Learning the Banda: Act One
Overture
--
Act One
At first, in a hieratic performance, as if in slow motion, the king
submitted with mournful joy, bowing his meek head. The hooded man raised
an ax, and then the rapid slash of a pendulum, the blade multiplied in every reflecting
surface, and the heads that rolled were a thousand.
"You cannot be considering this," your father says. "Not seriously. Seven's too young to see this nonsense for what it is."
"Too old," your mother says, as you rearrange the food on your plate, organising by an arcane method you came up with years ago, based on an intricate relationship between size and colour that you've tried explaining but can't. "It should have been done long before this. And it's not nonsense."
Your father shakes his head, stands up from the table, says, "I'll have no part of it," and his words echo with a ring of finality, something that distracts you from the plate, makes you look at him. He glances at you, takes in your older brother and younger sister, then shakes his head again. "This will not end well," he tells your mother. "This is ridiculous and so are you, for believing in it."
Now, you think he was probably spitting the words out, pushing them up from his belly like jewels of calcified vomit, but then, back in your innocence, you paid only scant attention to him, half of your mind caught on your food and the pattern it makes on your plate, the other half focused on the outcome of a game you and your neighbourhood friends had developed that afternoon. You always do that -- go further, think deeper, and it gives you a curious sense of weightlessness sometimes, of half-estrangement at others, but mostly you just find yourself frustrated that no one else seems to care about the underpinnings of the fantastical worlds your group creates. It's a weakness, you think -- that you have always thought, even more so back then -- that they aren't willing to try and decode, to attempt to decipher, and occasionally you feel like this makes you better than them but mostly you just feel a little out of place.
You're never out of place with your mother, though. She understands. She looks into your eyes and asks questions that no one should really ever ask a seven year old but questions which you answer, which make you think, which send you falling deeper and deeper into other worlds, other lives, other yous. Perhaps what happens is not entirely your fault or your mother's fault; perhaps the both of you are to blame, a secret conspiracy between two, a marriage of minds that should never have existed at the same time for the sake of the entire world.
--
Your mother started going to the local hounfor before you were born. She began her initiation a year before you arrived in the world, silent and wide-eyed, and she says, on your way to the hounfor where she worships, "The family are why you arrived, Jen. Without them." She stops there, shakes her head. You should have asked, then and there, what her plans were, what she hoped would happen, what she had sworn to do, but you don't. You are in a part of Dallas you've never seen before; you are too focused on the new surroundings outside of the window to pay much attention to her unspoken hints and heavy silences.
This area is not like yours; for one, the skyline is right above you, rather than in the near distance. The people are browner, they don't have freckles like you, they look tired and wary as you drive by, nose pressed to the passenger-side window. Of course, you're only seven, you're too young to understand racism and classism and all the other -isms that sour the world, have made its history bloody and so very, very biased. You will learn about these things later.
When you get to where you're going, your mother parks on a piece of land that may have been blessed with grass once in its life but is no longer, is now just a patch of mud and rock and weeds, ground-in cigarette butts and a crinkled paper bag from Whataburger spinning past you. Your mother holds your hand and walks you inside a house -- smaller than yours, yet somehow all the more comfortable for it. You assumed then that it was because your father wasn't there; later, when you've learned, you know it's because Papa is.
The kitchen is the first room you go into and it smells of spice and heat and coconut. People crowd around a table, talking and laughing until you come in, and then they all stop, in sync, look at your mother first with a line of disapproval in their foreheads that something inside of you wants to smooth out. When they look at you, though, the atmosphere changes.
An old woman, sitting at the table, ends of white braids peeking out from her headwrap, leans forward, studies you for a long moment before she says, "C'mere, child."
You look up at your mother and she releases your hand, just like that, but sets her palm on the top of your head. "He's already yours," your mother says.
You aren't smart enough to hear the plea in your mother's voice, you have no common sense in this unknown place with these unknown people, you are too awed by the way the air hangs, heavy and salt-laden, too intimidated by the way everyone is looking at you, too young to know what you're getting into when you shrug out from under your mother's touch. You walk around the table, the small crowd parting easily for you, watching you, filling in the space of your steps a moment after you take them. You stand in front of the old woman, meet her black eyes, and -- and you feel something at the base of your skull, something that usually only happens when you think of things beyond the real, of fantastical worlds and psychic animal instincts.
"He's always been yours," your mother murmurs. You would look at her if you could take your eyes from the woman in front of you, the one whose gaze holds your own.
