Jinx Schwartz
Amazon
Smashwords
Category:
Young Adult/Teen
Publisher: Jinx Schwartz
Type: Fiction
Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 9781936127214
When a ten-year-old Texan moves to Haiti in the 1950's, she is instantly plunged into a world of voodoo, zombies and political unrest. To her, it is a paradise.
Living in Camp Peligre, a construction camp miles from civilization, Lizbuthann, her parrot, Pee Wee, and their best friend, Doux Doux Boudreaux, spend many hours roaming jungle paths on horseback, swimming untamed rivers, swinging from Tarzan ropes dangling from giant kapok trees, and indulging in a little unwelcome "snoopery" inspired by childhood detective novels. Unfazed by tropical disease, storms, and varmints, Lizbuthann is determined to delve into an even more dangerous and forbidden world: witchcraft and zombies. Her precocious and curious nature inevitably lands her, and everyone around her, in a heap of havoc.
Innocence and evil compete in this humorous coming-of-age fictography that takes us back to another time and place, where rivers-and little girls-ran wild and free.
Excerpt
Weclom to Port-au-Prince
Some welcome. They couldn’t even spell it.
Gooey tarmac oozed around my brand new patent leather shoes, and damp heat wilted the Shirley Temple curls my mother forced my hair into earlier in the day. I could practically feel the ringlets springing back to their natural orange frizz. I began to glow. Southern girls don’t sweat, they glow. Rivers of glow ran through my scalp,and down my neck.
I looked back toward the DC-3 airplane, hoping to see my mother and little sister. No luck. I should have waited inside with them where it was cooler but, as usual, I was in a big old hurry. Grownups jostled by me, headed for the terminal building. I was of a mind to follow them, but I’d promised Mama I’d wait until she could get Sister awake enough to leave the plane.
I fanned myself with my hand and cocked my head. From somewhere, drum beats echoed. Not the tinkling,cheerful sound of a Havana steel band. More like a tom-tom sound, with a steady, hollow, thump, thump, thumping, that reminded me of movies set in Africa.
My nose twitched. Something stunk up the thick air. Smelled to high heaven. Worse than my grandfather’s one- holer outhouse in July. I sniffed the stink, tracking it toward the WECLOM sign, and what I spotted was far more rotten than their spelling. Stuck on posts next to the misspelled greeting was something really, really,ugly.Several somethings.
Daddy says I have eyes like an eagle, but even so it took a second or two for what I saw to sink in. Or maybe I just didn’t want it to. Matter of fact, if I hadn’t spent so much time at all-day-for-a-dime matinees back in Texas, I probably wouldn’t have even recognized a human head on a stake, but believe you me, that’s what they were. Four of‘em. And even though I was upwind, my smeller told me they’d been there awhile.
I pinched my nose and held my breath, waiting for Mama and Sister to finally make it to the bottom of the clanky old ramp, but at about the same time they arrived, my brain and mouth went all cottony. I tugged at my mother’s hand, thinking to tell her about those fly-covered, stinking heads, but could only manage, “Mama, I’m fixin’ to throw up.”
“Not now Lizbuthann. I see your father,” Mother snapped. She was a mite miffed with me because I’d gulped down two frozen daiquiris, which I thought were slushy lemonades, during the flight. I was asking for another when my mother took a sip of hers, realized they were laced with rum, and gave me a talking to. I protested that it wasn’t my fault the stewardess was dumb enough to give a ten-year-old like me a loaded snow cone, but Mama wasn’t having any of it.
She made a beeline for the terminal building, yanking me along behind her. As I threw a last look over my shoulder at the scary heads, I decided it was probably a good thing Mama only had eyes for my daddy, because if she’d seen those heads, we’d surely have been marched right back onto that plane. The last thing my stomach needed was a bumpy return trip to Cuba.
Daddy had a big smile on his face in spite of the fact that he was surrounded by gun-toting Negroes wearing wrinkled shorts.
My father never wears shorts, nor do any other grown men I know, but I’d seen those snooty-accented explorers wearing them in Tarzan movies. Since they, like whoever was out there on the posts, occasionally lost their heads to savages, maybe my father was smart to stick with long pants, just in case there was a connection.
I longed to be in shorts myself. Mama had us gussied up, right down to white gloves, like we were going to church instead of taking a tummy-jolting flight just above the wave tops. It’s a wonder they even managed to pass out those rum- laced daiquiris.
While Mama and Daddy hugged, Sister and I gawked at a huge black woman swathed in layers of multi-hued scarves who, like some exotic butterfly, floated toward us.
She fluttered to the floor in front of me, lowered the basket she had balanced on her head, and uncovered a collection of the most beautiful dolls I’d ever seen. Their heads, wrapped in brilliantly colored scarves, were topped with tiny baskets brimming with tropical fruit and flowers. Like the woman who sold them, the dolls were dressed in frilly blouses and brilliantly colored skirts. Sister and I were bewitched. We’d never seen a black-faced doll, much less any so spectacular.
I was reaching for one when Mother called out, “Girls, come over here and give your Daddy a hug.” She talked in a real happy voice, even though her eyes were wet.
Tearing myself away from the dolls, I pushed Sister in front of me. I hadn’t seen Daddy in six months, and before he left Texas he and I hadn’t been on the best of terms. Even though mother read us his letters each week, my three-year- old sister barely remembered him. Sister whirled and buried her face in my waist, so it was left to me to break the ice.
