Description: Chapter One Moon Day A butterfly the color of my name did tell me that a Big Spin was coming our way. I was standing by Mr. Grant's wisteria, which hung over his fence and down into our yard, when Ruby Butterfly, this jeweled metamorphosis of a cattypillar, landed on a bright green wisteria leaf like some kind of winged oracle and looked straight at me; we exchanged glances, you know, the way liked-minded and soul-bodied creatures can. We understood each other down deep to our transfigured and transforming cellular parts, and I knew the Big Oaks had told Ruby Butterfly and now she was letting me in on the not-so- secret secret: a storm was coming. Her message was akin to "Run fer ya lives!" in Big Oak and Ruby Butterfly speak. Or, "Stay and watch if you the stomach fer it." I thanked Ruby Butterfly, who had flown back to the blue, for letting me know, and I watched Samuel Beckett Sparrow hop down from the aboves to my feet. He pecked at the dirt, and I wonders how I could warn the others. No times like this one right now. I went back into the house and to the kitchen, where Mammaloose was cooking red beans and rice. Uncle Gilbert sat at the table reading the papers and stirring his coffee-round and round his spoon went, creating its own little Big Spin. "Where you been?" Mammaloose asked. "Never seen anyone who took so long gettin' from one place to 'nother like you." "I stopped at the library with Jacob," I told her. "We have a report due on hurricanes." This was near to the truth. "Set the table," Mammaloose told me. She seemed in one of her good-time moods, so I needed to make my words full of care. Mammaloose never hears my words as glad tidings. She says I is constantly putting a target on myself by using my Ruby words. When I was small Mammaloose could not tolerate my Ruby words at all. Sometimes she whipped me with a leather belt she said my daddy used to hit me with before he died in the car crash with my momma. I knew her words were not part of the true imaginings. My daddy would never have harmed a hair on my head, arms, or legs, and not any other part of my being. Not with purpose. Not like Mammaloose used to do. She doesn't touch me with hurt anymore these years. JayEl-that's what I call Jacob-says it's because I'm bigger than she is now. Maybe she is afraid of you, he says. No matters. I pulled plates out from the cupboard and put them on the wooden table. Uncle Gilbert gave me cheerful glances as I set the plate near him. Fork. Knife. Glass. I poured beer in the glasses of Mammaloose and Uncle Gilbert. "I think a big hurricane is coming our way," I said, likes I was talking about the weather-which I suppose I was. "I never heard nothing," Mammaloose said. "Wouldn't matter though. We been through so many storms, so many floods. This house danced with Betsy and came away just fine. And everything since." Mammaloose says any part of her house stand up to any part of anything else. Except maybe the roof. She be after Uncle Gilbert to fix it since before the last storm ate a piece of it for lunch. She loves this house so much, she says, she chose a man who would fit the house; he had to be small enough for the low ceilings. So, she says, she looks around until she came up short with Uncle Gilbert. He cringe when she puts those kinds of words on him. And then he has another beer. He know how to hide. Same as me. We all have the urges to survive. And I has swamp learning. Knows how to survive and thrive even in the difficulties. Even in the Mammaloose difficulties. "I ain't worried about no hurricane," Mammaloose said. Mammaloose and I sat at the table with Uncle Gilbert, who is no uncle to me, and we ate rice, beans, and cornbread, just like we did every Monday. Silence between us. The house sighed, the way houses do when they grow weary of the quiets. Mammaloose stared at her food while she ate. She did not notice me thanking the food for giving up its life for me. After living almost my whole life with Mammaloose, I had learned to say my talks with food and other things in the silence so only the intended of my words could hear. I have some memories of my before-Mammaloose life, but she says I have lived with her from the minute my parents died when I was five, and before that I lived next door in a little shotgun house. I don't remember living in that house. I do has images in my mind of the swamp and my sisters, Opal and Pearl. I can hear my daddy's voice, see the white alley gator Daddy called his good luck-though I don't see how much good luck that white alley gator could have brought if my daddy got killed in a car crash. I has memories of waking up during a fais