Ruth May

TRIED TO SEE NELSON NAKED. I don’t know why I wanted to. When he gets up in the morning first he washes his face out of a dingered-up bowl in the chicken house and puts on his pants and his shirt. He washes the back of his neck with the pink hole in it till his skin shines and water runs all down.Then he looks at his clothes real hard and says a hex before he puts them on. Brown pants, red T-shirt.That’s all the clothes he has. Everybody here has just one clothes. My friends are the one with the blue pajama shirt, the one with the checkered pants with the legs rolled up, the one with shorts with big white pockets hanging out the bottom, and the one with the pinkish shirt down to his knees and no pants.The girls don’t ever, ever wear pants. And the little babies don’t wear a speck of clothes so they can just squat down and pee-pee ever-when they take a mind to.

The chicken house is made out of sticks. The wall has square little holes and I just wanted to see Nelson. I was bad. Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me be good, but Baby Jesus didn’t.

The chickens were setting on eggs. Good little mamas, we said, making us some more chickens. Their house was nothing but a shack. They tried to hide their nests in the bushes but Nelson and I found them. He said they were bad hens trying to steal their babies from us. I tried to scold them, but he said chickens don’t understand English. He showed me how to sing to them: Kuyiba diaki, kuyiba diaki, mbote vel Mbote ve! Then we took back all those eggs. I got to help Nelson in the morning when Rachel and them had school, if I promised Mama I wouldn’t go near any other children.They are all sick. They have to go to the bathroom number two in the bushes and we might catch it.

We took the eggs in to Mama and she floated them in a bucket. Some sank on the bottom, and some floated on top like when you bob for apples.The sinkers are okay to eat and the floaters are the rotten ones. When you say, Last one in is a rotten egg! I reckon that means you’re going to float. Nelson wanted those and Mama worried he’d get sick if he ate them but she said, “Oh, go ahead,” and so he took them. But he didn’t eat them. He hid them in a place. He said the witch doctor Tata Kuvudundu wanted those eggs for the dead people that needed to lie down. Nganga means witch doctor. Tata Kuvudundu is one because he has six toes on one of his feet. Nelson said Nganga Kuvudundu could make live people dead, and dead people come back alive. Nelson thinks Tata Kuvudundu is probably so important he could run the army, but he’s too old. Maybe one of his sons instead. Nelson knows who Patrice Lumumba is, too, like me. He says some of them are saying to bury rocks in your garden right now, and after the white people are all dead, dig them up and those rocks will be turned into gold. Nelson said he didn’t believe that. Nobody really believes it, he said, except the people that want to. I said, Why will all the white people be dead? Nelson didn’t know.

There’s all these extra people going to church now. Nelson says it’s because the lion tried to eat up Adah, but Jesus turned her into a bushbuck right just at the last minute. Like in the Bible. And right when the lion’s mouth bit down on the Adah that turned into a bushbuck, the real Adah disappeared from there and turned up okay on our porch.

Nelson says everybody’s got their own little God here to protect them, special African ones that live in the little tiny thing they wear around their necks. Agree-gree is what you call it. It’s like a little bottle, only made out of sticks and shells and things. Sometimes I think about all those little teeny Gods riding around on people’s necks, a-hollering: Help! Let me out of here! Like the genie in the Laddin’s lamp. You just rub it and say, Here, little God, you better watch out for me or you’ll get eat up by the lion right along with me!

All the little Gods are mad at Jesus right now, and they’d like to hurt one of us if they could. If Jesus doesn’t look out. I told Nelson that Jesus is -way too big to ride around in a little gree-gree. He is big as a man, with long brown hair and sandals, size extra-large. Nelson says yes, everybody has figured out that He is a right good size. They’ve a lot of them started going to hear Father talk about Jesus and figure out what’s what. But Nelson says they’ve got one foot in the door of the church and one foot out. If something bad happens to one of us, out they’ll go.

After we found all the eggs in the bushes and took them, Baby Jesus made all the chickens be good and lay their eggs in the one big nest we made in the corner of the chicken house. Mama took a pencil and marked thirteen eggs with X.We kept those in the nest, and when the hens laid fresh ones, we took those for eating. Sometimes scrambled, sometimes hard-boiled. We don’t ever eat the X-mark eggs, because they’re a-going to turn into baby chickens. When they grow up they’ll be our new laying hens, some of them. And the other ones will grow up to be fried chicken! The not-lucky ones. They’ll get their necks chopped off and jump around squirting blood, ha ha ha, poor them. The chickens better get their own little gree-grees to wear on their necks, I reckon.