The Ancestors Read online

  This is crazy. But whatever’s going on, I can’t stop it.

  After about half a mile, a three-way intersection came up. I didn’t know these twisty roads in daylight, much less at night, but without a second’s hesitation, I hung a left.

  I found myself on a two-lane road with a blown-out streetlamp, and old small houses standing on big, sloping parcels of land.

  I saw a dark Oldsmobile sedan ahead, idling on the shoulder. Tension plucked my nerves. Something about the scene struck me as wrong.

  As I drew closer, I realized what it was: a man sat behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. Who would be sitting in a car taking a smoke at three-thirty in the morning?

  I looked toward the house beyond the Oldsmobile, saw the front door yawning open, and light beams bouncing around inside, like flashlights.

  I suddenly understood what was going on. Although I had no idea how I was going to handle it, I slowed to a halt and shifted into Park.

  The driver sprang from behind the wheel like an angry snake out of a sack. He scrambled around the front end of his car. He wore a dark T-shirt, jeans, and a black bandana knotted around his head.

  He also had a pistol, and he was aiming it at me.

  “Get the fuck out of the car, ma’fucker.” He flicked his cigarette to the ground, but didn’t take his gaze off me for a second. “You five-oh? Huh?”

  A calmness that I could not logically explain had settled over me. Holding his gaze, I slowly shook my head. “I was only driving through,” I said.

  “Creepin’ with yo ma’fuckin lights off? Huh? I said, get out the damn car! And put yo ma’fuckin hands up!”

  I took my hands off the wheel.

  Then, moving very slowly, I got out of the car.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Once I climbed out of the car, things happened quickly.

  The gunman stepped toward me, pistol tilted sideways and pointed at my face. “Turn the fuck ’round.”

  “Okay, no problem, man,” I said. “It’s cool.”

  He grinned fiercely, showing a mouthful of shining metal fronts. Beginning my turn, I did something he probably never expected.

  I swiped at the gun.

  He let out a soft sound of surprise as the weapon spun out of his grasp and landed on the gravel.

  Do you understand the origin of your unusual agility and quickness? Has it not arisen to aid you when you needed it?

  He cursed, and charged me. I launched a punch that connected squarely with his jaw, and his head snapped back, fronts clicking in his mouth. He sagged to the ground, KO’d.

  I pushed out a heavy breath. The entire altercation had lasted maybe five seconds.

  I picked up the gun and stashed it against the waistband of my jeans, and then flipped over the guy’s body and found a cell phone riding his belt.

  I called 9-1-1 and reported a robbery-in-progress, reading the address off the wrought-iron mailbox at the end of the driveway. The operator cautioned me to wait for the police to arrive, but I hung up on her.

  I crept toward the house. The flashlights were in motion—the others hadn’t seen me drop their lookout man.

  Drawing the gun, I carefully entered the doorway. My shoe crunched across a broken vase.

  “Who the fuck is that?” a man’s voice asked nearby.

  Two light beams swung toward me. I dove behind a sofa.

  “I’ve called the police!” I said.

  They responded with gunfire. Pistols boomed, and rounds tore into the sofa and the walls. I hugged the carpet.

  From a back room, I heard a woman’s muffled scream.

  I had to do something, had to help her.

  Risking a bullet in the head, I crawled like a crab around the end of the sofa. A bullet smacked into a floor lamp nearby, and glass shards rained over me.

  I pushed myself to my feet and dashed for the hallway.

  Gunfire, and a pain tearing through my shoulder. I crashed against the wall, sending a collection of framed photographs clattering to the floor.

  I’ve been shot.

  I looked behind me, fearful that one of the gunmen was coming to finish me off. But they were fleeing to the door to escape. One of them let out a sudden bleat of pain, and I wondered if the police had already arrived.

  A familiar silhouette darkened the doorway. Oringo.

  My shoulder burning, I scooted against the wall and watched.

  Oringo had knocked the first gunman flat on his back. The second one raised his gun to fire on him, and Oringo took the weapon away from the man as easily as if the guy were a child. The gunman swung a fist. Oringo took the punch without slowing at all, grabbed the guy by his shirt and casually tossed him across the room.

