INAUGURAL DÉLANA R.A. DAMERON FICTION PRIZE WINNER

Long before I know to make those little pillow sachets to summon back dreams, to harvest the burdock to keep sugar down, to mix the clay for Miss Arnolda’s arthritic knee, to make a balm of devil’s nettle for wounds. Long before all that—but around the time that I learn to send for rain—I watch my mama stay in bed nearly all day for three days. And on the third one, I hover in the doorway of her childhood bedroom and look at the heavy quilt over her shoulders. The one with the tiny yellow flowers the color of butter, the one Big Dove made when Grandma Hettie was just a little girl. It gently quivers up and down with Mama’s breath.

I shuffle my feet to the right side of the bed, wedging myself between the little side table and the bed frame. I study her face. I can tell that she is awake even though her eyes are clasped so tight that her swollen eyelids wrinkle. I whisper, Mama. Again: Mama. I whisper, Mama. I wanna be a witch. I say, No, no, I’m gonna be a witch. I tell her that I would cast a spell on Daddy, and he’d just disappear. Disappear forever and ever, he would. I promise.

My mama, never opening her eyes, she tells me: Hush up, girl. My mama, she says with her voice breaking: Don’t talk about your father that way. Turning over on her back, she tells me that he still my daddy. Even though I been watching her sob days because of him now, and she ain’t calm yet. Even though, I know that nasty cut must still sting beneath the gauze.

I decide I better not tell her about all of the potions I make when the sun is out. I better not tell her about any of the potions that I leave in mason jars tucked behind the weedy edges of our backyard. I look around the room, looking for something else to say to talk to her about: the curio cabinet in the corner with the ceramic dolls that no one lets me play with, the robin-egg-colored curtains on the same wall, the little green rug in front of the closet. I can’t find anything to say, and my throat just feels mossy.

I finally return my gaze to her face, searching for the little mole on her left cheek. But I can’t find that either—not with her face bandaged up like that. So I shuffle back out of her room, leave my mama sobbing in the bed, and go to Grandma Hettie’s den. I sit down on the copper-colored linoleum tiles near the wide glass doors, where my grandma’s houseplant lives. I trace my fingertips across the navy-blue rim of the pot. Then I start humming the song that flew to me three mornings ago.

Maybe some ten odd minutes of humming pass when Grandma Hettie rounds the corner on her way back from the front yard garden. She patters to the kitchen to clean the okra. As she walks past, she glances at me, and I quiet my humming. Then, just a few feet from the kitchen’s doorway, she stops in her tracks and turns around to look at me real good. I don’t meet her gaze. From my periphery, though, I can tell that she’s sitting into her right hip with her head cocked to the side. I can tell that she can tell that I’m trying not to cry.

And she says (and I want you to know that she says this real casual. Real casual as though she was just telling me that, when she was outside picking the okra, it smelled like rain again. That a storm is probably already brewing and gonna get here this evening or next), she says: You know, baby girl, I’ve been watching you go around this house with your lip all poked out. But, you can’t save nobody in this life, girl. Not even your mama.

Before I can still the lump fluttering in my throat, before I can chirp out a sheepish Yes’m or But… Grandma Hettie flat-footedly resumes her patter back to the kitchen. Only the trail of her honeysuckle perfume stays with me.

And I’m left trying to put my lip back up and to swallow what she said down the first of many times.

II.

On the second day of us at Grandma Hettie’s house, I float alone and ghostly around the house in the twilight, careful not to stir Grandma or Mama. I land in the den again and crane my neck up at all the pictures on the family wall. I scan, scan, scan the frames. I want to find the one where my mama is with me, even though she didn’t know, at the time, I was with her.

I’ve seen the photo plenty, heard the story behind it even more plenty. I look at her long legs stretching toward the finish line at the last meet of high school, before her college scholarship, before it ended up being the last meet ever. Other times, when I am not alone with this wood-paneled wall, when Mama and I look at the pictures together, she points to that same photo of her running, her chest and chin to the glorious peachy sky. And she says, I barely won that one. Barely, barely—

’Cause I slow you down, Mama? I ask, repeating something I overheard from Grandma Hettie once.

And then there’s a pause like what I said isn’t wrong but isn’t quite right either.

Until she breathes out, Oh, baby. Her lips touch the top of my head, and she says, I just didn’t know what I was carrying. That’s all, my little Hummingbird. That’s all.

III.

