They bowed their heads and reached out for him, and as Memphis felt their hands blessing his head and shoulders, his mother’s fingers clasped in his, his fear turned to exultation. I did that, he thought in wonder. How did I do that?
Only Aunt Octavia was skeptical. “Why would the good Lord give that gift to a boy?” she’d asked his mother later, in the house on 145th Street. They were in the front parlor sitting beside the radio and snapping beans for the next day’s supper. It had been too hot to sleep well, and Memphis had gotten up for a cup of water. When he heard them talking, he hid in the darkened hallway, listening. “Sometimes a gift is really a curse in disguise, Viola. A test from the Good Lord. Might be the Devil himself in that boy.”
“Hush up, Octavia,” his mother had said. She rarely stood up to her older sister, and Memphis felt proud of her even as Octavia’s words sowed doubt under his skin. “My boy is something special. You’ll see.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, Vi,” Octavia had said after a pause, and then there was nothing but the sharp snip, snip, snip of string beans being broken into halves and dropped into a bowl.
News of Memphis’s powers quickly spread through the Harlem churches. When Pastor Brown balked at using Memphis’s gift during services at Mother AME Zion—“We’re not that sort of religion, Viola”—Memphis’s mother had taken him to the various Pentecostal and Spiritualist storefront churches, over Octavia’s objections: “Low-class holy rollers—and some of ’em talk to the dead, Vi. Nothing good’s gonna come of this, mark me.”
There, on the fourth Sunday of every month, for eight months running, Memphis stood beside the pulpit looking out at faces both hopeful and skeptical. While the choir sang “Wade in the Water,” and people prayed and sometimes shouted out to God, congregants would come forward with their ailments and Memphis would lay hands on them, feeling the warmth build under his palms, seeing into that other place in his mind, the place of vague faces in the mist. Miracle Memphis. And then, when it had mattered most, the miracle had failed him. No, not just failed—turned on him.
From time to time, he’d catch Octavia eyeing him from the doorway, wearing an expression somewhere between contempt and fear. “Doesn’t take much for the Devil to get inside, Memphis John. You remember that.”
Memphis usually thought his aunt’s obsessive thoughts about the Devil were crazy. But what if she was right? What if there was something terribly wrong, a shadow side to him that was biding its time, waiting? The thought was like his dream—unsettling and unreadable.
The trouble with Jo back at the club had left Memphis rattled, and so, his business taken care of for the evening, he hopped the double-decker Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus going uptown and got off around 155th Street. He walked several blocks north, then west toward the river, where the houses thinned out, until he came to a small African graveyard on a bluff, the final resting spot of freed slaves and black soldiers. There, in the peace and quiet of possible ancestors, Memphis liked to sit and write. Memphis found the lantern he kept secreted inside the knothole of a sheltering oak. He struck a match from the book he’d pocketed at the Yeah Man club. The flame inside the lantern gave off a comforting glow. Memphis perched on the cool ground and opened his notebook. In its way, writing was like healing: a cure for the loneliness he felt. Sometimes the cure took; other times, it didn’t. But he kept trying. He bent his head over his notebook, writing by lantern light, chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets. All around him, Harlem was alive with writers, musicians, poets, and thinkers. They were changing the world. Memphis wanted to be part of that change.
He was startled from his concentration by the cawing of a crow perched on a headstone nearby. Memphis’s mother had told him that birds were heralds. Warnings. It was silly, of course—nothing more than some leftover African superstition. Birds were just birds. He was reminded for just a moment of the crows in his dream, but the thought was fleeting. The hour was late and Memphis’s eyes burned with exhaustion. There would be no more words tonight. He blew out the lantern, bundled everything into his knapsack, and headed down the empty street with its lonely gas lamp. The moon sat full and gold above the ruin of the old house on the hill, the former Knowles mansion, now dwarfed by the rows of apartment buildings in the distance. No one had lived there in all the time Memphis had been going to the graveyard. The house gave Memphis the creeps, and he usually walked down the center of the street, far from it.
Cold light washed over the boarded-up windows and refuse-strewn lawn. It pooled on the marble limbs of a broken angel statue and made the dead trees seem alive. Memphis glanced quickly at the house and stopped. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement. Something about the house was different, though he couldn’t say what.
The bothersome crow flitted past, making Memphis jump, and he hurried on his way. Once back on the crowded streets of Harlem, Memphis shook his head and laughed softly at his skittishness. He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery. Blind Bill Johnson shuffled up the street, his cane testing the path ahead of him. Memphis didn’t feel like talking to the old man, so he dodged down a side street and raced on. It felt good to run in the warm September night. He had his notebook of poems, his books, and a pocket full of money. What was there to be worried about? It was time to stop worrying and get on with living. With his world slung on his back, Memphis walked the rest of the way back to Harlem. He passed the brownstones of Sugar Hill, peering from afar into the warm amber light of windows and lives he hoped would someday be his, and headed for home.
His brother, Isaiah, was asleep in the narrow bed by the window in the back room. Memphis took off his shoes, undressed, and slipped into his own bed as quietly as possible. Isaiah sat up and Memphis held his breath, hoping his brother would roll over and fall back to sleep. He hoped he hadn’t woken him.
Isaiah sat very still, staring into the dark. “I am the dragon. The beast of old,” he said.
Memphis raised himself onto his elbows. “Ice Man? You all right?”
Isaiah didn’t move. “I stand at the door and knock.”
A few seconds later, he fell back on the pillow, fast asleep. Memphis felt his brother’s forehead, but it was cool. Nightmare, he guessed. Memphis sure knew about those. He rolled onto his side and let his body go limp. His eyelids grew heavy and sleep overtook him.
In the dream, Memphis stood on a dusty road bordered by cornfields. Overhead, the clouds tangled into dark, angry clumps. In the distance sat a farmhouse, a red barn, and a gnarled tree stripped of leaves. A crow cawed from a mailbox on a wooden post. The crow flew to the fields and perched on the shoulder of a tall man in a funny hat. His skin was as gray as the sky, his eyes black and shining. The half moons of his nails were caked with dirt, and every finger wore a ring. “The time is now,” the man said, though Memphis did not see his lips move.
The dream shifted. Memphis stood in a long corridor. At the end was a metal door, and on the door was the symbol: the eye surrounded by the sun’s rays, a lightning bolt directly beneath it like a long zigzag of a tear. He heard the soft flutter of wings, and then he was lost in heavy fog, and his mother’s voice called to him: “Oh, my son, my son…”
Memphis was not aware of the tears damp on his own cheeks. He moaned softly in his sleep, rolled over, and was lost to a different dream, of pretty chorus girls waving fans of feathers who blew sweet kisses and promised him the world.
EVIE’S DREAM