As August wandered around the packed room, she scratched at her thighs, though she knew she shouldn’t. But the mosquito bites were plaguing her, and the lace of the stockings was agonizing against the frantic itch of the bites. August had been covered in them, layering bites over bites ever since she’d eavesdropped on her sister’s proposal in that plum tree at the beginning of summer.
She looked around at all the people packed in the Officers’ Club: dancing, eating, and grabbing drinks from the bar. August didn’t understand it. Shouldn’t they all be in black? Grieving a loss? Isn’t that what this was? Some no-name Yankee nigga no one knew from Cain coming to take away her sister. Camp Lejeune. It sounded like a prison. Camp. Something told August it wouldn’t be the summer camps she had been sent off to every July down in Mississippi, where she had learned to build a fire, catch and gut trout, use a compass—rituals her mother had claimed every God-fearing Southern woman should know as easy as the Lord’s Prayer when she had driven her down in the family’s Coupe de Ville. No, this camp would be different. Her sister would not be frolicking in unkempt bramble and unruly thicket, but August figured Miriam would indeed learn new ways of Southern womanhood.
But here August was anyway, dressed in a pale yellow, the color of one of her sister’s lemon meringue pies, holding her petite junior bridesmaid’s bouquet of violets, resting, glaring close-mouthed at all the people acting like there was something to celebrate today. Trying, desperately and discreetly, not to scratch at her bites. Or, at the very least, to scratch discreetly.
“You brought that house of the Lord down.”
August turned her head to see Miss Dawn, who looked like she was traveling toward her on a cloud. Miss Dawn wore a white gown with cumulus clouds for sleeves, a single pastel cowrie shell hung from her long locs, piled high atop her head. She held a tiny porcelain plate painted with English tea roses and overflowing with red velvet cake. She forked cake into her mouth and nodded.
“Brought down the house.”
Miss Dawn had known August her whole life. She’d even been there at August’s birth. As Miriam told it, their mother, Hazel, did not trust the attendings and nurses where she worked at Mount Zion Baptist to deliver her baby. Not after Hazel’s first delivery, when the white doctors and staff had to restrain her from setting the delivery room afire. In the middle of a late August night in 1963, Miriam ran from the family home and down the street to the leaning pink house at the end of the block, screaming for Miss Dawn to come and to come quick. Pulling her head back in from her bedroom window, Miss Dawn had sprinted back with Miriam and found Hazel on all fours near the clawfoot tub, a moaning and calving heifer of herself. Miss Dawn had placed a hand on Hazel’s belly, another cupped August’s crown, and she cooed and guided August into existence.
Miriam—eight at the time—stroked her mother’s face with a damp towel. Placed soft kisses on her forehead. “I got you, Mama. I got you,” she’d whispered over and over.
Miss Dawn speared another chunk of red velvet cake and pointed it at August. “You should sing more often, child,” she went on. “God talks to every baby when they’re born. Every single one. But I believe He talks to some a bit longer. Whispers something only He can understand, I suppose. Some magic bestowed to certain children. You one of them. You and the whole North clan, really. Though don’t a one of y’all see it.”
August moved like lightning. She pulled the fork from Miss Dawn’s long fingers expertly. Her lips closed around Miss Dawn’s fork, and she tasted the decadence of the cake.
Miss Dawn threw her head back and roared. “You Hera in the flesh,” she said and pulled August to her breast. Because August was almost her height, and because August still held the fork in her mouth like a popsicle, Miss Dawn kissed the side of her cheek.
Then sunlight pierced the dark hall as the front door of the Officers’ Club was thrown wide open. The midday light blinded August momentarily. Even Miss Dawn held up a billowy sleeve to shield her eyes from the imposing sun. A figure appeared in the doorway, but the figure was so slight it did little to block out the overwhelming sun.
“Where he at?”
The accent. August would always remember how sharp, how short the vowels were. She hadn’t heard anything like it until a few weeks prior, when some Yankee in a beautiful Marine Corps uniform interrupted her piano practice that Sunday.
“Where he at?” the stranger repeated.
The door closed behind him, and August’s eyes were able to adjust, able to take in the Chicago man.
He was the spitting image of Jax. Anyone could see that. Reading their faces was like reading a lineage: They looked like clones. The singular difference being height. This man, a whole head shorter, this twin, threw his head this way and that, scanning the room for Jax.
August did the same. She spotted the ivory Marine Corps uniform in the center of the dense dance floor. Jax spun her sister around to Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.” Miriam’s train was tucked into the front of her dress. They both were in a trance of new love and did not notice the flash of sunlight, the newcomer.
The wedding crasher.
She heard him over the twang of Stevie’s harmonica, the laughter from the couples on the dance floor, the stomping of heeled feet. August’s musical genius made her strangely acute to sounds, vibrations, echoes. And her formative years sitting in her family’s plum tree and listening in on adult conversations had only strengthened her auditory prowess. She had an ear for all sounds. She distinctly heard the stranger’s indignation over the roar of the music.
“I know for a fact this honky not touching me.”
A middle-aged waiter in a white dinner jacket and a thick black bow tie that matched his sideburns had stopped the stranger from entering the hall further. He had his palm on the slight man’s chest and shook his long, wavy Bee Gees hair back and forth fervently.
August heard, “I’m not telling you twice to get your white hands off me.”
August saw a gleam of pearl. The man had reached to his left side and pulled out a pistol. Clenching the barrel, the stranger swung the pearl handle down across the white man’s face, and down the white man went, his body twisting from the force of the blow the same way August spun jacks and marbles on the kitchen tile. August swore she saw a tooth fly loose as the waiter careened to the floor.
“Where he at?” the stranger demanded as he placed his pistol back into a holster hidden in his dark suit jacket. He adjusted himself, his cuff links. Straightened the tie at his collar, then rocked his neck back and forth, settling it back into a comfortable place. Dusted off his jacket.
The white man was still a heap on the floor. The slight man had knocked him out cold.
As he stepped over the waiter, like he was nothing but a dead cockroach on the floor, the intruder said something inaudible even August could not make out. But after all her years of living in the South, she didn’t have to. She had seen the angry mouths of white men and women hurl this at her and her loved ones too often to count. The newcomer had spat out “nigger” as he stepped over the unconscious white man.
“And that right there,” Miss Dawn said between bites of red velvet cake, “is Hades himself.”