Prologue
The splatter of rain on the tin roof awakened Mama Cheche Brown. The rhythmic beat of the drops intensified, becoming large streams. She tilted her head, listening as they blended together in the grooves of rusted metal sheeting on top of her row house. The sound morphed into a trickle as water rolled off the eaves and landed in the dark Delta farmland surrounding her home. The rainwater splashing on the tin reverberated to her body, running a chill up her spine.
Mama Cheche’s shoulders shook. “Lordy, me. Can I make it through one more summer? This weather’s gonna be the death of me yet.” The box springs on her iron bed squeaked when she got up. Ignoring the familiar noise, she slipped on her dressing gown, walked to her rocking chair, and sat in it. Her heart recognized a rhythm and pounded to a distant beat. A flash of drums crossed her memory, the same sound that often called her in the night and reminded her of the land of the people she descended from.
Despite her eighty years, Mama walked to the Mount Zion Church every Sunday. Those long treks of hers had turned the loose soil into a path of hard-packed, gray earth that ran to the main road. Mama considered herself a faithful Christian. She had been a member of Mount Zion for more than sixty years, before World War II. Most parishioners who had known her since she joined the church as a pre-teenager trusted her; others were wary of her. They were uncomfortable around her because she had “the gift.” Nevertheless, she couldn’t help how those people felt and she couldn’t deny what was coursing through her body. Her instincts were acute. Oftentimes, she could look at a man and know he was up to no good before he even spoke. Grandma Dee had called it “the knowin’ of what was comin’.”
An old, white-haired preacher man with a smile on his greasy lips once told her he could cast out the demon in her with a few swigs of his wine, but she knew better. After a sniff of his clothes soaked with the cheap fruit of the vine he’d spilled on them, she backed off. With tears in her eyes, she told him, “Jesus left it in me to know a good preacher man from a bad preacher man.” She shook her finger at him, “You ain’t a good one. Jus’ move along.” He wasn’t going to mess with her good thing. After all, she had “the gift.” She reckoned Jesus wanted her to use it. “It don’t make no sense for my Grandma Dee to teach me the good mojo if I was just to get rid of it. Lawd, I been saved to do good, and I’m gonna do it by usin’ what I got!”
She blinked, trying to clear the tears, then she looked around. “Why is there so much light in this room?” She stared at the plastered walls covered with newspaper, held together with a mixture of starch and water. It closed the light from the cracks, so the rooms in the row house should have been dark. Mama looked at dates on those old papers and they triggered thoughts about her long life. She had seen a lot, her heart had hurt a lot, but she was patient. Instinct told her she had a purpose; something big was going to happen and she would play a part in it.
She sighed, because she sensed the moment she had been waiting on was soon coming to pass. She heard the churning Sunflower River call her name as it had for Grandma Dee so many years ago. When she started needing naps in the afternoon and her heart wasn’t beating steadily like it used to, Mama didn’t go to the doctor, she had no use for them. She chose to look up the symptoms on the fancy cell phone her daughter Tippiny sent her, a handy tool for a solitary lady. She could ask it questions, and it talked right back! One day she told it how she was feeling. The pleasant but distant voice diagnosed the problem as something called afib. All that meant to Mama was that her time was coming, but not yet.
“Oh, yes, dear Lord. There’s a time and place for everything, like the Good Book says. She glanced at the wall calendar, another gift from Tippiny. Above the year 2012 plastered on the page was a picture of the Washington Monument in D. C., where her daughter worked part of the year for a law firm. The rest of the year she worked in Atlanta. Such a nomadic life and no time to come see me. Will I see Tippiny again? Dear God, is this going to be my last year on Earth?
Her bones creaked as she reached for her long willow wood stick. She wrapped her claw-like fingers around its knob, using it to pull up from her rocking chair with hands roughened from growing up picking cotton. Her knuckles tightened with the strain, but she managed to get to her feet. Straightening her back to her full five-foot height, she tucked loose strands of white hair into the braided twist at the nape of her neck. Then she buttoned up her gown over her ample bosom, smoothing out the wrinkles before she slipped on her rough-hewn sandals.
Staff in hand, Cheche made her way to the sun-bleached boards that served as her front door that she’d left open to catch the morning breeze. Rain poured harder, and she felt cool splatters of it on her arm. Not wanting to get wet, she pushed on the door to close it and the rusty hinges creaked. She stopped and rolled her dark brown eyes. The mojo was coming. The soft plop of water hitting the front porch had a haunting beat. “Oh, my it’s callin’ to me.”
She shuddered as she struggled to open the door again feeling the need to go outside. She looked up at the high tin ceiling covering her porch, shielding her eyes from the glare, the strange bright light reflecting back at her. Water snaked its way through the edges of a hole in her porch roof, one that had been puttied up years ago. The round puncture had bits of tin flaring out from its center, jagged and sharp. Cheche used her stick to force the putty back in place. A memory she had avoided resurfaced; something from a very dark night in the Mississippi Delta. That bullet hole made her shake all over. She clamped her lips together and then smiled, “But I was clever to hide that proof in plain sight. Nobody’s ever going to discover it.”
The water from the edge of the hole appeared to run red. Cheche put her ebony hand under the flow and stared at what she saw as blood coursing over her hand. She then rubbed wet, blood-covered fingers through her curly hair, loosening the bun and causing thick drops to run into her eyes. She brushed the liquid aside. This is a very powerful vision. Memories flooded her brain. Her entire body vibrated. The memory became a vivid reminder of the day Goldie went missing. This rain’s gonna bring up the dead. Lordy, it’s time for the dead to rise.