Something She Can Feel

by Grace Octavia

  “I know she do,” she said sadly. “But she just don’t understand, you know? She been alone and stuff all the time and she don’t know what it’s like to love a man like I love Michael. She always saying we ain’t gonna be together, but she just mad because she can’t find nobody. But I know when I have this baby, Michael gonna help me and we gonna get our own place and everything.”

  “But I have to ask you again, Zenobia. What about the other baby? How can he do all of this for you and do the same for Patrice’s baby?”

  She just shrugged her shoulders and kept her head down. I saw a tear fall from her eye and stain her red tank top.

  “I can’t lose him,” she said, sniffling now. “I can’t lose Michael.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I remembered her saying that when we first talked about the baby. “You make it sound like your whole life is wrapped up in being with him.”

  “It’s just the way he make me feel when we together. You don’t understand. It’s like I ain’t even alive if I ain’t with him,” she said, and I could see in her face that she meant it. “And when he be with Mikayla, just holding her, I’m like that’s what I wanted from my daddy. Somebody to just hold me and love me. But he was never there for me.” She crouched over in the seat and covered her face with her hand.

  I moved my seat near her and began to rub her back.

  “I do know what love feels like, Zenobia,” I said. “And I also know that you won’t find the love you’re looking for from your father in any other man.”

  She looked up at me.

  “Having another baby isn’t going to bring Michael closer to you,” I said as compassionately as I could. “And it’s not going to erase the pain you feel for never having a father.”

  Soon I started crying, too, and Zenobia and I sat there talking and crying until my lunch period was over and the next section of students started filing in.

  Before Zenobia left, I embraced her and told her I’d be there for her, whatever the decision was.

  I was exhausted. So tired I was sure my feet had divorced my body and whatever stubborn strips of skin that continued to keep the two attached were going to snap the moment I reached my car toward the back of the school parking lot. After missing my lunch break talking to Zenobia, I was on my feet for the rest of the day and every muscle in my body was aching—from my index fingers from pointing, to the very tips of my toes from running around the room. To make matters worse, I’d stayed late, working with a few of the soloists, and it was 6:15 p.m. The sun was still high, though, and it felt like it was sitting right above my forehead. Trying to juggle two heavy bags and a radio I’d carried to work, I thought fainting and rolling under one of the other cars might be a better option than setting my sights on my own car. At least, then, I’d be out of the sun’s spotlight.

  “Whew,” I exhaled, finally making my way to the driver’s-side door. Not caring where anything landed, I dropped all of the bags right where I stood and let my shoulders go limp to take a second to catch what little breath of life I had left. When I finally got enough energy to actually bend down to get the keys out of my purse, I noticed that the brightness around me had dulled and thought maybe a cloud had snuck up and covered the sun. If I hustled fast enough and found the keys, I’d be lucky enough to ease into the car before the sun came striking again. No one else was in the teachers’ parking lot, so I was sure it would find me again.

  “Nice view,” I heard someone say.

  Still bending down, I turned my head to see that the cloud was actually an old pickup truck.

  I straightened up quickly, snapping the found keys into the palm of my hand.

  “Oh, I’m ...” I covered my brow with my hand, so I could see who was sitting in the truck.

  “No need to apologize,” the person said. “That’s exactly what I was looking for.”

  I stepped forward and squinted a bit more.

  It was Dame. He was grinning and leaning out of the truck window with one hand still on the wheel.

  “Excuse me?” I asked as I frantically straightened my skirt.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, smiling, yet apologetic. “Well, I meant it like that ... but I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

  A bead of sweat trickling down my forehead, I could see the muscles in his arm tighten and flex as he spoke.

  “Thanks ... I guess,” I said, trying to sound unaffected—stern, yet calm and not staring at his biceps. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Yes, you could,” he said. “I was actually here looking for you. I knew it was late, but you always stay late before graduation.”

  His statement caught me off guard. I wondered how he’d remember that.

  “For what? I mean, what did you want?”

  “Well, we could start with you coming a little closer, so I don’t have to scream my business out over this whole parking lot.”

  “Come over there?” I asked, looking around the lot. It was a simple request. But I still felt inside that I needed to stay where I was. Like walking to the truck was wrong in some way. I felt girlish and ridiculous for thinking all of these things.

  “Yes,” I said ... looking at his arm and then away. Closer to the truck, I saw that the old, blue thing really did block out the sun. Maybe it was the steel or just the size, but I felt cooler there. Cooler and smaller somehow.

  “I wanted you to hear something.” He shifted the gear and put the truck in park. The engine growled and then grunted as if it was threatening to cut off, but then it kept going.

  “Hear something?”

  “Yeah. Something I think you might like. I’m thinking about putting it on my next album.”

  “Dame, I told you I don’t really listen to music like that. Don’t you think you—”

  “I’m just trying to get your opinion. That’s all. If you like it, you like it. If not, you don’t. It’s all good.”

  “Well, I have to ...” I turned to look at my bags on the ground. “I was on my way home.”

  “It’s just one song, Ms. Cash.”

  “Mrs. DeLong.”

