Here’s a story Gram used to tell me: Once upon a time there were two sisters who’d married two brothers and lived across the street from one another. Each morning they rose early to work in their gardens, and in the evenings, they sat out on their porches, put their feet up, and hollered across the road to each other. One day a man with a crooked cane came limping down the road. He walked slow, breathed heavy, and kept his head down to shade himself from the setting sun. The sisters were so caught up in their talk that they didn’t see him until he was nearly upon them. Had they known the man, they would have spoken, but neither had ever seen him before.

After, the one sister called across the road to the other and said: In all my life I ain’t never seen a man so black.

The other sister bucked her eyes and said: Black? The man I saw come down through here was white.

And when the one sister said this, the other cocked her head. She’d known her sister to tell a lie now and then but never one so bold.

You must think I’m some kind of fool.

I didn’t before, her sister replied, but I sure do now.

At this, the one sister huffed. She’d always suspected her sister thought she was smarter than her, and now she’d finally admitted it. She stood, turned her back in anger, and walked into her house. It was then that the man came back down the road walking the other way. The sister who’d stayed outside gasped. Where before she had seen white, now she saw black.

The man stopped, looked the woman over, and decided to himself that something about the way she stood there looking wide-eyed at him was sweet. He limped over to her fence post and rested his crooked cane against it.

The man tipped his hat and said: Now ain’t you something to see.

The woman smiled up at the man, for he was head and shoulders taller than her, and said: I might be.

Now here the story changes based on what kind of mood Gram is in when she tells it. Sometimes the man lies his way into the woman’s house, claims to be sorely in need of her facilities. The version I like best is the one where the woman just invites him in. But in the one I’m telling you, they don’t do nothing more than stand outside talking.

After, the man tipped his hat to her again and walked on, leaving her surprised at both her words and his. How could a man talk to a woman like that — a married woman, no less — make her feel all kinds of ways, and then just pick up and leave like it didn’t mean anything?

She was getting ready to cross the road and apologize to her sister when she saw the man’s crooked cane lying on the ground. She picked it up: the handle was still warm with his touch, and when she put it to her nose, it smelled like linseed oil and him. The man never came back for his cane, and the woman spent the rest of her life wide-nosed, lusting after his scent.

The moral of the story — according to Gram, at least — is that if you want to be happy, and stay happy, don’t touch a crooked cane, no matter how handsome or sweet-smelling the man who carries it. But I know to my soul that can’t be why the first teller, whoever she was, told it. Sometimes, I think the story’s asking the hearer to be happy with what they have and not let the road carry their mind further away than their feet can travel. Other times, I think it’s saying that you got to get what you want while you can. Mostly I just feel bad for that woman. I can’t imagine spending my whole life wanting and never doing anything about it.

Church was the only time I ever saw boys. Gram schooled me at home because the schoolteachers were dumb twice over: they didn’t know the Bible, and they didn’t know how to treat me. Gram took me to church to hear Reverend Powers preach the Word. Now I liked hearing the Word from Reverend Powers, ’cause every once in a while he slipped up on a sermon that sounded like it might could be halfway right, but mainly I went to see Momma. Momma was dead and buried in the graveyard behind the church, but everything around her grave was alive with her scent. Momma was most always purple, but the night she died, she was strawberry drifting into shamrock. Your true color comes back after you’re buried, though. Each grave gives off its own bright shade.

The Sunday I met Porter, he and everything he put his hands to blazed blue. Gram had got it into her head that my hair needed flat ironing, and so by the time we got to church, the only open pew was the one in front of him and Ms. Lorraine. I could see the hymnbook in his hands growing bright with the scent of him. I’d never smelled anything that blue.

As Junior Walker was leading the choir in “He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word” and everybody was on their feet feeling right thankful for the blood, I felt this tingling at the base of my neck. I knew without turning around that it was Porter playing at the ends of my hair, curling the locks around his fingers, slow, like he didn’t care if folks was watching. Then he pulled it. My head went back, and all I could feel was that cooling blue, like that time when Daddy had won some money uptown and drove me and Gram to Biloxi to spend the weekend at the beach. Porter pulled my hair, and it was just like I was out there splashing around in that cool water all over again.

