Spiritu
by Alysia Slocum
We together. My great-uncle Bill Byrd would say, “We together.”
OOO
The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish are able to, when aging, reverse their life cycle and return to a polyp, their earliest stage of life, before starting over with genetically identical jellies, achieving a type of immortality.
OOO
In Portugal, Saturdays are crowded in the graveyard. The cemetery in Ribeirão has a large receptacle for stems, a station for cans and a hose for watering. The women of the family bring with them a collection of blossoms purchased from the florist or from their carefully curated gardens. Here in the center of town the masses collect, arrange and leave brightly-colored love-notes of peony and baby’s breath on tombstones for the Lord’s day. In Salreu, a short ride away from my grandmother’s house, her deceased relatives are kept in a tall granite mausoleum; the center of an entire spiritu preserved in a stone house. My grandfather is buried in his hometown, Ribeirão, beside his mother and father. From across the sea in America, Vovo would pay a florist to arrange flowers for her late husband, so that his plot wouldn’t look abandoned.
When we arrive in Portugal, we first check on my grandfather’s arrangements to make sure his place looks as beautiful as everyone else’s.
In the heat, the florist leaves carnations to ensure they last. On his birthday and the Holy days, she leaves roses and lilies. With the richly colored blossoms and the afternoons inside the cemetery walls, our family, standing beside family after family, makes a ritual of longing.
When we visit, Titi prays and I look for dead leaves that should be wiped away. We light a tall candle and leave it to flicker until it's extinguished by morning rain.
OOO
Our spiritu lives in both celestial webs and earthly constellations, enmeshed with us as we navigate what it means to be a family. Our spiritu is the collective of circles that holds hands, where my hand is my hand and your hand is your hand, but when we press our palms together, that is the core. Our spiritu, and the floating aquatic-style appendages, hold onto all the ways we choose what will influence us from now on.
“That’s her half-sister,” a person introduced Lisa to another person I had never met. It was Easter Sunday and shiny quarters, cocooned by brightly colored plastic eggs, were scattered discreetly across the front yard. Half-sister, as if she was neatly severed into even parts, one section living comfortably in our familial spiritu, the other half belonging to, well, whose family? The phrasing brought to mind one half-circle dwelling in the concentric sphere, and the other half dangling somewhere off a tentacle, waiting for another ethereal limb to latch onto. And I, also a half-sister, dangled accordingly from the opposite side.
OOO
But this is not spiritu. In spiritu, we are all sanctus, and no one is lost.
After he became a lawyer, my father worked on a legal team that defended Bobby Seale. He mentioned it lightly one evening from a stiff Victorian chair in front of the fireplace. Billie Holiday was playing. I was 18. He said, "When you get stepped on, you have a duty to say, ‘ouch.’"
He said his grandmother moved the coals in the furnace with her bare
hands. Our spiritu has a raised fist in the air.
OOO
Not every core can influence the people inside it to be the same, and where you fall concentrically can change.
I ask of you:
Were your parents in the center when you were eight?
Did you expand with Herculean strength to hold their spiraling together?
Did you ever wake up one day and find yourself in an entirely different spiritu with a close companion and a romantic partner you found along the way; the only sign that you had ever belonged elsewhere is the glitter, the imprint, the ash that falls off, what we guess are tentacles.
OOO
I was seven years old when I first met my Tia Herminia. Her hair poured behind her head like thick honey, curls fastened with precision and bobby pins. Life magazine, March 4th, 1940, without the hat. I knew the face already; her sister, my grandmother, wore her hair the same way, the same reserved expressions and the same skirts, across the Atlantic Ocean in New Jersey.
The stories from my grandmother's homeland were reminiscent of dark fairy tales: elegance and decorum, death and mystery.
My grandmother said the boys from Coimbra would lay their university capes over puddles for her to walk over in the rain.
What would you say to them?
“Nothing, you can't encourage them,” she warned, shaking her head.
She told me boys would come and serenade her outside the bedroom, which she shared with her sister. “Did you ever wave and say, ‘hello?’”
She shook her head fervently. They couldn't wave and say hello, but they would crouch under the windowsill and listen.
OOO
There may be a big break, a singular moment that surgically removes you from your core, and often it's a self-slicing, but remember that a change in core is hard to quantify in the moment. There is a shift with no tectonic plate-driven earthquake to announce it. Shifts are silent, and they move as slowly as a propagated plant in development; one day there is new life elsewhere.
OOO
Spiritu is debt, and the people you owe can change.
Dad, born in 1931, called other Black people, “Bloods.” When we drove through the South on our cross-country road trip, he counted how many other Bloods were in a restaurant before we sat down.
OOO
You may want to find measurable boundaries. You may pledge allegiance to the titles that you find. Black, Portuguese, American, but you will fall short, because each tentacle glides right into something else.