“Hi, Daddy. Are there head hunters here?”
Mama shot me an exasperated look. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Bud. Your daughter’s drunk.”
Daddy, who evidently hadn’t seen those heads out on the fence, looked bewildered by my question, but he did that a lot with us kids. Especially me.
This little reunion wasn’t going as planned and I could tell Mama was getting upset, because her eyebrows twitched. All she’d talked about since my father left San Antonio was how, as soon as school let out, we’d join him, and she was real happy about that.As for me, I had serious doubts about this so-called great new life Mama talked about, what with me having to give up my school and friends, but even so, I’d thrown up my hand during Show and Tell so I could share it with my classmates. “My Daddy’s a dam builder, he’s going to Hell, and he’s taking us with him,” I’d begun, only to have my favorite teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, grab my hand and march me straight to the principal’s office.
The principal’s job, as far as I could figure, was to spank kids who messed up, which I’d never done until now, so naturally I was a mite nervous. Mama says I have lots of nerve.
Principal Young didn’t look young at all, but more like an old owl. Tufts of hair stuck out of and around his pointy ears. Coke-bottle-bottom glasses magnified his yellowish eyes. I expected him to hoot, but instead he asked me to explain myself, which I was much too scared to do, even if I knew what I’d done, so he sent me out into the hall while he and the teacher called my house.
When Mrs. Baldwin came out of Mr. Young’s office she was smiling. She said they’d talked with my grandmother Hetta, and that I should have a little talk with her and then, the next day, I could retell my story to the class. When we got back to the classroom she told the kids there had been a little misunderstanding and I wasn’t in any trouble, but they crawdad-eyed me the rest of the day, like I had cooties or something.
I was still worried about how I’d messed up when I got home from school, but nobody was mad at me. Mama smiled while Grandmother Hetta showed me this tiny dot on my little tin world atlas. Haiti, it was called, and we were going to live there because Daddy was going to build a dam.
I was mighty relieved to find out that I hadn’t, with an angry, silent wish all those months ago, sent my daddy straight to Hades after that little set-to we had. Especially since I thought we had to go with him, which would have been pretty danged unfair, in my book.
That night in bed I eavesdropped on Mama and Grandmother Hetta’s conversation in the living room. I’d never told anyone that, through some miracle of air vents, I could hear everything that happened in the living room clear as a bell. That’s why I never protested when I was sent to bed, even when there was a program on the radio I wanted to hear. That alone should have alerted the grownups that something was amiss, but they never figured it out.
I am an excellent dropper of eaves. For instance, one night I overheard my Aunt Marjorie, who doesn’t have any kids and doesn’t seem to like ‘em much, telling another aunt that I was annoyingly precocious, and even though she mispronounced it, I now knew, thanks to those air vents, how she really felt about me. I continued to be precious andshe continued to pretend to be annoyed. I gotta say, though, she’s a pretty good pretender.
Anyhow, this night I was keeping my ears open for what my mother and grandmother had to say. Mama sighed and said, “I swear, sometimes I just don’t know what to do with Lizbuthann.”
Of course, my ears perked upon hearing my name. Grandmother Hetta laughed softly. “Johnnie Ruth, I think you named Elizabeth for the wrong aunt. She’s a sight more like your Aunt Arleigh than your Aunt Elizabeth. I should know, I was the oldest of all the sisters and practically raised her. And what Elizabeth Ann—Grandmother Hetta is the only person in all of Texas who pronounces my name so it doesn’t sound like Lizbuthann—did today pales in comparison to what you did to me when you were a girl.”
Oh, this was getting good.
“When you were about her age, your wild aunts, and you know what pistols they are, came for a visit to the farm and one of them told this off-color joke.” She lowered her voice and told the joke to my mom, but I couldn’t hear it, darn it. When they both started laughing, I knew I’d missed a good one.
Grandmother Hetta continued talking in a normal voice, saying, “You children were supposed to be asleep, but evidently you heard your aunt’s joke and told it the next day. In Vacation Bible School.”
Mother gasped, but she was kind of giggling, too. “That must have set the gossips’ tongues to wagging.”
“Oh my, yes. I thought I’d never hear the end of it. The preacher almost had apoplexy and suggested that since your father died recently maybe you’d fallen in with a bad lot. As if there was a bad lot to be found in Locker, Texas.” They continued to talk and I drifted off, happy to be off the hook at school, and at home. Grandmothers are good that way.
So, thanks to grandmother’s patient explanation that day after school, I knew I wasn’t following Daddy into Hades when I stepped off the plane in Port-au-Prince, but it sure felt like it. I’d seen paintings in Aunt Marjorie’s art books of sinners burning in Hell, their mouths open in silent screams for help from Heaven—like it wasn’t too darned late—and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have expected old Lucifer himself to suddenly appear in that sweltering terminal building.
Maybe it was the daiquiris, the heads, the heat, or a combination of all of them, for the next thing I knew, I woke up with my head in the doll seller’s lap. People fanned me while my mother hovered and Daddy paced and twirled a curl of hair that Mama called his worry lock.
Mama elbowed aside a couple of Haitian kids who’d dashed in to snatch a few strands of my red hair when I conked out. Sitting me up, she looked back over her shoulder at my father. “Lizbuthann’s fine, Bud,” Mama reassured him. “She does this a lot.”
Daddy did not look reassured.
|