"Not mine," the woman says. "Papa Ghede's. And oh, but by the family, child, do you belong to him." She frowns, finally looks away from you, towards your mother. "This one ain't gonna serve as payment. We'll need another." Before your mother can argue, before you can even react to the words, to the meaning behind them, the woman looks back at you, murmurs, "You'll stay with us tonight. Yeah, baby?"
You reach out, drawn by something beyond yourself, by something bigger than yourself, and trail the tips of your fingers down the centre of her forehead, middle finger tracking down her nose as well. "Yeah," you say, fingertips tracing the bow of her lips. Your mother coughs out your name and you correct yourself, say, "Yes, ma'am."
When the small crowd leaves the kitchen to go in the back, you go with them. Your mother does not. You hear her crying.
--
In your memory, now, the events of that night are hazy, bleed together like watercolour on paper, but if your early childhood is dyed over with roses, then this night is the first time you smell blood -- though you don't realise it, not yet, not what the smell of rust and iron and life and death will come to mean for you, the new epoch of your life it will usher in.
It happens so quickly, in the beginning. The old woman disappears for a few minutes, leaves you surrounded by strange people. They don't feel strange, though; the strange thing is how comfortable you are with them, in them, among them.
"What's your name?"
You turn to look at the person who asks, a man with sweat dripping down the sides of his shaved head, but before you can answer, another man steps in front of you, pushes you behind him, tells you, "Don't answer that."
You frown, tilt your head, eyes dancing between the broad back of the man in front of you and, through the crook in his arm, to the man who asked the question. "Why not?" you ask.
The man standing across from you, the one whose eyes you can see and do, can meet and do, the one whose nostrils you see flare as if he's a wolf to scent you, laughs. The man protecting you says, "Names have power, boy, and if Mama was right, yours more than most."
"Call me Jack, then," you say after a moment's thought. It's a name you like, one you've gone by once or twice before in games, the only combination of your first and last names that ever makes sense to other people. "What are we doing?"
"Gonna dedicate you," the woman says, appearing in the middle of the empty space as if she's always been there. She hasn't, though; she fills the space with a presence so full of death and raucous goodwill that you feel as though you could pick her out anywhere.
Without thinking twice, you slip past the man, slick like soap and twice as bitter, read the crowd well enough to dart through them, evading every hand reaching for you, and come to a stop in front of her, toe-to-toe with her. She crouches down, takes your chin in a gentle grip, smiles at you.
You smile back, can't do anything but smile back even as you ask, "To who?"
"Ain't never been baptised," she murmurs, patting your cheek and standing back up straight. "Ain't nothing on you for any other god or spirit. How'd you like to meet one of mine?"
"Papa Ghede," you guess, butchering the pronunciation of the name you heard earlier. "I don't know."
The woman laughs. "Honest," she says. "Good. That'll serve you well, child."
--
This is where your memory gets dizzyingly loud and vibrant, no longer the rose-hued summer garden but the riotous noise and life of a Carnivale night. This is the first time you meet Papa. This is the first time you really, truly, actually see.
--
It happens slowly but, by the end of that year, you're living with the old woman -- Melania, you learn, once you understand what it means that she's gifted you with her name. You go home for weekends, sure, and some of the holidays, but your mother can't look at you without going glassy-eyed with tears and your father never quite meets your gaze again. He complains that you aren't in school -- a real school, he says, because learning your times-tables at the feet of one of these third-world superstitious old grandmothers is not a real education -- and grumbles when it's time to part with cash for your upkeep, but never around other people, not really even around you. You just hear things, sometimes. Sometimes you hear things that no one even says.
This is one of Papa's gifts. It's the first one you learn about, actually; the first one that develops in you, the first one you meet face-to-face.
In between school lessons on history and culture -- and more practical teachings on race and class -- she teaches you about this gift and how Papa's choices may not always make sense but this one does. She tells you how out of place you'll always be, you with your pale skin, galaxies of freckles, Judeo-Christian ancestry. She tells you that even if you have never felt like an outsider before, you will now and will always. She tells you that you can seethe with anger all you want, but Papa is giving you the gift which also means an advantage, an understanding, a knowing. She tells you to give yourself over to Papa and what he's teaching you, through her -- and so you do.
You cling to the first lesson like something with claws, hold it tight to your chest like you'll be buried with it. There's no option but to give yourself over to Papa and what he's teaching you, what he's doing inside you, following the new tracks he's laying out as if you're a virgin engineer, no way of knowing what lies ahead and moving at top speed on blind faith alone.