When I came back to myself, the Communion tray had passed me by, and Gram was turned around in her seat hectoring for an apology. Gram was mean and sweet — somewhere between blood and berry — and depending on the day, her hue could be loving or hateful or both. Porter pulling my hair brought out the hateful. She said a mannish boy like that, a boy that was all hands, was no kind of company for a young lady to keep, and that I was too young to even be looking at boys anyhow.

I turned to look, and all I could see was Porter’s lips. They were the pink of budding sweet pea, and looking at them made you want to wait around for the bloom. Then they were telling Gram all about how Porter had no idea what she was on about, how nobody in their right mind would touch anybody kin to her with a ten-foot pole. And all while he spoke, I felt that cool blue feeling rising up in me.

Most times when we drove past Daddy’s house, Gram never said nothing. I remember when he still smelled green like dew grass in the sun. Back before Gram sat him down in her kitchen and told him he had to choose between liquor and living with her and me. Now Daddy stays in a house with a rotting-away porch, and when I’m out walking and he waves to me, all I smell is turned-stomach green.

But that Sunday, Gram asked: You know the one thing I don’t regret about having your Daddy?

Him buying you this car before he lost all his money?

No, Gram said. The only thing I don’t regret about having your Daddy is that your Daddy had you, and I don’t want you wasting what little time God gives you running up behind a damn-near man that don’t know no better than to pull your hair to get your attention.

I turned away from her and looked out the window at the trees we were passing now. Behind the trees there was a creek that ran into the river, and the thought of it brought me back around to that good clean feeling. What I didn’t say to her is that in the Bible, love is a doing kind of thing, and so I know that that good feeling Porter made in me with his hands was the Lord doing his work.

When we pulled into our driveway, she turned the engine off and said: Promise me you won’t go running behind that boy just ’cause he’s the first one to sniff after you.

I promise, I said, because I had decided already that I would wait for Porter to find me.

Before she passed, Ms. Maybelle had been on the mothers’ board of the church, smelled like how pennies look after they’ve been left to sit in water, and baked some of the nastiest lemon cakes anybody had ever tasted. Gram says that it was because she was getting up in years and sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between sugar, salt, and baking soda. But I knew it was because she was hateful, owing to the fact that at every repass, she’d eat a little sliver of everything but the cake she’d brought. I went to her homegoing service anyway to visit the graves.

That morning, I put on a nice blue dress — most folk wear black to funerals, but I like to have on something with a little bit of life to it — and fixed a basket of sweets: tea cakes for Momma, fry bread for Mr. Jean, biscuits for Ms. Lucille, who didn’t like sweets, and a slice of fresh apple cake for Mr. Franklin because, when he was living, apples was his most favorite thing. His grave was over by the older graves, next to the sycamore tree, and it was sweet yellow, like buttercup leaning into a summer breeze. It’s not just who you are that gives you your color but who you love too, so maybe Franklin died loving him a buttercup woman. Or maybe that scent was his own self hidden by life and coming home to him in death.

You don’t have to tell me that dead people can’t eat. I know that. But if I were to die, I would like for somebody to sit by my grave, bring me sweets, and remember that I was a body that wanted and needed. The first time I brought food, it was just for Momma. I put a tea cake right where her headstone meets the green, and as soon as I did, this furry-footed warm feeling tiptoed its way up my spine. I’d never known her to be that happy while she was living.

I tried to tell Gram about how the graves smelled and about that furry-footed feeling they gave me. She just hugged me close and said, I know, baby, I know. Because she thought I was talking nonsense and missing Momma. But I wasn’t missing Momma. She was her own purple self in the ground, right where I could find her when I needed her.

It was Franklin I was visiting when Porter finally found me.

What are you doing all the way back here? he asked. He was wearing a beautiful mud-brown suit.

