Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (8 page)

“I can’t wait till we have our Indian names,” Teensy says.

“Tonight is the night,” Caro says, and she closes her eyes and leans her head back in the hammock.

“Ooooh,” Necie says, “I hope it’s not too dark in the woods.”

“
Of course
it’ll be dark,” Teensy says.

“It will be dark as
velvet
,” I say.

Necie’s eyes grow big. Caro reaches out and grabs her like a monster out of nowhere, and she lets out a squeal.

I can smell all Mother’s flowers, and I can hear everything from my spot in the hammock. Someone beating rugs a few doors down, lots and lots of birds, a fly buzzing, and Mr. Barnage’s truck rattling down the street. I know the sound of all the automobiles and trucks in our neighborhood.

Mother’s honeysuckle mixes in with the smell of her gardenia and butterfly ginger, and makes it smell so sweet out here on the porch. The Rose of Montana vine that Mother has trained to climb across the porch ceiling is just dripping
with flowers. She takes cuttings other people throw away and puts them into old coffee cans, and pretty soon they take over our porch and yard with blossoms. My mother can grow any flower in the world, and she knows all their names too. Our whole yard is full of camellias, Mother’s pride and joy. And she’s got all kinds of roses and white and purple periwinkles and a potted kumquat that she brings inside during the winter so it won’t freeze. If there is one thing my mama loves to do it is work in the garden. Father and my grandmother Delia make fun of her. They call her a field hand. Necie’s mama always asks Mother to join the Garden Club, but Mother won’t. She says her club is the Altar Society. Most of her flowers end up on the altar at Divine Compassion, not in our house.

In the spring and summer, I live out on this porch that’s surrounded by flowers. Come the warm weather, Mother and Delia’s maid, Ginger, set up two beds at the end of the side porch with the mosquito netting that drops from the ceiling, then Mother sets up a little night table and a boudoir lamp and we all take turns sleeping out here. When my girlfriends come over to spend the night, Mother makes Pete and his pals move back to his room and lets us sleep out here. My favorite nights in the world are the nights I have my girlfriends over. That is when I sleep my best, hardly a nightmare at all when my buddies are with me.

Sleeping on the porch is the best thing in the world. You fall asleep with the sound of crickets, and you wake up with the sound of birds chirping. When you’re still half-asleep, they sound like a waterfall. If Huey Long himself came to visit, the porch is where I’d put him. We don’t have servants fanning us here in Thornton, although sometimes we try to get Ginger, my grandmother’s maid, to fan us with Delia’s vetiver hand fans. But she says, “Go soak your head, that cool you off.”

* * *

It is evening and we all play cards after supper out on the porch with Pete and Mother. Father has business tonight, and so he didn’t come home for supper again.

My brother, Pete, teases us all the time. He keeps making up names for us. He calls Teensy “Tinky,” and calls me “Stinky.” Caro he calls “Karo Syrup.” And Necie he calls “Knee-sie” and points to his knee and then his eyes like he’s playing charades. Pete is two years older than us and big and strong, and has foxtails that fly from his bicycle.

After four hands of Crazy Eights, Mother says it’s time for bed. We all say goodnight and put on our gowns and Mother comes out to make sure the mosquito netting is draped around our beds on the porch. She puts out a little
pissoir
so we won’t have to troop all the way inside and up the stairs to powder our noses.

We act so good and quiet that Mother thinks she has saints on her hands.

“Did yall thank the Holy Lady for helping you through the day?” she asks.

“Yes, ma’am,” we all call out from our beds.

Mother is standing there on the other side of the mosquito net, already fingering her evening rosary. “Well, then tell your guardian angels goodnight.”

“Goodnight, angels,” we say.

“Goodnight, little girls,” Mother says.

We lie silently and watch her cross the gray planks of the porch and head back into the house.

When she is out of sight, Caro says, “We’re not little girls, we are Royal Indian Maidens.”

“Maybe instead of thanking the Holy Lady, yall should apologize for wiping her face off,” Teensy says.

That makes us giggle.

“Yall scrubbed off her lips and turpentined her skin,” Teensy says. “
Imbecile
. I bet those Cubans would have never
sold that statue to your father if they knew yall were going to ruin her looks.”

“Shhh!” I say. “Mother might be in the living room listening. If we’re quiet, then she’ll think we’re sound asleep and go on upstairs.”