On your eighth birthday, your hand in one of Mama Mel's, you meet the eyes of the man behind the counter at the botánica and know exactly what he's thinking and feeling. You smile at him, a smile born more from teeth than happiness, and Mama Mel squeezes your hand, tells you, "Don't be rude, child."
Chastisement hurts, always does, but it's worse when it comes from Mama Mel, worse still when her tone of voice and the look in her eyes tells you not to abuse the power you've been given, that you have to prove yourself worthy of Papa's gifts every second of every day, that left-handed use of your knowledge is a surefire way to get sent back to your parents, suburbia, a life you consciously toss aside every day and choose to leave behind every night. There is not much you'd balk at doing, knowing what the other option is, and Mama Mel knows it, the others of her hounfor know it, Papa knows it, you know it.
"Sorry," you say, shame in your voice and on your face as you look down at the floor, scuff your sneakers on the dusty linoleum. "Sorry," you say, again, this time to Papa, and when you stand there, a year later, turning nine and asking for the same thing, still hand-in-hand with Mama Mel, still the same man behind the counter, you tilt your head and frown.
Another one of Papa's gifts is kicking in. This one is much better. This one doesn't hurt.
--
The first gift -- mind-reading, telepathy, whatever anyone wants to call it -- hits you hard and takes forever to train. You're still not sure how Mama Mel knows when you wake up with the ability but she looks at you over breakfast one morning -- eggs, grits, fried plantain -- and narrows her eyes. Your manners are perfect, you know that, so you simply set down your fork and meet her gaze.
"Oh, child," you hear, but it takes you a moment to realise that you never saw her lips move. You look behind you, sure that you heard something, but there's a hint of Mama Mel's laugh in the air and the house is empty apart from the two of you. You turn back around, sit properly in your seat -- Mama Mel is big on manners -- and cock your head to one side in silent question.
"May be a blessing but Papa ain't letting you get away easy," you hear, and then, like that's one small explosion setting a city alight, you start hearing more. You start hearing everything.
The agony of it nearly knocks you unconscious, has you lolling in your chair at the table, almost falling off. You try to apologise but can't form words; you try to see Mama Mel, to tell her with your gaze that you're sorry for whatever's happening, whatever you did, but your eyes are clenched tight to block out the light and flooding over with tears at the sudden torment racking through your body. You're not sure how long you float in that overwhelming haze of sound, a million different voices overlapping in your ears, but when a cup is pressed to your lips, you drink the offering down because there's one voice louder than any other. It's a voice telling you to drink, telling you to stiffen up, to grow a spine, a pair of balls, how the hell are you supposed to be mine if you can't even handle this, Jensen Ross Ackles.
You drink, cautious at first but greedy when you realise that the world becomes quieter with every swallow you take. The liquid tastes like water to you, clear and clean and smooth, just the right side of ice cold on a hot day, and when the glass is empty, you open your eyes, dip your finger in for the last few drops.
"No denyin' it, child," Mama Mel says. You frown and she nods at the bottle on the table, says, "Drank the whole glass down and went back for the last of it."
Pimant clairin. You drank an entire glass of clairin left to marinate with twenty-one ghost peppers sunken at the bottom. You drank it, touched it, and the liquor that has given people second-degree burns, that has sometimes taken away a person's ability to taste anything ever again, is like nothing to you.
If you doubted before -- and you didn't, even if a little skepticism should have been in order -- you don't anymore, not with ten ounces of pimant clairin sitting calm in your belly and blocking out the noise.
"C'mon," Mama Mel says. "Guess we ain't got time to waste, not with that kickin' in."
"But I don't -- not with what kicking in?" you ask, even as you're scrambling off the chair, dumping your dirty dishes in the sink after scraping the remnants into a bucket near the door.
Mama Mel doesn't say anything; she rarely answers your questions, so you're used to it and the second she looks at you over her shoulder, says, "The first of Papa's gifts, child," you nearly miss a step, almost fall onto knees that are still shaking from the sensory overload vibrating, even now, in your ears. "O' course, someone like you, picking you so young, he had to start with the wildest." She shakes her head, clucks her tongue, says, "Papa does what he wants, I guess, and we just have to deal."
She pauses outside the hounfor and you stand next to her, reach over and press fingertips against her arm. When she looks down at you, eyes already going distant with planning, you ask, "But what gift?"
If she sounds sad when she answers -- which she should, which she probably did -- you don't notice it. "Knowledge, child," Mama Mel says. "And too much of it."
