Eden Read online

  Praise for Eden:

  “Daring [and] explosively supernatural … [Eden is] a startling reminder of how forceful Southern magic can be… . The message is simple, though profound: love and death destroy difference, devouring us all… . Vernon’s talent … is as green and growing as those country fields where her ghosts lurk.”

  —Ann Powers, The New York Times Book Review

  “Astonishing … These are the primal scenes, the bare elements of melodrama, the Morrisonian, Faulknerian, Southern Gothic family secrets, familiar in their very atrocity… . Vernon’s voice sometimes takes on an Orphic authority, rising from vigilant observation and the magical force of language to make the ordinary new… . With wild specificity, Vernon re-creates a universal existential moment: the quailing of the spirit in confrontation with ‘death, my death.’”

  —Anya Kamentz, The Village Voice

  “A profoundly raw and gripping read: Vernon’s is a new African-American and Southern voice with sustaining dramatic power that magnifies the human condition.”

  —Jean Thompson, The Baltimore Sun

  “Sensual and disturbing, Vernon’s debut novel has an intensity and lyricism… . Vernon writes with a scary, deep knowledge of a very primitive place… . The rural countryside of Pyke County, Mississippi, resembles a scorched paradise—an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world.”

  —Hal Jacobs, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “An important story, not to be categorized by race or gender or region. Its truths are universal… . Vernon relies on the highest philosophies of spirit to tell this story of the body, and she does so in a way that does not take it from the hands of the people of Pyke County, but shares it graciously with the hands of all… . Vernon’s prose is unapologetic; it rushes forward, soaring at times, grounded at others, unfettered by a strict genre of reality.”

  —Kate Cantrill, The Austin Chronicle

  “[Vernon is] a remarkable new voice… . Eden offers symbolism galore: a lizard-like scar from breast cancer, the fattening hog oblivious to its own fate, Chevrolet’s lost arm. But it’s not the symbolism that is the strength of this book, it’s the raw and fearless voice of Maddy whose candid observations turn the ordinary into the poetic.”

  —Greg Langley, The Baton Rouge Advocate

  “Vernon’s exquisite, original language is pure poetry. She is a fearless writer, as unafraid of the graphic sexual image as she is of the tender gesture. One grows to love these characters, to become haunted by their losses, their desires, their hopes… . [A] wild and unforgettable and utterly new, strong language for tough truths.”

  —Susan Larson, The New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “An empowering coming-of-age story based on acquiring the knowledge that all choices are going to cost you something … Vernon’s writing is sensual and tactile… . What she does best is delve behind the scenes of a racially charged environment. She shows how the real effects of racism take hold behind closed doors and how racial oppression is intimately linked to sexuality, power, and self-love. Vernon leads the reader into the most intimate places unflinchingly and without apology.”

  —Cara Hopkins, The Colorado Daily

  “Eden takes the reader through a strange and religious experience… . [It] deals heavily with how Maddy confronts mortality and learns to deal with the burdens of adulthood at an early age.”

  —John Saucier, The Daily Mississippi

  “Conjuring a world that is both intoxicating and cruel … Eden is an unforgettable novel impelled by the poetry and power of a voice that is complex, lyrical and utterly true.”

  —The Portland Skanner

  “Vernon’s use of symbolism is so well done that the reader must pause to consider it. Her characters are at once familiar and unique… . There is much wisdom in this novel.”

  —Brenda Morey, The Long Island Press

  “Powerful and raw … Vernon’s language is totally uninhibited… . At times Vernon writes as if she were reinventing the language… . She blends real with the surreal and merges the mythical and the supernatural as do García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Toni Morrison.”

