And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when
I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike
that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south. I had always avoided that bridge, for it was stained with the remembrance of the mother, uncles, and cousins gone Natchezway.
But knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how can move us from mountains to meadows,
from green woods to fields caked in snow, knowing now that memory can fold the land like cloth, and knowing, too, how i had pushed my memory of her into the "down there"
of my mind, how i forgot, but did not forgot, I know now that this story, this conduction, had to begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and the land of the lost.
And she was patting juba on the bridge, an earthen jar on her head, a great mist rising from the river below nipping at her bare heels, which pounded the cobblestones, causing her necklace of shells to shake.
The earthen jar did not move; it seemed almost a part of her, so that no matter her high knees, no matter her dips and bends, her splaying arms, the jar stayed fixed on her head like a crown.
YOU ARE READING
the water dancer
SpiritualYoung Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her-but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with...
