Alena thought about what had transpired in her life in the past few weeks. She thought about Maya and what her safety meant to her. It meant everything.
“Yes. I am,” she answered. Her words sounded strong even though she was trembling inside.
***
That evening Alena sat in her living room drinking a cup of tea and trying to make sense of what Gloria told her. Though it didn’t make any sense, she knew it was all completely true. As she sat there urging herself to breathe deeply, she heard her name. She thought maybe she had imagined it and took another sip of tea. Then she heard her name again, this time louder and clearer. It was the same sweet voice from the night of her birthday, high and mystical like the silvery tones of a flute. She looked around the room. The voice called her name again. It seemed to be coming from the corner of her living room where she had propped up the Black Madonna painting.
She stood up and walked slowly to the painting. The voice grew louder and clearer with each step. When Alena stopped in front of the painting the voice spoke again, this time sounding as if someone was standing right in front of her.
“Alena, close your eyes and see from within. Breathe deeply. Allow your heart to open. Come to me, Dear One. Touch me.”
The urge to obey pulled on her body like a great magnet. Her hands and feet began to tingle. Alena reached her fingertips to Mother Mary’s brown painted face. In the instant she touched the canvas it trembled and gave way to an opening of sparkling light. The room filled with brilliance. Suddenly Alena felt as if she was being squeezed between worlds. In that breathless moment she was pulled through the swirling vortex of light and transported to another realm.
In the next instant she was standing at an enormous gilded door encrusted with glittering emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. Alena gasped as she beheld the magnificent vision. Then before her, Mary Magdalene appeared in all her glory.
“It’s you!” Alena beamed, her face lighting up with joy. “You came back for me!”
“It is you who has returned to us. Welcome, sister,” Mary said, smiling warmly.
The great door swung open at their approach. Beyond it awaited a dismal and decaying palace, the complete opposite of its splendid entrance. Alena winced. There was barely enough light to make out its crumbling columns and floors or its massive soaring gray walls shrouded in cobwebs. Mary turned to Alena who peered at her with questioning eyes.
“You must trust,” she said, already sensing Alena’s fear. She held Alena’s hand in hers, leading her through the opening. “Let us explore, shall we?” The love and mercy Alena felt emanating from Mary gave her the courage to step into this grim unknown world.
“Where are we? What is this place?” Alena asked, her anxious voice echoing off the walls.
“This is the Throne Room of your Divine Queendom. My Dear One, we are inside of your heart.”
NINE
Alena struggled to grasp what Mary had just told her.
“We’re inside my heart?” Alena asked in amazement.
“Yes. This is your heart, and this is where the first lesson of your initiation begins.”
“But—” , Alena began to mutter.
“You will understand more clearly as we proceed,” Mary assured her before she could continue. “Let us walk further.”
Alena decided that it would be wise not to ask any questions of Mary and followed her lead in silence. Her stride was graceful and majestic as they went on, over the filthy stone floors and through the immense breadth of Alena’s heart. Alena wondered how a being as glorious and pure as Mary Magdalene could stand a place like this one.
As they walked Alena saw that the dark palace was a labyrinth of great halls and staircases that opened up to five separate grand chambers. They were almost upon the first chamber when suddenly Mary halted in her tracks.
“Careful!” she warned. They had come upon a crevasse in the surface of the floor. Embedded into it was a hardened brownish, gray substance that had corroded into the stone. Mary helped Alena jump over it.
“Dear One, do you see here?” Mary said pointing to the brown matter embedded into the fissure. “Old hurt you have refused to recognize. This is the decay of false promises, those made to you and those you have made to yourself.”
Alena could only nod as Mary motioned for them to continue. As they walked, the light grew even dimmer until the hall they were traveling became almost completely dark. Alena advanced cautiously, reaching her hand out toward the wall for guidance. But an acrid smelling sludge oozed down the stone walls. It glowed a sickening yellow-green in the wan light. She drew her hand back in disgust, her stomach knotting as a telltale stench snaked into her nose. The Shetani. Alena shot Mary a pleading glance, who again sensed her trepidation yet nodded at her to forge ahead despite it.