  He smirked slyly.

  “Mrs. DeLong,” he repeated.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll listen to the song.”

  “Good.”

  I stood there, two inches from the car shaking my head in anticipation. Waiting for him.

  “Oh you’re waiting to hear it now?” he asked, sounding confused.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Come on now. You can’t be serious.”

  “What? I said I would listen.”

  “We got to roll. You don’t listen to something like this just anywhere.” He was laughing. “We got to roll with it. Drink it in with the breeze.”

  “But I was about to ...” I looked back at my pile on the cement again and couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  Dame helped me get the things into my car and we were driving away from the school in the pickup truck. He plugged his MP3 player into what was clearly a new radio in the old truck, turned the volume all the way down and pushed back in his seat. Looking around as we rode in silence, I noticed that there were no seat belts, the air-conditioning had been torn out, and there was a big hole in the floor beneath the gas pedal. I hadn’t been in a pickup truck in years, and this one had to have been old enough to belong to my grandfather. But Dame, who’d looked comfy riding in the back of a chauffeured Bentley days before, seemed just as natural here.

  “Do we have to go somewhere to get the song?” I asked.

  “No ... I’m just waiting until you can hear it.”

  “Hear it?”

  “Trust me,” he said smoothly. Still handling the truck, he looked over at me and I swore he winked without moving his eye.

  I felt I should probably protest, but the heat in the car was getting to me and I just wanted to catch a breeze, so I sat back in my seat like him and held my head toward the window frame, just as I had when I was a little girl r
iding in my grandfather’s truck. I relaxed my neck and let my arms fall to my sides.

  As we rolled down University Boulevard and through the middle of downtown, I wondered for a while who might be seeing me riding with Dame. The people from church. From school. My parents. What would they say? We weren’t doing anything. Just riding. But I knew they’d say something. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be and that was enough. And then I thought of how crazy it would look if we inched up to Evan at a stop sign. He’d look over at me. Open his mouth. Roll down his window. Say my name in a question. I searched the lanes, the parking spots for his silver BMW, but never saw it. And by the time I got tired of looking for the car and recognized that no one—not one single person walking by—even bothered to look, I realized that I’d been riding in silence for over thirty minutes. I’d unbuttoned the top of my shirt and taken out my earrings. The breeze had gotten into me and riding along beneath the steel top, I didn’t even feel the heat anymore.

  “You ready?” Dame asked, turning the knobs on the radio.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Break out, his voice called through the speakers. Yeah. Break out. There was a pause and then a beat came in. Fast and full of a kicking bass that thumped in my chest, it vibrated through the truck, rattling so hard I could feel it in between my toes. It was loud. Loud and making the doors creak. But still the constant waves moving through my body made me remember when I used to ride in the front seat of Billie’s car freshman year in college as we listened to UGK, the 69 Boyz, 2 Live Crew, OutKast—all of the rap CDs my father would toss in the garbage had he found them in my room.

  Then, just as I began to fall back into memory and nod my head to the beat, I heard something that was unfamiliar in a rap song, but very familiar to me—the unmistakable thunder of a Hammond B3 organ.

  “Oh,” I said, straightening up, “that’s an—”

  “No.” Dame stopped me. “Just stay relaxed. Feel it.”

  I unfolded again and listened. Dame came in and rhymed on top of the beat. As I’d heard, his flow was fast and intense. I felt old just trying to make out the words and it was funny because when I stopped trying, I could hear and understand them perfectly.

  In the verse, Dame was talking about the music industry and other rappers and how he wanted to break through. Everybody wanted something from him. Everybody wanted to “take” something and try to “remake something” and not give credit. Then he said only God could “take and make,” so he was going to take and make and he was going to be God. A god. Any god.

  I felt my forehead crinkle. I was used to black men referring to themselves as God, a god, but it sounded ludicrous. The very concept of God was perfection and man, destined to die, was innately ungodly. A maker or not, it wasn’t something that could be debated.

  “What you think?” he asked, turning the song off before it was over.

  “Well, I think it’s ...”

  “Be honest. I ain’t come all the way to get you to have you blow smoke. I want to know what you think.”

  We were at a stoplight. I saw two girls from Black Warrior walking by on the sidewalk on the other side of the truck. They were wearing tight jeans and cutoff T-shirts that showed the muscles in their stomachs. Just before the light changed, one noticed Dame and pointed toward the car.

  “Dame!” they both squealed, jumping up and down like kangaroos beside each other. A few other people walking by turned and looked, too. Dame nodded his head coolly as if we were in a music video and smashed his foot on the gas.

  “So?” he continued, weaving into the traffic in front of us.

  “What does it matter what I think? Obviously, I’m not your target audience.”

  “Oh, you’re starting to sound like them now.”

  “I liked it. I liked the beat. The organ was interesting. It all flowed together.”

  “What about what I said?” he asked, looking at me quickly.

  “The whole thing about breaking through the industry—I got that.”

  “But?”

  “But I just don’t know why you had to bring in the stuff about God.”

  “You have a problem with me saying I’m God?”

