Dominion

His first lady was Priscilla Stringer of Clarksdale’s Zion Funeral Home Stringers. She had a degree in music education from Tougaloo College and could have been Miss America had it not been for her woebegone limp. The women praised her faded-gray eyes, moist, peachy skin, the heavy waves of dull red hair, but they called her Hunchback when she wasn’t around—even though she had no hunched back, just a bad hip from when she was five years old and playing funeral with her brothers and sisters. They had laid her into a box their granddaddy had built for selling pecans and hoisted her up, up until she was dizzy with excitement at being so far from the ground. The feeling, though, was fleeting. The box was rotted; she’d come smashing through the bottom, landing heavy on her right side. She remembered the house call from Dr. Levy, too, where he’d poked at her hip once or twice with his thick hairy fingers, pronounced it not broken, and promptly left. In the middle of the night, all these years later, if she lay on it wrong and her pain pills had worn off or Rev had confiscated them, her body would recall the searing pain of that day as well as the scratch of a rock on her cheek or the sharp smell of grass, and always the thud as she landed, but never the miracle of the flight that had come before.

Sabre and Priscilla had five boys: Trey and Moshe (twins), Mack, Ivy, and Emanuel, called Manny, or Wonderboy. The first four looked like more of Sabre’s genes had gone into their making, but Wonderboy looked like the best of both of them, and for that Priscilla was glad. For four nauseous years of her life, she had carried these loads on a small frame and a bad hip, and only the last time did she come out with something bearing the imprint of her distortion.

1

I’m just a nobody trying to tell everybody about somebody who can save anybody.

FROM THE MINISTER’S DESK

Sabre J. Winfrey

June 4, 2000

MORNING MESSAGE: We’re Not Worthy

SCRIPTURAL BACKGROUND: “And I saw in the right hand of Him who sat on the throne, a scroll written inside and on the back, sealed with seven seals. Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals?’ And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll, or to look at it.” Revelation 5:1–3 NKJV

SABRE POINTS: What does the inability of anyone to open the book of judgment tell us about the Christian in the time of John?___________________________________________________________

We know that sin was passed to us through our brother Adam, and we know only the Lamb has walked the earth without sin. Why is John so distraught that none other is worthy to open the book of judgment? How are his views reflective of the Heavenly Father’s?___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

Revelation proselytizes the end of history as we know it. How can that acknowledgment make us stronger in our day-to-day walk?___________________________________________________________

The wages of sin is___________________________________________________________, but the gift of God is___________________________________________________________.

PRISCILLA

The duration of Sunday devotional depended on whether or not the Holy Spirit drove Rev into falsetto. As he walked from behind the pulpit to stand between the enormous sprays of magnolia on either side of the altar, I could tell he was headed there.

“Whoooooooooo is?” he croaked down deep and then slid an octave up. “Whoooooooooo is? Who is worthy?”

Rev favored a low bass in his arrangements for contrast and fiddled with every aspect of musicianship. Of course, the sanctuary had been constructed for acoustic excellence. The altar, bandstand, and pulpit lay in the valley with the pews rising on an incline, so that his honey voice floated up to make me shiver. Witnessing him in his element dampened my twenty-five years of fury at Melvistine Evan’s beastly self for encouraging me to sit down out of the sanctuary choir when she complained I couldn’t get the precision rock right because of my limp. Anyway, Rev sang the first two lines, and Melvistine’s hungry eyes were edifying him, and I thought proudly (despite our problems), That’s my man.

In the early days before the computer, I typed all of the church’s programs using a big blue typewriter he let me pick out. I enjoyed key clacking and ink smudges, the tidy paper begging to be used, the busy hum of the machine. I would close the study door and let him tend to the boys, except for whomever was nursing. It made me feel important, even though the sermons I produced based on his notes would end up being used as guideposts or maybe not at all, depending on how the Spirit moved him. I was so proud, proud to be his wife and the mother of his children. Then, I thought we were in this thing together; it took a long while and a harsh fall to see it had never been about us, but about him. And even after realizing why he had hired Linda to be his secretary when she couldn’t type, spell, or figure her way out of a paper bag, I continued to research and create these programs for him, for the Seals.

But I digress. I was rocking just fine from my seat, and certainly, everyone could hear my beautiful operatic soprano and the precision of my tambourine, loudest when Melvistine called herself leading a song. Besides, sitting down, I looked better than every sister in here, even Katherine, or Kathareen as everybody said, who was barely thirty but recently widowed when her husband was mangled in an accident with an 18-wheeler. Brown and juicy, Kathareen still had all her teeth, had come up on a little money with the wrongful-death settlement, and always had a foot of somebody else’s hair affixed to her head. Plus, Deacon Golliday always had to tip over with a pillowcase to cover the big, shiny legs she never saw fit to throw a pair of stockings on.