--
Nine is easier to deal with, both in reality and in your memories. Most of your eighth year is spent desperately sucking down pimant clairin, learning how to block the thoughts of everyone within miles of you, fighting to make your mind your own again. Eight is a blur of pain and knowing and hatred, at times. Nine is better. Nine is the Irish-coffee voice of your grandfather whispering in your ear as you're waking up, regaling you with stories from history, stories of war and bloodshed and mistaken love that blossomed real. Nine is your great-great-great-grandmother telling you tales about the Tuatha Dé Danann to get you to sleep, imploring you not to forget where you came from, even if the gods of another place claimed you before the Fair Folk she promises you're descended from ever had the chance.
Nine is the year you first feel him.
You don't know who he is. He's not dead, he's not family, he's not within one hundred miles of Dallas, he's not one of you -- and you use that term carefully, because there are so many people who look at you the same way they looked at your mother, even if you're more like them than she ever was, deep down underneath the circumstances of your birth and the colour of your skin. He's different. You don't know his name, no matter how hard you try and listen, no matter how many times you beg Papa, and you do beg, deeper and needier and harder than you've begged for anything else in your life. Papa doesn't answer and Mama Mel, the first time you mention it, tells you never to speak of it -- of him -- again. You open your mouth to ask why but her eyes narrow, flash in a light that you can't see, and you nod your head, dip your gaze to the floor. You loosen the tight control of your gift, the first one you received, and gently press on the smooth-slippery net around Mama Mel's thoughts.
There's the vaguest impression of triumph, a sense of purpose, and then she slaps you, breaks your concentration and leaves her handprint on your cheek. It's the first time she's struck you and even through the throbbing ache of it, you don't complain. Even through your punishment -- a week without food, sleeping on the ground at the door to the hounfor, living off of water, willpower, and Papa -- you don't complain. You deserve much more than a mere slap and you know it, half expect more punishment, maybe the pimant clairin when you least expect it, maybe something of Simbi's or the Baron's.
By the end of the week, you're a trembling, nervous wreck, and only half of that is due to the lack of food in your body. You jump at every noise, your barriers slip more than usual, and you hear him whenever it's quiet. His voice fills the silence. His drawl, a little like yours but without the Creole influence, slides next to you while you're scrubbing floors with toothbrushes like he's getting down on his knees with you, scrubbing right alongside. Sometimes he's close enough that you can feel his breath in your ear as you lean against the outside wall, skin burning under the sun. Sometimes you feel the press of his body against yours and, when that happens, you bite your lip to keep from making a sound, bite it until it bleeds, and then there's the swipe of a finger over the blood, a moan like he's being ridden and your blood is his pimant clairin.
Your older brother had an imaginary friend when he was young and you were never short of invisible companions when you still lived with your parents. He's different, though. He's real, real in a way you can't understand.
Not yet, anyway.
--
Your first gift, at seven: knowledge. The ability to read minds. The ability to look in another person's eyes and know how they feel, what they think. The ability to answer questions that have never been voiced because, to you, everything is voiced. There is no privacy of the mind, not with you, not anymore.
Your second gift, at nine: knowledge, again, but a different kind. The ability to talk to the dead. The ability to know what's happening far away in the world of the living and in the worlds of those who've passed. The ability to call forth any spirit that you desire -- except him. He never answers your summons, not like the ghost-souls of everyone else you invoke. He just -- is.
Your third gift, at eleven: knowledge, again, but of yet another kind. You attend your first Fête Ghede.
--
No one plans on your attendance, least of all you: a skinny, rangy, pale and freckled kid of eleven, body on the cusp of puberty with a mind as old as the oldest person alive on the planet -- and then some. You spend the days leading up to the fête cleaning, preparing, making small offerings in the nearest cemetery and apologising to your ancestors that you can't go to their graves and leave them food or drink or flower. Eleven is too young for the banda, you know that; you've heard stories about the dance, about what it means, all from people older than you, most of them dead, and the thought of dancing the banda fills you with terror. Sure, you're nearly a teenager, but you're still waiting to have your first wet dream, still waiting to start growing hair on your chest, still waiting for your voice to drop. The banda is not for you. The Fête Ghede is not for you. You're relieved, willing to miss the holiest day of your patron for another year or five, but you pass out in your breakfast on All Soul's and don't wake up for three days.
You don't wake up, but your body isn't lying on the floor of Mama Mel's kitchen all that time. No, your body goes to the fête, your body drinks pimant clairin, rubs pimant clairin over your little pre-teen dick and balls, dances the banda, jerks off in front of everyone gathered and even comes. You have no memory of this but others do. You're terrified that somehow, some way, your parents will find out and take you away. As violated as you feel, being forced to leave would be worse.
