Chapter 12 12

12 I took the pipe to my room.I'm sure she wouldn't be looking for it in a drawer.As I tucked the pipe into my handbag, the relief I felt suddenly turned to anger.I started pacing back and forth.I felt an irresistible urge to shake my mother awake and ask her why I had been brought up to believe that the cause of all evil was my pipe.What I bear in my heart is a kind of silent self-blame, a heaviness that no one can see, just like the heaviness you experience in your dreams, you want to run, but you can't move.I've been carrying this weight in my bones, yet my mother just ignores it.She turned a blind eye.wait a minute.It's not entirely fair.Maybe my mother thought I didn't know about pipes.She tried to shield me from the truth—never talked about it, hid newspaper clippings—but that didn't exonerate her.cannot.She should at least have thought that Mike and I would find out.For God's sake, the whole island knows about pipes.How could she think we didn't know?I heard her breathing, an accordion-like rhythm echoing through the house.I don't want to see her wake up.I scribbled a note and put it on the kitchen table, telling her I needed to get some exercise and get some fresh air.

Hepjibba's house was less than a mile away, on a winding lane.The trail skirts a slave cemetery, passes an egret colony, and then curves to the beach.When I came to a bend in the path, I saw her house, surrounded by tuberose and sea japonica.I knocked on her iridescent blue front door, waiting for her to answer.She didn't come out to answer the door.I walked down the path to the back of the house.The screened porch door was unlocked, and I went in and tapped twice on the door to the kitchen, which was the same shiny indigo as the front door.The blue color is supposed to scare away the "booga witch" - a haunted ghost that is said to lug your spirit away at night.I don't believe that Hepu Jiba really believes in the "Witch Buga", but she loves the traditional customs of Gele.The blue door is supposed to keep the witches away, but Hepjiba has buried a row of conch shells in her garden just in case.At one end of the porch stood what she called an exhibition table, piled, as ever, with the odds and ends of the island treasures she had collected over half her life.I walked over to the table, suddenly filled with a powerful nostalgia.Mike and I spent a lot of time huddled around this table.On the table are pieces of coral, crab claws, animal sponges, left-handed snails, shark eyes, bamboo shoots and razor clams.Every humble shell, even the broken ones, is memorialized here.I picked up some notched sand urchins, a two-legged starfish.The feathers of egrets, herons, and ibis were inserted among these sea creatures, and some feathers stood erect, as if they had sprouted and grown there.In the center of the table, the long jaws of a crocodile rest on a wooden box.This is naturally Mike's favorite thing.My favorite is an ivory loggerhead turtle shell.In my imagination, I once swam in the vast sea with the shell of the loggerhead turtle, and I didn't come back until I swam to the bottom of the sea.I rummaged around on the table and found it buried under a pile of sea scallops.We were having a "girls picnic" on the beach the night Hepjibba found the tortoiseshell.At least that's what those events were called.Now, sitting down in an old rocking chair, with my arms around the loggerhead turtle shell, I once again feel a strong wave of nostalgia.I haven't thought about "Girls' Picnic" in a long, long time.Ever since I was a little girl. "Girls' Picnic" was started by Kate when she and her mother were brides and Bane was a toddler.Every year on the eve of May Day, they must meet on the beach of Bone Field.If it rained, they rescheduled the picnic to the first clear night after the rain, however, I remember one year when Kate got tired of waiting, so she put up a tarpaulin awning.After Hepjibba hooks up with Mom and Kate, she also comes to the Girls' Picnic.Then, as soon as I learned to walk, I followed.After the death of their father, they immediately stopped this activity.I still remember the feasts they prepared: Kate's crab cakes, Hep Jibba's savory John's beans, lots and lots of wine.Mother usually brought some raisin bread pudding and a bag of sesame pancakes, for the sesame seeds Kate ate so much during her pregnancy that Bain was named after them.Everyone has a May Day gift—usually bath bubbles and Revlon nail polish—only bright red.However, that's not why I love these gatherings.What I love about them is that on that night of every year, Mother, Kate, and Hepjibba morph into something completely different.After dinner, they built a big bonfire with driftwood on the beach, and Bane and I sat in the shadows on the sand and watched them dance.Hepujiba played her tambourine, and the sound of the tambourine was so ancient that, after listening to it for a while, you felt that the sound of the drum was drumming out of the earth and rolling over from the sea.Kate shakes an old tambourine, ①Benne (Benne) means "sesame" in English. ——Editor's note

The air was filled with the sound of silver bells.Sometimes, they danced faster and faster as if possessed, their bodies cast black shadows in the firelight.At their final-year picnic, the three of them walked into the sea fully clothed, each holding a piece of wool ripped from their mother's embroidered sweater.Bain and I put our toes on the water's edge and begged to go in with them, and Kate said, "No, it's our business. You stay behind." They walked into the sea until the freezing water hit their waists, at which point they tie the three yarns together.The waves rushed towards them, and they kept urging each other, screaming, hurry up. "I believed then, and I still believe, that it was a rite of friendship concocted on the spur of the moment when they were drunk and dancing. And, of course, the sweater that Mother happened to unthread. Kate tied them up Throwing the wool into the night air and into the waves, they laughed. It was a wild and seductive laugh, and it was innocent and playful, like children laughing. When they scurried back, Hepjibba found She got this loggerhead turtle shell. She stepped out of the water and nearly tripped over it. She stood there with the waves coming in and the foam around her feet, and Mother and Kate couldn't stop giggling. .” Than on the mouth! "Hepu Jiba said in Gele language, and everyone immediately quieted down." Look what the sea has brought us. "She said, picking up the tortoiseshell from the water. The ivory-colored tortoiseshell was smooth and round, dripping with water, and looked pure against the night sky. I believe they all thought it was a sign. They put it in the sea. Life was connected, and a loggerhead turtle shell miraculously washed up at their feet. For a long time after that—year after year—the shell was passed from one to the other. I I remember it sitting on the mantelpiece at our house for a while, and then it was on Kate's bookshelf, or on this table at Hep Jibba. It must have reminded them of those nights and the rope they tied on the wool Knot. Now, sitting in my rocking chair on the porch, running my thumbs over the porous tortoiseshell, I glance back at the blue door. Hepjiba is clearly not home. I get up and put the tortoiseshell Putting it back on the table, I felt for a moment that this table was not just a distant childhood memory, it seemed to be a part of my life. Since I was ten years old, I knew that I would leave the island. On the first day after my father passed away One Ash Wednesday, when the priest's hand touched my forehead, I felt myself rise like a phoenix from that tiny speck of ashes on my forehead. I'm going to get out of here, I said to myself. I'm going to Fly away. After college, I rarely come back, and when I do, it's with a kind of aloof arrogance. I didn't even get married here. The wedding was in the back garden of a family in Atlanta Held, and that person was just a casual acquaintance. I remembered that Kate once joked with me that I had forgotten about the mudflats back home, and she was right. I've been trying my best to forget this place. I never The thought was, standing on the porch at Hepjibba, with a sudden surge of love for Egret Island, and not just for Egret Island, but for my mother, the woman who danced around the campfire. One thing hit me: I never did what my mother did. Never danced on the beach. Never lit a bonfire. Never walked into the sea at night with other laughing Their lives are connected with theirs.