We get quiet and just lie there for a moment, with our bundles of supplies stashed beneath the beds.

“Now are we going into the dark woods?” Necie murmurs.

“No,” I whisper, “we have to wait till the whole house is asleep.”

“How will we know?” she asks.

“I can tell,” I say. “Houses sleep like people sleep. I can tell.”

After a while, I climb out of bed to check. “The coast is clear!”

We pull out our stash from under the beds, lift up our nightgowns, and take turns rubbing a raw onion all over our bodies so the mosquitoes won’t carry us away. We’re lucky it’s been a dry summer so far or we’d never be able to go into the woods at night without getting bitten to death.

Then we sneak off the porch and into the backyard.

“
Stealthily!
” Caro says.

We cut across the Munsen’s alley, walk a few hundred yards, take a deep breath, and then slip into the woods.

We have Pete’s flashlight and a half-moon for light. I finger the piece of paper in the pocket of my nightgown. It holds our tribal story. I am the Mistress of Legend tonight.

“What if we run into a camp of hobos?” Necie asks.

Caro is holding the light since she’s the tallest. She also carries a rucksack with some pieces of wood in it. She’s the Mistress of Fire.

“The hobos are closer to the railroad tracks,” I say.

“Father says his friends at the police station have already run all the hobos out of Thornton,” says Teensy. “
Maman
and he got in a big fight about it.”

“Mama fed some hobos a few days ago, right on our back steps,” Necie says. “But I am not supposed to talk to hobos, just feed them.”

“Hobos keep coming round your house because your mother won’t erase the hobo mark, even though the Mayor told everyone they should,” I say. “Mother only feeds them once a week now, or else she says we’ll end up joining them, as much as Pete eats.”

Necie is the only one of us who knows how to cook, so she has brought fudge in a paper sack. She is the Mistress of Refreshment. Teensy, the Mistress of Dance, has got four empty oatmeal boxes in her sack for our drums. And I’ve got the needle.

We keep walking until we are on the edge of the little bayou that runs back behind Teensy’s house. We all help Caro build a small fire. Caro is a swell fire builder, good as a boy. Mr. Bob taught her and she taught me.

When our fire gets going, we all sit around it.

I gaze into its flames and begin my telling the story of the Divine Tribe of Louisiana Ya-Yas.

T
HE
S
ECRET
H
ISTORY OF THE
L
OUISIANA
Y
A-
Y
AS

Long before the white man showed up, the Mighty Tribe of Ya-Yas, a band of women strong and true and beautiful, roamed the great state of Louisiana. Leopards slept with us and bears fed us honey from their paws and fish jumped up into our hands because they wanted to be our food. The trees were so thick that we could travel from New Orleans to Shreveport on treetop, and we did, hundreds of Ya-Ya Indians traveling on the tops of trees.

Our mother was a black she-ape named Lola, who found us in a cave at the beginning of time and raised us like her very own children. We loved her like a
mother. People didn’t mess with the tribal Ya-Ya sisters.

But then Hurricane Zandra, the hugest hurricane known to man, came and ripped all the trees out by their roots and turned all the streams into rivers and killed everybody, including our mother, Lola. Only four of us survived. Everywhere we turned, evil alligators tried to eat us. There was nowhere to hide because those alligators could crawl from water to land and be just as mean in either place. We were starving so bad that our bones were sticking out, and we didn’t sleep for forty days. Finally we were so weak we just gave up.

The alligators rejoiced and crawled up to where we lay helpless. They crawled so close that we looked right into their ugly old eyes and saw the light of the moon reflected. We tried everything we knew, but our strength was gone. Then from behind the moon came a gorgeous lady. We could see her from where we lay on our deathbeds. She looked down and saw we were hanging by an eyelash over the canyon of doom! And the Moon Lady shot silver rays from her eyes so hot and mighty that those alligators were burned to a crisp right in their sleazy tracks! Fried those ugly critters sunny-side up, right there on the road. We could hear them sizzling.

And the Moon Lady said, “You are my daughters in whom I am well pleased. I will always keep my Divine Eyes peeled for you.”

We, the Ya-Yas, had lost our jungle home, and our town does not realize we are royal, but secretly we all know our history and we will be loyal to our tribe forever and ever, in sickness and in health. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. The End.

Then I look at everyone in the eyes and say: “Now it is official: we are from here on out to be known as Ya-Yas!” And everybody starts clapping.