do-do and someone shushing me back to sleep while the partty went on and on in the other room. I has more images of watching someone make jambalaya-seeing hands chopping vegetables. Hearing singsongsssss. Mammaloose says, "That's just Ruby's imagine. She don't know nuthin' about nuthin', especially no swamp. Too many stories from her daddy, that's all." I do sometimes have wonderings why Mammaloose never talks about my mother-her daughter. She has no photographs of my momma or daddy. Does she have reasoning for this? When I was small I asked. I ask no more. If I want conversing, I talks with the Flying or Rooted People, or with JayEl. Jacob Lazarus. He has a love for words like I does. Make every sentence a singsong. A fais do-do. He understands words have their purposes. They be magic. Conversing is not supposed to be like the white noise music I hears in elevators or at the big box stores. No. Conversing is a hearing, feeling adventure in conjuring, loving, and connecting. JayEl feels the same. If JayEl not around, I might goes to the Place Where My Vegetables Grow, which is in the back of Mammaloose''s house. Or maybe I go to the Crossroads. The first time Uncle Gilbert took me to the Crossroads, I was just a child. The lady behind the counter gave me a frozen cup. The first taste did tell me it was made of more than ice and syrup. "Cher, you like my sno-ball?" the lady asked. I nodded. "It's magic. You never be da same, cher. Laissez les bons temps rouler." She winked. A galaxy did reveal itself to me in her winking eye. A man be there, too. He shake hands with Uncle Gilbert, who called him Callaway Lanier. They talks about price of something while I looked at the stars in the lady's eye. She smile at me sweetlike. I didn't go back to the Crossroads till I was about twelve. Went solitaire. Wandered inside and saw the Lady with the Galaxy in Her Eye. She handed me a frozen cup, like before, like this had been a kind of habit thing between us forever, a ceremony. I took it. "What you need?" she asked me. "A garden," I says to her. I had tried growing a garden, but nothing come up. "The whole world can be a garden, dawlin'," she said. "You trying to set down roots? Lessee what I can do." I followed her to the back of the store, where she did have candles lit and a kind of shrine with flowers and such around the Mary and some of da Saints that I had no recollecting of since Mammaloose made with certainty I never been near a Catlick church. That be Daddy's religion, not Momma's, not Mammaloose's. Mammaloose used to be going to the church of John the Baptist, but no more. I did have glad feels coming to the back room of the Crossroads with the Lady. A wave of heat touched my skin, as though a hand ran across my cheeks and forehead, like someone blind was figuring out who I was. Alongside those candles and pictures were bottles filled with plants. Maybe other things too. I had not much looking time. The Lady was holding out a few plastic bags. She began dropping seeds into those bags. "These seeds are beginnings, cher," she said. "They be blessed. You remember that." As we left the back room, I turns around to say my farewell to the whoever's residing there. "You touched, cher?" the Lady asked. "I have the feels of home back there," I said. She nodded. "You is home, dawlin'. The whole world is your home." At the Lady's counter was Mr. Lagniappe, like before. I calls him Mr. Lagniappe now 'cause he brought a little extra into my living, but then he was just Mr. Lanier. "You planting a garden?" he asked back then. "That a fine thing. I bring you some manure from the zoo, if you like. That help them seeds." He made the glancing eyes at the Lady and I sees then the love going out from him to her. She pay no mind to his glances-or else she had no knowing of their meaning. The Lady nodded. "He can do right by your garden, cher. Even the Earth needs good eats." The next day, Mr. Lagniappe brought zoo manure to the garden when Mammaloose was at work. And he did so the next year and the next. I never had trouble growing nothing after that. Mammaloose has never had a meeting with the Lady or Mr. Lagniappe, so she has a belief that they from my imagine. I don't mind. That way the Crossroads is my place. I goes there and eat a frozen cup and every once or twice in a while, I let the Lady make me a po''boy. And she let me go in the back with the candles and such. I always feel that precious hand on my face. And the flames always dance a bit of a hello. Mammaloose would have none of this coming my way if she knew about it. Even though I be nearly eighteen

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