The first:
"'Tell me,' I said at last, 'why does he want to die? He must want to die, he's killing himself, why does he want to die?'
"He looked at me in surprise. He licked his lips. 'He don't want to die. He wants to live. Don't nobody want to die ever."
The well-meaning narrator, concerned for his younger brother who has found himself wrapped up in the kudzu vine of the world's trappings, begs a friend of the younger brother to tell him "'why does he want to die?'"
And the crazed friend "licked his lips" and said "'He don't want to die. He wants to live."
In my mind, I picture the intriguing mystic from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Tia Dalma, licking her lips with a wide-eyed expression and an all-too-knowing grin as she replies: "Him don't want to die. Him wants to LIVE..." as she settles back into her seat and continues to offer her wicked expression.
Isn't that why everyone entangled in the world gets there in the first place? No one wants to die. But they're willing to risk their lives to LIVE!
The second quote:
"She was crying again. Still, I couldn't move. I said, 'Lord, Lord, Mama, I didn't know it was like that.'
"'Oh, honey,' she said, 'there's a lot that you don't know. but you are going to find out.'"
Here, Tia Dalma has postured herself as a tear-plagued mother who knows, with heart-wrenching dread, what the pain of the world will do to her children.
It wasn't too hard for me to jump to, this scenario. I loved, after all, the parts in the third installment of Pirates where we see Tia Dalma grieve her old lover's choices and her old love's cruel and bitter past.
As this river witch looks out the window, mourning over the dying world, she offers an endearment and a piece of advice: "Oh, honey...there be a lot you don't yet know." She turns to him now, staring at him (or through him, maybe) with a foreboding (if not frightening) expression on her face. "But you are GOING to find out."
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