With every step into the darkness, Alena knew there was no going back. She swallowed and pushed on, spreading her hand across her chest to press down against her terror. In the distance growls and snarls sounded from the shadows. Something was approaching. The sounds drew closer and closer, the ground rumbled. The rising odor made her want to vomit.
The hall opened into a hollow stone clearing. As soon as they stepped into its dim light a great beast vaulted at her. Its slimy skin was the color of soot and it hissed like a viper. It was so close to Alena she could feel its hot sooty breath sweeping over her face.
“Hail!” Mary commanded the beast. Mary’s voice thundered and echoed, no longer holding the sweetness it had minutes before. Its lips peeled back, bearing a row of dagger sharp fangs as it snarled at Alena. Another beast darted at her, its bulging eyes glowing red.
“Demons, hail by the name of Christ!” Mary commanded once more. The power of her words sheared through the darkness and the beasts relented and fled. Alena crumbled onto the cold floor, her chest heaving. Tremors of icy terror wracked her body as she screamed.
“Peace,” Mary said to her calmly. “Peace be still, Dear One. You are safe. You must remember these words of power. The beasts must submit to your belief in the light you emit when you speak in the name of Christ.”
“Why? Why did you lead me here if you knew I’d be killed?” Alena cried breathlessly. Mary only smiled and helped her to her feet.
“Dear One, those beasts cannot kill you unless you give in to them,” Mary placed a hand on Alena’s shoulder. “That was Heaviness and Rage, two of many demon servants to the Shetani.”
“How did they get into my heart? Who put them here?”
“My dear, it was you who allowed them entry. You let them in with your own anger, your bitterness and self-loathing.”
Alena’s brows furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Come and see.”
Unbeknownst to Alena they had finally reached the door of the first chamber. Mary approached and it flung open to an enchanting sight. The bright chamber held a massive, long emerald table flanked by seven golden sconces, each about four feet in height, with violet colored fires roaring atop them.
“Alena, your heart is your power source. Your heart also gives either permission or denial to the realm of darkness. It is the doorway between Heaven and Earth, where the spirit realm and the physical world meet. It is the epicenter of infinite divine power and gives you the ability to create any and everything. This is the Power of the Heart.”
Mary placed a hand over Alena’s still thumping chest.
“Creation is manifested with belief and feeling. In the grand design of the human heart, your emotions are the rulers. They are the doorways that either shield and fortify your heart or give Beasts of Darkness such as those the right to invade it. This is the Law of Free Will that the Creator has granted man. Do you understand?”
Alena nodded.
“The Beasts of the Shetani have no power in or of themselves, however, emotions like bitterness, guilt, shame, resentment, anger, and fear open up heart wounds. They give these demon servants authority to infiltrate your heart, what we call your Throne Room.
The door that we entered your heart through today was an open wound, a breech in your heart that remains because you have not yet healed, you have not yet forgiven. Dark emotions are the Shetani’s food.”
Alena looked down at her hands, they were still trembling.
“How do I get rid of them? Alena asked.
“That is what I have come to teach you. First, look at the walls of your heart, Alena. Tell me what it is you see.”
Mary raised her hand to one of the enormous stone walls and at her gesture it shone like fine crystal. In its reflection Alena recognized her own face. Her life was playing like a movie upon the walls, memory by memory. In the first frame, Alena saw herself being born.
“My God, that’s me! I was delivered right into my daddy’s hands. He was still a lawyer back then. Two years before I was born, he was debarred by a racist white bar association in the South before we moved to Maryland. It was Daddy’s lifelong dream to be an attorney and he was the first of all his family to graduate college. I was born right into his heartbreak. I watched him give his life trying to wrestle that dream back. But it never came back. I watched him pour all that heartbreak right back into us,” Alena sighed. Her heart ached for her father despite all he had put her through.