It begins like this: On the first day, I sit in the corner and hum to my houseplant a song. Not the houseplant in my Grandma Hettie’s den because this doesn’t begin in her house, and she got a prayer plant. It begins in my mama and daddy’s house, where there’s a wilting rubber plant. It’s my favorite song, and I just made it up that morning. It came to me right after my mama takes my jeans out of the washer and sees that I forgot to take out of my pockets the two Lip Smackers that I had just gotten for my birthday. I loved the lip balms so much and only wanted to carry all of them everywhere, you see? But my love does not stop the balm from washing away because love don’t stop anything from washing away, and now I am only left with empty tubes. I cry and cry over the lost balm, the empty tubes. My mama shakes and shakes her head, tsks and tsks. She says that this is why we can’t have nice things.

When she says things like this to me, my sternum and ribs feel so hollowed, so fragile. My mouth feels stuffed with lichen. I don’t want us to not have nice things. I’m sorry, I say with a warble.

- What I tell you about sorry?

- Sorry don’t make things right.

And with that, she drops the empty tubes into my cupped hands, and I carry them with me to the backyard. Before I bury the tubes, I pass each of them beneath my nose to see if there is any sweetness still tucked inside of them to smell. And I think about our old sunken couch that I do like sinking into but is hard for grown-ups to get out of once they sit down. And our toilet that leaks sometimes. And our rickety dinner table. I mourn how I am to blame and begin digging a little hole by the black walnut tree in the backyard. As I pat the dirt back over the tubes in the flowerbed, I hum a song that just flies into my throat. Once I stop crying, I realize how pretty it sounds and hum it all day.

IV.

What I’m trying to say is this: on the second day at Grandma Hettie’s, she takes me on her dusk-time stroll after dinner, trying to beat the shower that’s arriving shortly. It’s only misting when we pass by Ms. Geraldine and her sister Ms. Arnolda, sitting on their porch sipping on sweating jars of sweet tea. We stop on their steps so that Ms. Geraldine can say:

-Oooo wee! Look at this doll baby right here. She looks just like—I mean just like—you know who you look like, little Bird?

On any other stroll with my grandma, I love this game. Any other stroll, I grin gummy and sing back to Ms. Geraldine, Big Doooove. And right after I coo my great-grandmother’s name, I bounce my head and sway my shoulders from side to side, showing off the plumage of pink, blue, purple, and white barrettes my mama put on the ends of my twists.

Just like Big Dove, mmhmmm, Ms. Arnolda affirms. And then the sisters weave a chorus back and forth about Big Dove who would wear her necklaces and fingernails long, and oh Big Dove who painted her long fingernails and her full lips so, so red. Big Dove, who was so very pretty. Big Dove who wore red lips even to church sometimes—yes, honey, even to church. Before ending with: And you got eyes just like hers.

But because this stroll is not just any other stroll. Because, before this dusk-time stroll, I still had to watch my mama cry. And because I only got to eat supper with Grandma Hettie because my mama still don’t have an appetite. And because at that supper, I had just finished a drawing of roses to make my mama feel better when I spilled my juice all over the flowers while reaching for another roll to put in my mouth. And because I wanted to cry—but I didn’t because Grandma Hettie said there was no use in crying when you could be cleaning—as my drawing bled out into a murk of reds and pinks.

Because of all of this, my heart feels like it’s beating 1200 beats a minute. My heart wants to come up through my throat, but it can’t because my mouth is lichen again, my throat moss. So when Ms. Geraldine asks me who I look like, I don’t have nothing to say. I just stand there with my face looking torpid and my fist nesting a salvaged piece of the wet, ruined drawing.

- Don’t just stand there looking po-mouthed, Grandma Hettie says, looking exasperated.

And when her exasperation can’t soften the lichen in my mouth or peel the moss from my throat, she gives my behind a swat: You speak when grown folks are talking to you!

So I wail, Biiiig Doooove! I call her name like I’m calling her to show up in a hurry. And, with the mist now become drizzle, we turn around, and I wail and I wail all the way back to Grandma Hettie’s house.

IV.

And on the first day, when I’m still at my house humming to the rubber plant, I hear my mama and daddy screaming in their bedroom in the back. I try to pay it no nary mind like my ol’ Grandma Hettie would say but I do jump and jitter and hold my breath a little bit from time to time. But then I keep humming. I keep humming until I feel my father’s steps rumble the ground.

I know the rumble means they are going to stop yelling in their bedroom. They’re gonna come and start yelling in the front room, where I am. And sure enough, holding that straight razor to his neck like he’s apt to do at least once a month, he arrives in the front room.