“Lawd, I got to know: Whoooooooooo is? Who is worthy?” called Rev. “To open up the book of the seven seals?” crooned the quartet in response.

Manny’s bass grooved, and Ivy slammed the drums like a maniac. I don’t know how many times I had to tell my boys that this was a house of the Lord and not the VFW Lounge. Manny was throwing eyes at somebody; I craned my head to try to follow the direction of his gaze. Church was packed, but in the general vicinity was Kathareen; Maggie’s girl, Diamond (it’s a shame that somebody saw fit to give that child a stripper’s name); and Mary Kay’s oldest daughter, the one with the liver lips. I had heard so many things about what that child did with them lips. Merciful father, say it aint that one. Manny was special, my baby—I couldn’t bear to have him turned out by some worldly hussy. I twisted a little further for a better look. Did I need to go over there to check the situation out? Rev would be damn inquisitive if I moved, and also too if I got up and walked over there, I would no longer be the best-looking woman in the room. My hip throbbed as if to underscore that point.

I flipped my hand to motion for Bertha Benny. Her brother had the Gulf War syndrome, and he sold his various pain and nerve pills to get crack; she usually had something on hand. She was ushering that Sunday, so by the first offering, she had slipped me a few nerve pills in a yellow handkerchief. I dipped my head low into my gilded Bible and dropped one under my tongue, where it quickly dissolved to dust and bitter. You got the fulfillment quicker thataway. I started to pray. If God didn’t protect my baby from ruthless women, who could?

DIAMOND

Where normally I had been a back-row believer, since I began loving Wonderboy, I became a third-row Christian. I had to be able to lay eyes on him quickly if I needed to, felt the rising panic in my chest when I couldn’t. Now, he was playing bass, which I think was his favorite, but not his only, or even his best, instrument. He picked up the piano by ear at Seven Seals, before his mama had the chance to teach him at home. Next came the drums and the diddley bow with his uncle, and then there was the guitar that he made wail in the middle of revival, so deep was he in the Spirit. In the third grade, they bussed him to Booker T. Washington Junior High, where he learned the trumpet. For a moment, he eyed the saxophone, but his daddy said a man never oughta put nothing in his mouth but food. He focused his talents on the piano and the guitar; he mainly played Velvet (one of two given to his daddy by Ike Turner) or Sarah, a little acoustic that had belonged to his grandaddy. Although all of the Winfrey boys could sing like angels, if anyone could truly sing his ass off, Wonder wouldn’t have nothing to sit on. During one of the Black History Month assemblies at school, the drama teacher played a recording of some Zulu singers, who sounded less like they were singing than vibrating together. Several kids were inexplicably crying. Wonder’s voice was like that. It made people feel like crying in a good way.

The summer before sixth grade, he transformed. His voice squeaked, hair shot out like quills around his jaw, and tight, animal thighs began to stress his school khakis out. His face angled up, and he had brooding eyes—even when he was smiling. It was then that they discovered he could run, too, like, really run, and so his daddy had him training with his brothers and the other high school boys in the mornings and afternoons. Each Thursday, the driftwoody bleachers were full of people watching him look like a man among kids. And even when he was playing both sides of the ball on Friday nights at Dominion High School, and the other boys had more or less caught up to him, he was the only one that got to wear red cleats. He darted through the line like a beast and a dancer. People bought fewer concessions when he was on the field because they didn’t want to miss what he would do next.

If he didn’t have a big dick, somebody should have stoned him, but everybody knew all the Winfreys did. When he passed, the teachers got nervous; the girls sighed. When he picked you, you didn’t giggle about him with your girlfriends, or they would get too jealous and try to slander your name. Me and my siblings were smelly poor when we were younger, and on top of that, my mama went and left, or died, which was shameful in itself. Kids like me usually went through school either being very violent or very quiet. I wasn’t a fighter, so I had long ago chosen the latter. In our shared spaces, I was content to watch him, knowing I would never get the chance to love him.

Junior year, I started letting my hair hang wild every day because I heard he liked that. They started saying I must be mixed with something, but who knew? I certainly didn’t. It must have worked because one day last September, he was behind me in chemistry and complained to the teacher that he could not see around my hair. It got the class to cracking up and my face burning red. After the bell had rung, as we were leaving, he overtook me.

“Diamond Bailey,” he said, like he had just remembered me from somewhere.