Being friendly, I said, and he must have liked the way I said it, because he laughed.

You don’t seem too heartbroken about Ms. Maybelle passing.

I told him that I wasn’t. It was a beautiful day that the Lord had made.

The Lord make that dress too?

It was my turn to laugh. He liked my dress ’cause it was blue. People like seeing their own scent come back to them. Makes them feel complete. It also didn’t hurt that it hugged my figure so good it had made Gram sniff and say: The Lord is my shepherd.

Anything in that basket for me?

Only thing left is whiskey, I said. And that’s promised to Mr. Jean.

That so?

It is.

Up in the sycamore tree, a crow cawed and flapped his wings.

I don’t think he likes you, I said.

Do you like me?

Maybe.

You want to go for a ride with me sometime?

Yes, I said. I wanted to go for a ride with him more than anything.

Porter smiled, and it was the brightest smile I’d ever seen on anybody living.

Porter started visiting on Thursday evenings, when Gram was away working the line at World Color, dyeing magazines and pamphlets. After I let Porter in, I’d turn on the TV, and we’d sit on the couch and look at each other. After a few weeks, I had him start picking me up from the graveyard so that we could ride around with James. They bagged groceries together down at Laurent’s. Porter said James’s people had money, but James didn’t act like it. He was a loving kind of yellow, the type that let his eyes do most of his talking. I reckon there was just too much on his mind for his mouth to latch onto. When Porter had James with him, I knew we were going up around his land to pick berries and scare goats into fainting. Afterward, Porter would drop me off down the road from Gram’s, and I would walk home. But then one day he cut the engine and said: You must not like me all that much.

Why do you say that? I asked.

You don’t ever want to spend any real time with me, he said, looking out the side window. All you have for me is a few hours here and there. It’s enough to think you don’t want to be around me at all.

I want to be around you, I said. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he wouldn’t look at me. I wanted him to look at me.

It’s all right if you don’t like me, he said. I’ll understand. Lots of folks don’t want to be around me.

I do want to be around you, I told him. It’s just that Gram is home all the time, and it’s hard to leave.

What if your Gram was asleep?

I dreamed that the river was Porter. Not him himself but his scent. The color I smelled on him ran all the way to where the Hatchie meets the Mississippi. Porter was flowing from where I stood to as far as I could see. It was all I could do to keep myself from diving in.

That night, Porter drove me to the river’s edge, took the key out of the ignition, and looked over at me like he was sick with need. But before we went any further, I wanted to make sure that he was a good Christian, so I asked him if the water was enough. But that was a trick question, you see, and I told him so, ’cause the water wasn’t enough. If it was, then John the Baptist would have been enough, but you need the blood if you really want to be saved. That’s how you know God anointed women. Women bleed but don’t die to give life, just like how Jesus bled and didn’t die to give life.

Porter said that that sounded about right, but wasn’t I lonely all the way over there on the other side of the truck? Couldn’t I move in a little closer?

I asked him if he didn’t hear the things people said about me.

He said he did but that he wasn’t worried about what other people said, that most folks round here couldn’t tell their asses from their elbows.

I laughed and told him that just the other day Momma had said the exact same thing.

Porter asked me if Momma always talked back when I visited.

I told him that most often she did.

He said that that must be nice.

I laid my head down on his chest and said it was nice to speak to Momma from time to time but that I still missed her living self.

He stroked my hair and said he missed his momma too, even though she was still living. Ms. Lorraine liked to drink, and like Daddy, once she found her way into a bottle, she couldn’t never seem to climb out of it. Sometimes it’d be days before Porter heard tell of her.

I took his hand, raised it to my lips, and kissed it.

I told him that he wouldn’t ever have to worry about knowing where I was. I told him that I was ready to be his home if he’d let me.

Then those cooling blue hands of his were up my dress, and my whole body felt like it had been dipped in the water and made new.

Gram was wearing her pan-throwing face when she caught me climbing back into my window.

You been out with that boy, haven’t you?