I am this, but-
I am here,
and-
I am human, but I have spirit/I have spirit but I don't know what it is/I am Black but you can't always tell/I am Portuguese but my language is stunted, small, I am not myself in that language/This is my family: four children, but we used to be five, six if you count babies, but we never totaled six at once, we totaled five and now we're four.
At the swimming pool, a classmate walked to the snack bar with friends and gestured to the lifeguard on duty, who was spinning a whistle attached to a lanyard around his index and middle finger, before letting it loose in the other direction. She told her snack bar circle that the lifeguard was my brother, and one of them challenged, “but he's a Black guy.”
I am, but-
In non-spiritu, when you search for identity, you are subject to what others will offer to you.
My mother was Portuguese in America and American when she visited her family in Portugal.
In kindergarten the teacher’s assistant asked me to translate for a new student using Spanish.
“Oh, I don't speak Spanish.”
“Are you sure?”
And even if your parents happen to share genes with you, and you are in spiritu together, they cannot share in the totality of your outcome. You are on your own.
OOO
Remember that every circle in the sphere must leave one day, if not to propagate into new worlds, then to depart from our lifetime. Nothing is forever. The smallest circle, at the center, will eventually need to end. Circle Petite might slide farther away from the middlemost point, as young children and infants take up space. They might drift into wider and wider circumferences until they are almost forgotten. But, they might stay, eventually cracking, like lifted paint or rotting from the inside. It's possible that, with this expired nucleus, all of the remaining circles will eventually drift toward other spiritus. It is also possible that circles simply reconform around the decay, and newer circles: new life, partnerships, friends as family will arise, drift towards, and latch.
The personality continues on, made up of inherited voice.
For Easter my grandmother made sweet bread in the kitchen, waking up at five to greet a resurrected loaf, a brown dotted egg nestled in the center.
For Christmas, she rolled the fragile bones out of codfish with a dishcloth, curling them into rounded spheres, baptizing them in a frying pan.
Now my mother wakes up for the bread that rises and baptizes codfish into oil.
"Keep the faith."
"Soldier up."
"The sun will come up tomorrow."
“What’s done in the dark, will one day come to light.” "We together."
Survivalist language. Hard times language. Late 1880's language. Great Depression language. World War II language. If you're Black, it’s been hard the whole time. Dad's Ma told Pop Pop, and Pop Pop told Dad and he told us.
You will be born to us with resilience, and if that is not how we got you, we will breathe strength into you, until it is there; the impact of life en spiritu,
Our lux perpetua,
Our moonlight.
What you will make of your inherited voice, the spiritu cannot tell you.
OOO
In our circle memory, our minds race in different directions, lunging at brief moments, so that we can cup them in our palms for longer.
In fourth grade, Mom and Alex were in Italy for a week and Dad was facilitating the home-life schedule. He took me to dinner at the Olive Garden and we ate our fill of garlic breadsticks upon which we agreed that the Olive Garden experience is really all about the breadsticks, and for years afterward when we drove past the Olive Garden, I’d declare that Dad took me there, and when you go, you should really order the breadsticks. In the evening of our first full day with Mom away, I changed into pajamas and crawled into bed, waiting for the “goodnight ritual.” Our ritual included the “Love Sign” that I taught Dad after a lesson on sign language in school, and explained that your index finger, pinky and thumb extended means, “I love you.”
“Look, like this,” I demonstrated, and Dad and I both reached our hands out and pressed the tips of our extended fingers together, our version of The Creation of Adam.
You might not be done circling a nucleus, however decayed. You may still be in progress, talking about the ways it aggressively spun, or the ways you spun together.
Dad didn't dance, but I danced on his feet and he swayed humming the overture from The Nutcracker.
Inherited voice can be infinite/can be loud/can be louder with a nucleus decayed because there’s no one there to tell you to slow down - they didn’t mean those things in that way. Inherited voice can mean fighting with silence; you’re standing alone and you can scream at decayed nucleus all you want, but there’s no one to hear you anymore.
OOO
Their imprint will still glitter for you. They can drift towards other tentacles, but we don't plan to perform elegies for circles that we safe-keep under our moonlight.
Dad said his siblings would wait by the train tracks to collect fallen coal in transit, for the stove.
Your departure-ash, your trail of shimmering glitter, is collectable.
I know who you are if I know the voice of your spiritu.
Alysia Slocum LaFerriere is a storyteller across genres who writes about family histories, racial identities, community, and belonging. Her chapbook Hair was published by Philopatry, a writing collective at Pratt Institute, where she was both an editor and contributor for the publication The Felt. Alysia holds a BA in English and a minor in political science from Rutgers University. She graduated from the MFA in Writing program at Pratt Institute and is currently a visiting assistant professor there. She is also an elementary school art teacher, and lives in New Jersey. Alysia spends her mornings running, a movement that is sometimes included in her creative practice.