Sugar Rum Halloween

My sixth sense was keener than most folk’s. That’s why Grandma Mable always took me to church. She said I had a gift, but I felt I had a curse. So as I sat with my hands folded in my lap on Grandma Mable’s coffee stained settee, I secretly wished I could disappear. It was Halloween and I wanted to go trick or treating with my friends, but instead I had to attend another exorcism.

Pastor Lewis said in church one day that God made woman to be transporters of souls. We were nurturers of the mind, body and spirit and it was up to us to save the world. Grandma Mable took that statement literally. She bore twelve children, was the best midwife in both Lowndes and Echols counties and was the head mother of our church, God Bless Us Missionary Baptist Church of Lake Park, GA.

“Stacy!” Grandma screamed my name as she thundered down the hallway, looking for her favorite hat, a big black thing with a fringed lace hem and a black lace veil sewed in the front. “Are you ready, baby?”

I watched her putting on that hat. She would slap me silly, if she knew that I thought that she looked like a witch when she wore it. She’d slapped me good, if I said the word “witch” in her presence.

“Trick or treating aint nuthin but the devil.”

She always told my Mama around Halloween, “People dressing they children like witches. If they really knew what a witch looked like, they’d be hard pressed to celebrate it.”

I believed her. If trick-or-treaters saw Grandma Mable and knew what we did every fourth Friday night, they’d take off their costumes and scream in terror. Witchcraft was nothing to play with and definitely not worth pretending to be and that was coming from someone who saw a witch up close and personal.

“I’m ready, Ma Mable.” I watched the fire embers dance with the shadows on the wood paneled wall. It was warm outside, but always cold in this house.

“Well, let’s get then.” She lowered the veil on her hat. “We got souls to save.”

When we stepped outside I faintly smelled something rotten and my imagination ran wild with the possibilities of the odor’s source. It smelled like a dead body stuck in a rum barrel. Perhaps the crisp cool days kept his body preserved, but today was unusually hot for October, so the smell of the corpse perfumed the air. Perhaps the dead man snuck in the keg to hide from something or someone. Bumped his head on his dissent into the barrel and then drowned never knowing what happened.

I had a long walk ahead of me so my mind kept coming up with ideas.

Miss Leola Black, my eighth grade Social Studies teacher, the one I nicknamed Snow White, told me that my imagination would get me in trouble some day. I didn’t appreciate what she said and never liked her after that. She was a bitter but beautiful-looking woman, which didn’t seem to fit quite right. Her blue black hair, brown round eyes and full lips were unusual for white women in Lowndes County. The light tan freckles on her face she tried hard to hide with the same pink Avon pressing powder Ma Mable used to cool her stout bosom in the summer. Wasn’t surprised to find out that Snow White was actually a black woman from Louisiana. There’s a name for that, but it’s too hard for me to remember.

As we walked closer to the church, the stench became stronger. Ma Mable turned to me and said, ”That’s the smell of a rotten soul, but we’ll fix it, directly.”

My legs shook. I wanted to turn around and high tail it back to the house, but Mama and my brothers were long gone. They went to my school for the fall festival and to my cousin Jennie’s Halloween party. I had a gift that only Ma Mable could tame was Mama's justification for leaving me with the old woman. I had a curse I said to myself as I drug my foot through the red Georgia clay, hoping the clay would shackle my feet and hold me from the church.

The smell of sugar cane rum burned my nose when we entered through the church doors. Slavery and sugar went hand and hand. Sugar was the reason so many blacks were brought to America. We worked the sugar canes in Barbados, worked the sugar mills in the South, made rum for the white folks, who sold it to Europe, to buy more slaves and we drank from the leftover barrels to numb ourselves of the guilt.

Alcoholism ran rampant in small southern towns. It did not discriminate, black, white or red, and this lily-white girl who lay on the floor before the church altar was living proof of that. She reeked of the stuff. The rum dripped from her hair and her once white cotton shirt was drenched gold and brown.

“Lord, have mercy. Who brought her here?” Ma Mable stammered to the front of the pulpit.

“I did.” Deacon Walter Ness stood up from the pews assigned to the deacon board.

“Who is she?” Mother Lester, the oldest mother of the church, wobbled in the small church sanctuary on a cane made of a broken oak twig. “She can’t be here. Send her to First Baptist.”

The other ladies of the church mumbled, nodded their heads, and huddled by the space heater. “We don’t want another lynchin',” one of them whispered.

“She’s Miss Mary-Margaret, the mayor’s daughter.” Ma Mable took off her coat and veiled hat. “Did she tell you to bring her hear, Ness?”

“No, Mam. Mayor Hogan did.”

The church became so silent that I could hear the wind whistling from outside.

“He begged me to bring her here.” Deacon Ness’ chin quivered. “I had no choice.”

Ma Mable nodded her head, then looked at me. “Come here, child.”

Her voice ran through my entire body and called me like the Pied Piper’s flute. My feet floated to the fallen woman on the floor.

Miss Mary-Margaret’s body jerked and shook against the wooden planks mounted to the floor. There was a tornado that came through here a few months ago, which knocked the church’ great oak through the pulpit during service. The planks were reminders of our blessing. No one was hurt.

“Mary Margaret.” I said to her as I watched her body flail back and forth. “Mary Margaret are you in there?”