I might have been, I said, swinging my other leg over. Every place on me his hands had touched still tingled.

Didn’t I tell you not to mess around with that boy? She asked like she couldn’t remember. Didn’t I say that?

Gram could be evil-mean when she wanted. I once saw her throw a frying pan at Derby. Derby was picking pecans out of our yard, like he does every autumn, and any other day she might have said bless his heart, invited him in, and sent him home to his Aunt Sally with a full stomach. But that day, I don’t rightly know why, she lit after him with a frying pan. She didn’t hit him, but it was a hot minute before he passed by our yard in anything short of an all-out sprint.

I sat down on the bed, crossed my arms, and waited on Gram to light into me. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat down and put her arms around me. I leaned into her sweetness.

He do something to you?

No.

Don’t lie to me, little girl.

He ain’t do nothing to me, I told Gram. What we did, we did to each other.

Tell me, Jesus, Gram said. Tell me what I done to deserve a granddaughter that sluts around so.

Gram.

Lord Jesus, Gram said. Please find it in your heart to forgive my granddaughter for defiling your temple.

Gram.

Don’t talk to me! Talk to him! Get down on your knees, and pray to Him for forgiveness.

I got down on my knees and bowed my head, but I didn’t pray for forgiveness. Instead, I prayed for more good clean feelings. If Jesus is love, and you love somebody and they love you, how can Jesus not love it when you make each other feel good?

After Gram left, I lay down in the bed and closed my eyes, but there was too much brightness in me to sleep. I’d never had a color all to myself before. Some days I didn’t smell like anything, and other days I was my own rainbow, but now all I could smell on me was blue. I knew then that Porter had marked me, and the next morning, when I went to the bathroom and saw that my blood had come, I knew that I had marked him too.

When sleep finally came for me, he brought with him a woman rising up from the river. She had on a yellow dress, and her hair came down past her elbows in long black waves. The dress was lace-trimmed, belled at the cuffs, and silky with the kind of shine that catches the moonlight in its folds and throws it back. She had to lift it up to walk, and when she did, I saw her blistered feet. She tried to say something, but every time she opened her mouth, water trickled out. The yellow of her dress reminded me of James. I sat down by the water and watched her mouth make shapes with no sound. She seemed real sweet.

Gram woke me the next morning by stirring up the most awful ruckus imaginable. By the time I dressed and made my way to the kitchen, Gram had set out biscuits, scrambled eggs, fatback, and sliced peaches with sweet cream. A peacemaking breakfast if I ever saw one.

I ever tell you how the Lord saw fit to bring me your father? she asked, sitting down to the table. I shook my head no, and when I did, she told me this:

Once upon a time Gram was married to a good man who went by the name Junior. He had been raised up in the church, taken in by a preacher after he lost his parents to the yellow fever. Now Junior had a brother by way of adoption named Louis, and sometimes when Louis looked at Gram, her cheeks grew hot and her heart fluttered. She couldn’t eat. And in bed, when Junior started kissing on her, she pretended he was Louis.

Then one night, in a dream, she felt herself rising up, and before she knew it, her dreaming self was high above her house and drifting, faster and faster, slowing only once she caught sight of Louis’s house. She sifted down through their roof and snuggled right up next to Louis and, in the morning, awoke to find that her waking hunger had, somehow, been sated in her sleep.

But her dream visits had the opposite effect on Louis. Each morning he rose up bedraggled. Couldn’t work. Couldn’t eat. And found himself dropping by his brother’s house just to catch sight of her.

One day Gram opened the door and found Louis on her doorstep. She told him his brother wasn’t home.

I know Junior’s out.

If you know he’s out, she said, then why did you come by?

You know, Louis said, taking a step closer. You know the reason I come by.

Go home, Gram said.

I will, Louis said, just as soon as you tell me why you smile at me the way you do. Don’t you know a smile like yours makes a man lie awake all night?

Don’t do this, Gram told him. It ain’t right.

