Gumbo Read online

  Who can forget the summer of 1998, when Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were on the national bestseller lists simultaneously? Black and White folks put them there. The works of scores of living Black writers are being taught in universities and colleges across the country, despite the assault on Affirmative Action and multiculturalism. Black writers are in the canon and ain't going nowhere. Several years ago, as part of a United States Information Agency tour of Turkey, I lectured at several universities there about contemporary African American writers. The interest among students and faculty was passionate. One faculty member had shared photocopies of Their Eyes Were Watching God with her students because the book was unavailable in the country. The Turkish people loved Hurston because in her wise, enduring rural folk they saw themselves. Paule Marshall told me of a Richard Wright Society in Japan, made up of scholars devoted to a study of Wright's work. We are a community that has traditionally created stories that speak to and nourish the world, and we still are.

  Never before have Black writers mastered as many genres—literary fiction, (winning major awards from Pulitzer to Nobel), commercial fiction (making major money and racking up major sales figures), extending and enlarging science fiction, mystery, detective writing, wiping out the borders that separate genre and literary fiction altogether (à la Walter Mosley). In some quarters there is much hand-wringing about the “commercialization” of Black literature. And some have even charged that popular, clearly commercial fiction by Black writers is a threat to the future of Black writing. I think the only threat to the future of Black writing is a Black community that fails to understand and rejoice in the fact that it has a story that the world cannot get enough of, a Black community that fails to honor and read its literary writers as well as its commercial writers, a Black community content to let others define its story and establish the prevailing standards by which it will be judged. A Black writer getting a six-figure contract puts more money into our community. At least that's how I do the math.

  Gumbo presents an enticing overview of where we are now. Gumbo is an African-inspired dish, and an African-inspired way of speaking. The stories in this anthology will nourish you and introduce you to a hearty stew of Black writers speaking a New World African language that mixes it all up and that calls on all of our traditions and creates some new ones.

  Hurston/Wright Award winners David Anthony Durham, Tayari Jones, Nelly Rosario, Ravi Howard, Erica Doyle, Faith Adiele, Genaro Ky Ly Smith, Amy DuBois Barnet, and William Henry Lewis, whose stories you will read on these pages, are all carrying on and extending the tradition established by Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Gumbo is also filled with many other writers, some of whom you may meet for the first time in these pages, who are working in that same tradition. But for me the significance of Gumbo is that it brings together a tasty, spicy sampling of all the stories we are writing now. It resonates with the sound of our longing from whatever vantage point we live out the African American and African diasporic experience. Gumbo is a literary rent party. And like the rent parties of old, everybody here had to pay to get in. This time, however, the currency was a story. And so the narratives in Gumbo are boogying in the middle of the living room floor with an audience circling them, egging them on; they are locked in the upstairs bathroom doing the nasty; sitting on the porch plotting the future of race; in the kitchen, eating jerk chicken and black-eyed peas; on the porch falling in love. And who's here? Danzy Senna, Eric Jerome Dickey, Van Whitfield, Tananarive Due, Edward P. Jones, and a whole lot more, including some surprise guests who brought totally new jams with them. What kinda party is this? The kind we've needed to have for a long time.

  If you are reading this book you are attending the party. If you bought this book you are an investor in the future of Black writing, and the stories are your immediate dividend. The strong, assured future of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, down the line, will be, in the words of the godfather of soul, “The Big Payback.” But for now, come on in. Let me have your coat. If you've got to smoke you have to do it outside. The bar is over there. Food's in the den.

  Richard and Zora?

  They're around here somewhere. I just saw them . . .

  The Dew Breaker

  BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  Anne was talking about miracles right before they reached the cemetery. She was telling her husband and daughter about a case she'd recently heard reported on a religious cable access program about a twelve-year-old Lebanese girl who cried crystal tears.

  From the front passenger seat, the daughter had just blurted out “Ouch!,” one of those non sequiturs Anne would rather not hear come out of her grown child's mouth, but that her daughter sometimes used as a short cut for more precise reactions to anything that was not easily comprehensible. It was either “Ouch!,” “Cool,” “Okay,” or “Whatever,” a meaningless chorus her daughter had been drawing from since she was fourteen years old.

  Anne was thinking of scolding her daughter, of telling her now that she was grown up she should talk more like a woman, weigh her words carefully so that, even though she was an “artiste,” others might take her seriously—but she held back, imagining her daughter's reaction to her lecture might be, “Okay, whatever, Manman, go on with your story.”

  Her husband, who was always useful in helping her elaborate on her miraculous tales, and who also disapproved of their daughter's sometimes limited use of language, said in Creole, “If crystal was coming out of her eyes, I would think she would be crying blood.”

  “That's what's extraordinary,” Anne replied. “The crystal pieces were as sharp as knives, but they did not hurt her.”

  “How big were these pieces?” the husband asked, keeping his eyes on the road. He slowed the car down a bit as they entered the ramp leading to the Jackie Robinson Parkway.

