As the orchestra lifted into “Darling Nikki,” I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this – to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.
I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm’s – raised and fisted or Martin’s – open and asking or James’s – curled around a pen. I.
When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets. Pressed side by side by side, or sitting crossed legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.
Afterward, he had held Iris so tightly. If she hadn’t said, I can’t even breathe right now, he would have still been holding on to her, wanting to pull her inside of him. Even bent in front of the side mirror, just inches from him, Iris still felt too far away.
I held on to my mama’s Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy’s stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.
Nothing is like a quarter-mile sprint. All muscle and breath and power. And then it’s over and you got a thing behind you – another race you can clock among your races.
When we asked, What do you love? Sylvia looked around her perfectly pink room and said, I’m not the boss of me. How the hell would I even know.
I love that people think the world is even halfway ready for what we about to bring.
When boys called our names, we said ‘Don’t even say my name. Don’t even put it in your mouth.’ When they said, ‘You ugly anyway,’ we knew they were lying. When they hollered, ‘Conceited!’ we said, ‘No- convinced!’ We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together wasn’t something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.
You got something you love, little man? Then you good. You love food? You cook. You love clothes? You design. You love the wind and water? You sail.
When you love a thing, little man, my dad said, you gotta love it with everything you got. Till you can’t even tell where that thing you love begins and where you end.
Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it.
That’s why I don’t buy it when people say children don’t know. That they’re too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life – crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can’t tell me all of it’s not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.
Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over.
I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.
But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross – a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.
And when she says, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I’ve ever known.
I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow with each situation I put on the page.
I don’t “take a lot of mess.” I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence, and I have no tolerance for people not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.
My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby’s hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm’s – raised and fisted or Martin’s – open and asking or James’s – curled around a pen.
Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor has a breath or two left at the end of the day for sitting and running our mouths.