by Randi Pink
“Hey,” he heard her singsongy voice through his closed window.
“Damn,” he said aloud, knowing what that meant. She was on her way up the leggy tree outside of his bedroom. He needed to write. Even a little, quickly. He cracked the window and began writing as she slowly and carefully climbed in her frilly dress.
Hey there, Miss miss:
Please stay where you are,
Miss miss, you don’t know me at all.
Don’t throw rocks, don’t kiss.
No offense, Miss miss,
But there’s better than this,
Much better, there’s bliss.
Miss miss, I like,
Black Angel, I love, Miss miss, I need you to know.
Please go, Miss miss.
You’ll be somebody’s Mrs.
Not mine, Miss miss.
Not even close.
There. He’d written his first poem about Dorothy Mae, and while it wasn’t anything special, it revealed how he truly felt about her on the hidden inside. As poetry does.
Isaiah heard a small rasping sound on his bedroom window. It was Dorothy Mae’s bright pink manicured fingernail scraping a heart against the glass. He shut his journal and walked over to raise his window so she could clamber inside.
“Come in,” he said, trying to sound light and airy while feeling heavy with grief and craving for someone the polar opposite to Dorothy Mae.
He slid the window down after her and stared at her for a brief moment, hoping she’d say something worth hearing.
As she leaned in to kiss him, he dodged. “Have a seat,” he said, bouncing around the bed like a kangaroo. “I have to run to the toilet.”
He didn’t have to go to the toilet at all. He just needed time to think and analyze his own reflection in the mirror. “Come on, man,” he told himself. “The town Sheba’s in your bed.”
But his body reacted in ways it never had before. Tiny beads of sweat seeped from his neat hairline and dried before they reached his brow. His bottom lip trembled like he wanted to vomit. And his right hand shook with the instinct to write, or maybe to read; either way, he wanted to disappear somehow into words. To forget the predicament he found himself in.
Looking in the mirror, he saw weakness all over him. Too weak to tell a beautiful young woman in the next room that he was no longer interested in her and that maybe he never had been. Bank’s closed! He should’ve been brave enough to say aloud but wasn’t. Simultaneously, he was too weak to release such feelings and fade away into the desires of every man his age. Just kiss the broad. What are you, lame? Muggy would’ve surely asked him. And yes would certainly be the answer. He was lame.
He exhaled loudly at the mirror. “Come on, Isaiah,” he said. “Come! On!”
But there was no use. He simply did not want Dorothy Mae any longer. He wanted Angel, and if he couldn’t have her, he wanted to devour words on a page. He closed his eyes and attempted to focus his confused mind.
The hardest of truths was that the conflict inside him was placed on him by humanity, and the deepest weakness was he wanted to succumb to it. To give in to the perception of what society thought he should be—more like Muggy Little Jr.—interested only in the pleasures of now and uncaring for the steadiness of his people’s future. He wasn’t like Du Bois at all. He wasn’t even like Booker T. Washington. No revolutionary cared so much how they were seen within the flawed world. They only cared for repairing it. They would lay down their lives to make an attempt at valuable change, not tease tears in a tiny toilet over kissing a girl.
A cry burned at the corner of Isaiah’s eye, and he blinked it away before it could fully materialize.
“No!” he said to his reflection. “You will not.”
He closed his eyes and searched his mind for an appropriate segment from Souls to distract him. When he thought of one, he reopened his eyes and unblinkingly recited it to himself:
“‘He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another … He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another … He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.’”
He lost count of how many times he’d said it. He would’ve continued, but he heard a small, concerned knock on the door.
“You okay in there, baby?” his mother said softly.
He blinked at her sweet voice. “I’m okay!” he lied. “Be out soon.”
With one last look, he threw a cold splash of water on his face and considered the words he’d repeated over and over. Profound, strong, true, and wholly empty when spoken aloud by Isaiah himself. They needed a revolutionary to speak them, someone worthy, not him. Words alone held no sway. They didn’t carry whips and chains, or yell halt to adversaries without someone worthy to speak them.
So with one last breath, he forced himself to go back into his room to kiss the girl he didn’t want to kiss.
ANGEL
“Hey, my angel,” said Angel’s father through broken breaths. “And there’s my sweet boy.”
Her father held his arms open for baby Michael, and just like before, he fell into them. The same calm knowing came over Michael, and it made Angel want to cry. She knew that her father was right, but didn’t want to accept it. The child knew something about her father that she couldn’t know. Her instinct was to snatch the baby away. It was too obvious when they were together—new life and impending death, sitting at the opposite ends of their journeys, greeting one another with a mutually earned respect that she couldn’t bear to acknowledge.
Angel wanted her father alive. She wanted both of her parents, walking hand in hand like they used to. Supporting one another. Holding each other up in life and health and strength, never in sickness. The knock on the door made her shoulders jump and snapped her out of whatever she was in. It was her mother’s four o’clock hair appointment—the tender-headed Barney twins plus one. Angel was beginning to think their mother was sending them just to get a break from their chaos. Odd of the sisters to knock on the front door. They usually burst directly into the back as if they owned the place.
