didn’t understand how he could do that. She tried, telling herself one night This is all, there is nothing after this, but she felt swallowed by the vast barrenness. She thought of her father’s bones, crumbling to black dust inside that beautiful casket beneath the ground.

  Maybe David had a point. Religion was a crutch, a way people rationalized away their pain in life, like the slaves yearning for a better existence. A denial. When there is no fear of death, David had told her once, there is no need for religion.

  For a moment, watching David examine her mother’s dirty air filter and shake his head, she envied his strength. Here I am with a two-month-old scratch on my wrist from Teacake, but he heals by himself, she thought. His spirit, his body, everything. No wonder he never seemed to age a day.

  “Din-ner!”

  Her sister’s shrill voice flew out of the open living room jalousie windows, a reminder of childhood. That was the same window where Jessica had stood vigil, waiting for her father to come home from his job working on the telephone lines; she’d probably been waiting by that window when he drove to Burger King in his billed Oakland Raiders cap, the one night he never came back. Jessica saw Alex’s hazy figure in her place, in a bright-purple dress. Kira was beside her in the window, a ball of white taffeta and lace. “Dinner, Mommy! Dinner, Daddy!” she echoed. As usual, Kira needed to be a part of the production, whatever it was.

  Bea Jacobs had fixed baked chicken, collard greens, cornbread, and two desserts, a sweet potato pie and a lemon pound cake. Jessica was amused by her mother’s sudden culinary finesse. She’d never cooked this way for the family before, but she started in earnest after Kira was born, assuming a grandmother’s role, and Uncle Billy had passed along some down-home Georgia recipes since he moved in, like peach cobbler and chicken feet stew. Bea was a neurotic cook, obsessed with kitchen details the way she’d fretted over the books before she retired as business manager of a chain of beauty shops. Like her daughters, she was a perfectionist. And she caught on fast.

  “Where’s David?” Bea asked, pulling her chair up to the head of the table after setting down the plate of cornbread. She’d always been thin, and she wore her hair in a silver natural, cut short the way Alexis wore hers. Only Jessica relaxed her hair, letting it grow in a straight page-boy style just past her ears.

  “He’s washing up,” Jessi
ca answered.

  “Let’s go on and say grace, then.”

  In a clash of wills with his in-law, David had once made a production of refusing to sit through grace at her table. Jessica thought her mother would bite through her lip, she was so angry. All things considered, Jessica thought with a smile, Bea was adjusting well to having a heathen in the family; both her father and grandfather had been pastors.

  They grasped hands; Bea taking Jessica and Alexis’s hands on either side of her, Jessica holding Kira’s tiny fingers, and Alexis reaching over to Uncle Billy’s wheelchair to touch his ruined left hand. Uncle Billy still couldn’t move his left arm since his stroke. They murmured their amens in unison.

  “You finished fooling with that car yet? I got something you need to listen to in back,” Uncle Billy said when David joined them at the table. He’d dressed again and smelled of fresh cologne. The scent, whatever he’d found, suited him.

  “Don’t tell me you rooted out that old Jelly Roll record.”

  “Told you I had it somewhere up in all them boxes. Original recording, nineteen and twenty-five. Got me some Satchmo too.” Uncle Billy’s words slurred slightly, the stroke compounded by missing front teeth and a heavy Georgia accent. Sometimes Jessica couldn’t understand him, but David never had a problem. A relative from Bea’s mother’s side, Uncle Billy had been born near the grounds of the same plantation where the family had been slaves for years.

  “I’ll be damned, Uncle Billy,” David said, smiling. “I may just have to sneak in here one night and steal those away. And that old Victrola of yours too.”

  “Oh, no. You ain’t stealin’ nothin’ from this old man. And I’ma still find that Jazz Brigade recording. My daddy left me that from when we was in Chicago, right ‘fore the Depression. He used to watch those boys rehearse. Said they could cook. Seth ‘Spider’ Tillis, Lester Payne, all of them.”

  Something like rapture passed across David’s face. He loved music. Whatever shelf space on their walls and in the closets that wasn’t filled with books was dedicated to his vast record and CD collection, exclusively classical, blues, and jazz. He’d once told her that his CD collection alone numbered more than four thousand. But it was much more than a hobby to him; the New York Times had called David’s book on the early jazz age, which he’d written at Harvard as his doctoral dissertation, the “definitive history of jazz.”

  David leaned closer to Uncle Billy, his chin resting on his palm. “Uncle Billy,” he said slowly, “if you could find The Jazz Brigade … I lost all my originals. And it’s so rare—”

  “What’s the … Depression?” Kira piped up.

  David tapped her on top of her head. “It was a long time ago, Duchess. Many years before any of us were born.”

  “Now, hold up. I was born nineteen-seventeen,” Uncle Billy corrected him.

  “Yes, you’d better speak for yourself, David,” Bea said. She always spoke a painstaking English, her T’s sharp, a result of her upper-middle-class rearing upstate in Quincy.

  “We sure got some old folks at this table, don’t we?” Alexis asked. She shared a playful glance with Jessica; she and Jessica looked like twins, though Alex was thirty-four, six years older than Jessica, the same age as David.

  “Old enough to know better,” Bea said.

  Bea’s skin was a fair shade, though she’d told Jessica she was teased by her cousins as a child because she was the darkest one in her family. Maybe it was through rebellion that Bea married Raymond Jacobs, the darkest man she had ever known. Bea’s pet name for him had been Blue, Jessica learned much later, because he was blue-black. Jessica and Alexis were mixtures of brown, though Jessica couldn’t think of a time when anyone ever once felt a need to discuss the family complexions. In church school, when one of Jessica’s young classmates pointed out that Bea was “light-skinded,” like it was something special, Jessica didn’t know what the girl was talking about.

