These Bones Read online

  Praise for These Bones

  Chenault’s short but powerful gothic work blends the best elements of folklore, horror, the blues, and archival history in resonant and lyrical prose. Fans of alternate histories, suspenseful literary fiction, and Black speculative fiction will be hooked on piecing together this intricate, entrancing tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Kayla Chenault has created something truly exquisite: a rich tapestry whose gorgeous poetics never obscure its themes or narrative. From beginning to end, These Bones is a sheer pleasure of Dalloway-esque perspectives, postmodernist structures, joined histories, and the ghosts they reveal.”

  —Stacy D. Flood, author of The Salt Fields

  What a remarkable book. A generational history viewed obliquely through vignettes of various voices, songs, sermons, and ephemera full of magical realism, horror, righteous anger, sorrow, betrayal, love, and revenge. Utterly original. It’s a gut punch.”

  —Alana Haley, Nicola’s Books

  Chenault brings forth a history that isn’t buried as far underground as once thought, a history soiled with horror and ferocity that finds harmony in the stunning prose.”

  —Caitlin Chung, author of Ship of Fates

  These Bones

  by Kayla Chenault

  Philadelphia

  Contents

  Praise for These Bones

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Characters

  Prologue

  In the Summer of 1909

  Untitled

  The Funeral

  From A Historical Survey of Napoleonville

  Lauds; or, A Morning Meditation

  A newspaper clipping found in Rev. Jonah Kincaid’s office

  From the diary of Samuel Kincaid

  Marginalia

  Timetables

  Hymnal

  All

  Autopsy

  From The Autobiography of Rhythm and Blues

  Home

  Tempess’s Place

  Sweet and Sour

  Napoleonville Ladies’ Luncheon Club Newsletter

  From Heartland Melodies: Inspirations for Blues Standards from Middle America

  Aubade

  Nocturne

  Compline

  Requiem

  From Heartland Melodies: Inspirations for Blues Standards from Middle America

  Sermon against Scofflaws

  Maid and Cook: A Dialogue

  Antediluvian

  Untitled

  The Wedding

  The Isle Is Full of Noises

  The Bramble Cleared

  From “The Remaking of an American Church”

  ’Deed I Know It, Sister

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

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  Copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start

  Copyright

  Dedication

  To Janet, Jo, Jeff, Jack, Brent, Paul,

  and of course Patrick Brettschneider,

  and in memory of Richard Chenault II.

  Cast of Characters

  I. The Bramble Patch

  The Lyons Family

  * * *

  Markum “King” Lyons

  Ma Lyons

  Dinah Lyons

  Lazarus Lyons

  Esther Lyons

  Odessa Lyons

  Wanhope Elizabeth “Bit” Lyons

  The other Lyons children (“Them Others”)

  The Barghest’s Girlie Show

  * * *

  The Barghest

  Jessup

  Ida

  Winnifred

  Fannie

  Bertha’s Kin

  * * *

  Bertha

  Tempess

  Auntie Rhea

  Tata Duende

  Selene, or “Moon-child”

  Snow-baby

  The Tellers

  * * *

  Grandma Ady

  Mother

  Bessie Teller-Chapman

  Tommy “Bobwhite” Teller

  II. Napoleonville

  The Kincaids

  * * *

  Rev. Jonah Kincaid

  Eugenia Kincaid

  Samuel Kincaid

  Penelope “Sistie” Kincaid

  Jacob Jonah “JJ” Kincaid

  Croswell Kincaid

  The Aileys

  * * *

  Dr. Peter Ailey

  Verity Ailey

  Geraldine “Deena” Ailey

  Sally Ailey

  The Keiths

  * * *

  Richard Keith

  Dorotheé “Dolly” Keith

  Marie-Anne Keith

  Aimee Keith

  Dear Dr. W. E. Lyons-Harris,

  I am writing you to deliver the enclosed photograph. My name is Hannah Ickes, and I’m an undergrad student in the archaeology program at Vanderbilt University. This summer, I got the opportunity to work with the City of Napoleonville Historical Society on the newest edition of their local history book. We went to this site while we were there. We think it was your childhood home, because according to some records we found, the people who lived in this house were the Lyons family, and from all the further research we could do we found that you are the only member of your family still alive.

  I figured you’d be interested in seeing your old house. I also wondered if you would mind answering a couple of questions about your life growing up. First of all, the first edition of the history guide said that the African-American side of town was called the Bramble Patch during your childhood. Could you give us some more information on that? What was it like being from the Bramble Patch? (Any anecdotes would be super helpful, thanks!) Also: you have this amazing life story about leaving Napoleonville and becoming a pediatric surgeon. I wonder how you were able to accomplish that, especially living in a time where the odds were stacked against you so much?

  Please feel free to write me back at your earliest convenience. Thank you so much. I hope this photo brings you some joy, and I hope this note finds you well.

  Sincerely,

  Hannah Ickes

  Dear Miss Ickes,

  My body is hobbled. De-threaded. As if every stitch and sinew and bone has been ripped away from the fabric that was once my body, and I am what is left. You’re lucky that you wrote me when you did.