The moment you understand what's happened, that Papa took you over and used you as his own sack of flesh, you lock yourself up tight, tighter than a prim and proper church girl locking knees together so there's no room for anyone to get between them, human or spirit or other. Your barriers go up tighter than ever before, give you a headache with the pressure of their strength, and tight as you've made your mind, you're alone. The dead don't come to visit, which is fine, but he is gone as well. You never thought you'd miss him as much as you do but it beats like a rhythm in your bones, this need to hear him, to feel him, to bring him back to you. The rhythm isn't stronger than your fear, though. The rhythm isn't stronger than the feeling of red-cheeked shame when other people look at you knowingly with shrewd, watchful eyes. The rhythm isn't strong enough to change your mind except it gets deeper, more demanding, with every day that passes.
Mama Mel finally sits you down after the new year, ten weeks after your body learns the beat of the banda without your say. "Child," she says, and reaches over to touch your hand. You flinch and she leans back, nods her head in something that might be mournful acquiescence. "Jensen, listen to me," and you do; she never uses your name unless the lesson you need to learn is life-and-death important. "It happens to everyone the first time. Granted, they ain't usually so young as you, but it happens to all of us. You gotta let the walls down, child, you hear me? Papa don't mind you needing a lil' time to think but he starts gettin' impatient when two months look like they're gonna be turning into three."
"I'm not letting them down," you tell her, chin up, eyes narrowed in emphasis, heart pounding with cornered-rabbit panic.
"It comes down to trust, child," Mama Mel says. "And if you don't trust Papa, you got no reason to stay. If you're gonna hide from the one that knows you the best, inside and out, the one you belong to as sure as if he paid cold, hard cash for you, then I ain't got a thing to teach you."
She sends you outside to think, tells you to not to come back inside until you have an answer that you're going to have to live with for the rest of your life. The barriers being up, you don't mind that; you're trained well enough to keep them going -- and strong -- and maybe if you left, Papa would take his gifts back and you wouldn't need the wall around your mind anyway. Leaving Mama Mel would be hard, especially if it was to go back to your parents, or one of them, at any rate. Your mother still lives in Dallas and she's the one that would want you, but if you had to leave this life, it might be better to leave everything about it, including the woman who brought you into it, walked you right into the kitchen on the night of a celebration and gave you away like some form of tithe. Perhaps San Antonio wouldn't be bad. Perhaps living with your father, falling back into the casual Baptist slant to his every-day, tussling with your brother and taking care of your sister, perhaps that would be a good enough life to ignore the ache under the surface.
It's not what you choose, though. You think about it, long and hard, all day, and when the sun sets and Mama Mel stands at the back door, arms folded on her chest, watching you, you pluck up the courage and say, "I want to know about him." She looks like she's going to argue, refuse the same way she has before, so you blurt out, "I've danced the banda, Mama. I'm old enough to understand."
Your words deflate her; you can almost see it as she gives in, slowly, fighting the realisation, inch-by-inch, that you're right. She nods, then, and says, "If Papa says your lil' body's old enough to dance the banda, then yeah, child, you're old enough to understand. But you can't take this back, y'hear? Once you know, there ain't no way to un-know. You sure?"
In answer, you let the rigidity of your barriers melt, let her press against your mind with blade-sharp fingers, let the feel of Papa settle back into your bones as if he'd never left. It feels like home.
"Fair enough," Mama Mel says. "Come on, then, child. I'm gonna need a drink." She pauses, eyes him, adds, "You danced the banda, you're grown enough to have one, too."
--
The two of you talk for hours that night. Mama Mel has always treated you more as a tiny adult than a child, even when you first moved in aged seven, all knobby knees and wandering mind. She's never talked down to you, never gave you the easy way out, never sugarcoated a single word over the last four years. And yet, tonight, you learn that she has shown some restraint, that she does, at times, gloss over things. Tonight, you're told everything you've been too young to know. The knowledge fills you like something tangible, a weight at the bottom of your belly even as the rest of you feels lighter than air and invisible in the same way.
Him. This boy -- and he is a boy, he's younger than you, Mama Mel says, they're always younger -- is the one Papa's chosen for you. "Not just Papa, though," Mama Mel goes on to say. "There's a whole bunch of the family int'rested in you and Ezili had to give her blessing as well, all the chosens come from her. We ain't never seen anyone like you, child: white as all get-out and yet strong enough at seven to hold the presence of every mind within one hundred and fifty miles."