My heart sang, but he went on his way down the hall without saying another word. The next day at lunchtime, he upped and asked me to give him what was on my tray, and I did. It was a thing the boys did sometimes if they liked you. The next day we had chili and rice, and he asked me again, and I gave it to him again. He took everything but the fruit cocktail, and I sat with my friend Bunny and side-eyed him, scooping the sap-thin fruit cocktail juice from its molded compartment as my stomach complained. The day after that was Friday, and we were having catfish. You could smell it all up and down the hall.

The catfish came hard-fried on a cloud of white bread, and even though that starchy bread would be stuck to the roof of my mouth for the rest of the day, I spent the morning periods daydreaming about drowning my fish in hot sauce and ketchup and making a sandwich. Well, he was waiting for me in the cafeteria, and I had to tell him no. He laughed, and the other athletes laughed with him. He let me off the hook, but he made sure I saw him taking Shanice’s fish from her tray.

The same afternoon, he cornered me in the hall and asked me for my phone number.

That was ten months ago, and now he was my everything, and I was his. He gave me money, and he didn’t bother me about no coochie, even though I wanted to give him some, and he would have been justified in asking because he was who he was. But I wasn’t a pretend virgin. I was 100 percent a virgin, and it was amazing to him, and me, too, that a girl like me got to be seventeen without even being finger fucked—by a friend of the family or spare uncle at the very least. For that reason, we decided together to save ourselves for each other when the time was right.

Not everybody was in love with Wonderboy, though. A lot of people assumed he thought he was too much, and I could believe that he did. When we were thirteen in Vacation Bible School, Lissandra Betts asked if Jesus had a last name. Lissandra wore Coke bottle glasses and was in special education. Her and all the Bettses were so big and tall you could tell they had plow-hand or blacksmith in their lineage. Nobody made fun of her, though, because her brother, Beefsteak, was colossal and smart as a whip, but he would bang heads over Lissandra. If it had been anybody else, Mother Butler would have thought they were playing with the Lord, but everybody knew Lissandra was sincere. Somebody yelled out, “Of Nazareth.” Another somebody said, “Christ,” and almost said, “Duh,” after that, but they checked themself before Beefsteak could.

“Jesus Winfrey,” yelled Wonderboy. “You didn’t know? His name was Jesus Winfrey. Jesus Winfrey, Emanuel Winfrey, can’t yall see?”

Everybody laughed or booed. At other times, he had said his brothers had tried to throw him down a well, or that he had just come from crushing Philistines, or that he had merely one seal left to break, but this time, Mother Butler really got mad. She walked him straight to the pastor’s study and stayed gone a long time. He came back smiling.

“What your daddy say?” I overheard one of the boys ask when we were leaving to go home.

“Amen.” Wonderboy laughed.

PRISCILLA

The last thing I did after every cleaning was dust my kids’ baby pictures. Rev used to ask me why I bothered with those pictures all the time, assuming it was some sort of female sentimentality, but I’d given up cells, blood, life, and careers for them; I couldn’t help but need to feel pride. And to be honest, that was the best time of motherhood, when they belonged totally to me, when they couldn’t talk and only I could soothe them. That said, I was not one of those women who thought my children’s shit didn’t stink, but people had to admit that I had some good boys. Trey and Moshe were twenty-four and had a full ride to Meharry; Mack was twenty-two and driving trucks. My knee baby, Ivy, was twenty and studying music over at Ole Miss, and Manny was going into his senior year, set to be salutatorian—all with no children out of wedlock, thank you, Jesus.

I could scarcely believe I had adult kids and that I was this old. I mean I had watched it coming, but still I felt blindsided. Blessedly, my life hadn’t happened across my face. Not only did my classmates have multiple grandbabies, their formerly snatched waists lapped over their waistbands, and their mouths had been permanently splintered from years spent drawn around cigarettes. To keep my shape, I pushed back from the table and wore a corset and a pantie girdle every day. I also did calisthenics and rode my bike, and with Rev being so into physical fitness, he approved. Wednesday, I had taken so long cleaning and pattering around the house, it was already midafternoon when I decided to take a quick ride. The early June heat had yet to become unbearable; I figured I’d be home in good time to get dinner started.

In minutes, I was pumping down the street on the bike, and soon I cleared the neighborhood. The headiness I got when riding made me feel powerful, strong, and young, all the ways I never felt on my own two feet. I stood up on the pedals and urged the bike into a devilish speed, blazing through downtown via the Red Panther River trail. The river snaked on into the next county, but the trail stopped near the highway. There I dismounted, pushed my bike up the ramp, and paused at the two lanes of road between me and Carpenter’s Junk Store. They put their new shipments out on Wednesdays, and I came almost every week to poke around and chat with the clerk, Wilma. Every third word of Wilma’s was a curse, but she kept me laughing. It was usually easier for me to have a conversation with folk who weren’t in the church—because Barbara, Brenda-Gale, Melvistine, all of them, were too snooty and fake for their own good. Wilma was real. While we were sharing a laugh, Craig Carpenter came around the building.