-You really don’t love me, Lynette? You really don’t love me?

-Of course, I love you, Michael! Why you always gotta do this? Please, please put it down! Why you always gotta act up in front of her? Don’t do this in front of our child—

How does it start? Maybe something like—I don’t know—my daddy remembers while he’s shaving that he didn’t like the way my mama first said his name in the morning when she still got sleep crusted in her throat and eyes? He’s real sensitive like that—like his father. Or at least, that’s what his mama, Gran Nancy, says.

On good mornings, when he’s not like this, I like to watch him shave in the mirror. I like to watch his skin glisten after he gently slices away and rinses the clouds of shaving cream from his face. And I like the way his aftershave in the emerald green bottle smells—which he tells me smells like eucalyptus—even if it does wrinkle my nose. On good mornings, he catches me in the mirror watching him and mouthing the syllables: you-cah-lip-tuss. He smiles at me through the mirror and blows me a kiss. I get to my tippy toes and stretch my hands up to catch the kiss before letting him finish getting ready.

But when I am 4 and the morning is not good, I get up from my plant and find wherever he has stomped to and tell my daddy to stop. Don’t do that don’t do that. Cling to his knees and tell him that I love him. I love you I love you I love you. I love you. I love you. I jump at his waist with my arms outstretched. Gimme a pick-me-up. Gimme a pick-me-up.

But now at almost 7, I am tired. Oh yes, I’m already tired. I know you know that children get weary, too. It takes a lot trying to distract people from their pain. Takes a lot trying to save somebody only to realize sometime later you can’t save nobody. So I keep on humming, heavy-shouldered and all.

Also, now that I am almost 7, I know he is not going to do it. Even though I kinda wish he would. In fact, I think very consciously: I wish you would. Just go ahead and do it. Go ahead. And soon as I think this thought, the atmosphere changes. Feels like the beginning of the world when the gods’ breath grew labored and sharp right before their lungs just—collapsed. ’Cause my mama finally yells over my daddy: Just do it! Just do it! If you really don’t think I love you, just do it! I don’t give a damn. I’m so tired of your shit!

My daddy drops his arm. They just stare at each other. Real curious. Real raw. Looking at each other in a way that I’ve never seen before. My daddy takes a huge gulp of this transformed atmosphere. Releases a scream that still makes curds of me. Starts charging at my mama. My mama runs away. Runs around. Picks up lamps. Picks up bowls. Picks up cushions. Throws them behind her. Trying to get him to trip or at least slow down. I watch for a few moments. By a few moments, I mean minutes. Or maybe more than a few minutes because this is new. Maybe it’s thirty minutes or an hour. What I’m trying to say though is that I don’t watch the whole time because I feel the tears swelling in my eyes. I tell myself, No, no, no. You’ve got to hum. So, I turn again to the rubber plant. I scoot my back against the wall, brace myself against the salt. The sting. Close my eyes. I hum.

VI.

I am about to complete the fourth encore of my song when my mama comes running past me again. This time, though, she grabs me up by the wrist, hefts me in her arms. She starts running towards the front door, swipes up the car keys from the rickety dining table, puts them in her blouse, somehow avoids all the glass.

She probably would make it out the door if she didn’t have me in her arms. I am small for my age, but I still slow her down. Even so, she still moves pretty fast. Even so, my father catches up with her. He backs us up against the front door. I don’t know why my mama puts me down, puts me down in front of her.

They just keep staring at each other.

VII.

Heaving.

VIII.

Until just like that. My daddy gets her. With his razor, cuts her right there, across her left cheek, below the little face mole that I like to press my finger to and kiss when she tucks me in bed at night. My mother gasps as though the scream shriveled up in her mouth before it could get out.

I keep telling myself, hit him in the balls, hit him in the balls (like how the fourth-grade girls on the playground had just taught me to make the boys who try to touch you bow). But I can’t do it. No, I can’t do it. But my mama can. It’s like—now that the gods have stopped breathing so heavy—she can hear my thoughts. She kicks him. I, for good measure, stomp on his foot as he is on his way bowing to us.

Now, my mama swings open the door and runs out, yanking me by the hand down the lawn and to the street where the car’s parked. Holding her bleeding cheek with the other one. Somehow, I manage to look at the sky. Just long enough to see how pretty the sun makes the sky as it’s going down. So pretty that I wanna stop and taste all that sky, all that beauty because it looks just like the rose-and-lavender-colored cotton candy my best friends JoJo and MoMo got in their Easter basket four, five, maybe six Sundays ago. Forgetting myself, I point up and exclaim, Mama, look! My mama responds, Come on, girl! And I remember what we are doing and am sad that the sky is mocking us like this.