"I wasn't strong enough, though," you say, focusing on the one thing that makes sense. "I had to drink the pimant clairin every day, more than once a day, for eight months."
"You was alive to drink the pimant clairin," Mama says. "Not everybody is, the first time they get that gift."
No one's put it that bluntly before. It gives you shivers.
"Who's interested in me?" you ask.
Mama Mel grins and her teeth gleam bright like bone in the candle-lit kitchen. "The whole family, child. Every single one of 'em."
Your shivers turn into goosebumps. "And when you say chosen," you go on, feeling your way through the quicksand of conversation that's suddenly surrounded you, "what does that mean?"
"Bein' one of Papa's means you're gonna have a lot of sex," Mama Mel says. "There ain't gonna be no stopping you once your balls drop; you'll be fucking someone new every day." You flush. "Oh, hush," Mama tells you. "You think we only dance the banda on our holy days? Child, those of us who follow Papa, who belong to his family, we dance it every time we fuck. You ain't gonna be any different, so the sooner you stop bein' a prude about it, the better. Sex is good. Sex is fun, it's natural, it's something our bodies know how to do instinctively, like birds building nests or flying south for the winter. And what have I told you about instincts, child?"
"To trust them," you say, quietly. "But I'm not -- I mean, the others, they showed signs of it before they hit puberty. I've got nothing. I don't even touch myself."
The laugh that comes from Mama Mel's belly rings loud and clear. "You better start, child," she says, through her chuckles. "Papa's giving you time to get used to the gifts before he knocks you sideways and sends you pantin' after every cunt and dick that comes your way." You open your mouth to argue, shocked at the insinuation, but Mama Mel ends every doubt by asking, "The one Ezili gave you, it's a him and not a her, right?"
Gay. You have no sex drive at all, don't feel an ounce of sexual attraction toward anyone. You always thought maybe there was something wrong with you, or maybe the only sex you'd ever have would be while serving as Papa's flesh during the banda. Apparently that's not true. And apparently you're gay.
Mama Mel clucks her tongue; when you look at her, she's shaking her head. "You ain't nothing but Papa's. So the one they picked for you has a dick, so what? Gender don't mean a thing to us. You wanna fuck a girl, get so far up her pussy you can feel your dick in her belly? Fine, good, do it. You wanna fuck a man's ass or get fucked in the ass yourself? Fine. You wanna suck on a nice round pair of tits and then go drink down come and spunk? Great. Jensen, baby, love is love. Fitting together goes beyond what kind of physical parts you have. It's something deeper. And a chosen isn't something all of us are given. They're someone that some of us never find. You'll have yours. You've been given yours. Get to know him. Get to know yourself. Y'hear?"
"Yes, ma'am," you say, though it's a rote declaration, your mind still turning over her words, looking for a bad apple in the bunch. Everything is ripe, though, and green, and smells like small rosebuds of truth on a spring day.
The two of you sit in silence as you think. You're obsessed with him -- not to the point of mindlessness but it just feels wrong when he's not around. You feel empty if he's not at your side, sighing at the scent of blood and cooing in wordless appreciation at sharp things that shine wrong in the dark. You are so used to him, so needful of him, that you don't even worry when he watches with too-sharp eyes as you kill the birds and drink the blood, eat the raw flesh, because he's there with you and he doesn't judge you, can't judge you for something he's so jealous of. You wish you knew his name.
"He's not -- right," you finally say, picking at the edge of the table, the scratches you've put there over the years. "Something's wrong with him, something bad."
You'll have the words later, years later, to describe him, even if you don't have them at this moment, sitting at the kitchen table, too scared to look at Mama Mel and see judgment in her eyes for the type of chosen Ezili's given you: psychotic, insane, gleefully murderous, sociopathic to a certain degree.
Mama understands you now, though, knows what you're trying to say even if you don't. She makes sure you're looking at her as she says, solemn, "Child, we ain't always right. Now you've danced the banda, now you're old enough, you'll see. Oh, baby. You'll see."
And you do, of course. Mama Mel never lies to you.
--
On your twelfth birthday, you wake up to wet underwear, wet sheets. It takes you a moment to understand but then you do, and when the connection is made between the damp on your skin and what it means, you feel the stirrings of a hunger in the base of your spine that you've never felt before. You start to touch yourself, wrap your hand around your cock and shove fingers down your throat before you slide them up your ass. There's nothing like this feeling, the way it takes you over, the way it sits low in your belly and opens its mouth for more.
