Tea Party #17 ~ Fiction
Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version
Barren | Tamara Madison
Nine and a third months had passed when Luttie Belle May sent word that the womenfolk must gather in her garden for a special healing ceremony at midnight of the full moon. Each one must bring blankets and dress with protection from the pending heavy rains.
The women began assembling at half past eleven. Chattering and whispering, all were in place by a quarter ‘til the hour, speculating as to why Luttie Belle May had requested them. She was still up to something. Many wondered if she had grasp of her right mind, singing and carrying on like she had been lately.
On the sixth stroke of midnight, the skies again sprinkled sweet rain and Luttie Belle May appeared on the front porch, hobbling on her one good leg out to the yard where the women waited with swollen breasts and all sorts of questions spilling from the tips of their tongues. Luttie Belle May said nothing but fell on her knees and prayed a howling, melodic prayer in a strange tongue. The louder she prayed, the harder the rain fell, lubricating the earth as the clouds rode the waves of a warm, wet wind. The women’s eyes stretched wide in amazement as the earth contracted beneath their feet. They felt a rippling in the places where their wombs had been, and many of them dropped to their knees.
Still praying, Luttie Belle May greeted each woman by drizzling drops of peanut oil in her palm and instructing her to massage the strangely clumped collard greens at her feet. Curious but unquestioning, the women all squatted and gently stroked the leaves with oil and rainwater. One by one, the leaves shifted to the melody of the moon’s moan as even the stars twinkled in amazement, bearing witness to the miracle.
Gradually, instinctively, without ever lifting her eyes, each woman carefully peeled the leaves, one after the other in growing anticipation. In the center of each clump lay a plump bundle with clear, shining, wide eyes and thick, dark, curly hair, fat feet kicking and flapping the collards. Their complexions represented the rainbow shades of the earth herself. Ecstatic with tear-soaked laughter and breasts overflowing, the mothers bundled their babies and pressed them close to the emptiness they had carried shamefully for so long. Each woman arose and kissed Luttie Belle May Hawk Richardson III as she blessed the child in her arms.
*****
The clinic mysteriously disappeared from East Indigo, and the city-slick officials never reappeared for the results of their research. No one could explain the vastly growing population of coloreds in West Indigo. Grossly disappointed, the mayor panicked in disbelief. Why, damn near all of them nigras had babies. All the boys were named Richard, Richardson or Hawk; and Lutties, Belles and Mays just spilled all over everywhere. Convinced that his plans of expansion had failed, the mayor fled in a fury, not daring to ask questions.
West Indigo so prospered that they just ran the white folks out from even their own side of the railroad tracks. Within a decade, colored folks, dressed like psychedelic peacocks in free-flowing feathers, flooded both sides of town and business boomed—this time beneath the palms of blue-stained hands. The land was beaming with pride-filled smiles, though not a pale face could be found for miles. And in a spanking new pair of even bigger britches, the town soon changed its name from Indigo to Collard County.