I know it ain’t right, Louis said. I come over here today to apologize for trying to put it all on you. I know it ain’t on you. This here weight on my heart is from the Lord. He’s testing me same as he did David. I don’t think David would have suffered so if he’d admitted to the sin in his heart and asked Bathsheba to pray with him. Just pray with me one good time. That’s all I came here to ask after.

He grabbed hold of her hand and bowed his head, but he didn’t pray.

Quit it, she told him, once he started kissing her knuckles. But she didn’t move her hand. Instead, she floated up out of herself and was looking down at herself and Mr. Louis, laying her down on the davenport.

Love can be like that sometimes, Gram said. Sometimes it burns so bright in you that you can’t see your way around anything else. It don’t matter what’s right and what’s wrong. ’Course after I turned up pregnant with your daddy, Gram said, that love wasn’t nowhere to be seen.

I looked down at the flat of my belly. If he puts a baby in me and it’s a boy, I decided, I’ll call him Benny after Daddy. If it’s a girl, I’ll name her Cassandra, after me.

The teapot whistled. Gram stood and picked it up with her bare hands, forgetting that it was hot. She dropped it, and water sloshed out all over the floor, sending these little hot-pink sparks bouncing up every which way. I jumped up to help her, but when I reached my hand out, she pulled me down to kneel on the wet floor beside her.

I wonder sometimes, she said, where all that love he felt for me went. All I had for him is still here in me.

After breakfast, I went out to Gram’s garden to try and work out all the fullness, but no matter how hard I hoed and weeded, it wouldn’t leave me. I was looking for something else that might need doing when I seen James walking up the road with a handful of daisies to match his scent.

Those flowers for me? I called out.

Sort of, he said. They’re for your momma, for her grave.

I took them from him and laid them up beside the watering can. They were nice and loving and yellow. A little white ribbon held the stems together, and I thought it was just about the sweetest thing. Just then I seen the living-room blinds peep open, so I knew that Gram was listening in.

You want to walk me to the church to give them to her? I asked.

When we got there, Momma was in one of her moods. So I just laid the flowers right on down and kept walking to the big sycamore, where there was shade and folks were always happy to see me.

I asked James if he was willing to sit himself down in the grass, even though he had on them nice, pleated pants.

He said, I don’t mind the grass, and sat. It gives me this kind of feeling, like the grass is breathing. God didn’t just make everything, because you know, He is everything. And if He is everything, then you, me, are just part of him. Everything is. And when you think on it that way, it seems like blasphemy to not like anything the way it is.

It was the most words I’d ever heard him speak.

There’s a woman who comes to me sometimes, I said. She says she jumped in the river and swam all the way down to heaven. Aren’t you a pretty little thing, she says. Pretty little thing, she says, come go with me. Do you think she’s God too?

She would have to be, James said, looking at the sky.

She says it takes a good long while, but if you keep swimming, you get far enough down to reach the light, and when you do, the part of you that’s loved, the part that the world needs, stays here, but the part of you that’s you, the part of you that you need, that part passes through the light and restarts; it starts all over again.

James got real quiet then, and so I knew he had more on his mind than his mouth could put words to.

He sent you to break up with me for him, didn’t he?

Yeah, James said, turning to look at me. I’m real sorry.

That night, I awake to the river woman sitting at the edge of the bed, one leg bent, the other hanging off the side, letting her dress spill onto the carpet. I close my eyes, and we are back by the river. There is just enough light from the stars shining down to give it a glow all its own.

The river woman takes my hand and walks me down to where the water rises above my ankles. I can feel the mud between my toes. She cups some water in her hands and puts it to my mouth. I drink, and it tastes clean and sweet.

She’s cupped up another handful.

More, she says. Just drink a little bit more.

I do, and she starts to telling me her story:

Her father was the right hand of the chief and had him three wives. The first wife was the river woman’s natural mother, who had died while giving birth to the river woman, on the same day the third wife gave birth to another daughter. The third wife raised them both as her own. One day, the third wife took the sisters to the river.