You gain an awareness, notice things that would have passed you by before, like the way some people look at you, the way others react, and there's a part of your mind cataloguing all of this even while the majority of you hoards those memories for dark nights and darker mornings. Thankfully Papa waits until you're a little older, until you turn fourteen, before he lets control of that hunger go careening full-force through your body.
You've danced the banda four times -- your body has, at least, though your mind's only been there for three of them, but you have danced it, and done so of your own free will. You've touched yourself every way anyone has ever imagined. You've grown used to the hunger sleeping like a coiled-up serpent in the small of your back.
You're ready, or at least you think you are, until the very first hunger pangs radiate out from their burial ground and go right to your dick and mouth, making both drool at the thought of filling something, of being filled to bursting. You want hot, naked flesh against your own. You want spit and come and sweat. You want to bury your face in a woman's pussy and eat her until she comes, and then you want to fuck her through her orgasm while you get your face in a man's ass, rim him 'til he's practically dying, fuck him while he begs, and when you fuck him, you want someone behind you, pressing deep and getting you loose and open the way you are for Papa, filling you so full of come that it leaks down your thighs enough for you to reach back, swipe it up, eat it.
You whine, back arched, as you come, just like that, just from thinking about it. You hope that one orgasm will take the edge off but it makes everything worse, turns your skin super-sensitive, every moving whiff of air from the ceiling fan like hands all over you, stroking, caressing, kissing and fucking and pressing. You come again, and again, and again, but the feeling never dies. It just gets worse.
"Papa," you say, beg, as you roll over, as you hump the sheets, as you suck on one finger long enough to get it wet and then push it in your ass. "Fuck."
--
When you regain mindfulness, the urge to fuck is still there, still present, but not as bad as it was. You feel the intensity steadily ratcheting up, though, like you're getting to the top of a rollercoaster's dive, feeling every rise of your temperature like one of the clicks on the track -- click, gotta fuck, click, need to fuck, click, fuck fuck fuck, click, now fuck now, click. You know that when you hit the top, you're going to lose control again, just like you know that losing it with someone else will make it -- not better, but easier, perhaps.
This is the first time you're bone-deep grateful for Papa's gifts. You spread out your mind, search for someone who'll give you what you want while you're trying to ignore your hard-on long enough to put on clothes and shoes, fly out the front door. You follow a siren-call of lust and want and need; in the back of your mind, you hear Papa laugh.
There's no conversation when you get to where you're going -- you don't know where that is or even care. One thought circles in your mind, over and over again, the same one you woke up with, the same one Mama Mel warned you about when you were eleven.
She's right, too; this time when you wake up, when it's possible to push back the desperate urge to get as deep into someone as you can, you look around. People who wear the bridle for Papa's family, both genders, a range of ages from teenager to more-than-middle-aged. There are seven of you in the room and every part of you aches. You're covered in come and you itch your stomach, watch dispassionately as some flakes off and falls to the floor.
Beside you, a quiet mind -- thankfully not angry, thankfully not run off by the power of Papa moving in you, using you. He's thinking, instead, is watchful, curious, and though he doesn't say anything, he presses tight to you, telling you with his body what his mind is too silent to convey.
"I'll learn," you tell him, as he wraps his arms around you, as he presses his forehead against the slick-cooled skin of your arm. "But it's you. You know that, right? I'm learning all this for you."
There's a phantom press of lips along your jaw. You smile, feel him slide away, and when the fire flares hot and burning inside every party of you, you start to laugh. You may be imagining him -- you don't think you are, but it's a possibility -- and you may never, ever, in your life, meet him face-to-face, look into his eyes, take the measure of his body the way you know his mind so well. Even knowing that, even knowing that you may just be insane and that this group of people has taken advantage of your naïveté, of your need to belong, of your mental divergence, you still laugh.
He kissed you. For the first time ever, he kissed you.
The others start to stir as you touch yourself, press your fingers over the echo of his lips as if it's possible he left an imprint of himself, there, for you to have, a remnant or a taste, anything. You touch the place where he kissed you, eyes half-lidded as you think of him watching you, seeing this and still kissing you, still staying with you. When one of the women yawns and spreads her legs in invitation, you don't let the fire take you over, don't let yourself descend into the mad fury of a sex-crazed bag of bones for Papa, don't give in to the pressure building throughout your body and making your dick drip precome like a girl gets wet.
You think of him.
