From The Star Side of Bird Hill
Dionne once had another idea entirely about how she would celebrate her sixteenth birthday. She and her best friend in Brooklyn, Taneisha, had their hearts set on a party hall on Church Avenue. Everybody was going to be there. Taneisha’s Trinidadian cousins and uncles and sisters, their friends from school (mostly Taneisha’s), and Darren, the boy that Dionne had been going with since he moved up from Jamaica three years before.
Dionne thought of Darren often in spite of herself, though she knew that attachment was the first step on the road to disappointment.
After her father left, Dionne witnessed a parade of men her mother entertained for as long as they would stick around. But while she could attract men, draw them into her web, Avril had trouble keeping them. In the last relationship, the one that ended the year before Dionne started high school, Dionne wanted to believe her mother’s conviction that her boyfriend, Musa, would marry her. But something happened once her mother made her intentions for Musa clear, and every time he came over after that, he was always just about to leave again, as if her mother’s desire for him had propelled him in the opposite direction. By his last visit, Musa wouldn’t even take his coat off, just brought the books he’d promised to Phaedra and the Vogue fall fashion issue he’d promised to Dionne, kissed their mother, and left. Dionne had learned from her mother that if you wanted to keep a man, he should love you at least a little bit more than you loved him.
Avril’s plan to send the girls back home for the summer, announced just one week before they left, had messed up everything—the party, working at V.I.M. to save up money for school clothes, Dionne’s hopes of going into the city on Saturday nights with Darren and Taneisha and her girls. So, here she was in Bird Hill on her birthday, Saturday, July 16. And, as her grandmother Hyacinth would say, nothing at all go so. There would be no DJ making special shout-outs to the birthday girl, no adults hovering in the back alley smoking joints, drinking beer, squeezing past each other to heap their plates high with curry chicken and roti skins. No girls dancing front-to-front on boys, winding their waists as if their whole lives had made them move this way, talking afterwards about the boys whose dicks had gone hard, then soft on them.
Back in Brooklyn, the outfit that Dionne put on layaway—white jeans with a question mark in gold thread on the back pockets, a matching white top and jacket—still had $20 to go before it was paid off. Instead of wearing it, Dionne was sporting the new dress her grandmother made for her with “room to grow,” a maritime number with a boat collar, white trim, and heavy navy fabric. Dionne thought that the dress was more fit for a box of powdered milk than a girl like her, with legs that started just below her neck, arms made for hanging on to boys rather than pounding nutmeg, and hands more fit for finger-snapping than housework of any kind.
Buller Man Jean was the one to whom most of the hill women turned to get their clothes sewn and, in a pinch, their hair done. He owed Dionne’s grandmother a favor and so he gave Dionne a relaxer before the party that left her hair not quite straight. A night of sleeping in hard plastic rollers had given Dionne a neck ache and tight curls that didn’t brush her shoulders the way she liked. But it would have to do. A lifetime of watching her mother closely had been nothing if not a tutorial in resignation and making do.
The party, if it was fair to call it that, was a joint one with Clotel Gumbs, a girl who wore glasses with lenses as thick as breadfruit skin, crinoline dresses that reached her ankles, and a mouth that seemed to open only to correct grammar or to quote Bible verses. Dionne thought Clotel rather unfortunate. And though in summers past the girls played together and ran as far as the hill women saw fit to let them, now it was clear that they had nothing in common besides a birthday. Where Clotel envisioned a life as a schoolteacher and homemaker, Dionne saw herself working in a fashion house on Fifth Avenue, selecting trends for the next fall collection. In Dionne’s mind, her summer job selling sneakers and clothes at V.I.M. on Flatbush was a humble but legitimate step toward her career in fashion. Being stuck in Barbados, a place she might have described as sartorially challenged, was another step a world away from the life of glamour Dionne wanted for herself, a life full of style and free of the burdens of her mother’s and sister’s needs. These differences, simply matters of style when Dionne and Clotel were younger, were now big enough to constitute a wall neither of them could see over.
Both girls were new to the high heels that bore blisters into their feet. Dionne was painfully aware that she had finally turned sixteen, the age at which Avril said she could start wearing heels, and her mother wasn’t there to see her wobbling or to show her how to walk in them. Dionne and Clotel shifted their weight as Father Loving said an interminable prayer, during which Dionne fluttered her eyes open to find the reverend wiping his brow and studying her breasts, which pressed insistently against her frock. After his incantations, Father Loving offered them each a new leather-bound King James Bible. Clotel seemed genuinely excited to accept her gift, while Dionne took hers reluctantly. She mumbled thanks to everyone for their gifts and kind words, all their variations on wishing her the best of life in Christ. Then she steeled her shoulders, readying herself for the inevitable conversations on one of two topics—books or baptism.