  I am sentimental in my old age. In these latter days, away from the Bramble Patch, I am unsure if I can recall much of its lingua franca, but still I know the blessings and cusses and slurs very well. For example, I know that I’m colored. So, I know when I’ve been insulted.

  All things hang upon the tempting banality of a decent life. I don’t think you’re looking for ghosts. No. You’re just unearthing a starved beast.

  Some people said that the Bramble Patch was built on the bones of its dead. The man I called “Daddy”—Markum “King” Lyons—that’s what he told me often. I understand you academics are now looking for the evidence of that history. Well, King told me every house there had a foundation made of calcium and marrow, but I think he made it up to scare me. Trouble is, I’m not sure. So, if you can trace the lineage of a curse with your toolkit, I’d wager my soul against yours that the cornerstones of bones will ugly up your dreams for the dig site.r />
  It was a kiln made from hymns, spirituals, and clapping games. And we were its golems, the not-quite-monsters.

  I was buckskinned, like my mama, and by my mama I mean the woman who birthed me and died. Anyway, I was buckskinned and I had scabbed knees, and so the white folk decided they were going to stuff me for their trophy room. Like they did with my mama when they found her. But they got other people instead. I didn’t know what a golem was, but I felt like one—made of clay. There was the Barghest. All of his world was built on top of other people’s bones. Like the bones of Lazarus and Bessie and ’Livia and my mama, and others too.

  When I was in medical school, I spent time looking at babies in jars—the never-born. Some still looked like seahorses in formaldehyde. Some were covered in fuzz. One specimen had two heads and two underdeveloped penises. They would have shared nothing but hunger and thirst, two lungs and one liver and a spleen. (Suppose: one had left the mother’s faith of Catholicism and become agnostic but the other dreamt of becoming a priest; how could the first endure the other and vice versa?) These memories keep me up at night.

  And the Barghest was more worrisome than that.

  Sincerely,

  Wanhope Lyons

  In the Summer of 1909

  At the edge of New England, the world hung in place. The firmament frothed, salt eroded, and barnacles crusted, as all the old sailors and fishermen tried to find their land legs again. Everything was always gray. Gray eyes, hair and peacoats, parasols and sky, sea and people—especially, gray people. The people were barnacled, and the weather was constant. Only the sea could change.

  At the whalers’ end of the harbor, busk upon busk of marine skeleton was carved away from ivory blubber. The blubber tumbled and spilled and gurgled in the mud. Next, crimson would gush from the wound, splattering the harbor. Stray dogs would lap at the puddle of sanguine nourishment. With adipose and hemoglobin and dark gray dermis removed, only the stark bones remained.

  Then came the quiet stitching of a seamstress, hunching vulture-like to weave the bones between strips of cotton. The harpy liked to curse each garment, laces and eyelets and all they held together. “Stays and bodies to break. Cinched waists under cuirass, collapsible lungs of broken wind.” With bitter fingers she wove the curses into the corsets. Each curse ached her joints, creaking them, turning her nose beaklike and the hoods of her eyelids leaden, and she would hover over her work, stretch her wings, and screech her curses. Then the corsets made with malice were shipped off to stores, where they would end up in the hands of all manner of women, highborn and low. A corset is an equalizer for lady and whore.

  Now the whalebone indents, raging red, marked Jess’s bare torso. These rakings were the murdered odontoceti’s last act of brutality. Jess tried to catch a fraction of her breath. She had danced for nickels, she had shimmied with zeal and hollered where the moment called for it, and made men forget their worries and wives. She should be much less winded than she was in that moment.

  High yellow and modest as she was, burlesque never suited her, though it sustained her. Her hair fell in angelic ringlets, a cascade of them, in fact, and the scent of vanilla followed her, lovesick. Her suitors were many but her lovers were none.

  In front of her stood the Barghest, that big-toothed, sharp-clawed pimp, more tar than mammal and more dog than man. “Examinating time,” he was apt to say as he inspected his girls for flaws. The Barghest was, after all, a businessman. And like all businessmen, he had learned of the new Food and Drug Act passed by “that walrus of a president what had made everyone sell quality to the people.” The Barghest was no fool. The Barghest would sell quality to the damn people. The damn people wanted whores like water, but the whores had to be quality.

  “Jessup, darlin’, this is the year of Jubilee. You know? The year of Jubilee. The Barghest turns fifty,” he said through whiskey-laden laughter and cigar smoke. He was red under his black skin, glistening in his own sweat.

  “Well, happy birthday to you, then?” Jess was little impressed with the Barghest, though he had been her boss and her pimp for somewhere near ten years, now.

  Her breasts bounced when he asked her to jump up and down. His bulldog jowls filled with smoke, and he growled. A happy growl. A trumpeting of triumph.

  “Got a kiss for me?”

  “Is it your birthday yet?”

  “Your skin’s puckered underside of your thigh. Have Alma get you some cold cream.”

