Nine Bar Blues. Sheree Renée Thomas
trembled, her bright jewelry banged against her chest. “You got the best luck of all, child, the best.”
Luck? I was only in the first grade, and hope rose above my fear. Maybe if I raised my hand in class I would always know the right answer, I thought. Maybe if I didn’t know, I could be invisible. Aunt Dissy stared at me, her eyes wide, knowing, bottomless mirrors. I wished I were invisible right then.
She dug her nail into the fat meat of my palm. I tried to focus my eyes on her thick silver ring, not the pain.
“You got the Sight.” Her tongue held onto the “t,” the word itself an incantation.
My face crumpled, my palm raw, exposed. For a moment, Aunt Dissy’s eyes softened. She passed me one of her hard candies then stroked my palm with her rough, bejeweled hand, tugged at a loose plait curled around my ear. “If you don’t understand right now, rest assured, babygirl. One of these nights you will find out in your sleep.”
The red twisted wrapper fell from my hand. I stood petrified under the hard gaze of several generations of Aunt Dissys, hanging on the wall. Behind her heavy choker, I could see where there had been a deep gash in her throat. The scarred skin was raised and thick like a rope. Maybe the Dissys looked so sour because they were all cursed with the same “best” luck.
“Go on, play now,” she said and frowned, as if she’d heard my thoughts, but I was frozen, didn’t close my eyes for more than a few minutes for three whole days. Instead, I stared at the dark portraits that hung in heavy frames along the walls of every room. Imagined the navel names of the stern-faced women. Before, when I asked Mama about their names, she answered with one sharp word. “Dissy,” she said and shrugged. So I fought off sleep making up a litany of names and stories about the Dissys’ mysterious lives. And when the strain of wakefulness became too much, Mama found me passed out under the sink in the back bedroom, owl-eyed and babbling.
“What did you do to her?” she asked and carried me away. Aunt Dissy bit down on hard candy and grinned, the sound like crushed bones. I didn’t find out until much later that Aunt Dissy poured whiskey in my tea, an old Dissy trick to force me to fall asleep. “The Sight’s coming one way or the other, Faye.” Mama unbuckled my overalls and put me to bed. “Even a mother’s love can’t change a child’s fate.”
Mama didn’t speak to Aunt Dissy for six whole weeks. Didn’t matter no way. Aunt Dissy had told me something else that scared me that first night. Peppermint couldn’t mask the whiskey on her breath, nor those words she had whispered, as if they were a gift. “And with the Sight, you’re going to live longer than the richest woman, deeper than the sweetest love.” Coming from Aunt Dissy’s lips, that didn’t sound so good.
All day long Mama had tried to protect me, but when my eyes closed, I was on my own. And like all the others born before, not long after Aunt Dissy read my palm, the Sight came to me, just as she said, deep in my sleep.
That night I dreamed my room was alive. The walls, the doors, the ceiling pulsed and heaved as if they were flesh and breath. The room rattled like the tail of a snake. In the night, dark as the inside of an eyelid, I willed myself awake, refused to sleep for fear I would dream the dream again. But when I grew weary of fighting off sleep, I woke to a room that was collapsing all around me. Chips of paint floated down like peeling flakes of dry skin, decayed flesh. The walls hissed and screamed. I scratched the paint chips off of me, but they kept falling, dark and jeweled snowflakes.
My body felt dry and prickly as the brightly colored paint stuck to me, covering my skin. I screamed as the chips crept over my arms, my legs, my throat and face. Only my eyes remained. I could see the dream world caving in on me, but I could not escape. Something or someone was holding me, holding my breath. It forced my mouth open, forcing me to swallow. I tried to swing and fight but my arms felt heavy, weighed down by the rainbow tiles that covered my flesh. Neither asleep nor fully conscious, I fought between worlds. I couldn’t stop seeing. A mosaic mummy, I scratched and clawed and screamed myself awake. The skin on my throat, my arms, even my belly were in tatters.
I cried for my mother but it was too late.
The night the Sight came to me, the night it ripped my flesh into cruel tattoos, Mama died. I never forgave the Sight for taking my mama away from me.
Aunt Dissy claimed it was a heart attack. “Yo’ mama has always been weak.” She covered the mirrors and dressed my wounds with raw honey, forced me to drink a bitter tea. As I swallowed the peppery spice, she refused to let me see her. She wrapped my tattered body in cloths and locked me in my room. But it didn’t matter. I already knew the look of terror on Mama’s face. As the Sight’s fire crept over my body, burned through my shredded skin, I let the pain take over, allowing it to numb the pain of me being left behind.
I never got a chance to tell Mama what I saw in my dream. Every night I waited for her, whispered her name as I tried to fight sleep, but Mama never came. Only Aunt Dissy. And the others. When the oldest came to me, the very first Dissy, I recognized her as if she had always been there, hovering in my room. She floated in the air above me, the look in her eyes like two open wounds. Her body was covered in what I thought at first to be tattoos. But she was riven in cuts and runes. Even her blue-black face. The others gathered around her, rubbed ashes into the wounds. They covered her with a dark stained robe and gently braided her hair, dabbed petals from bright flowers on her unblinking eyes.
As they worked, I recognized them from the portraits that filled the walls in all the rooms of Mama’s house. The woman with the regal black bun and the high, lacy white collar that covered her neck, the Dissy in the long skirts, with bright ribbons that hung down to her knees. The other dressed in sack cloth, her head covered in a handkerchief. Still another dressed in a cloche hat, sporting glossy marcel waves and a fur-trimmed coat, wrapped around her glorious figure. I saw another Dissy wearing what might have been a lab coat. She puzzled me. I couldn’t tell if she was a scientist or held court in someone’s kitchen. All of them Dissys, the infamous line of women in our family, women whose minds wandered in the realm of the spirits, returned with the answers in their dreams. And from what I could tell, their stern faces staring back at me from heavy frames along the mirrorless wall, none of them had been full of cheer. Ever.
So many Dissys. And still others came, from times I could not recognize. They showed me things I didn’t understand, led me to places past fear. And if I refused to sleep, they would sing in the wind. They would whisper in the rain. They would linger in the shadows, the walls of my house shaking, humming, hissing until I slept, until I wove their signs into stories, some I whispered to Aunt Dissy, some I kept to myself. And when I refused them too long, the dark circles under my eyes like black half-moons, they would carve the dreams into my skin. Signs and symbols haunted me, a bloody warning in the light of day.
I wore long sleeves for years. The others teased me, said I was sanctified. I never kept up with fashion, for fear that one of the guidance counselors would think I was a cutter, for fear that CPS might take me away. I covered myself until women in ink were as common as night and day, and then I set the scars free.
For most, dreaming marks the end of labor, a time for rest, reflection. For me, it marks when my labors begin.
My dreams held the fates of people I had not met, their lives netted with my own. And no matter what I did years later to try to change my ‘luck,’ my fate, what Aunt Dissy said was turning out to be true. She’d lived longer than nature allows, while my own mama had died fairly young. Aunt Dissy had seen more dreams than any single mind should ever have. Her body held the story, just like mine. And at the rate I was going, it looked like I too would carry her burden, the weight of the scars, the weight of years.
Longer than the richest, deeper than the sweetest love, she’d said.
But what’s the point in living long if you’re broke and lonely and all the dreams you hold are for everyone but you?
“Hey Slim.” I jerk my chin up in the obligatory greeting and watch Mrs. Medina’s green beanpole of a grandson bebop his way down the street. He has gotten to the age where he thinks he’s grown. He has three long hairs on his top lip he calls a mustache and some knobby strands on his