“I remember being so happy and full of rage at the same time when my parents would tell us stories about those good old days when Daddy was still practicing. I swelled with pride imagining how my parents once lived so well. It was a far cry from the poverty that kept chasing us.”
Alena’s four-year-old self sitting on her father’s lap, flashed on the wall.
“That’s me and Daddy. Like always, I was trying to impress him. Back then I would say and do anything to make him proud of me. I had so much fear of my father and at the same time I craved his love.”
The next frame appeared on the wall.
“I’m seven here.” Alena fell to her knees, her heart filled with sorrow and terror. “This is when Daddy... Stop it. Please, stop the images.”
Mary waved a hand and the scene quickly changed on the wall.
“After that happened, I lost my voice and my heart. The fear he put in me would always live in my body. The shame. I always thought people could see it marked on me. I hated him, I hated my mother too. I hated myself. Still do I guess. From that day on I learned not to trust my parents to protect me or provide what I needed, and I certainly didn’t trust God to do it, either.”
“All is well now, Dear One. I assure you that you have always been under our protection and most certainly, our love.”
Alena felt a surge of anger and her eyes darted from the scene on the wall back to Mary’s.
“How can I believe that?” she blurted out. “If I’ve always been under your protection then how was my father allowed to hurt me? How was any of this allowed to happen?”
“Alena, I understand your need for answers. They are threaded into the tapestry of spiritual beings living human experiences on the earthly plane. The answers are here for you. For now, we ask you to trust that what I say is true. Please, continue.” Alena sighed despairingly and lifted her eyes back up to the wall.
In the next scene, a young Alena and her sister Agatha are running frantically.
“That’s my older sister Agatha and me. She was nine. I was seven. This was before Syreeta and Randy were born and the first time my parents left us home alone and we almost got taken way. We were asleep when we heard banging the front door. It was the landlord and the sheriff coming to evict us. Here they’re hauling our belongings onto the lawn. They were the bad people my father warned us about. The same kind of bad people who’d debarred him. They were the ones who made our family so poor, and made Daddy so sad and mean that he did those terrible things to me. They want to take everything now—our home, next maybe even me and Aggie. The landlord asked where our parents were. We just stared back at him and obeyed Daddy’s rule—never ever tell anyone our business. Don’t ever talk to a stranger, especially not a cop.”
Alena covered her face with her hands, not wanting to see the images or remember those days. After a few minutes she looked up again at the pictures playing on the wall.
“Daddy taught us that the world was a very, very dangerous place especially if you were black. The bad people were always plotting to take what you prayed for, dreamed of and worked hard to get. I knew this to be true when the landlord said he was taking us to Child Protective Services, CPS. They could take us away from our parents and put us in a home and separate us, our greatest fear. According to my dad, they attacked us to keep him distracted from getting his law license back since he was on the verge of a victory against them. By the grace of God I suppose, CPS didn’t charge my parents or keep us in protective custody that day. We were free. We were also homeless. We stayed that way for years. We’d be in a home for about a year, get evicted the next, and end up in a shelter.”
Mary nodded knowingly as the next frame began to play.
“I’m nine here. It’s the morning after Christmas. Our house had burned to the ground the night before. A log burning in the fireplace rolled free onto a rug and started the fire. Thankfully, my little brother Randy woke Daddy up in time and he got us all out safely. Everything was destroyed including our Christmas gifts. The only things we had left were the clothes on our backs and a few water logged family photos. We lost everything and once again we were homeless and sent to a shelter.”
Another frame rolled on the wall.