IX.

Usually, we just drive up the road to Aunt Sporty’s house, but my daddy always looks for us there. And this is new, this is different. So instead, we go to Grandma Hettie’s house, my mama’s mama’s house. It smells like the mothballs she uses to keep the snakes away. I can tell that my grandmamma just cleaned because it also smells a little like bleach and pine and there’s candles lit all around. Later that night, when I am stuck fluttering in the honey spot between dream and wake, my eye lids flitting 12 beats per second, it’ll come to me: that is what the inside of my mama’s belly probably looked like when I was in there. Like candle glow.

In the kitchen, Grandma cleans my mama’s face with alcohol and rubs some salve in the gash. This salve is pungent, makes my nose wrinkle in a different way. Hold still, girl, my grandma mutters when my mama winces and flinches. We go to the den after they finish up. I sit on my mama’s lap. She clasps her hands real tight around my belly. I rub the outside of the right one so that she can use her left one to put the cup of ginger ale to her lips every once and awhile. Grandma’s sitting across from us. After my mama tells her about the morning, they just stare wearily at each other for a long time. Sometimes they stop staring at each other to look at the floor as though the floor’s done them wrong.

My grandma is stroking red wooden beads of her necklace. Pensively. Sometimes glints of sorrow furrow between her brows. My grandma opens her mouth as though she’s gonna say something, but then closes it and just say mmph and shakes her head. She does this a few times until finally when she opens her mouth, the words come out: You’ve got three days to get yourself together.

- What you mean, Mama?

- What you mean what you mean? You got three days. You can’t stay here. You gotta go back and make things right with him.

- Mama, through clenched teeth, he almost killed my black ass...

- Hey now. Listen! I don’t…I don’t want you out here like I was. Especially when you already got her mouth to put food in and one on the way…

- Mama, please.

- Now he’s—I know he’s not perfect. No man is, but he’s a good man. He takes care of you and your baby. He works. Pays the bills. Don’t be chasing women. Don’t be out all night drinking and gambling the rent away. Y’all got a place to stay. And you tell him to kill hisself?

- Mama as a whisper. And a plea. A question. Without turning to face her, I can feel my mama shaking her head. Differently than when she was shaking her head this morning about the Lip Smackers. Heavier. In rhythm with her right knee bouncing me up and down.

- You can’t leave him when you got this baby.

As soon as my grandma say this, I see her stand up. She looks like she’s coming over to pick me up, but I don’t wanna be in my grandma’s arms. I slide off my mama’s lap and pretend that I don’t know what’s going on or what has been said. I want to kneel beside a plant and hum. But my grandma catches me anyway and hugs me real tight and kisses my cheek. She turns her back to my mother and turns her eyes to the wall of family photos. With my chin over Grandma’s shoulders, I watch my mama’s face in her hands, watch her shoulders shudder.

The afternoon that my mother has to prepare for our return home, the sun seems to explode into every corner of Grandma Hettie’s house. We couldn’t bring anything with us for this visit to Grandma Hettie, but we did stop at a store to pick up a pack of underwear, some socks, toothpaste—those sorts of things. My mother washes what we wore while here before packing it in some plastic store bags. Meanwhile, I’m back in the den again.

My eyes glaze over the room until I lock eyes with Big Dove’s portrait. Locking eyes with her brings back to my ears the conversation from the family cookout a few weekends ago. As long as I was quiet and agreed to run back and forth to grab drinks and food for elders playing cards, I could stand close to their table while drawing no accusations of being in grown folks’ business.

Jostling the ice in her cup thoughtfully, Cousin Luckie, who came down all the way from L.A., started it off.

- You know, this drink tastes almost like one of Big Dove’s. Not quite, but almost. Dove could make some drinks, couldn’t she? Or, excuse me—she’d, she’d call them tonics. She’d say, Here. Try this new tonic! Tasted good, had you feeling good, and then when you woke up the next morning, no headache!

- And then, Uncle Barry joining in before placing down a card: You also had to be careful around Dove though. You know how she got down. You had to watch out for what’s she’s mixing—what with all those roots, leaves, and jars she’d be messin with.

- Now, here you go, Barry. Your scary behind always tryna make it out like Big Dove was some kind of witch or something.

- I ain’t saying that. I’m just saying—you know how she was.