“So, now that you turn sixteen, are you going to give your life over to the Lord in service?” Mrs Jeremiah asked, her rheumy eyes taking Dionne in. She clutched Dionne’s elbow between two firm fingers. The younger woman felt that Mrs Jeremiah’s conviction about Christ could break bone.
“Yes, God willing,” Dionne said. Her voice cracked. God’s name felt like a word in a language she would never learn.
Dionne looked over the jaunty red feather in Mrs Jeremiah’s hat and her gaze landed on her grandmother and Phaedra. She felt keenly the absence of her mother, who was in no small part responsible for her birthday turning out like this and should, she thought, at least be there to witness the disaster. The women kept bringing more and more food in aluminum pans out to the blue-flame burners. And Dionne kept expecting her mother to walk through the church hall’s front door.
The people on the hill were Christians, and seriously so, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t like to have a good time. Lyrics such as “Get something and wave for the Lord” were made for Bird Hill, where any news was reason to have a party, and parties could start in the late afternoon and put the stars to bed the next morning. The Soul Train line sent women hobbling back to their seats with sweat on their brows and complaints on their lips about their old bones, the young children rubbing their eyes and seeking their mothers’ laps.
Dionne and Trevor, who had been keeping each other at a respectful distance until then, came together in the back of the church hall, which doubled as a stage for the annual Passion play. They agreed to slip out separately and meet at their usual rendezvous location, star side. They’d named it that because of the way the moon and stars bathed the graves in the cemetery that sloped down behind the church in light, eliminating the need for flashlights that might lead prying eyes to their hiding place. “We’ll call this our special place,” Trevor whispered the night they named it, and Dionne, desperate for space that was not her sister’s, not Avril’s, not Hyacinth’s, just hers, nodded, thinking he could give her what she needed.
It was hot outside, as if all the heat that had gathered during the day decided to stay the night. Sweat collected in Dionne’s bosom, plastering her cotton bra to the top of her dress’s wide collar. She’d worn the dress all evening with an air of self-sacrifice, but now, in the open air, she tugged at its buttons. She took a seat on Trevor’s forebear’s grave with the gift Bible tucked firmly beneath her, making a show of trying not to dirty her new clothes.
“You having fun yet?” Trevor asked.
“Define fun.”
“C’mon, Dionne. You have to admit that seeing Sister B. do the pepper seed was fun.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Dionne laughed. She remem
bered the old woman’s shaking shoulders, the way that everyone was genuinely concerned about her teeth rattling out of her mouth.
“What do you think his life was like?” Dionne asked.
“Whose life?”
“His life. Trevor Cephus Loving. July 14, 1928–July 21, 1973.”
“Probably the same as my father’s. Baptisms, weddings, funerals. More food than you could ever eat in one lifetime.”
“Same as yours? Do you want to be a reverend?”
“I guess I never thought I had a choice.”
“Everything in life is a choice. It’s not like you just wake up one day and suddenly you’re Father Loving the third.”
“Well, it’s not like in the States, where you just decide what you’re going to be and then you go to school and become that thing. Here on the hill, who you are is who your people have been. I was born the same day my grandfather died. Everyone said that was a sign I was coming back as him.”
Dionne felt the door close on anything substantial between her and Trevor, but then also the urgency of their closeness in this moment. Dionne knew that any man whose life was already decided for him couldn’t be hers. But here, where her spirit felt only halfway home, anchorless without Avril, she wanted something familiar to be close to, somewhere to land.
“Have you ever noticed that all these people died close to their birthdays? It’s almost like the earth remembers them and knows it’s their time.”
“I don’t know how your mind works, Dionne, but I like it. What would you do if you knew this was your last birthday?”
Dionne turned to Trevor and whispered in his ear something reserved for places outside polite company. Trevor was shocked that what he had been begging for all summer was finally being offered freely. He tried to stay cool. He placed a fiery hand on Dionne’s thigh and did away with her blue panties with a deftness and care that indicated he knew that at any moment she could decide differently.
“Go slow,” Dionne said, warning. She used her hands to guide him inside her.
Trevor made love to Dionne by moonlight, her bare feet planted on the crumbling gravestone while he entered her with sweetness she didn’t know he could muster. Dionne remembered the roughness of Darren’s hand inside her and braced herself for what Taneisha told her would feel like a pinch and then like the ocean opening inside her. She sighed, taking in the heat of him at her neck and the damp of the night air on them both.