  “I don’t have a problem with it. Like you said the other night, you can say what you want to say. I just don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “So, you don’t think the black man is God?”

  “No. That’s crazy. God made man. Man can’t be God.”

  “Spoken like a true Christian.”

  “I’m not hiding behind my religion here. I don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’m not some Bible-toting fanatic.”

  “I was about to say, I did notice that you didn’t pray over your food the other night.”

  “Very funny.” I sighed. This was where my beliefs seemed to constantly come under the microscope with people. Like I told Kayla, they all wanted me to be one-dimensional—my faith, my life. But sometimes I didn’t pray over meals. And I didn’t care. I wasn’t even sure that it mattered. Sometimes I didn’t want to go to church. And a lot of times I made up silly excuses and flat-out lied to my own parents. I didn’t know if that mattered either. I’d never say any of that aloud, but it was true.

  “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” Dame said, obviously looking to see if I was affected. And if it had been years ago, I might have been. Then I was overly concerned with how my spiritual path looked to other people—is she saved, isn’t she saved.... But as I got older and it got harder, I decided that me loving the Lord had to be enough. I couldn’t pretend I had the Bible all figured out just because my father’s a pastor. He chose that when he got saved after years of running the street. I was still a work in progress and willing to admit it.

  “It’s not that. I just don’t want you to think I’m so small-minded that I can’t even consider your idea of man being God,” I said. “I do question things sometimes. But I believe in one Creator and that’s it.”

  “Look, I was raised in the church just like every other kid in Tuscaloosa. And I believe in God, but I think, if people are going to say we’re made in His image, they may as well accept the responsibility that they’re Gods, too. Like, your parents, they made you. So you’re a part of each of them. Right?”

  “Yes,” I answered, noticing that it was getting dark outside and looked at my watch to see that it was already 8:30 p.m. Time was rolling fast beneath the wheels of that truck. Evan had meetings and he probably wasn’t home yet. But he’d be looking for me soon. I thought to call, but I was enjoying the conversation and company too much.

  “So in a sense, if you’re a part of both of them, then you’re them.”

  Dame sounded like a poet reading at one of the poetry readings in the Hay Center at Stillman. Listening to him, it was hard to imagine he was a high school dropout. All of this clearly mattered so much to him.

  “I can’t say no to any of that,” I said.

  “Now, if we connect that to man, then man should just accept that he’s God and stop claiming he should act ‘godly,’ and just be a god. I think it’s some real bullshit when people say they want to act godly, but they’re just men. If you say you’re a god, you have no choice. Your word is your bond. You’re not the God. You’re God’s son. Still a god.”

  I looked at Dame and I knew I was grinning. He was so wrapped up in his ideology, he was now tapping on the steering wheel and getting loud.

  “What you laughing at?” he asked, just as I burst out in laughter.

  “You’re so serious about this,” I said. “You should’ve seen how intent you were.”

  “Hell yeah. I’m trying to build,” he said, laughing now, too.

  “Well, that’s very Tupac-narian of you.”

  “You know ’Pac?”

  “Of course.”

  “No doubt. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. ’Pac had a lot to say about personal responsibility and living up to your potential. That’s all a brother’s trying to say,” he added, his voice mockin
gly militant. We both raised our fists and continued laughing. “You know, it’s crazy. All those years I was away, I just kept thinking what it would be like to come home and kick it with you and now I see, it’s cool as hell,” he said.

  “Oh, now we’re kicking it?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean. Just like, talking to you like a real person. Not my teacher. Just another person.”

  “I know what you mean,” I admitted. “I didn’t think you were as mature as you are. I was expecting you to be cursing every five words and drinking forties. You’d be all gangster and rhyming for no reason.” I started moving my arms around like I was an angry rapper prowling a stage.

  “Oh, MCs are just like anyone else—at least if they want to survive in this industry. We have to turn it off and on. You can’t be all hard all the time. Hip-hop is on The View ... Good Morning America. Now, you can’t come at Regis and Kelly like, ‘Y’ know what I’m say? Know what I’m saying, my nigga?’ ” We both laughed. “That silliness won’t sell any records and this is all about money. Trust me. You’re hood in the ’hood, but when you leave, you let that go. Hip-hop done grown up. We sip champagne when we thirsty now—that’s Biggie.”

  “I know Biggie Smalls, too. I’m not that old,” I protested, slapping his arm gingerly.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “with all this stuff about you not liking music.”

  “I never said I didn’t like music. I said I don’t listen to much hip-hop.”

  “Well what about your own music? What’s up with that?” he asked, and in his voice it seemed he’d been in the church the other week when I couldn’t sing. And I hadn’t sung since then. It was a fact that presented an internal dilemma I wasn’t ready to consider. So I just stopped talking about it and thinking about it and no one had bothered to bring it up again. But I knew I had to figure something out. I couldn’t teach music if I couldn’t sing.

  “Nothing, I guess,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’m just not singing right now.”

  “Not singing? You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” He slowed the truck down and pulled into a spot at a Waffle House. “You have to be singing.” There was a sense of urgency in his voice. He really couldn’t believe it.