  —Diana Anhalt, The Texas Observer

  “Olympia Vernon’s fiction is suffused with a profound poetry that is both uniquely placed and unforgettable. Her writing grows out of an insurgent magical-realist tradition, represented by Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, but also by Gabriel García Márquez. Her characters come fully clothed in an angry and articulate poetry that only the greatest sensibilities have so far managed. In Olympia’s world the archetypal Afro-Americans of her predecessors meet the unfolding mysteries of Latin America. I believe that this young writer is joining that august company with stunning authority. Her fiction raises the already high bar of American fiction to a new level. I feel privileged to witness the coming onstage of such a talent.”

  —Andrei Codrescu

  “Exemplary … Be prepared for a magical, enthralling, and lyrical foray through a forest of well-chosen, purposeful words… . Eden proves to be enlightening, engaging, and awesome in its economy, its utter beauty, its truth… . There is no question that Vernon is poised to share shelf space and a place in history with the blessed few classic literary greats.”

  —Tonya Marie Evans, QBR

  “An angry, viscerally felt debut tale … Vernon’s prose is colloquial and fleshed with figurative leaps, the brutality of her images alternately fascinating and repellant… . An eloquent, if bizarrely childlike, and unflinching coming-of-ager that bears mountains of grief, passion, and guilt.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Vernon’s writing is lyrical and emotionally powerful as she captures the tensions between the races and sexes in a small community of blacks eking out whatever living and dignity they can manage.”

  —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

  “Olympia Vernon writes of a rural, Southern town where women live so close to the land and so bold in their hearts that they share the pain, passion and, occasionally, the peace, of all the nature that surrounds them. This is a world alive with rainstorms, green lizards, magnolia trees and love, in all it’s seasons. Eden marks the debut of a singular young writer.”

  —Veronica Chambers, author of Mama’s Girl

  “With raw power and insight … Vernon’s idiosyncratic prose style … and Maddy’s stark, often surreal perception of the world … makes [Eden] stand out.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Eden is that rare first novel incorporating raw energy as well as compelling characters and lovely prose. With erotic and spiritual vitality this novel’s narrative unfurls.”

  —Darcey Steinke

  “As emotionally powerful as it is poetic, Vernon’s raw and fierce first novel possesses a beautiful, albeit brutal, lyricism and introduces a strong new Southern voice. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  EDEN

  OLYMPIA VERNON

  EDEN

  Copyright © 2003 by Olympia Vernon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Olympiar />
  Eden / Olympia Vernon.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4752-4

  1. African American teenage girls—Fiction. 2. African American families—

  Fiction. 3. African American women—Fiction. 4. Rural families—

  Fiction. 5. Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3622.E75 E34 2003

  813’.6—dc21 2002033863

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO GOD, THE ANGELS FOR ROUSING ME OUT OF MY SLEEP TO

  WRITE THIS NOVEL, AND THE CHILDREN OF INDEPENDENCE

  MIDDLE SCHOOL FOR SHARING THE HAPPINESS WITHIN THEM,

  DURING MOMENTS WHEN MY HEART WAS IN A GREAT FLOOD.

  DO YOU THINK YOU SHALL ENTER THE GARDEN OF

  BLISS WITHOUT SUCH TRIALS AS THOSE WHO HAVE

  PASSED BEFORE YOU?

  —THE KORAN

  EDEN

  chapter

  one

  One Sunday morning, during Bible study, I took a tube of Aunt Pip’s fire-engine-red lipstick and drew a naked lady over the first page of Genesis. Her chest was as flat as a man’s, her face blank and clear. The language was loose around me, as I remember the sound of Mama’s voice and the question that came along with it, the one that counted: “Don’t you know that blood and milk is the same?” She shook me between her words. “They can’t sit out long before the world get wind o’ ’em and the next thing you know they caught in the tubes and the devil come out and you end up titty sick; ’cause he be red, red like this here mess you done made.”

  The clouds were dark. I sensed that it would, indeed, rain because of the birthmark on Mama’s forehead. It was a long, winding, tornado-shaped birthmark below her widow’s peak. It was a red stirring of her soul. She always pulled it back before the storm to witness its color change in the mirror.