  Raymond was Bea’s second husband. She’d divorced her first husband after ten years because of his drinking, then moved to Miami to begin a new life. She’d also hoped to have children, and her first husband had been sterile. Then, she met Raymond.

  Raymond, who was six years younger than Bea and had only an eighth-grade education, won Jessica’s college-educated mother through his sly wit and natural intelligence. His lack of formal schooling shut him out of many jobs, but Jessica had known he was a genius before she really knew what a genius was. She’d always looked forward to the day—maybe in fourth grade or fifth grade, she’d thought—when she could sit down and impress her father with how smart she was too. Fate had cheated her out of that chance.

  Raymond had been young when he died, only forty. But Bea was no longer young. Jessica remembered, while sitting at the dinner table, that her mother had just turned sixty-six. She didn’t look it, despite her silver hair; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, splotched with only a few dark moles. Still, in just ten years, which no longer seemed like an eternity to Jessica, Bea would be seventy-six, close to Uncle Billy’s age now.

  Time passed so quickly. Jessica felt the disquieting sense, as she often did, of enjoying a fleeting moment before it was over as a memory, as though she were already reminiscing about Sunday dinner with Uncle Billy and her mother, way back when they were both still alive. Alexis’s excited cry pulled Jessica from her thoughts. “Ooh, girl, I almost forgot,” her sister said. “Tell us about that book you’re writing.”

  The question was a surprise to everyone at the table, bringing a round of smiles and exclamations. Except from David.

  “I was planning to tell you tonight. It’s not in stone yet. Peter said something to his agent, and he thinks we can get a contract and take a leave of absence for a few months.”

  “Peter.” David’s tone was knowing, nearly scornful.

  “What does that mean?”

  David didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the road as he drove the minivan south on Biscayne Boulevard. It was raining again, unusual for February. Usually, the moody, sporadic storm clouds they’d experienced throughout the week appeared in summertime. It had been a gloomy and wet few days. Maybe that accounted some for David’s sour mood, Jessica thought.

  “Block … buster … Video,” Kira said from the backseat. She’d taken to announcing all signs they passed. “I can read. Burger King. See? Star-dust Mo-tel.”

  “That’s enough, Duchess. We know you’re smart,” he said.

  “David, why are you so down on Peter?”

  “We’ll talk about that later.” He tried to sound pleasant.

  “Mommy, is Peter coming over?” Kira asked. Jessica allowed Kira to address Peter by his first name because her attempts to pronounce Mister Donovitch were hopeless. “He gave me a doll-baby. ’Member? For Christmas?”

  “I remember.”

  David sighed shortly, no longer hiding his irritation. Jessica wondered if he was somehow jealous of Peter, if he felt threatened by her friendship with him. True, David was always simply courteous when Peter visited, holding himself at a slight distance only she could detect. But jealousy didn’t make sense; she’d told him she thought Peter was gay. Did David have a problem with whites, then? She’d have to wait until they were home and Kira was bathed and tucked in before she could corner David in the bedroom for an explanation.

  She found David spread-eagled across the bed, lying on his stomach. The bed, which David had imported, cost him twenty thousand dollars, he told her the first night they shared it. It was more than a hundred years old, a canopied opium bed that once belonged to some useless lord in China. The rich teak frame was engraved with intricate patterns of dragons. The bed was so high, David had explained, because its original owner probably rarely got up and wanted to meet visitors at eye level. Even now, whenever Jessica sat on the bed, which was built to rock slightly on a hinge, she felt like she’d entered an age-old sanctuary.

  “Okay. Tell me what’s bothering you,” she said.

  “I hate hearing secondhan
d about developments that affect our family,” David said, his voice sounding muffled.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just mentioned it to Alex—”

  “I know what it takes to write a book, Jess. And traveling besides? I don’t like it at all.”

  Jessica felt a stab of hurt, but it quickly turned to anger. “I planned to talk it over with you. I didn’t know I’d also be asking permission.”

  “Apparently not. It sounds very much decided.”

  “You wrote a book, David. Remember?”

  “Exactly my point. I wrote a book before I had a family or any life to speak of, and it ate up vast portions of my time. Four months, to me, sounds highly optimistic. I’d say at least six.”

  “So? What’s six months?”

  At this, David rolled over to look her in the eye. “Six months,” he said, “is six months. A very short time, and yet a very long time.”

  She didn’t understand him. No matter how long she lived with him and observed him and tried to think the way he did, he always confounded her somehow. Was it chauvinism? Selfishness?

  “Peter says—”

  David cut her off with a disgusted sound and rolled toward the wall. He was muttering to himself in another language, not Spanish this time, but Amharic or Arabic. She couldn’t tell which. She thought of Ricky Ricardo having a tantrum on I Love Lucy.

  “English, please,” she said.

  Groaning, he lifted himself and sat beside her so that their feet dangled together over the edge of the bed. He rubbed her thigh. “Do you watch my face when I listen to Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik? Or Bessie Smith? Or when I look at you and Kira? Do you see the delight?”

  She nodded. She’d seen that expression today, when he talked about music and his lost Jazz Brigade records with Uncle Billy.

  “That’s how your face looks,” he said, “when Peter comes. Or any of your other reporter friends. You cloister in a corner and build a bonfire among yourselves, feeding it with analysis and supposition and gossip. The city commissioner’s race. The presidential election. What’s Peter’s specialty? Oh, yes. The Mafia. Santo Trafficante and the rest. The sites of their summer homes, their illegitimate children, and so on. That’s where we lose each other, Jess. You can sit with me and enjoy Mozart. And Bessie Smith. And Kira, of course. And you even tolerate my ramblings about the Crusades, or King Tewedros the Second in Ethiopia, or Francisco Pizarro, or the Huguenots in France—”