“I’m eleven here, in the sixth grade. Everybody knew me as the poor, quiet, dark girl. I had a crooked, gapped smile so I never smiled. Sometimes we were living out of a tent on a campsite if we couldn’t get space at a shelter. I was eating my dinners at soup kitchens and saving my free lunches for Randy and my youngest sister Syreeta. I carried my secret shame the best I could. My secret life. I prayed hard every day for a normal life like the other kids had, but I never felt as worthy as them. In my heart I didn’t matter, not to God or to the world. I gave up saying prayers. My saving grace was my mind. I was smart, we all were, smart as whips. I may have been poor but I was in gifted and talented all through school.”
The images shifted and changed again.
“Here I am at sixteen. That’s TK, Thomas Khalil, my first love. He insulated me from my dad, from everything really. But it didn’t last long. CPS and the police were called to our family’s trailer while I was at his house. My brother Randy had gone to school one morning in my father’s shoes, begging his teacher for food. My father was nowhere to be found and the neighbors tipped off the police that we were being neglected. My boyfriend’s little brother saw the police taking Randy and Reeta away and raced to tell me the news. I ran back to the trailer with TK. I tried to stop him from going in, but he wouldn’t let me go inside alone. The neighbors told us that Reeta and Randy had been taken into state custody. By then Aggie had already gone off to college, no one was there to stop them. I hated myself for not being there to save my family.
I couldn’t stop TK from seeing the squalor we’d been living in on the other side of that aluminum door, and once he did, all of my secrets came spilling out. They were too much for a sixteen-year-old boy. I knew in that moment that he would stop loving me and he did. My aunt and grandmother came all the way up from South Carolina and managed to get the state to release my brother and sister to their care. I went with them.”
The scene changed once more.
“That’s me in college. All of those smarts landed me a scholarship in one of the top schools in New York City and it changed the course of my life. I had a place to stay and do my work in peace. That dorm room was my haven. By the end of my first semester I had almost straight A’s.
I thought my life was finally changing for the better. But in that same year, I made a poor choice to trust a co-worker at a temp job. He brought me to his house under the guise of a date, and I had consensual sex with him. Moments later he let me know that his friend had been watching us the whole time and now it was “
his turn.” When I refused, they held me down. I tried to talk them out of it. I fought. I cried. I begged. My begging turned to babbling. He yelled at me. ‘Shut the fuck up, my own mama don’t tell me no.’ he’s saying. Then he pried my thighs apart and he raped me.”
Alena paused. Her eyes filled with tears of shame again, threatening to run over.
“I can’t, Mary.” She dropped her eyes from the screen.
“You are free from judgment, Dear One. Speak your story freely, Alena. Release it.”
Alena swallowed hard and Alena folded her arms around herself. “They took turns raping me for hours. The next morning while they slept I snuck out the back door. I ran and ran until I got to the subway station at five in the morning with my body throbbing with pain and my soul shut down. I never spoke about the rape just like I never told anyone except Mama and Syreeta about Daddy. I was so embarrassed and ashamed and sure this too was my fault. After that, I focused hard and vowed, no matter what, I was going to become someone so incredibly accomplished that I would transcend everything I had ever gone through and prove myself worthy once and for all. I swore that my life wouldn’t have an ounce of resemblance to my childhood. I picked up Daddy’s old dream and decided to go into law. I guess in a way, it was my last effort to get him to love me—or at least make me feel human again. At twenty-three, I graduated from Columbia Magna Cum Laude.”
A younger version of Gabriel had entered the scene.
“I met Gabriel three months after my law school graduation. Of course, he wasn’t a hotshot attorney or the president of his father’s company then. After our first date he fully expected to sleep with me, but by this time I had grown at least a little wiser. I told him no. He complained that it was late and he lived an hour away, upstate. I gave in and let him sleep on my couch. My refusal to sleep with him seemed to intrigue him though, and we dated many times after that. When we went out, women’s heads would swivel at the sight of him. He was tall, handsome, and he was white. There was no hint of the poor black curse that had hovered over my father all of those years.”
A Fistful of Honey Page 8