“You oughta let me throw that bike on the back of my truck and drop you off at home,” he told me.

He had a beard and a mouth full of Skoal, but he wasn’t bad looking at all, sort of resembled Little Joe from Bonanza. I envisioned myself naked beneath him, tickled by a mat of rusty chest hair, squirming under the sweet stench of tobacco in a bed of hay.

“No, thank you,” I said.

Rev would have a hissy fit if he found out I was in the car with another man, a white one at that. If a Black woman was in the car with a white man, she was either tricking or cleaning, and Rev wanted his wife associated with neither. I wheeled my bike to the edge of the road, faced a dazzling, sinking sun. A car whooshed by, forcing a reckless shiver up my spine, a feeling so icy and familiar and choke-deep that it took all my might not to fling myself into traffic to see if I could get airborne. I glanced back, and Wilma and Carpenter were there, as if they were making sure I didn’t.

I turned the block and was relieved to see Rev’s car absent from the driveway; I figured he was probably out somewhere harmonizing. Manny’s truck wasn’t there either, and I wondered where he might be. If you asked me, he had too much freedom, but I couldn’t tell Rev nothing about none of these boys. His trust-them-until-they-proved-you-wrong approach to parenting always frightened me, and I’m certain he wouldn’t have been that way if we had daughters. I pushed my bike into the side door, leaned it across from the washer and dryer, and entered the kitchen. The lights were on, but the house seemed unnaturally quiet. After all these years of raising boys, I had yearned for silence. Now, with only one left, quiet proved to be just another thing I thought I’d wanted.

As I washed my hands at the sink in the half bath, I pushed the shade aside and saw Manny’s truck in the alley. I had repeatedly warned them against parking there, but they wouldn’t be satisfied until a robberman held a gun to their head and stripped them of all their belongings and dignity. I proceeded up the stairs, was poised to knock on his bedroom door, when I heard breathing: hushed and impatient. I gave the door the slightest shove and was looking at Manny from behind, hunched over whatever he was doing. His skin was taut with strength; his rump came right off his back like his father’s. A step to the right revealed Maggie’s girl on the floor beneath him. Her nipples looked like Cocoa Puffs, and I knew she couldn’t have good sense because she shielded them and not her privates. Manny turned his great, boxy head around, and the way he looked me straight in the eye in the midst of this trifling act instantly and thoroughly convinced me that deep down inside there was something wrong with him. I closed my mouth and the door. This was my fault; my mama used to say that if you went looking for trouble, you wouldn’t have to go far to find it.

There were harsh whispers behind me, the shrieking of the embarrassed girl. My earlier fulfillment had done a Houdini, and my hip throbbed. I took two pain pills with a nip of the Jack that I kept in an economy-sized box of women’s supplies in my closet. When I heard Manny’s truck pull out of the alley, I took a bath, and afterwards, I thought over my options from my bedroom. One thing was for sure: I definitely wasn’t in the mood to stand in a hot kitchen and cook and then clean up after. While I was contemplating where to call in for takeout, he began knocking on the door, which I ignored. I decided to phone in an order to Borgononi’s. By the time the doorbell rang for the delivery, the house had come alive. Manny was playing his guitar, and Rev was holding a lively conversation with somebody in his study. I paid and tipped the guy, but, abandoned by my appetite, left the bags on the kitchen counter.

I peeked in the study to tell Rev the food was there, and then I paused and exhaled, grateful my fulfillment was kicking in. Finally, I went to the door of Manny’s room, left open on purpose, I knew. He looked up at me as I was trying to look away; our gaze held a few seconds past ordinary. I broke the stare first, directing it at my bedroom, where I was already lying down in my mind.

“Go eat, son,” I said.

DIAMOND

The Winfreys lived up on Ashton Court, the grandest street on Coon Hill, with all the rest of the fancy Black folk. It was proper from the outside, so proper I didn’t want to go in, especially not sneak in there. But I really would do just about anything for him, so I followed him through a maze of lemon oil and leather. The wood floors shone. Gold and silver tassels hung off everything. A grand piano, huge and stern, sat in the living room. I would love to hear him play it, but he was acting like he was in such a big rush. Above the piano was a portrait of the Winfreys and their boys, all handsome and coordinated in navy and red. If a house could judge, this one would; walking through the perfect rooms made me feel small but heavy and conspicuous, like a bowling ball.