Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Read Online Free PDF Page A

story. Now sit still and let her play you like you play that piano.”
    As I got older Poppa would push me.
    “Can you hear the ancestors, little 'un? They are not happy today.”
    “No, Poppa, I can't really hear them.”
    “Then ya just aren't listenin’, are ya? Now don't you roll those eyes at me. Yer gonna needs to know this one day.”
    “Know what?”
    “How to tap into a place's power spot.” He would bend down with his hand, touching that sandy Carolina soil.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Hum. Ya gotta hear the hum.” He looked straight at me as if I were being told the most important piece of information ever.
    “The hum?”
    “Yes, the hum of the Great Mother. Let this sink in. Every inch of this land has been walked on by somebody's ancestors. That means there are events, conversations, killins’, singins’, dancin’—Lord almighty—squabblin’, you name it. It has happened. So ya decides first what ya needs to tap into. Find the way in. Ya must hear the tone. Follow it and yer probably at a vortex.”
    “You believe this, Poppa?”
    “I know this, Shug: the white man don't know.”
    “Careful, Poppa, Dad's white.”
    “Hmm. He's Irish-Scottish. That ain't white. They been fightin’ the white man who takes the land—takes the land till the Grim Reaper comes up and taps the white man on the shoulder and says, ‘No weaslin’ outta this one, yer time has come.’ It used to tickle your old Poppa to see a white man turn white as a ghost.”
    “Okay, in English.”
    “Most people nowadays, Shug, don't see. Don't feel. Don't hear any-thin’ that science can't prove. A hundred years ago people said a man would never fly.”
    “But he couldn't.”
    “Yes, granddaughter. Yes, he could. He just hadn't figured out how. The Eagle Dancers knew man could fly It was only in this dimension that the mechanics hadn't been worked out.”
    “So now we know how to fly”
    “Only in the physical, granddaughter, not in the spiritual. Back to your studies, and find me a vortex before lunch.”
    “Does my hungry tum-tum count?”
    “Nope.”
    I somehow knew that this was where I had to learn and train. Poppa would talk about shape-shifting, the practice of shifting the containment of the human condition in order to open it up to other forms of consciousness.We'd take walks every day, and he would communicate the way he saw the world, which was that there was life in all things, that there was a kind of knowing in all things. Like anyone, according to Poppa, I'd have to retune my own receiving information system, in my own being, to be able to hear the unique harmonics—thereby understanding the language of the spirit world. What I do know is that he knew this language. I cannot tell you I quite understand how he did, but I watched with amazement as he would communicate with nature, and he seemed to understand it—he seemed to bask in his relationship with it.
    I did not have this ability and somehow I knew I never would, but at age four I began to feel something else. I began to feel the music inhabiting me. I'd say to Poppa, “Songs are chasing me,” and he would say, “Shug, slow down and let the song's stories talk to you. Tell them ya've got room around the fire for 'em and their friends. And ya listen to 'em, Shug, ya listen up now, and they'll teach ya things ain't nobody on this earth can begin to think about even tryin’ to blow in those kind of trade winds.” He'd say, “Don't be afraid, Shug, my grandmother Margaret Little told me the same thing when the stories started bendin’ my ear as a little rascal. She'd say, ‘C.C., if the stories don't knock the fire out of ya, then they just might warm that little rascal heart of yers.’ ” He told me from the beginning, “The stories have always come a visitin’. And the stories have always said, ‘C.C., this is who we are and you'll use your own language to tell folks about us, but this is our framework.’ ” And he said he