This here dirt is your body, she said, kneeling and picking up a handful. She dipped her hand into the rush of the water. This here, she said, is your soul. And then she relaxed her fingers and let the water slide through them.

You see, she said, it’s not the water alone that makes the water the water. It’s the thing in the water that makes the water the water, and it’s not the dirt alone that makes the dirt the dirt. It’s the thing in the dirt that makes the dirt the dirt.

Then she took up more dirt, wetted it in river water, and rolled it into a ball of mud. She broke the mud in half and put one half in each sister’s hand.

The you is not in the one or the other. The you is in the two coming together to make one.

When the sisters grew up, they married the same man, not wanting to be separated. They even grew pregnant together, giving birth to girls.

After the river woman tells me this story, the woods and the river go black. I see instead thatched roofs blazing, and I know that now I’m seeing through her eyes. A man raises a bow and, laughing, shoots an arrow through the heart of a running man whose arms, legs, and head are all on fire. Water splashes my bare feet. An empty basket rolls in front of me. My sister runs toward a burning hut. But a woman in a crown of cowrie shells struts out of the hut holding our husband’s severed head. My sister screams, tackles her, beats her face in with balled fists, even as the woman’s long knife plunges in.

I run into the smoke and blaze of the hut, stumbling over what is left of our husband’s body. I find a woven basket and, within it, our newborn daughters. One has her eyes closed, as if in sleep, and the other can’t cry for coughing. My hands snatch them up. Outside, my sister’s body slumps on top of the dead cowrie woman, the knife still in her.

The river woman says in my ear: I sat our babies down in the water, where it was nice and cool.

She says: When I was sold upriver, I saw them swimming alongside the boat. They swam that whole crossing. They didn’t never once leave me.

I called Porter a couple times to see if we couldn’t come to some kind of understanding, but Ms. Lorraine said he wasn’t home. I called all that next week, but I was never able to catch hold of him. I knew he bagged groceries over at Laurent’s on Saturdays, so I waited outside for him.

James was out front sweeping when I got there. He said that Porter was busy doing something for Mr. Laurent and that he might be a minute.

I told James that I didn’t mind a little waiting.

James stopped sweeping. He looked at me with those knowing eyes of his.

He asked if he could ask me a question.

I told him that he already had but that he was welcome to another.

What makes you so sure about Porter? he asked.

I smiled. I knew that what he really wanted to ask was what did I see in Porter that I didn’t see in him. James was handsome in his own way. He was broad in the shoulders but narrowed as your eyes went down. He had a scar that started just above his left eyebrow and ended at the top of his cheek. I never did get the story from James about how he got that.

He’s your friend, I said. What makes you so sure about him?

A crow cawed, peering out of a nest in the belly of the a in the Laurent’s sign. That’s when Porter walked up.

He didn’t look surprised to see me. He just gestured over to where his truck was parked. When we got there, he opened the door and waved his hand for me to get in.

He didn’t speak, and neither did I. Porter stared straight ahead into the distance, like his ship was coming in just on the other side of the horizon. A few weeks ago, he would have looked at me like that.

I don’t want to see you anymore, he said. All I ever wanted from you was what you got between your legs, and now I’m tired of it.

He smelled as soft and warm as the rain. I thought about Gram, the wide-nosed woman from her favorite story, and the river woman who had to give up her babies, and knew to my soul that I wasn’t ever going to let what happened to them happen to me.

We’re having our first fight, I told him. It’s okay for you to be upset, but it’s not okay for you to try to hurt my feelings.

He tried to say something else, but I reached over, lifted his apron, unzipped his pants, and made him hush with my mouth. He acted like he didn’t want me to touch him, like it didn’t feel good to have my mouth on him. He bucked his knees and tried to get me off him. I could feel the blood gathering in my nose where his knee had caught me, but I kept at it anyway. I kept at it until his legs went still and he understood that me and him mingling together were Christ’s body remade. I kept at it until my mouth filled with blood and my whole body burned blue.