Free White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi Page A

Christmas and birthday cards, shaky but elegant, the
g
’s and the
y
’s straight legged rather than curled.
    neither are you
    Miranda tapped her pen against her teeth, read over what she’d written. She ripped the red spotted page out of her book and threw it away. But the page was the reason for the certainty in Miranda’s voice the next night, when she told her brother that the goodlady would take care of Lily. How could she doubt the goodlady? The goodlady was Lily’s creation. Besides, she thought, the blood is the life.
     
    •
     
    Our great-grandmother, GrandAnna, the one who left the house to Lily, was named Anna Good. There’s a cupboard in the attic full of her things, or at least the things that Lily didn’t give to charity shops. The cupboard was a treasure trove for Miri—Miri found things in there I couldn’t even see until she brought them out—white kid gloves, silver hair ornaments, fans. One day I found a sheaf of newspaper cuttings from the ’40s in there—pages of
The Dover Post
collected without a theme until I noticed, halfway through the pile and checking back, thateach page had the same number in its corner—25. Page 25 always had a patriotic cartoon on it, all on the theme of plucky Brits defeating the enemy by maintaining the home front—a stout housewife planting her own potatoes and taking a moment to smack a potato that looked just like Hitler on the head with her trowel, that sort of thing. They were drawn by an artist who worked in curved lines and harsh scribbles to indicate shade. The biggest cartoon took up a quarter of the page:
Be careful what you say—you never know who’s listening.
Two sweet-faced teenage girls talked avidly on a bus, while behind them, two men grinned with their teeth and leaned closer to the girls, closer, closer, more as if they were about to devour the girls than eavesdrop on their conversation. One man was a fat soldier covered in swastikas, the other was slit-eyed, uniformed, with a moustache that fell to his knees. You don’t have to be that close to someone to listen in on their conversation. You don’t have to be licking the person’s neck. The horrible hyperbole of it—it was a brilliant cartoon. None of the page 25s collected in GrandAnna’s folder were dated later than 1943. They had begun in 1940. Three years worth of cartoons. And it was on the biggest and best cartoon that I made out the signature: Andrew Silver. My great-grandfather, whose RAF plane had gone down somewhere over Africa before the war was even halfway through.
    GrandAnna’s hair was very white and came down over her shoulders in a great mass. Lily used to have a photo of GrandAnna, Miri and me in her purse, from when we went to visit GrandAnna on our seventh birthday. In the photo Miri is on Anna’s lap and has her arms around Anna’s neck with the sober confidence of someone adored. GrandAnna and Miri are looking at the camera, at Lily the photographer, and they are very poised. I am beside GrandAnna, leaning an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at her with an apprehensive expression.
    The room under the trapdoor downstairs was her bedroom. “Afterthe war she was scared of bombs for the rest of her life. It was the noise, she said. She couldn’t sleep anywhere else,” Lily told us. It was the Christmas before Lily died and she was sitting on my bedroom floor with handmade notepaper spread across her knees. She had a tinsel flower tucked behind her ear and she was writing thank-you notes for our Christmas presents. She liked to do it and we liked her doing it.
    “Where did you sleep, then? Not down there?” I asked.
    The psychomantium used to be Lily’s room. There was a dressing table in there, and a velvet, high-backed chair, faint smudges on the walls where posters had been, and a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri’s room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall.