Good! Doctor says, louder than I think he means too. You have to teach yourself to do that, to speak to your rational self and as you say, ride it out.
Mona's voice dims to the humming the deep freezer makes when I'm ironing clothes in the basement.
I'm not dying. I'm not dying, I say to myself over and over. It's just another spell. It's just another spell.
In a matter of minutes that seem to draw out for a lifetime, everything leaves then becomes clear again.
In the parking lot, after we've parted, Mona turns, waves to me and hollers, See you next time. I'll let you know about the wedding, she says and winks.
There is no I hope you feel better or let me know how you're doing. I wave back and watch her heels clicking across the asphalt toward her Volvo.
I couldn't say anything I had on my mind to say, I tell Doctor. I feel tears rising up in my neck.
I see, Doctor says, knocking his posed fingers against his forehead. You did well though, he says, I think you are getting better. You are gaining control. And you look so good today, he adds, well rested.
But I know he's thinking I'm screwed up in the head. He's a brother too, which makes it worse. There is so much more I want to say. So much more I want to know. I want to ask him if he's married, and if he is would he cheat on his wife. I am wondering if he would find Mona attractive. I want to ask him if he's hungry. If he wants to go get a bite to eat just to talk some more. I want to bury my head into his shoulder and just cry but I can't, I've already told him too much. In a few minutes he will write me a prescription, shake my hand, and schedule me another appointment. But before that moment he gives me a smile. A genuine smile that I snuggle in and feel clear down to my toes. And I am waiting with hope for what comes next.
About the Contributors
FAITH ADIELE has received the Dorothy & Granville Hicks Residency in Literature from the Yaddo Corporation, as well as fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Additional honors include the first Willard R. Espy Award in Nonfiction and the PEN New England Emerging Writer Award. Faith divides her time between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Iowa City, Iowa, where she is currently enrolled in The Writers Workshop and the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She is at work on a memoir.
JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN is the author of the novel Rails Under My Back and Harbors and Spirits, a collection of poems. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois in Chicago.
UNOMA N. AZUAH received the Hellman/Hammett grant for her writings on women's issues as well as the 2000 Leonard Trawick creative writing award from the English Department at Cleveland State University, where she got her MA in English. Ms. Azuah served as the secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA Lagos), and as the publicity secretary of Women Writers of Nigeria (WRITA).
NICOLE BAILEY-WILLIAMS is the author of A Little Piece of Sky, a novel that spent two months in the #1 bestselling position for coming-of-age novels on Amazon.com. In addition to being an English teacher with the Ewing Township Board of Education, she is a freelance writer and co-host of The Literary Review, a book review show which airs on WDAS (1480 AM). She writes for Publishers Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, and QBR (Quarterly Black Review), and was a contributing writer in the Notable Black American Men reference book. She currently resides in Mercer County, New Jersey, with her husband, Gregory.
STEVEN BARNES, the author of fifteen novels including Lion's Blood and as many teleplays, has been nominated for both the Hugo and Cable Ace awards. Mr. Barnes lives in Washington with his wife, author Tananarive Due, and his daughter.
AMY DUBOIS BARNETT is editor-in-chief of Honey magazine and an award-winning journalist. Previously, Barnett spent two years at Essence magazine, where she oversaw five sections: Food, Home, Entertaining, Travel, and Parenting. She also top-edited the magazine's fashion stories and edited features. Prior to that, Barnett was Fashion and Beauty Features Editor at Essence magazine. She is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Award for fiction writing and is currently working on a novel.
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES is the author of Plain Brown Wrapper (an Alex Powell Novel) and coauthor of Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times. She is also a contributing columnist for the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, has written for Vogue, the New York Times, Quarterly Black Review of Books, Essence, Emerge, and other publications. She is a correspondent on National Public Radio's The Tavis Smiley Show and her commentaries frequently appear on NPR's All Things Considered.
BERTICE BERRY, Ph.D., is an inspirational speaker, sociologist, and former standup comedian. She is the author of four works of nonfiction and the novels Redemption Song, The Haunting of Hip-Hop, and Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-Fix Remedy. She lives in San Diego, California.
MICHELE ANDREA BOWEN, the author of Church Folk, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with master's degrees in both history and public health. She lives in North Carolina.
CONNIE BRISCOE is the author of P.G. County, Sisters & Lovers, Big Girls Don't Cry, and A Long Way from Home. She is the former managing editor of the American Annals of the Deaf at Gallaudet University and has been hearing-impaired for most of her adult life. She lives in Ellicott City, Maryland.
LORI BRYANT-WOOLRIDGE, the author of the novel Read Between the Lies, is a veteran of the television broadcasting business. She spent seven years at ABC and has worked at PBS and Black Entertainment Television. She has won an Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Writing.
CRIS BURKS earned her MFA in creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago, where she taught fiction writing for several years. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in several literary publications, including Shooting Star Review and Short Fiction by Women. She lives in Sacramento, California, and is the author of SilkyDreamGirl.
BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL is the author of three acclaimed novels: Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, which won an NAACP Image Award for Literature, What You Owe Me, and the New York Times bestsellers Brothers and Sisters and Singing in the Comeback Choir. She lives in Los Angeles.
LORENE CARY is the author of Black Ice, a memoir, and the novels Pride and The Price of a Child. She teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children.
VERONICA CHAMBERS, a former editor at The New York Times Magazine is the author of the memoir Mama's Girl. Currently, Veronica is a cultural writer for Newsweek. She is a frequent contributor to both The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and author of a book about filmmaker John Singleton, Poetic Justice: Filmmaking in South Central. She is also the author of two children's books, Amistad Rising: The Battle for Freedom and Marisol and Magdalena. She is in the early stages of other fiction projects.
MAXINE CLAIR is the author of the novel October Suite and Rattlebone, a collection of short stories, which won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction, among other awards. She is also a Guggenheim Fellow.
PEARL CLEAGE is the author of the novels I Wish I Had a Red Dress and What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day as well as Mad at Miles: A Black Woman's Guide to Truth and Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. She is an accomplished playwright and a cofounder of the literary magazine Catalyst. Ms. Cleage lives in Atlanta with her husband.
J. CALIFORNIA COOPER is the author of The Future Has a Past and five other collections of short stories, including Homemade Love, winner of the 1989 American Book Award, and the novels The Wake of the Wind, Family, and In Search of Satisfaction. She lives in northern California.
DANA CRUM is a journalist and poet who lives in Harlem. Crum has built an impressive résumé as a freelance writer. Since getting his first big break in the urban magazine The Source, Crum has successfully made a name for himself in both commercial and underground syndication.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT is the author of After the Dance
and two novels, The Farming of Bones and Breath, Eyes, Memory. Krik? Krak!, her collection of stories, was nominated for a National Book Award. Critical acclaim and awards for her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, included a Granta Regional Award for the Best Young American Novelists, a Pushcart Prize, and fiction awards from Essence and Seventeen magazines.
R. ERICA DOYLE 's fiction has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly. She has published poems and articles in Callalloo, Ms., Best American Poetry 2001, and Black Issues Book Review, among other venues.
TANANARIVE DUE is the author of the novels The Living Blood, The Black Rose, My Soul to Keep, and The Between. Freedom in the Family, a book written with her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, will be published in 2003. Due has a BS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MA in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature as a Rotary Foundation Scholar.
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM is the author of Gabriel's Story and A Walk Through Darkness. He was born in New York City and spent his formative years in Trinidad, his parents' homeland. He received a BA and MFA from the University of Maryland and won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award in 1992. Durham, along with his wife and children, divides his time between Scotland and the United States.
PATRICIA ELAM is the author of Breathing Room. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Washington Post, Essence, Emerge, Newsday, and in anthologies such as Fathers' Songs and New Stories from the South. A winner of the O. Henry Award, she has been a commentator for National Public Radio, NBC News, CNN, and the BBC. She lives in Washington, D.C.
PERCIVAL EVERETT is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of fourteen books, including Glyph, Frenzy, Watershed, and Suder. He lives in Los Angeles.
ROBERT FLEMING, a former award-winning reporter at the New York Daily News, is the author of The Wisdom Of The Elders, The African American Writer's Handbook, Havoc After Dark: Tales of Terror, and the editor of After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men. His poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous periodicals and books, such as Brotherman, UpSouth, Sacred Fire, Brown Sugar, and Dark Matter. He lives in New York City.
ARTHUR FLOWERS is the author of two novels, De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues. He is a cofounder of the New Renaissance Writers Guild.
THOMAS GLAVE is the author of Whose Song? And Other Stories. Voted a “Writer on the Verge” in June 2000's the Village Voice Literary Supplement, he has won many writing awards, among them the prestigious O. Henry Prize. He is only the second gay black writer, after James Baldwin, to claim that honor. A 1993 honors graduate of Bowdoin College and a graduate of Brown University, he traveled as a Fulbright Scholar in 1998–99 to Jamaica, where he studied Jamaican historiography and Jamaican-Caribbean intellectual and literary traditions. Glave has been published and praised in many prestigious literary journals and his work has appeared in various anthologies. Born in the Bronx, New York, he was raised there and in Kingston, Jamaica. He is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
MARITA GOLDEN is the author of nine works of fiction and nonfiction, including her memoir, Migrations of the Heart, and the bestselling books Long Distance Life and Saving Our Sons. Her most recent novel is The Edge of Heaven. Marita Golden serves as president of the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
JEWELLE GOMEZ is an activist, teacher, arts administrator, and literary critic. A transplanted Bostonian, she has lived in New York for twenty years, most recently in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Gilda Stories.