When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, and looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kind of pleasure could be her religion.
Donika Kelly
An American poet, she is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (2017), and the full-length collection Bestiary (2016), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she received her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Tin House, Indiana Review, Sinister Wisdom and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Sanctuary
The tide pool crumples like a woman
into the smallest version of herself,
bleeding onto whatever touches her.
The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled
with plastic lace, and, closer to the vanishing point,
something brown breaks the surface—human,
maybe, a hand or foot or an island
of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp.
A wild life.
This is a prayer like the sea
urchin is a prayer, like the sea
star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber—
as if I know what prayer means.
I call this the difficulty of the non-believer,
or, put another way, of waking, every morning, without a god.
How to understand, then, what deserves rescue
and what deserves to suffer.
Who.
Or should I say, what must
be sheltered and what abandoned.
Who.
I might ask you to imagine a young girl,
no older than ten but also no younger,
on a field trip to a rescue. Can you
see her? She is led to the gates that separate
the wounded sea lions from their home and the class.
How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:
to claim her own barking voice, to revel
in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers
woven into the cyclone fence.
Where We End Up
Wonder why the grasshopper wells all point
east, heads dipped in sync at the rising sun.
Wonder too why we head west, what it means
to return home or someplace similar.
Probably don’t mean much. There’s only doing
and done and where we end up. So we keep
west until cliff and ocean, a seal dead
and bloating on the beach. I’ve been here before
and turned back. Then turned again to the same
place made different. Just another way of saying
this sand the same but smaller and more. This water
the same and new. This sun, the same one shine
here and wherever we used to call home.
Brood
My chest is earth
I meant to write my chest is warm
but earth will do
to exhume a heart
Beat
I meant to write
breathe
Did you know I was alive the whole time
I was alive in the ground but torpor
But torpor
Slowed beat
My chest filled like a jar with dirt
I mean
dearth
For slow months at rest in the hole
I’d made in myself
A frozen ground
A ground in thaw
I mean
Spring is coming
I mean
I push the wet dirt with my mandible
I mean jaw
Jaw
Y’all
I know I am not a nymph in exhumation
but would you please explain
this half-remembered light
Imbolo Mbue
Born in Limbe, Cameroon, she is a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia universities and currently lives in New York City. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers (2016), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Award, and in 2017 was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and the Washington Post and a Best Book of the Year by close to a dozen publications, has been translated into 12 languages, adapted into an opera, and is set to enjoy further life as a stage play and film.
A Reversal
—When I die, do not take me back home, Papa said. I want you to bury me right here.
I sat up on my bed and rubbed my eyes, briefly looking at my phone.
—Papa, I whispered. What’s going on? It’s two o’clock in the morning.
—I needed you to know this right now, he said. I can’t sleep. Whatever you do, do not take my body back to Cameroon.
I looked through the darkness of my bedroom, the light of a passing ambulance briefly illuminating it. I reached for the lamp but dropped my hand, deciding the darkness would be best for a conversation such as this.
—What did the doctor say at your check-up yesterday? I asked. Your blood-pressure medicine stopped working again?
—No, nothing like that. I’m fine. He says the way I’m going I may live to see the day when people go over to Mars just to have dinner.
I did not laugh. Neither did he,
though he’d clearly made the joke for his own benefit.
—Papa, I have to be at work at 8 a.m., so please tell me right now why you’re calling me in the middle of the night to give me this strange instruction.
He didn’t immediately respond.
—Are you going to tell me now, or do you want me to drive to Brooklyn tomorrow . . .
He sighed.
—I just . . .
I continued waiting.
Why was he doing this to me, right now?
It had been a brute of a day at work. I needed my sleep, which had been slow in coming; my mind couldn’t find rest, busy as it was ruminating on what a new client had said to me earlier in the day. The client had walked in, a man seemingly in his seventies, and the first thing he’d said to me, even before responding to my greeting, was where are you from?
—Where am I from? I said.
—Yes, yes, he’d replied, as if he needed the answer before we could proceed with his reason for coming to see me.
Take a deep breath, I told myself. A good long breath. That’s right; take another one.
—I’m actually curious myself, I said to the man, smiling; where are you from? You have such a distinct, regal face.
He chuckled.
—As a matter of fact, he said, adjusting himself in his chair across from me at my desk, I’m from here.
—Me, too, I said smiling.
—Of course you are; you mean you were born here?
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