The jerking stopped. Mary Margaret Hogan looked at me with the most glazed over green eyes that I ever seen. They looked like jade and her wet, curly red hair moved wildly with the October wind that flew in the church when Pastor Lewis and the First Lady arrived. Jeepers creepers I held my chest. Another wounded soul had arrived.

All the women on the motherboard formed a circle around Mary Margaret and me. I hated it when they did that. It made my feel like I was on my own and they were trapping me in a bullpen. I closed my eyes and prayed for it to be over and to not get scared when they sung that song.

Pastor Lewis and Deacon Ness read from the National Baptist Hymnal. “Reading Hymn #89. A charge to keep I have, a God to glorify and every dying soul to save that's fitted for the sky.”
In an eerie recall the women moaned and sang the words in unison, a slow sad chant that sent shivers through my spine.

Then it happened. The circle became hot inside and I found it hard to breathe. Wrongful death was choking Mary Margaret and me. Something horrible wanted her body, but it wasn’t her time to go. My job was to remind her of that, while the women agitated the evil, so that it could leave. Yet, evil was just as apart of the world as the water and sand. It had to go somewhere, so it might as well be me.

“It won’t stay long.” Ma Mable often reassured me. “You are touched by God. You are an angel upon the earth. Evil has no choice, but to go back to the deep when it meets you.

Her words held me breathless and I wondered where she got that knowledge. God never spoke to me and I didn’t have wings. Nonetheless, she traipsed me to these exorcisms with her every fourth Friday night. When would God tell her that I wasn’t the one I prayed to myself?

Boom!

A loud cracking noise split the communion table. Mary Margaret stood up and started screaming a high pitched yowl. I placed my hands over my ears and looked at her face. She was green all over now and cursing at me. The mothers’ hands clasped each other tighter as their voices grew louder.

“Leave me alone!” Mary Margaret screamed at me.

“I can’t hear you,” is all that I could say, because I felt a drop of urine in my underpants.

“I don’t want to go!” She screamed at me again.

“Mary Magaret?” I asked and walked toward her.

I had seen her around town. She was about the same age as me, and from what I knew of her being thirteen was just as troubling to her as it was to me. Mary Margaret was surrounded around brothers like me, who wouldn’t let her play with them. Her family smothered her and wouldn’t let her go anywhere especially past the tracks. My brothers did the same thing to me except when it came to church.

She was small framed like me. Her hair was not as long as mine was, but it curled up when it was wet just like mine was. Mary Margaret also had freckles on her face, but her freckles’ were strawberry colored; mine were honey brown. We smiled at each other in passing one day, but I’m sure she didn’t remember me. Usually it didn’t matter, but today I hoped she did.

“Mary Margaret, it’s me- Stacy Sawyer. My dad works for your daddy at the boatyard. We go to school together.” I walked closer to her. “I sit in the back of Mrs. Miller’s English class and you sit in the front with Peter Bailey.”

Mary Margaret’s face softened. “Stacy, I know who you are. You’re the only colored girl in my class.”

My jaw clinched when she said that. Possessed or not she said the wrong thing to me. Ma Mable looked at me with those piercing eyes of hers and I settled back into myself. Grandma had a better tolerance for prejudice than I did. The Civil Rights Movement was over a long time ago, but Valdosta and the cities that surrounded it lay trapped in time. Slavery wasn’t over in their minds and they passed it on to their children, and their children, and their children.

“Yes, Mary Margaret. It’s me.” I swallowed my pride.

Just before the women began the next stanza of the old hymn, Mary Margaret screamed again.
“I’m not leaving, Stacy. Stacy!”

She screamed. “Stacy!” Even louder, then she lunged at me with her bony hands.

From some strange urge in my body I took her hands and placed them over my heart. “Go on now.”

A voice came from my mouth, but it wasn’t me. None of this was I.

Then the wind stopped howling and Mary Margaret fell limp in my arms. Everyone came in closer and Pastor Lewis stepped through the imaginary circle.

“All is well.” His low voice rumbled through my skin. “The girl is ours again.”

Ma Mable threw her hands in the air and cried to the sky, “Hallelujah,” and the rest of the Mother Board joined in.

Two white men came in from the back door in the men’s restroom next to the choir stand. They wore John Deere mesh hats, checkered shirts and dusty denims. One handed Pastor Lewis a wad of money and the other one took Mary Margaret from my arms. I jumped up from the floor and tried to follow them into the back room, but Ma Mable and Deacon Hess stopped

“It’s over, Stacy.” Ma Mable held my shoulder.

“Huh?” My eyes stayed on the two men carrying Mary Margaret out the back.

“I think your time is done here for a while.” Ma Mable looked at Pastor Lewis.

“She’s getting too strong, too fast.” Pastor Lewis tilted his head as he looked at me. “Baby girl has a few gray hairs.”

I touched my head, then looked around at the other women, who held their mouths with their gloved hands.

“It’s not safe for a young girl to know so much of the other world.”

Ma Mable touched my hair. “We’ll pick up some Clairol at the store in the morning.” She put on her coat and hat and motioned me to the church door exit.

The next year I went on my first and last trick-or-treat excursion. I was too old to go, but I did it anyway.

Mary Margaret bumped into me at the town's Halloween parade. She didn’t speak to me or smile. She stepped back, turned around and ran away. Her reaction tickled me, because if anything I should have been running away from her.

Halloween was a strange time for a small southern town, because of the strong smell of fermented sugar in the air and the unspeakable things we did
.