E. LYNN HARRIS is a former IBM computer sales executive and a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He is the author of eight previous novels: A Love of My Own, Any Way the Wind Blows, Not a Day Goes By, Abide with Me, If This World Were Mine, This Too Shall Pass, Just as I Am, and Invisible Life. In 1996 and 2002 Just as I Am and Any Way the Wind Blows were named Novel of the Year by the Blackboard African American Bestsellers, Inc. If This World Were Mine won the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence. In 2000 and 2001 Harris was named one of the fifty-five “Most Intriguing African Americans” by Ebony and inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. In 2002, Harris was included in Savoy magazine's “100 Leaders and Heroes in Black America.” Harris divides his time between New York City and Atlanta, Georgia.
DAVID HAYNES is the author of a number of books including All American Dream Dolls, Somebody Else's Mama, and Right By My Side, which was a winner in the 1992 Minnesota Voices Project and was selected by the American Library Association as one of 1994's best books for young adults. Two of Haynes's stories have been recorded for the National Public Radio series Selected Shorts. In 1996 Haynes was named by Granta magazine as one of the best young American novelists. Haynes is at work on his next novel, The Majordomo's Daughter.
RAVI HOWARD is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Ravi's winning story Like Trees, Walking was inspired by the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald by the Ku Klux Klan. Howard is at work on the novel Like Trees Walking.
BRIAN KEITH JACKSON is the author of The Queen of Harlem, Walking Through Mirrors, and The View from Here. Jackson has received fellowships from Art Matters, the Jerome Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. The View from Here won the American Library Association Literary Award for First Fiction from the Black Caucus of America. Jackson lives in Harlem.
MITCHELL JACKSON is a native or Portland, Oregon. He received a BS in Speech Communications and an MA in creative writing from Portland State University. Jackson is currently living in New York City, freelance writing and attending New York University's MFA program.
SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU is the author of Hot Johnny and The River Where Blood Is Born, which won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award for Fiction in 1998. Jackson-Opoku has received several honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Gwendolyn Brooks Poet Laureate Awards.
KENJI JASPER is the author of the novels Dakota Grand and Dark. His work has appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Source, and other publications. A native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Morehouse College, he now lives in Brooklyn.
YOLANDA JOE is the author of the novels This Just In, Bebe's By Golly Wow, He Say, She Say, and Falling Leaves of Ivy. She also writes mysteries under the name Ardella Garland. Joe is a native of Chicago and received her MS from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York. After returning to Chicago, she began working in news radio for CBS, then switched to television news and worked as a writer/producer for a decade before beginning a full-time writing career.
MAT JOHNSON is the author of Drop. He was a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, and received his MFA from Columbia University. He is currently at work on his second novel, set in Harlem where he lives.
R.M. JOHNSON is the author of the novels Father Found and The Harris Men. He lives in Chicago.
EDWARD P. JONES 's debut collection of short stories Lost in the City: Stories was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992 and won the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for best first fiction.
TAYARI JONES is the author of the novel Leaving Atlanta. She is a native of Atlanta, Georgia.
AGYMAH KAMAU is the author of Flickering Shadows and Pictures of a Dying Man. He is originally from Barbados.
MICHAEL KAYODE lives in Washington, D.C., where he is at work on a novel.
VICTOR D. LAVALLE is the author of Slapboxing with Jesus, a collection of stories, and the novel The Ecstatic. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and received his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Currently he is at work on his first novel.
HELEN ELAINE LEE is the author of the novels Water Marked and The Serpent's Gift. She teaches in the Program in Writing and Humanistic
Studies at MIT. Educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Lee won rave reviews and a BCALA First Novel Award for The Serpent's Gift. She lives in the Boston area.
WILLIAM HENRY LEWIS is the author of a collection of stories, In the Arms of Our Elders, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Best American Short Stories 1996.
CHRISTINE LINCOLN is the author of Sap Rising. Lincoln was born and raised in Baltimore. At age thirty-four, she graduated from Washington College and was awarded the school's Sophie Kerr Prize, an event that was covered by The New York Times and The Washington Post.
BERNICE L. MCFADDEN was born, raised, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. In 1997, Ms. McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to rewriting the novel that would become Sugar. McFadden is the author of three novels, the national bestsellers Sugar and The Warmest December, and This Bitter Earth. The trade paperback edition of The Warmest December was published in January 2002.
TERRY MCMILLAN is the author of Mama, Disappearing Acts, and the bestsellers Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and A Day Late and a Dollar Short. She is also the editor of the groundbreaking anthology Breaking Ice.
WALTER MOSLEY is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series, Blue Light, and RL's Dream, and two collections of stories featuring the character Socrates Fortlow: Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, for which he received the Anisfield-Wold Award, and Walkin' the Dog. He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.
ANIKA NAILAH is the author of Free: And Other Stories. Nailah is the director of Books of Hope, a program that encourages young people to write and self-publish their own books. Her stories have appeared in several African American newspapers, including Reunion and Flare. She lives in Massachusetts.
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