“I’ll get it,” said Angel, looking back at her father. “Don’t worry, I’ll walk them around back. You okay with Michael?”
“Thanks,” he said, relieved to not have to shift himself out of their chaotic way. “Yes, I’ve got Little Man.”
Angel cracked the front door, and to her surprise, Muggy Little Jr. was standing there holding a brown leather-bound journal in his hands, grinning mischievously.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said with a sly wink.
ISAIAH
Isaiah’s lips had gone all tingly, but Dorothy Mae was still lapping them with full lungs. She smelled nice—like fake flowers. Had to be a lotion of some kind, because as her hands, then wrists, then forearm, then armpit brushed close to his nose, the smell stayed the same. Bored of kissing, he tried to ease her away gently. She was a girl, after all. One with an assertive way about her—like a fake flower.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered into his neck before kissing it.
She sounded like a picture-show girlfriend, not a real one. Like she’d rehearsed “don’t stop” to her own reflection to make it sound authentic. As he knew her, that summed her up. Isaiah wondered what she was like when she was alone—when she first stepped out of the bath. Smelling only of basic soap and hard Greenwood water, not fake anything. He wondered, did she wipe the condensation away from the mirror to stare herself down or did she walk past it unwilling to truly see herself as she was, regular. Beautiful, but regular, just like him. Still, Isaiah wanted to believe there was depth underneath all the vapid.
He pushed her away so hard she couldn’t deny he wanted to stop. “Let’s talk awhile.”
“Talk?” she replied. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I mean”—Isaiah scooted back, putting enough distance between them that she
couldn’t lunge onto his sore lips—“what’s your favorite color?”
“Don’t be a flat tire, Isaiah,” she said, nervously picking at her pink polish. “Who cares what my favorite color is?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t care, but okay, I’ll start,” he began. “Mine is obviously blue.” He pointed to the colored paper on his bedroom walls and wondered if she’d ever even noticed.
She looked around and half smiled. “Huh.”
Silence fell hard on his bedroom, slowly stacking a thousand invisible bricks between them in his small bed.
“Want to hear a quick passage from my favorite book?” he asked, pulling Souls from underneath his pillow. “I don’t know if you follow Du Bois.” He paused. “Do you?”
“I don’t follow politics.”
Isaiah laughed. “Du Bois is not just politics. He’s starting a revolution for our people. Real change, not that flimsy stuff Booker T. used to preach. This is taking our power back from the white man. Standing firmly on our feet and telling the world that we’ve earned the right to exist. Listen to this!”
Dorothy Mae held her hand in the air, halting Isaiah.
“I like Booker T. Washington, though,” Dorothy Mae began, her brow creased. “I don’t like when people disparage him for his methods. He did the very best he could under the circumstances of his birth and region.”
Isaiah grinned. “I thought you didn’t follow politics,” he said, noticing a fresh zeal in her eyes, finally a reveal of an opinion about something important. “You should show more of this.”
“I…,” she started, and got stuck in the beginning of the sentence. “I meant that I follow politics just fine, I just … How should I say? It’s not expected of me to speak my opinions aloud. I’m meant to marry well, not express my like or disdain for the revolutionaries among us.”
And that’s when Isaiah pinpointed the elusive thing he liked about Dorothy Mae—born to a wealthy-bank-owner father and a former-beauty-queen mother, she was just as trapped in expectation as he was. Hers was the expectation of marrying well within Greenwood society. Utilizing her radiance to charm herself into cushy sitting rooms with cut glass and tiny sandwiches.
“Okay.” He joined her back on his bed. “Indulge me for one more question.”
“Just one if you please.”
“What do you dream of becoming?” he asked before again shooting to his feet to pace the room. “Not ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I hate when teachers ask such questions. No! I mean, when you lie down on your pillow, alone and free, what do you dream of becoming?”
She looked at him skeptically, like she was afraid to be honest with him. Almost ashamed. “Father says I should—”
“No,” Isaiah interrupted. “Not what father says. What you say! What you think!”
With eyes like saucers, she opened her mouth and closed it four times before she found the courage to speak. “No one’s ever thought to ask what I want to be. Maybe never in my life. I’m not sure how to…”
“The truth as it exists in your heart, Dorothy Mae.” Isaiah beamed, finally feeling some semblance of connection to her.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
Isaiah held his palm to the sky. “You have my word.”
She leaned back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling, allowing herself, for the first time, to slouch. “I want to fly.”
Isaiah didn’t laugh, not even a little. He did, however, sit back on his bed and lean in close to her. “That’s the Dorothy Mae I want to hear about. Tell me everything.”
Then she stood to her feet, shedding her posture completely. “I don’t care how I get up there, Isaiah, I just want to be as close to the clouds as possible. Is that dumb?”
“I think this is the first not-dumb thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Hey!” she shouted playfully.