  Before she came here, Jess would wander in the crevices and rafters of barns, burrow in with the mice and be as small as small could be. Jess’s Sir was a white man, who her Ma’am said was filled with passion but little love. This Sir was a ghost. He did not appear in anything but half-hushed stories told between adults. Like hope.

  She remembered the day that word rolled off Aunt Mizzy’s tongue and the mousy girl couldn’t seem to even breathe after she said it. Jess was hidden in a rat’s nest in Aunt Mizzy’s parlor, half-sleep, while her Ma’am was cooking with Aunt Mizzy for church come Sunday. Aunt Mizzy said the word, and it struck Jess, as Aunt Mizzy seemed too old to believe in fairy tales.

  When Jess and Ma’am went home that night, she burned with the question.

  “Ma’am, what’s hope?”

  “An old dangerous thing that lurks in corners, Jess. I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

  “Is it real?”

  Jess’s Ma’am paused for a moment. “I can’t tell much about it, darling. Hope takes change. And only the sea can change.”

  The Barghest had said when they had met: “Oh, Jessup, baby, I can change. Just like the sea. And watch me! I’ll be someone new tomorrow.”

  And she wanted to believe it all too much. Believe that someone could change; that anyone could.

  The Barghest did change, in fact. She saw it happen, that first night. She watched the molasses smile for customers change into a hardened snarl by night’s end. If Jessup had learned fear, she would have run in horror at the sight of the Barghest that first night. But she had never learned fear, because she had never learned hope, either. Her Ma’am forgot to tell her. By now, Jess had known the Barghest to switch between sweet lapdog and fell beast so often that the word change could not remain in her vocabulary. She had seen him greet a customer with a smile and then found him gnawing on the man’s bloated remains only an hour or so later.

  A sudden commotion at the back entrance shocked Jess out of her mind. Some of the other prostitutes were giggling and shrieking and racing across the whiskey-warped floors.

  “Must be that piano man,” said the Barghest. “He never is quite on time. Always a little early or a little late, never on time.”

  “Can I go now?” Jess tapped her bare foot on the floor. The piano man’s arrival meant she’d have to squeeze herself into that gold velvet dress for her habanera dance.

  The Barghest waved her away. “Make sure Alma brings me my dinner into the office.”

  The Bramble Patch, the Black section of Napoleonville, came alive on Saturdays in a valley of iniquity called Mercer Street by the city officials and “Mercy City” by everyone else. Mercy City was where the hot music aroused and the hot women slept. Rag-music peacocked and strutted out of every bordello, bar, and dance hall and into the street; a great moaning and hollering paraded down Mercer Street. And that clash of those two noises was dangerous to passersby. It was a well-known fact that no one passed through Mercy City without some siren ensnaring him or some piano man calling to him with a melody.

  Tonight, the world would be filled with only the music and moans of Mercy City, though the Christian soldiers would shoo away the devil if they could. They never seemed to be able to get him out.

  Esther Lyons leaned quietly against the red brick spine of the New Jerusalem AME, pressing her body against the cornerstones. Until the brick would snap her back in half. All she could see was the New Jerusalem, shining with marble
banks and white houses: the white side of Napoleonville, up the hill from the Bramble Patch. The longing crept into her bones, to venture up the hill to the white side of town. In her hand, rough from hours of peach picking, sweat pooled and tarot cards crumpled. There, in the crooks of her knuckles, the paper cut into her. But she was to fly into the solitude of New Jerusalem, ooze into its shadows like a streak of sludgy tar on a hot day; those white people wouldn’t suspect a thing if they saw Esther Lyons, because she would be a tarry shadow, flecking herself on the little white clapboard houses. Because she knew what was coming to Napoleonville.

  Esther was so scared, she laughed.

  “Repent, brothers, repent,” she called to a hustling group of men, but as they murmured their reply, she heard the nits in their hair chatter back and forth to themselves. She didn’t hear the men. They were heading to Belladonna’s place, the crooked blue building that leaned too far to the left. The nits clicked and clacked over the men’s talk, blurring the natures of each. Man-nits—nit-men—all the same as far as she was concerned. She was concerned about it very little.

  Esther wasn’t proud of her mind that filled the gaps between tomorrow, yesterday, and today. Ma Lyons wanted her to get out of the house and join the crusade, occupy that mind with the rightside up, instead of the sideways and upside down. Pastor Mose told Ma Lyons that it would be wonderful to have Esther hang out on Mercer Street some Saturday night and “stop our men from fooling around.” But what he really wanted to say was, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  Esther eyed around the corner to see her mother preaching to Yeoman and Jack. She oozed back into the shadows and towards the Barghest’s place. She knew her mother agreed with Pastor Mose’s thoughts.

  The burnt end of the day sunk slow into the horizon. Slow, to where the Barghest’s ladies crowded around the back alley to take a smoke break before they danced. There was blood in their veins, for now, Esther noted. They had nothing left to fear, for the Barghest had told them what he was. There were no more demons left, for now.