Nymphadora of Spring City, 1929: an excerpt from the forthcoming novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman

My mother was a Star of the Morning. My father was a Saturnite. I was first an Infant Auxiliary Star, and then I was a Girl Star, then a Young Lady Star, and three years ago, right before Mumma and Pop drank a jigger of cyanide each, I became, in my own right, a full-blown Star of the Morning, Fifth House, Second Quadrant Division, North Eastern Lodge of the colored hamlet of Spring City in the town of Courtland County, Massachusetts.

After my parents committed suicide I declared, if only to myself, that I was no longer a Star of the Morning. But even now, three years on, I can’t stop wearing my pin. During the day while I’m teaching class, it’s hidden under my shirt collar, pinned right up close to the front of my throat. At night, after I’ve dressed my hair and put it in its cap, after I’ve rubbed my face first with cold cream and then a worn, oily piece of chamois, I do what Mumma showed me. I stand in front of the mirror, my skin all greasy and soft, and I take off the pin while staring at my reflection. A Star of the Morning is never allowed to look directly at her pin. My pin is a small brass knot filed down to look like a burst of light, with a rusty garnet in the middle. When I was an Infant Star, I would stand in the mirror beside Mumma, watching our reflections’ fingers at work unfastening our pins and I was filled with love. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. Mumma told me it was better than a diamond.

Stars of the Morning always take off their pins before they sleep, and always before their evening prayers, so as not to make a false idol out of it. Now when I take off my pin, I place it on my nightstand, and then, if I was to follow what Mumma taught me, I am supposed to reflect on my moral failings during the day and recite the Lord’s Prayer because Stars of the Morning are good Christian Negro women. But no one, if they could read my thoughts, would call me a Christian anymore, and besides, I don’t believe in prayer, so during this bit of the routine I try to just sit quiet on my bed. But after years of ritual, I can’t help myself.

The Grand Matron. From Leapfrog (a bit of the other) Grand Matron Army. Archival pigment print. 90 × 90 cm. ©2010 Ayana Jackson.

Image courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.

Even when I’m dumb, the blood in my ears pounds out the rhythm of “Our Father, who art in heaven.” To drown out these pious cadences, in my head I sometimes chant the obscene version I learned as a girl: “Our Father, who farts in heaven, whorish be his name.”

I am a thirty-six-year-old unmarried, orphaned Negro schoolteacher, in charge of a room full of impressionable young colored minds and every night, I sing a dirty nursery rhyme to help me go to sleep. It is enough to laugh, if I did not always feel like weeping.

The time for prayer over, ready for bed, the last thing I do before I lie down and blow out the light is to stand before the mirror again and pinch the pin between my fingers and very carefully stick it to the lace collar of my nightgown. I’ve slept with the pin for as long as I can remember. At the base of my neck, just below the collarbone, is a livid red line from its sharpest end drawing on me.

Dr. Gardner began coming to Spring City at the beginning of April. He just started showing up in the evenings. At first, he didn’t come near us. He hung around the shops...