  Anne took one last look at the surrounding buildings before the car plunged into the parkway. They were lit more brightly than usual with Christmas trees, and Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles in some of the windows. Anne tried to keep these visions of illuminated pines, electric candles, and giant cardboard Santas in her mind, as they entered the parkway.

  She hated driving through the parkway's curvy narrow lanes, even as a passenger, and would have never put herself through the ride, on Christmas Eve of all times, had it not been so important to her to go to her daughter's apartment in New Rochelle and convince her to attend Christmas Eve Mass with them, something the daughter was probably doing out of guilt because her mother and father had shown up at her front door. While in college, her daughter had declared herself an atheist. Between her daughter, who chose not to believe in God, and her husband, who went to the Brooklyn Museum every week to worship, it seemed, at the foot of Ancient Egyptian statues, she felt outnumbered by pagans.

  Anne was just about to tell her husband and daughter that the crystal pieces that had fallen out of the Lebanese girl's eyes were as big as ten-carat diamonds—she had imagined her daughter retorting, “I bet her family wished she cried ten-carat diamonds”—and that as crystal slid out of her eyes, the girl had visions of a man on a white horse telling her he was a messenger of God, when they reached the cemetery.

  Every time she passed a cemetery, Anne always held her breath. When she was a girl, Anne had gone swimming with her two-year-old brother on a beach in Jacmel and he had disappeared beneath the waves. Ever since then she'd convinced herself that her brother was walking the Earth looking for his grave, and whenever she went by a cemetery, any cemetery, she imagined him there, his tiny wet body bent over the tombstones, his ash-colored eyes surveying the letters, trying to find his name.

  The cemetery was on both sides of them now, the headstones glistening in the limited light, each of them swaying, it seemed—perhaps because the car was moving so fast—like white sheets left out overnight to dry.

  She held her breath the way she imagined her brother did before the weight of the sea collapsed his small lungs and he was forced to surrender to the
water, sinking into a world of starfish, sea turtles, weeds, and sharks. She had gone nowhere near the sea since her brother had disappeared, her heart racing even when she happened upon images of waves on television.

  Who would put a busy thoroughfare in the middle of a cemetery, she wondered, forcing the living and their noisy cars to always be trespassing on the dead? It didn't make sense, but perhaps the parkway's architects had been thinking beyond the daily needs of the living to the fact that now and then the dead might enjoy hearing sounds of life going on at high speed around them. If this were so, she thought, then why should the living be spared the dead's own signs of existence? Of shadows swaying in the breeze, of the laughter and cries of lost children, of the whispers of lovers, muffled as though in dreams.

  “We're way past the cemetery now,” she heard her daughter say.

  Anne had closed her eyes without realizing it. Her daughter knew she reacted strangely to cemeteries but Anne had never told her why, since her daughter had concluded early in life that this, like many incomprehensible things her parents did, was connected to “some bizarre event that happened in Haiti, right?,” mysterious customs the daughter had never shown the least interest in.

  “I'm glad Papa doesn't have your issues with cemeteries,” the daughter was saying, “otherwise we'd be in the cemetery ourselves by now.”

  The daughter pulled out a cigarette, which the father objected to with the wave of a hand. “When you get out of the car,” he said.

  “Whatever,” the daughter replied, putting the loose cigarette back in its pack. She turned her face to the bare trees lining her side of the parkway and said, “Okay, Manman, tell us about another miracle.”

  Anne had lost her two brothers, her only siblings, one to the sea, and the other, a grown man, to her husband, who had killed him in prison. That's the miracle she wanted to tell her daughter about on this Christmas Eve night, the miracle of her daughter being alive, but once again she could think of no reason to make herself do it. What was the use of disturbing her child's peace, of inciting her husband's constant sense of guilt?

  She was not an adherent to the all-revealing culture here. What harm could it do her daughter not to know any of this? About the young brother who had drowned? About the older brother, a Protestant preacher, who had been tortured to death, but not before leaving three circular bite marks on the face of the man who would soon after become her husband? So rather than entertain thoughts of sharing, or clarifying these events, for she was worried that if the daughter ever found out about them she might think her an accomplice in both deaths, she told them about another miracle.

  This one concerned a twenty-one-year-old Filipino man who had seen an image of the Madonna in a white rose petal.

  She thought her daughter would say “Cool” or something equally meaningless, but the daughter actually asked, “How come these people are all foreigners?”

  “Because Americans don't have much faith,” the father replied.

  “Faith is the evidence of things unseen,” Anne concurred. “Here you see everything.”

  “Hello?” the daughter said as if calling them from some great distance on the telephone. “Maybe people here are more practical, so if I see a woman's face in a rose, I'd think somebody drew it there. But there where people see everything, even things they're not supposed to see—or if you see it, Manman—you think it's a miracle. Here we can make miracles happen. There, in Haiti, the Philippines, or wherever, people are always looking for miracles. I don't believe in those things. Maybe if they happened in a different place, I'd believe anyway, even if they happened here, I wouldn't believe them.”

  “Why not?” Anne's husband asked.

