Filter House Read Online Free PDF Page B

somethin. She proud, though. Too proud, turn out, to even do a little thing like that, am I right?”
    Oneida nodded. Mom hated her to talk about magic. Superstition, she called it. She didn’t even like it when Oneida brought books of fairy tales home from the library.
    “How you come up with these, then?”
    “I—a friend.”
    “A friend.”
    “Mercy Sanchez.”
    “This Mercy, she blood? Kin?” she added, when Oneida’s confusion showed.
    “No.”
    “She tell you how to work em?”
    “No.” Should she break her promise?
    “Somethin you hidin. Can’t be keepin secrets from Big Mama.”
    Her picture was there, on the altar. “Mercy said they came from the Blue Lady.”
    “‘Blue Lady.’ That what you call her.” Big Mama’s broad forehead smoothed out, getting rid of wrinkles Oneida had assumed were always there. “Well, she certainly is. The Blue Lady.”
    Oneida realized why no one but Mizz Curtis and Dad had come to her rescue when the white men tried to arrest her: for the Blue Lady to appear in person, you were supposed to call her, using her real name. Which Mercy and Emilio had never known.
    “What do you call her?”
    “Yemaya.”
    Oneida practiced saying it to herself while she poured the iced tea and stirred in three spoons of sugar for each of them. Yeh-mah-yah. It was strange, yet easy. Easy to say. Easy to remember. Yeh-mah-yah.
    She told Big Mama everything.
    “Hmmph.” Big Mama took a long drink of tea. “You think you able to do what I tell you to?”
    Oneida nodded. Of course she could.
    Big Mama closed the curtains and lit a white candle in a jar, putting a metal tube over its top. Holes in the sides let through spots of light the shape of six-pointed stars. She made Oneida fill a huge shell with water from the bathroom and sprinkled it on both their heads. Oneida brought the chair so Big Mama could sit in front of Yemaya’s altar. She watched while Big Mama twirled the necklace of watermelon seeds around in the basket’s lid and let it go.
    “Awright. Look like Yemaya say I be teachin you.”
    “Can I—”
    “Four questions a day. That’s all Ima answer. Otherwise you jus haveta listen closer to what I say.”
    Oneida decided to ask anyway. “What were you doing?”
    “Divinin. Special way a speakin, more important, a hearin what Yemaya an Shango wanna tell me.”
    “Will I learn that? Who’s Shango?”
    “Shango Yemaya’s son. We start tomorrow. See how much you able to take in.” Big Mama held up her hand, pink palm out. “One more question is all you got for today. Might wanna use it later.”
    They left the bedroom to hang the clean laundry from the clothesline, under trellises heavy with blooming vines. In the machine on the back porch behind them, a new load sloshed away. Royal was watching tv; the rest of the kids were over at the park. Oneida felt the way she often did after discussing adult topics with her parents. It was a combination of coziness and exhilaration, as if she were tucked safe and warm beneath the feathers of a high-soaring bird. A soft breeze lifted the legs of her pajama bottoms, made the top flap its arms as if it were flying.

    Mornings were for housework. Oneida wasted one whole question finding that out.
    Sundays they went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not to church. “God ain’t in there. Only reason to go to church is so people don’t talk bad about you,” Big Mama told them. “Anything they gone say about me they already said it.” They got dressed up the same as everyone else in the neighborhood, nodded and waved at the families who had no feud with Big Mama, even exchanging remarks with those walking their direction, toward Cass. But then they headed north by themselves.
    Big Mama ended each trip through the exhibits in the museum’s tea room. She always ordered a chicken salad sandwich with the crusts cut off. Ivy Joe and Luemma sat beside her, drinking a black cow apiece. Royal drew on all their napkins, floppy-eared