Oh, you fuck the woman; you're in this house, with these people, for days until the mindless need to rut dies down into something a little more steady, keeping you perpetually on the edge of arousal. You fuck everyone and everyone fucks you and when you're steady enough to leave, the house reeks of sex like the smell won't ever come out. You think, maybe, that everyone who comes into this house will know exactly what happened here and they'll be caught in it, too, even if they're not family.
But through all of this, while you learn the limits of your control and then push them as far as you can, you think of him.
He's beautiful. And he kissed you.
--
--
Your fourth gift, at fourteen: knowledge, again, like always. This time it's sex. The lust for every single person, no matter the shape or size or gender; as long as they're willing, you're willing. You fall into every bed that offers an invitation and you learn how to please others just as you learn what pleases you. You dance the banda with one hundred different people. You learn joy in the movement of skin-against-skin outside of the fête.
Your fifth gift, at sixteen: knowledge, like always, but this time a choice along with it. Perhaps it is more honest to say that the choice is the gift; what you learn is just a side-effect of what you decide.
It takes you a while to make up your mind, as well. Mama Mel brings it up the morning you turn sixteen, stumbling out of your bedroom with sex-crazed hair and a satiated smile on your face. She takes one look at you and snorts, even from the stove across the kitchen. You get coffee, kiss Mama's cheek, settle down at the table with a slight sigh at the pain of it as she slides a plate of meat and fresh fruit, a bowl of butter-rich grits, at you.
"How many am I cookin' for this morning?" she asks.
You don't even flush; it's been two years since Papa lit the fire in your belly and there's no room for shame in your body when it's filled up with hunger. "Just three this morning," you tell her, eyes turning half-distant at the memory of what you and your two cousins got up to last night.
The hiss of more butter going into a hot pan fills your ears right before Mama Mel smacks you in the head. "Not something you should be getting used to," she says. "Better if you learn to channel it another way, and soon."
"Why?" you ask, and it's not an impertinent question, or one asked out of tired ignorance; you truly don't know what she's talking about. You've learned how to channel the hunger, for the most part, and no one ever tells you not to indulge. In fact, even discounting Papa dancing the banda in your body at eleven, you live surrounded by sex and the expressions of it -- have lived within it for years.
Mama Mel slips the pans off the stove, turns the burners off and sits down across from you. She stretches out her hands, palms up; you reach for them, cover them with your own, both pairs in the middle of the table. Skin-to-skin communication is always better, truer, deeper, and the two of you are so close, your barriers so similar, that sometimes even mind-to-mind is better.
She takes a deep breath and you feel the echoes of hesitation, regret, and sadness emanating out from her heart before she says, "The family's been talkin', child, sayin' that maybe you learned all you can here, need to move on." You open your mouth to argue but she squeezes your fingers and you take the rebuke in stride, close your mouth and lick your lips. You let the control over your gifts warp, just enough to release confusion, anger, refusal. "Child, they're not wrong," Mama Mel says. "Some of 'em been sayin' that you should've moved on soon as Papa rode you; he disagreed and one or two of the uncles did as well, so the loud ones held their tongue."
"They've worn Papa down?" you ask. "Or does he agree with them?"
"Papa says New Orleans," she says.
It's not an answer, but it makes your skin crawl -- in excitement, not disgust. You've heard stories about New Orleans, stories that dug in deep and clung tight. Since the night of your first celebration, you've been hearing stories about how your cousins out there choose to call on the family, and you've wondered. It sounds nice, to be perfectly honest, and getting out of this tiny house after nine years, stretching your wings outside of Dallas and learning who you are away from Mama's influence, that may not be a bad idea, either. Change, though. You don't know anyone out there, don't know if you'd fit in with the cousins in New Orleans. You'd be alone, completely alone, for the first time in your life.
"Not completely alone," Mama Mel says, sharply. "You know Papa ain't gonna leave you be; should've learned that lesson a while back."
"Sorry," you say, to both Mama and Papa. "I just -- why now?"
Mama Mel rubs her thumb over the skin on the back of your hand. "'Cause it's time for you to move on, child," she says. "Time for you to make your own connections in the family, instead of trading on mine and Papa's. Oh, hush," she says, when the beginnings of a protest are stirring in the back of your mind. "You know what I mean."
She looks at you, meets your eyes for a moment that draws out into two, three, fifteen, that turns into minutes. Neither of you say a thing; neither of you need to.
"I'd like to see my mother before I go," you say.
"Ten days," Mama Mel says. "And then you're headin' on a bus out of state. Agreed?"
You exhale, nod. "Agreed," you say.
Intermission