  He unhooked two sets of metal handcuffs from the loops of his slacks, and restrained the men. And then he came to me.

  “How’re you feeling, Daniel?” he asked.

  “A bullet grazed my shoulder, but I’ll live,” I said. “There’s a lady in the back . . .”

  “Miss Etta, yes,” he said. “I’ll go to her.”

  He went down the hall, and returned about a minute later with an old, heavyset black woman in a tattered house robe and rollers bouncing in her hair. She was crying and thanking him profusely, and the way she leaned on him, I guessed that she had met him before.

  “Daniel here is the one you should be thanking, my dear,” he said. “He was the first one to arrive to help.”

  Her tearful eyes brightened when she looked at me. “God bless you, sugar, oh, bless you . . .”

  I awkwardly accepted her gratitude. Oringo—by then, I’d decided to call him Grandpa Orin—winked at me.

  “Thank you for heeding my call, Daniel,” he said. “This is the land of our ancestors, and we must keep it safe, always.”

  A few minutes later, the police and an ambulance arrived. Paramedics, learning that I had been shot, wanted to check me out, but I politely declined medical care.

  After all, by then, my gunshot wound had stopped bleeding.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Amonth after our visit to Mississippi, I proposed to Asha. She was thrilled, of course, and so was I. We set the wedding date for the following June, and she and her mother and girlfriends began planning for the big day, with me dropping in my two cents whenever I was asked.

  Some nights, I dreamed of the house on ancestor land in the Mississippi woods. I dreamed of walking inside through the red door, taking a chair, and chatting with the patriarch.

  There are many, many others like you, he told me during these dream conversations. You are not the only one—I am the father of numberless generations, the grand ancestor of countless children.

  One autumn afternoon, I was at a bookstore and went to the café to get a coffee. The barista, tall and slender and slightly older than I, took my order.

  A ruby ring adorned his finger.

  He glanced at the matching ring I wore. We exchanged nods and a knowing look, and though he was a complete stranger, I felt such a bond with him we might have grown up as brothers.

  I finally knew my place in the world.

  I was no longer alone.

  Ghost Summer

  Tananarive Due

  Davie Stephens was sure he must be dreaming when he heard his mother singing softly in his ear. It was an old call-and-response song she used to sing to him in Swahili when he was young: “Kye Kye Kule . . . Kye Kye Kofisa . . . Kofisa Langa . . . Kaka Shilanga . . . Kum Adem Nde . . .”

  The sound nearly made him clap his hands in rhythm to the song, reminding him of the game they had played. His first name was Kofi, just like in the song, from his mother’s homeland. But he had used his middle name since first grade because other kids called him Coffee and tried to pick fights. It was like a stranger’s name. He preferred to be All-American David, like his father.

  “Kye Kye Kule . . .”

  When Davie felt a cold fingertip against his ear, he jumped up with a gasp.

  He wasn’t sleeping!
A shadow sat beside him on the bed, washed in darkness. Davie’s heart thumped. He opened his mouth to yell, but the shadow planted a firm palm across his lips.

  “Don’t be loud. You’ll wake your sister,” his mother said.

  Only Mommy! He smelled the smoky scent of her shea butter as she flicked on his light. She was wearing her “home clothes,” as she called them; green and gold and red and blue woven into her dress from Ghana. Davie looked at his Transformers clock radio, confused. Four AM.

  “I thought you left,” he said.

  “I’m leaving now. One last goodbye,” she said, and kissed his forehead. Davie thought he saw tears shimmering, but Mommy was always emotional about trips and airplanes. She thought it was every airplane’s destiny to crash from the sky, and the pilots had to fight for their lives the whole way. For months, she had talked about nothing but her visit to Ghana to see her family, and now she seemed sad to be leaving. “I’ll pack you in my bag, I think.”

  “You’ll be back soon, Mommy,” I said.

  Mommy didn’t answer, except to sigh. Suddenly, Davie was sure he saw tears.

