Brown Girl In the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson Page B

second. With a trembling hand, Ti-Jeanne pointed the man out to him.
    “Where, Ti-Jeanne? I don’t see anyone.”
    “How you mean? Look, he right there, walking bold face towards the Necropolis!” The man stopped, slowly looked over to where she and Tony stood. Terror made gooseflesh rise on Ti-Jeanne’s arms. The man’s face was a skull. It grinned at her. The thing tipped its top hat to her and kept walking. As it crossed in front of the house, she could no longer see it. Another vision. Ti-Jeanne swallowed hard on a cold lump of fear.
    Tony shook her shoulder. “Where are they?”
    “Never mind, Tony. I make a mistake. Was a branch blowing in the wind, or something.”
    Quietly as they could, they walked back up the path and into the house. “You stay here on the couch and pretend as if you sleeping,” Ti-Jeanne instructed Tony in a whisper. “Mami go probably come and get we soon.” She kissed him once more.
    She took the stairs up to her own room, remembering at the last instant to step over the creaky one, third from the top. When she reached her room, Baby was just beginning to stir, ready to be fed again. He yawned, knuckled his eyes with a little fist, began to whimper. At the sound, her milk started to come. The let-down reflex made her breasts ache. She remembered Tony’s mouth on them earlier, the game he’d made of licking the drops of milk that arousal had squeezed from her nipples. She sighed and picked Baby up, took him over to the bed, and sat down, shrugging off one shoulder of her nightgown so that Baby could suck.
    Mami found her like that a few minutes later. “Is time,” the old woman said. “When he done eating, it have a bucket of water in the kitchen for the two of you to bathe. Have to be clean to meet the spirits.”
    “Mami,” Ti-Jeanne asked, “it go be all right to take the baby with we?”
    “Yes; it ain’t have nothing in what I do to hurt he, doux-doux.”
    Ti-Jeanne wasn’t much comforted by her grandmother’s response. The one time Mami had persuaded her to attend a ritual in the palais, she had fled screaming from the sight of Bruk-Foot Sam writhing purposefully along the floor, tongue flickering in and out like a snake’s.
    Mami sat down beside her, just looking. The old woman’s face was sad, resigned. Without saying a word, she reached over and removed a piece of straw from Ti-Jeanne’s hair, then patted the hair back into place. Her hand was gentle. Ti-Jeanne felt her face flaring hot with embarrassment.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Duppy know who to frighten.
    —Traditional saying
    I t was finally time for the ritual that Mami had promised Tony. Ti-Jeanne had Baby cradled against her chest in a Snugli. Mami had changed into a brown dress and tied her hair into a bright red headwrap. The colours she was wearing were the same as those on the necklace that was always around her neck, except when she bathed: tiny brown and red beads.
    Mami took Ti-Jeanne and Tony into the kitchen, where she filled a basket with all kinds of odd things: three bunches of dried herbs that had been hanging in the kitchen window; two white potatoes—those were hard to come by, and Mami usually hoarded them; a margarine tub into which she had poured cornmeal; some of her homemade hard candy; her sharpest kitchen knife; a pack of matches; and a cigar, which she took from a cookie tin on the topmost shelf.
    Tony asked, “What’s all that for, Mistress Hunter?”
    “You go find out.”
    Mami gave the basket to Tony to carry, then lit kerosene lamps for herself and Ti-Jeanne.
    Tony said, “I could carry a lamp, too.”
    “No. In a little bit, both your hands going to be full.”
    Tony looked nervously at Ti-Jeanne, but what could she do? She gave him a tentative smile, tying to reassure him.
    Mami led Ti-Jeanne and Tony out of the house, down the back steps, and into another barn, the one that held the chicken runs and the pig pens. Their upheld lanterns threw swaying circles of light. The