  “Because it's like I told you, here we could make them happen, but there, in the Philippines, or wherever, they might not have the means.”

  “You could use vegetable dye to paint a face on a rose petal,” Anne's husband said. “You don't need technology for that. So how do you know they don't have the means?”

  “Because Manman is saying it is a miracle.”

  Anne hated it when her daughter dissected the miracles, coming up with critiques to explain them away.

  “Let me add that I don't think Americans are faithless,” the daughter said. “It reads ‘In God We Trust' on the money, doesn't it? Besides here we are going to this Mass thing and I know we're not the only ones doing that.”

  They were coming out of the Jackie Robinson Parkway and turning onto Jamaica Avenue. Anne tried to bring her thoughts back to the Mass.

  When her daughter was a girl, before going to the Christmas Eve Mass, they would walk around their Brooklyn neighborhood to look at the holiday lights. Their community associations were engaged in fierce competition, awarding a prize to the block with the most nativity scenes, lawn sculptures, wreaths, and banners.

  Anne, her husband, and daughter would walk or drive around to see these holiday decorations because their house had none. Each year, Anne suspected that their neighbors detested her family because their house had been the only nonornamented home on the block, had perhaps been the cause of their section only receiving an honorable mention yet again.

  She and her husband had put up no decorations, fearing, irrationally perhaps, that lit ornaments and trimmings would bring too much attention to them. Instead, as they would later discover, their lack of participation made them stand out. But by then they had settled into their routine and could not bring themselves to change it.

  When her daughter was still living at home the only things Anne ever did to acknowledge the season—aside from attending the Christmas Eve Mass—were to put a handful of shredded brown paper under her daughter's bed and hang a sprig of mistletoe over her bedroom doorway. The frayed paper—put there without her daughter's knowledge—was a substitute for the hay that had been part of the Baby Jesus' first bed. The mistletoe was acquired from the Christmas tree vendor who parked himself across the street from her beauty shop each year, because she'd once heard someone on a Christmas television special say that mistletoe was considered a sacred plant, one with all sorts of reconciliatory qualities. So much so that if two enemy warriors found themselves beneath it they would lay down their weapons and embrace one another.

  By not offering each other or their daughter any presents at Christmas, Anne and her husband had tried to encourage her to be thankful for what she already had—family, a roof over her head—rather than count on what she would, or could, receive on Christmas morning. Their daughter had learned this lesson so well that aside from the drive from block to block to criticize the brightest houses, Christmas disinterested her.

  “Look at that one!” the husband would shout, pointing to the arches of icicle lights draped over one house from top to bottom. “Can you imagine how high their electricity bill is going to be?”

  “I wouldn't be able to sleep in a place like that,” the daughter would say, singling out a neon holiday greeting in a living room window. “It must be as bright as daylight in there all the time.”

  Even now, they were doing the same thing, her husband talking about enormous light bills, and her daughter saying that an extravagantly embellished house across the street looked like “an inferno.”

  Even though the Mass would not begin for another fifteen minutes, the church was packed. Anne and her husband found three seats in a back row, near a young couple who were holding hands and staring ahead at the altar. Anne sat next to the woman, who acknowledged her with a nod as Anne squeezed into the pew. Their daughter was outside in the cold, smoking.

  The daughter soon joined them, plopping herself down on the aisle next to her father. Anne had tried to convince her to wear a dress, or at least a skirt and a blouse, but she had insisted on wearing her paint-stained blue jeans and a lint-covered sweater.

  Anne thought the church most beautiful at Christmas. The nativity scene in front of the altar had a black Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus, the altar candles casting a golden light on their mahogany faces. Th
e sight of people greeting each other around her made her wish that she and her husband had real friends, not just acquaintances from their respective businesses, the beauty salon and barbershop. She wanted to rethink the decision she and her husband had made when they came here, not to get close to anyone who might ask too many questions about his past. The only reason they'd set up shop on Nostrand Avenue, at the center of the Haitian community, was because it was the best chance they had of finding clients. But soon after the barbershop's opening, the husband had discovered that losing eighty pounds, changing his name, and giving Jacmel, a village deep in the mountains, as his place of birth, meant no one asked any more about him. He hadn't been a famous “dew breaker,” or torturer anyway, just one of hundreds who had done their job so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again.

  The church grew silent as the priest walked in and bowed before the altar. It was exactly midnight. Midnight on Christmas Eve was Anne's favorite sixty seconds of the year. It was a charmed minute not just for her, she imagined, but for the entire world. It was the time when birds began chirping their all-night songs to greet the holy birth, when other animals genuflected and trees bowed in reverence. She could picture all this as though it were being projected on a giant screen in a movie theater: water in secret wells and far off rivers and streams turning into wine, bells chiming with help only from the breeze, candles, lanterns, and lamps blinking like the Star of Bethlehem, the gates of Paradise opened, so anyone who died this minute could enter without passing through Purgatory, the Virgin Mary choosing among the sleeping children of the world for some to invite to Heaven to serenade her son.