Seth and Samona Read Free

have to eat cats,” I blurted out before I stopped to think.
    “Cat! You is sick one, boy.” Mrs. Fabiyi shook her stick again. “Go!”
    Samona stood up, rubbing her sore bottom. “We’re not leaving until I get my cat back!”
    Mrs. Fabiyi looked at her closely, then started cackling. I could see her red gums clear as could be. She must have forgotten to put her teeth in. Just like Granmè. And she had finally stopped waving that stick. Suddenly I wasn’t so scared anymore.
    “I know you?” Mrs. Fabiyi asked in a low whisper after she had finished laughing.
    “You threw vegetable soup at us on Halloween,” I reminded her.
    Mrs. Fabiyi started cackling again. “Ah-ah! I remember! So much fun. Trick or treat, you! Nobody else come that night.”
    “I wonder why,” Samona muttered. “You got my leaves all wet.”
    Samona had dressed up like a tree for Halloween, with real leaves pasted to her head. It took her mama two hours to wash the glue out of her hair. Then Mrs. Gemini wrote a poem about it.
    “Trick or treat make you mad?” Mrs. Fabiyi looked a little upset. “I was—how you say—making fun.”
    “Where’s my cat?” Samona put her hands on her hips.
    Mrs. Fabiyi chuckled. “Big, black cat? He play with my Egusi. You come in. You are welcome.”
    Samona followed her through the door in the wall while I looked around a little more. The opening
was
a door. It was painted black like the rest of the wall, which seemed like a strange color to me, and it didn’t have a doorknob on the outside. This was a pretty weird house.
    I had to go through one of those slimy, slippery bead curtains, that was just hanging right inside the doorway. Then there was a small hallway leading to another room. I followed it, holding in my breath and saying a quick prayer. Who knew when I was gonna come back out—or if I was. What I saw there made me wish Ihadn’t wasted my breath. There weren’t any bats in the corners or animal skeletons pinned to the walls or anything a witch is supposed to have in her house. All that was there were some normal-looking wicker chairs and some wood carvings on the wall. One of the carvings looked like the African masks our art teacher had showed us in a slide show last week. They were the only interesting things in the room.
    I followed Samona’s voice to the back porch, where she was petting a small tabby cat—Egusi, I guessed. Mrs. Fabiyi turned to me and made another one of those gummy smiles. In the daylight I could see that she wasn’t wearing a sheet at all. It was a long blue and green and black dress that touched the floor. The scarf was made of the same material. Mrs. Fabiyi looked younger than Granmè. She had black skin that was smooth and didn’t have a wrinkle in it. “Well, you. What you see?”
    “There aren’t any toad’s eyes or voodoo dolls or even a stupid love potion.” Here I’d come all this way and Mrs. Fabiyi turned out to be nothing but a regular old lady. Manmi was gonna kill me when she found out I skipped another piano lesson.
    Mrs. Fabiyi’s eyes twinkled. “You think I obeah-witch woman? Ah-ah! More fun to scare little boys like you.”
    “I wasn’t scared,” I said, turning away.
    “Mrs. Fabiyi hasn’t been sick,” Samona said, cuddlingthe little cat. “She went to see her sister in Nigeria.”
    “It good for you to come see about me. You come again. I promise no more soup.”
    Samona put Egusi on the floor and picked up Nightmare. “That’s very civilized of you, Mrs. Fabiyi. And I guess I don’t mind if Nightmare comes over here to visit Egusi either.”
    Well, I was tired of this. No one was going to eat or kill us here. I hadn’t even seen a kitchen knife around. Papi was right: You can’t believe everything that people say. It’s just like some of the kids at school who think that all Haitians are boat people and only eat frogs’ legs. I should have known better than to believe the stories about Mrs. Fabiyi. People like to