  “I keep at you, Maddy,” said Mama as she pulled a bucket of collard greens between her legs and took a small batch of them between her thick, round fingers. “Ain’t nothing going to waste now. It’s all a part of itself.”

  She worked the garden behind our house barefoot. I walked behind her sometimes to measure the weight of my bones in her footprints: the imperfect arch, the heel curved into the marrow of an athlete’s laughter—where the side of his face is flat at the jawbone like an old habit, wide, invisible. Every now and then, she’d laugh and hold her chest and tell me that my hips were as clear as Jesus’.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Grandma passed away years earlier. Sometimes a gust of wind drifted through the screen door and I could smell her wrinkled, pale body when she had taken off her panties to draw a bath. And the green lizard in her hands that she’d kept in a mason jar for hours at a time because it was the closest thing to the earth and the people in it.

  The house was warm. I once heard that whatever god a person believed in, that god would look just like him. But something was wrong with the gods in my house. None of them looked like me. They were blue-eyed and dirty-blond. Upright, narrow-jawed. Those same gods I saw during communion where there was no wine or cracker if I didn’t first praise Him and believe that He gave me life. I did until I went to take Miss Hattie Mae, the neighbor, a bowl of sugar for her potato pone. There I saw, for the first time, a black God.

  Miss Hattie Mae, a widow who never let anyone inside her house, walked forward with the bones in her hands covered by a thin layer of ointment. “It’s the arthritis,” she said. “Put the sugar on the kitchen table.” I saw Him there behind her, His arms on the cross, His orange eyes. Miss Hattie Mae was a thin, cautious woman with the scent of bananas trailing a pattern throughout her house. “Go on,” she said as the fumes of the ointment made my eyes watery. “Go.”

  Mama wiped the sweat from her forehead with a table napkin. It was white with blue horizontal lines going through it. She walked over to the kitchen sink and paused. All that flesh to haul around weighed down on her. She hated being a big woman, being out of breath all the time with that loose fat draining all of her energy. “Reckon your Daddy be home soon?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “He’s been out since Thursday.”

  Now it was Saturday. He had gone to Morgan City, Louisiana, to slaughter a hog that he’d fattened. Everyone in town knew that it didn’t take three days to kill no hog. He lied. He told Mama that it took so long because he and the boys had to bless the meat.

  “I’m wishing we had the killing,” said Mama. “It’ll go right nice with these here collards.”

  She had traded her life for him. I had seen her in pictures at sixteen before the fatness of her body swallowed her. One arm wrapped around Daddy’s throat from behind, the laughter on her face as light and delicate as lint on a child’s clothes. Because her belly was flat then and there were no babies to swell her. Because she loved him the way he was and had taught him the vocabulary of the liquor labels, the clear from the dark. She had fallen in love with an illiterate man, her fingers now mocking the shapes of caterpillars from hard work, a maid’s work. Because she knew that there would be times when she’d drop him off at Mr. Sandifer’s, his boss at the scrap yard, and his feet would never touch the ground.

  “I smell Grandma,” I said.

  Again she paused, looking out at the empty hog pen, remembering the night that Grandma chopped off Daddy’s arm with the ax because he smelled like thievery. Thievery to Grandma was anything less than Mama and nothing greater. The blood stayed in the house for three days. She made him step over it every morning on his way to work. It seemed like forever before the smell of blood and maggots cleared the air.

  “I smell her too,” she said.

  There fell a moment of silence between us.

  Mama looked at her hands and moaned. She was made of a glass vase. Her throat was sharp and fragile, her lips clear, smooth. She picked up a porcelain paragraph filled with the words of Jesus. Grandma always said that an object in a woman’s hands was the way she chose to lose a headache. She said this, that women who did not use their words caught a headache of the mind and spirit. If a woman was too weak to use her voice, her vocabulary got trapped in her temples and formed a blood clot. And with this came the disaster of silence.