“Some of that kind of sounds like it came from the Bible,” Necie says.

“Do not question the Mistress of Legend,” I say.

“Yeah,” Teensy chimed in. “The Bible doesn’t
own
those words.”

“Never mind,” Necie says. “Would yall care for some fudge?”

“Why, thank you, Mistress of Refreshment,” I say.

And we all bite into big chunks of chocolate pecan fudge.

“I hate those old alligators,” Caro says, then looks in the direction of the bayou.

“Uh,” Necie says. “Yall don’t think there are any alligators in this bayou, do you?”

“
Maman
put a
gris-gris
on all the alligators behind our house,” Teensy says. “We don’t have to worry.
Maman
is the one who gave us our name! She’s the one always saying, ‘Gumbo Ya-Ya, gumbo ya-ya!’ ”

“That’s us,” Necie says.

“
Exactement!
” Teensy says. “From here on out to the end of time, we will be known as The Ya-Yas! Nobody can take our name away!”

Then Teensy whips the empty oatmeal boxes out of her paper sack, and we all beat on them. And while we drum, we yell out to the night and the woods and the fire that we are now The Ya-Yas. Then Necie, the Mistress of Names, formally gives all of us our Ya-Ya Indian names that we have chosen ourselves. Mine is Queen Dancing Creek. Caro’s is Duchess Soaring Hawk, and Necie’s is Countess Singing Cloud. Each time Necie pronounces our new names, she sprinkles us with water from an old RC bottle with a hole punched in the top that she borrowed from her mama’s ironing board.

Teensy has been keeping her Indian name a secret from us for weeks. Finally when it’s her turn, she hands Necie an envelope, all secret-like. Necie opens the envelope, looking for Teensy’s name, and when she sees it, her eyes get big as Popeye’s and she starts blushing from head to foot. For a minute Necie doesn’t say a word. You can hear a whippoorwill calling from far away somewhere, and little crackling sounds from Caro’s fire.

Then Necie turns back to Teensy, who is grinning even bigger than ever. “I now name you Princess Naked-as-a-Jaybird.”

The Princess goes wild.

“Hot-cha-cha!” Teensy screams, and starts spinning around in circles. She rips off her nightgown and makes us take off ours too. Necie tries to chicken out, so Teensy and I have to take off her gown for her.

“This might be a mortal sin, yall,” she says.

“Yeah!” I tell her. “A Royal Ya-Ya Mortal Sin!”

“Everybody ready for ceremonial paint?” Teensy asks, with one of her bad looks.

“What?” we all say. This is not in the program, but the Ya-Ya tribe plays things by ear.

Teensy reaches into her sack and pulls out a bunch of Genevieve’s Max Factor of Hollywood tubes and pots of color, and pencils and lipsticks, and oh all kinds of lovely little items that Mother thinks are vulgar.

Teensy hands me a pot of red rouge. Caro gets a pot of brown color, Necie gets lipstick, and Teensy has the pencils. We take turns drawing on each other until we could pass for full-blooded Injuns. Red and brown streaks across our foreheads and black stars on our cheeks, and then Teensy has the idea of painting our stomachs and chests too. I draw a black line down the center of my body, and I rub lipstick all over one side and leave the other side regular skin color. Teensy draws lipstick in circles around her titties!

“Necie,” Teensy says, “take your hands away from your titties. We’ve all seen them before. They are nothing new.”

If that isn’t enough, old Teensy pulls out the necklaces and earrings that Mother made us take off the Negro Cuban Virgin.

“Ah!” I call out. “
The Secret Ya-Ya Jewels
, lost all these centuries, and only recently found by Princess Naked-as-a-Jaybird, world-famous lady archaeologist!”

We all scramble to put on the jewels, and pretty soon we are following Teensy, all slapping our thighs and running and whooping, “Hi-ho, Silver!”

Then we stop dancing to prick our thumbs with the sewing needle. The Mistress of Fire holds the needle under the flame of a match, and then we each take turns letting Caro draw a tiny bead of blood.

Raising our hands above our heads, we rub our thumbs together and recite our oath: “I am a member of the royal and true tribe of Ya-Yas. No one can come between us and no one can break away, because now we have the same blood. I do solemnly swear to be loyal to my sister Ya-Yas, and to love and look out for them, and never forsake them through thick and thin, until I take my last human breath—”