  “Saida?” Dad called from the hallway, his voice hushed in the dark. “Van’s here.”

  Davie was glad Mommy had lost the argument, but he felt sorry for her. She wanted to take them all to Ghana with her, but this was time to go to Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s in Graceville, Florida. The summer trip had been planned since Christmas, but Mommy wanted them to go with her instead. Mommy had said they should take a vote, and Davie had felt guilty raising his hand to choose Dad’s parents over hers. Of course, Neema raised her hand to side with him too, because she mimicked his every movement.

  Graceville won, even though their older sister, Imani, had refused to vote because she was going away to Northwestern for the summer anyway. The relief Davie felt only had a little bit to do with the farmer in Graceville who let them ride his tractor and horses whenever they wanted to, or Grandma’s fried chicken and sweet potato pie. Mommy and Dad knew exactly why he and Neema wanted to go to Graceville instead.

  It was never the same at Christmas. The best time to go was in summer.

  “Hope you see your ghosts,” Mommy said, and kissed his forehead. She was smiling; a sad, empty smile, but still a smile. Mommy’s smile made Davie’s heart leap. Maybe she wasn’t mad about his vote against her, or how he had led Neema to his side. The injured look on her face when he’d raised his hand had pierced him in a strange new way, as if she was his child—and he a parent who had made a terrible, unthinkable choice.

  “I’ll get video this time,” Davie said. “Proof. You’ll see.”

  Mommy made a tssk sound. “You think I never saw ghosts? In my village, they lived in the acacia trees. They sang us to sleep! We never saw it as a special thing. Not like you. Take care of your sister. I’ll miss you, Kofi.”

  “I’ll miss you too, Mommy.”

  Her hug lasted so long that Dad called for her twice more. The last time, he came to the doorway and stood there as if to block her way. “You’ll be late. Come on.” His voice was clipped, like he was mad. But he was only tired. That was what Davie told himself then.

  It would be a month and two days before he would see Mommy again. He had never been away from her so long, so he didn’t move from her arms even after Dad huffed out an annoyed sigh. More than annoyed, actually. Later, Davie would wonder why he hadn’t realized right then that something was very, very wrong.

  He’d known, maybe, but he hadn’t wanted to.

  That summer wasn’t going to be like the rest. Not one tiny little bit.

  Davie heard the shuttle drive off beneath his window, taking his mother far away from them. But as he tried to go back to sleep, twisting and turning beneath his sheets until they bound his legs, ghosts were the only thing on Davie’s mind.

  The weeks in summer usually fly by, but the two days before they would leave Los Angeles for Florida passed as slowly as the last two days of school. The day of the trip passed even more slowly. First, the flight itself was endless. One plane to Atlanta took forever, landing at the airport that was more like a city, with a transit system and far-flung terminals. The next plane was so teeny that they climbed up metal stairs from the tarmac in the rain, and Dad had to stow his computer case because the attendants said there wouldn’t be room.

  Neema, of course, complained the whole way. She always complained more when Mommy wasn’t around, because Dad would cluck and tug her braids gently and try to make her smile as if she was still a baby instead of eight already. She really played it up when Mom was gone, carrying around her brown-skinned Raggedy Ann doll and batting her eyelashes. Pathetic.

  Maybe Mommy is right about planes, Davie thought when the second plane landed with a terrible shaking and squealing. But then they were on the ground and everyone clapped with relief, and Mommy’s fears seemed silly again.

  Not Mommy, he reminded himself. He was twelve years old now. He was going to middle school in the fall, and he’d heard enough nightmarish stories about middle school to know that if any of the other kids heard him call his mother Mommy, he’d come home with a bloody nose every day. He’d already seen evidence of it: A hard glare from a teenager watching him play with Neema on the playground equipment at the McDonald’s Playland had been Davie’s first hint that the Punk Police were watching him now. He wasn’t a kid anymore; he was a target. His mother was Mom now. Nothing so hard about that. Like Dad told him, she would keep him a baby forever if it were up to her. He had to be stronger than that.