“It’s the truth,” he said, equally spirited. “All that talk about the weather and dinner parties. That’s dumb. But this? This is quite the opposite. This is the talk of a woman whose more than the weather or who sits where at the dining table. More than fringe and feathers. This, dear, is the talk of a dreamer.”
She sat back down on the bed, this time right next to him. More like a friend than a lover. “You’re a strange one. I hope you know that, Isaiah Wilson.”
“You know what, Dorothy Mae?” he asked. “I have a sneaking feeling that you might be, too. Way down deep.”
“It’s time for me to ask you a question now.”
“Anything at all.”
“Why don’t you show anyone who you actually are?” she asked. “You’re just as phony as you’re implying I am.”
“First of all,” he started. “I did not call you phony.”
“You didn’t have to,” she interrupted.
“Fair enough,” he gave in. “I’ll own that I’m usually putting on. I’m only real when I write. Can I read you one of my poems?”
He felt behind him, where he knew he’d left it, but it wasn’t there. Then he crouched down to look under his bed for his leather journal.
“Stand up a minute,” he told her, before tearing through his pillows and wildly unmaking his bed. “It has to be here.”
“What?”
“My journal,” he said, appearing to get frantic. “The one I always carry with me. Have you seen it?”
Dorothy Mae looked curious at the question. “I have to go,” she said instead of answering. “I have to go,” she repeated. And she was out the window before he could ask why.
ANGEL
“Muggy?” Angel stepped onto the porch to join him. “What are you doing here?”
Muggy Little Jr. turned his back to her and walked to the swinging bench at the far end of her large porch. “Sit,” he said before patting the empty space beside him.
“I have chores,” she started. “My papa … No, my mama needs me to help with a hair appointment … and baby Michael.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” he said with a rascally grin. “Worth the sacrifice of missing some little chores.”
She stood over him, knowing he had no clue what he was talking about. Some little chores, she thought, included helping her mother clean her father’s excrement, bathe and shift him to avoid festering sores, and help him fight for a will to live. Muggy Little Jr. was the worst hue of green—still naive and entitled but also with an air of grandiosity. He knew nothing beyond himself and cared not to find out. She’d hate to see where life actually took him in the end. Nowhere positive, she surmised.
“Okay,” he continued, striking a match to light his dangling cigar. “Not going to sit? Suit yourself.”
“Please don’t light that,” she told him. “Not here. It’s not good for my papa.”
Ignoring her, he opened the journal and began quietly paging through it.
“My apologies, Muggy,” she said, backing toward her front door. “I don’t have time for—”
“‘Black Angel,’” he started reading. “By Isaiah Wilson. Spin, spin, Black angel, spin…’”
As he read the poem aloud, right there on the sweltering Greenwood afternoon, Angel felt herself leaning against the railings of her porch. Her eyes went from angry and frustrated to kind and soft. She noticed the verbena again, even brighter than they had been that morning. Showing off for the sun and God and herself.
She felt her father, dying of an unknown illness in the next room. Fighting so valiantly just to sit up straight in her presence. Connecting more with beautiful new babies than with anyone else now. She felt her mother, robustly braiding away the pain in their small kitchen. Twisting the smallest of braids for something to focus on outside of the failing health of the love of her life, the father of her best friend.
She felt her hands shaking like they did before she was about to cry. She tasted heavy tears that couldn’t break through until she’d heard the perfect poem about her spinning in the pulpit. Then she saw the strange sight of Dorothy Mae, d
ressed in fuzzy pink, running up her walkway.
“Give it to me,” Dorothy told Muggy furiously. “This is not your business to tell.”
“Whoa, now,” he said, holding the journal high in the air and out of her reach. “You’re the one who handed it to me through Isaiah’s window just, what, a half hour ago? What the hell are you even talking about? I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard you speak.” He went to grab her around the waist for a kiss, but she wouldn’t allow it.
“Muggy,” she said to him. “This is wrong.”
He laughed in response. “Wrong, right, who the hell cares? It’s fun. Besides, I’ve already read her one of my favorites. Take it.” He handed the journal to Dorothy Mae and rested his attention on Angel. “Now you know, Black Angel. Do with it what you will.” He walked to the sidewalk and tipped his hat, leaving Angel and Dorothy Mae on the porch.
“Angel,” her father called out from the living room. “Who’s out there? Are you okay? I can come help if you need me.”
In a panic, Angel nearly tripped over her own feet heading for the door. “No, Papa, please don’t try to get up. Please.”
As she opened the door, she looked back at Dorothy Mae holding the journal. Dorothy had caught full sight of Angel’s once-strong father, withering on the couch. Angel shut the door, but it was too late; she’d already seen him.
“I’m…,” Dorothy Mae began speaking. “I’m so sorry.”
Then she ran away.
ISAIAH
“Mom!” Isaiah called out, flipping and re-flipping over the same bedspread, and turning his pillowcases inside out for the thirteenth time. “Have you seen my journal?” Isaiah was now in a full terror.