Due, Tananarive Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning, Essence best-selling author of Blood Colony, The Living Blood, The Good House, and Joplin's Ghost , and co-author of the NAACP Image Award-winning Tennyson Hardwick mystery series. She lives in the Atlanta area with her husband and co-author Steven Barnes. Visit her blog at www.TananariveDue.blogspot.com. Blood Colony A Novel By Tananarive Due Atria Copyright © 2008 Tananarive Due All right reserved. ISBN: 9780743287357 One The Colony Friday 6 a.m. 2015 Gramma Bea was the first to rise in the Big House. Each morning, Fana Wolde found her grandmother in the kitchen with Mahalia Jackson's soaring voice consoling her from the old CD player while Gramma Bea patted balls of dough between her palms, measuring drop biscuits. Gramma Bea cooked with care, hour after hour, as if the fate of the world depended on her getting the ingredients and temperature just right. Beatrice Jacobs was eighty-four, but she looked youthful in the black silk kimono she sometimes wore all day, when she didn't have the energy to get dressed. By lunchtime, she would be sweating from the heat, but she never left her kitchen. When she wasn't cooking, she was sitting at the kitchen table, either dozing or reading her Bible. Sleeping and praying took up the time left after cooking. She spent more time doing all three since her heart attack. Like most people, Gramma Bea wore her thoughts like clothing, so Fana didn't have to peek inside her grandmother's head to understand her. Fana could see it plainly: Gramma Bea stored her grief in her baking breads and stewing pots. Cooking was her meditation. Fana's grandfather had died five years ago, when his car had overturned in a ditch in the woods a half-mile from his kitchen table, during a rainstorm. The accident had happened at three-thirty in the afternoon, snapping Fana out of meditation. Fana, the first to know he was dead, had shared her grandfather's last, startled gasp. Grandpa Gaines had been dead before anyone had been able to bring blood to him, where a drop might have saved him -- or Dad might have been able to perform the Ceremony at the instant his heart had stopped, in the ancient way. It was so unfair: Gramma Bea had lost her first husband to a car accident, too. And to lose someone here must feel worse , Fana thought. No one died here. Fana knew why Gramma Bea always kept her grandfather's chair at the breakfast table empty, as if she expected him to come downstairs to eat, too. His absence was inconceivable. "Don't just stand there, baby," Gramma Bea said. "Start squeezing the juice." The kitchen smelled like oranges in the mornings because Gramma Bea was from Florida and insisted on squeezing her orange juice fresh. The oranges were already chopped and waiting, so Fana only had to pick up her dripping fruit, hold half an orange in her palm, and scrape off the pulp in the white plastic juicer with the methodical turns of her wrist Gramma Bea had taught her to perfection; one of the few things Fana believed she did well. Mom had bought a mechanical juicer years ago, but Gramma Bea wasn't interested in technology except to listen to Mahalia and the Mississippi Mass Choir and the other gospel she filled her silences with. Gramma Bea thought machines were a distraction, and the music brought her closer to God. And closer to Grandpa Gaines, of course. Gramma Bea thought about dying for a long while every day, working her way up to the idea. Sometimes, she didn't mind. Day by day, she minded less. She had begun to think of it as an appointment she had to keep, one she'd put off long enough. Fana wondered what else her grandmother would do with her time if she didn't have to think about dying. But she doesn't have to die , Fana reminded herself. She knows shehas a choice . "You've got some nice little hips now," Gramma Bea said, dropping her dough into neat rows on the cookie sheet. "Nice legs, too. My legs." Gramma Bea's kimono was cut high, the way a younger woman would wear it, to show off her legs. Her calves were veined blue, but her smooth shins had resisted wrinkles. "You should wear a dress when you go driving tomorrow." Fana felt alien enough outside without Gramma Bea's criticisms! Mom and Aunt Alex never wore anything except T-shirts and jeans either. Sometimes it was hard for Fana to believe that Mom and Gramma Bea were the same blood: Mom never had casual conversations with her about going outside, especially not about clothes. Mom only filled Fana's head with warnings. "Why do I need a dress?" Fana said. "It's just a driving lesson." "And lunch," Gramma Bea said. "At a nice restaurant." "Pass. I'll pack some food from home." Gramma Bea tsssked , a click against her teeth. "Go to a restaurant, Fana. Sit with the people for a while. It'll be good for you." Fana hated restaurants. They always smelled like meat, and the tension was thick behind servers' smiles and the kitchens