  She was thinking of Aunt Pip now, the evening the church folk came by for a cold drink of lemonade and a helping of potato pone, the moment she noticed that Daddy and Aunt Pip were missing and found an empty bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table. She was a woman with a need for moving things in her life. My father was her balance. He was her baptism. Before long, she was turning away from the voices, the gravity of gossip in the front yard, only to find Daddy’s fingers going up the hole in Aunt Pip’s vagina. She said nothing. She knew the difference between a man wanting her and needing her. What could she have done? She was a maid for damn near every white man in Pyke County. And men loved Aunt Pip. She knew how to walk with her shoulders up. She was a thin woman, useful. Mama thought of many things: the time she caught Daddy at the pool hall with that Jefferson girl, when she broke his collarbone in two places and no doctor would fix it because of his reputation, Jesus. She did nothing. Just stood there in the backyard for hours holding the tube of fire-engine-red lipstick that Aunt Pip had left behind, crying silently.

  Eventually, she spoke. Daddy had been at a cockfight all evening. And for some reason, he forgot that Mama was a woman who didn’t forget things. He thought her words would stay pinned up in her head. But I knew that she didn’t forget things: iron the sheets, stretch the towels out on the line, stop by the post office, remember the numbers. Lord, have mercy. Don’t ever forget the numbers. Never get a white man’s mail mixed up with a Negro’s. No man’s numbers were ever the same. His numbers were his life. And do those white man’s favors and remember to use that weariness against your sister. Remember to curse her out for sleeping with your husband. And don’t ever listen. Curse until your lungs close in on yo
u and shut you down.

  I could still hear the words, the cursing Mama put on Aunt Pip. She didn’t know words like that. Not Mama. She was a quiet woman, useful to the world. She didn’t curse. I told myself a lot of things. A lot of wrong, but rational things to keep from killing them like the dead bird that I’d found in the road: the eyes covered by a white film, the dark pupil underneath, circular. On that particular day, the day Mama chose to use her voice, I brought the dead bird home and threw it against my bedroom mirror until the eyes closed and it knew nothing else of the world. It did not stop the sound of the voices; my grandma held her chest and stretched her arms out to Mama and Aunt Pip, ordering them to stop hollering inside her house. The sound of the screen door slamming and the flies buzzed over a piece of sliced watermelon on the front porch. Grandma clenched her blouse and mumbled, “Y’all gone kill me.” A couple of days later, Aunt Pip sent me in the house to get Grandma. But I told her that she was too sick to get up. In her place, she had given me a green garden lizard to put inside Aunt Pip’s hands, saying: “This is my home. I left my heart here.”

  Yeah, it was a man who had separated Mama and Aunt Pip. Daddy had met them both at the pool hall. He was a young, well-built man with an odor on him. I’d heard men from Morgan City ask him about his fingers, if the smell of pussy was still on them. They said that he’d push his fingers so far up a woman’s stomach that he pulled the cord out. And when she went to pee, blood came from her. He had used his fingers to embarrass. This gave him power.

  “The rain’ll be here the reckon,” said Mama. “Get the clothes off the line.”

  The spring air floated upward. My fingers were wrinkled from the bucket of water, the collard greens. I missed the hog. I liked having something active around. The night before Daddy took the hog to Morgan City, I walked over to the gate and opened it. The hog licked her fur in the corner of the pen. She was afraid of me that night. Something kept her there. I opened the gate to free her. She didn’t move. “The men will kill you,” I said. “They will eat you and take your fur.” I hadn’t used my fingers enough to touch her. I was human. She didn’t trust human hands. Humans killed. They killed and ate what they killed. She felt that as I stared into her eyes and found myself there dying to find the part of me that belonged, that wasn’t green and afraid. I saw love in her eyes. She knew how to love. A hog who ate and loved what loved her. I slowly walked backward to find her so afraid of freedom that when the gate was completely open, she found herself cradled inside the sharpest corner of the pen, licking her private parts.