  As if in confirmation, when the plane rocked to a halt Dad patted Davie’s knee the way he patted his business partner’s knee when he came over for dinner. (His father was a movie producer, except not the rich kind.) That pat made Davie feel grown, even important.

  “Well . . . we’re here now,” Dad said. He didn’t look happy the way he usually did when he visited his parents. He said it as if flying to Tallahassee to drive to Graceville was like being flown to the moon against their will, held prisoner for ransom by space pirates camping on moon rocks. Dad sounded like he wished he could go anywhere else.

  There was no rain during the long drive past acres of thin, scraggly pine trees on I-10 west of Tallahassee, and Davie was disappointed to realize how much daylight was left even after such a long trip. Maybe two whole hours. He was ready to go to bed right now, even if it was only two o’clock in Los Angeles, not even time for SpongeBob. He was a little old for SpongeBob, but it was better than CNN.

  But the ghosts never came until after dark. And to Davie, the ghosts were the point of visiting Grandma and Grandpa Walter in Graceville during the summer.

  The ghosts were why he put up with having to share a room with Neema, and the excruciating fact that Grandpa Walter and Grandma only had a huge old satellite dish, and every time they came to visit the number of channels had shrunk because all the networks were bailing to cable and DishNet or DirecTV or something invented in this millennium, so unless he was going to watch CNN or the History Channel or Lifetime—get real!—there was hardly anything on TV all summer long. And ghosts were definitely the reason he put up with mosquito-infested, broiling North Florida in the middle of hurricane season—yes, sometimes it rained every day—instead of just holding out for Christmastime.

  In summer, it was all about the ghosts.

  Large trucks carried away load after load of fallen pine trees, but the woods were still thick. You see how they’re cutting it all down? Grandma always said on her way to this or that meeting to try to stop a new construction project. But while Graceville had a shortage of virtually everything else—particularly in the movie theater department—there was no visible shortage of trees whatsoever. Welcome to Graceville—We’ve Got Trees!

  Grandma and Grandpa Walter had lived in Miami most of his life, but they had retired to Graceville four years ago, on six acres of land shaped like a slice of pie—well, not a perfect piece, but it tapered to nothing at the V at the far fence. The single-stor
y house was fenced in and set back from a two-lane road where traffic raced past on its way to more interesting places.

  It didn’t look anything like Davie would have imagined a haunted house should look—old and decrepit, or with an interesting feature like a balcony, or at least a verandah. Graceville was full of plantation-style houses that looked like a reminder of the slavery Davie had seen with his own eyes when Dad showed him Roots, but Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s house looked like they had ordered it over the Internet from Houses-R-Us. Just like any other house, except painted bright peach, a splash of Miami in the middle of the woods.

  Grandma and Grandpa Walter were waiting for them in the yard when they drove up. The gravel driveway was a million miles long, so his grandparents needed plenty of notice to walk down to unlock the gate. Locking the gate was a Miami habit Grandma never gave up. Sometimes Grandpa Walter drove his car instead of walking because of his arthritis.

  When Davie and his sister got out of the rental car, his grandparents fussed over them as if they’d been gone half a lifetime, like they always did. Tight hugs from Grandma. Playful punches from Grandpa Walter, who liked to remind Davie that he used to box when he was in the army in the 1950s. Promises of special outings and homemade sweets.

  But it was different this time, too. Usually Dad just stood in the background and grinned, watching his parents. Davie’s father had told him that when he was a kid, a psychic at a booth at a county fair told him that his parents would die when he was young—and he’d lived in fear of losing them since. Dad had never expected Grandma and Grandpa Walter to see him grow up, or to know his children. Dad said he finally figured out that the psychic wanted to scare him.

  “But why would a psychic want to scare a little kid like that?” Davie had asked.

  Dad had looked at him like it was the dumbest question in the world. “That was in 1976, Davie,” Dad said. He waited a moment, as if the answer was hidden in the year, a code. Davie’s blank face made him sigh. “Racist, that’s all. What do you think?”