- I mean, it’s true that you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Big Dove. I give you that much. Wouldn’t expect much trouble from her because she didn’t talk that much. Never did. She stared more than she talked with those big pretty eyes of hers. But, those pretty cat eyes could strike some fear, they could. When they got to flaring? Boy, you better watch out. She get a type of way, and it would feel like she could turn everything against you. Have it so the wind and rain against you.

- You talkin about me being scary, but you talkin bout the wind and rain. Really, Luckie?

- Yes, the wind and rain! I seen her one time call down the rain when there was nothing but sun and clear skies, and it come—Cousin Luckie snaped her fingers--just like that! Just. Like. That. That’s the rain that Cliff got stuck in—trifling Cliff, the one who had Dove’s sister down bad. Flooded his whole car out. Had him stranded nearly a hundred miles away. She didn’t suffer no fools. And y’all remember when she straight up shot Hettie’s first husband in the ass?

Murmurs of others’ mmhms and cackles crackle around the table.

- Yes, indeedy. She sho did, Cousin Barry said, dropping his glasses to the bridge of his nose while examining his cards. That was the warning shot! He slammed the Ace of Spades down. Was gonna kill him the next time!

- Shit. You saw how tightlipped Hettie got after that husband of hers did die. Some folks say that was still Big Dove. Mmhm. Big Dove and those jars and powders. Dove would kill for her daughters…But you know how it is—sometimes, that girl of hers didn’t wanna be killed for. She just wanted to be loved.

XI.

After the third day, wrapped in dusk, Mama & me come back and open the front door to the radio blaring 98.7 KISS Slow Jams. My father greets us at the threshold and picks me up, takes my mother by the hand. He ignores my whines to put me down until he places me on the couch. After he releases me from his arms to the couch, he turns to my mother and offers a meek, I’m sorry, baby. I immediately scoot to the edge of the couch because I don’t want to sink in this time. I say under my breath: Sorry don’t make things right.

Mama raises her eyebrows, and I can hear them say, Now, what you say, little girl?

I feel the lichen again, but I go ahead and repeat it louder: Sorry don’t make things right.

My mother begins to admonish me halfheartedly, but my father says to leave me be and to just focus on them. He leads my mother to the center of the carpet underneath the ceiling fan. I watch him nestle his head deep in my mama’s neck. And they just sway, sway, sway. I can hear her quavering, his soothing. He looks like he’s inhaling and exhaling heaven in that moment. Like they’ve never known hell. And she, now with her chin over his shoulder, has her eyes clasped tight as they two-step in a dragging circle.

I try to be still, but it feels like the wings of my heart are thrashing in my chest two-hundred beats a second. As they make their first full circle, my father glances up at me and blows me a kiss. And I feel my hand start to lift to catch it. But right as he closes his eyes again, I let the kiss fall to the ground. I use my hand to push myself even further to the edge as I feel my ruby heart trying to fly out of my throat. I excuse myself to the kitchen, saying I need some water.

In the kitchen, after I drink one cup of water, the churning, humming, winged thing in my chest leads me to a mason jar in the sink. I rinse it out. Quietly as I can, I go through the kitchen door to the backyard. The moon has barely peeked out, still no stars yet. The sky is alive with a bruise-purple.

I put a little dirt, a little grass, some twigs, some walnut husk in the jar. And I hum. And I spin. I hum and I spin. Round and round, until again: I need some water! This time, I wail directly to the sky. More dirt, more twigs. I start to feel the gusts. When the droplets start falling, I don’t stop. I hum and I spin some more. I wail and I howl. Rain and all, I slow nothing down. I hold the jar up to the sky to catch the water.

And as the water quickens, I quicken my gathering. The twigs. The dirt. The husk. The spin, the hum. Water from the sky. Some bunches of grass. The twigs, the dirt, the husk, water from my cry. Bunches of grass with some clover mixed in. The potion thickens. Twigs, dusk, clover, dirt, husk, rainwater, spin, spin, spin. I quicken. I quicken. I quicken.

Contributor Notes

Destiny Hemphill is a chronically ill ritual worker and poet, living on the unceded territory of the Eno-Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation (Durham, NC). She is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and has received other fellowships for her poetry from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, Callaloo, Tin House, Kenyon Review's Writers Workshop, and Torch Literary. She is a co-editor for Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books 2023) and the author of the poetry collection motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life (Action Books, 2023), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Prize. "Healer, How Come They Call You Hummingbird?" is her debut short story. Her poetry has also been featured in Poetry Magazine, Southern Cultures, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series.