by Pearl Cleage
When I walked into the house, Aunt Abbie was in the kitchen already rinsing out a vase and filling it with water and just a pinch of sugar to keep the blooms fresh.
“I knew you could do it,” she said, taking the bouquet from me without even asking how it had gone with the weasel. “They're lovely! My favorites!”
I had to smile. “Weren't you even a little bit nervous that he might turn me down?”
She snorted at the absurdity of such an idea. “Not a chance. That little man is in no position to stand against the flow of things.”
“What things?” I asked, watching her deftly arrange the flowers in the vase and carry it to the dining room table. She placed it dead center and then smiled her approval.
“Just lovely. Did you get them at the train station?”
“Yes. The flow of what things?”
“I thought so,” she said. “I saw these birds-of-paradise earlier and I knew they would be the ones you'd pick!”
Having a conversation with Aunt Abbie was like learning how to swim. You could hang around on the edges of the pool if you wanted to, but sooner or later, you were going to have to take a deep breath and plunge on in.
“You were at the train station today?”
She nodded, making a minor adjustment to the largest of the blooms. “I had to pick up your ticket.”
“I'm flying, remember?”
“Not anymore,” she said, handing me an Amtrak ticket folder. “You're leaving tomorrow evening at seven-thirty.”
That was the southbound Crescent all right, but she had obviously forgotten my recent rantings about the problematic nature of coach-class train travel. “I'm flying Delta, day after tomorrow, at noon.”
“Look at the ticket,” she said.
I pulled it out. One way, deluxe bedroom accommodations, all the way to Atlanta.
“But, I can't afford this,” I said, wishing I could.
“My treat,” she said. “Happy Birthday.”
I looked at her. “My birthday is in August.”
She grinned at me. “Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and welcome to the new millennium! You're missing the point, dear. It's a gift.”
I laughed. “Do you have a secret bank account you're not telling me about?”
“It's no secret,” she said. “It won't cover near what you need on the house, or I would have offered it up long before now, but a first-class train ticket to celebrate a job well done?” She shrugged gracefully, releasing a little whiff of patchouli from the folds of her Chinese kimono. “Piece a cake!”
“You amaze me,” I said. “Thank you.”
“That's because I'm amazing,” she said. “And you're very welcome.”
I looked at the ticket again and noticed it was one way. I couldn't resist teasing her a little. “So how come you didn't make it round trip? Don't you want me back when it's over?”
“Of course,” she said, still smiling, taking my arm and leading me into the living room. We sat down on the couch, side by side. “But you won't be coming back by train.”
“Oh?” I said, amused by her certainty. “How will I be traveling?”
“By car,” she said, immediately. “Definitely by car.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “By then, I'll have enough money to buy my own first-class ticket.”
She was looking at me with a funny expression.
“What's wrong?”
She got up, stirred the fire into life, and turned back to me. I had a sickening feeling. She had that “I'm ready to tell you something serious as hell whether you're ready for it or not” look on her face.
The suspense was killing me.
“What?”
She came back to sit beside me. “You remember when I told you I had a vision about your needing some assistance and that's why I came here?”
I nodded.
“Well, there's more to it than that.”
“More to the vision?”
“More to everything. That's why I knew that little banker wasn't going to turn you down. It's much bigger than that.”
I was swimming around in the conversation as best I could, but I was barely keeping my head above water.
“Hold it!” I said. “Start at the beginning.”
She patted my hand gently. “That's just what I'm talking about. Where is the beginning? The real beginning?”
This was getting us no place fast. I decided to double back and try again. “Start with the visions.”
“All right,” she said, curling up and tucking her feet under her long skirt. “That's as good a place as any. Ever since I went through menopause, I've been having visions.”
“What kind of visions?”
“All kinds. Big things, little things. I can't determine any of that yet. Right now, all I can do is recognize them and write down what she says.”
“What who says?”
“Whoever is speaking to me through these visions. They're more auditory than visual, although sometimes I do see images, but they're usually fleeting.”
“And how long have you been hearing these voices?”
She heard the skepticism in my voice, and she did not appreciate it.
“I don't hear voices,” she sniffed. “I have visions. There's a difference, although you're still too full of estrogen to understand it.”
The way she said it, the hormone sounded like an active blocker of both intelligence and intuition. I wanted to tell her that at thirty-four, my estrogen was probably already on the wane, but I didn't want to piss her off even more.
“Sorry.”
“Don't be sorry,” she said. “Estrogen is fine, but it definitely blocks a lot of female magic, especially the stuff having to do with being able to see the past and the present and the future as all part of the same bolt of cloth. As long as you can have babies, you can't really focus on this stuff. You've got to have time to let your mind wander for it to come through. Especially the voices. Which is why I've only been hearing them for about five years. It's like as soon as the hot flashes went away, I could hear things coming through on a whole different wavelength.”
It sounded a little crazy, but I do believe in the existence of untapped wells of female gifts and magic, and menopause could as easily be a font of special wisdom and spirituality as the time of diminished powers and depression people sometimes want us to think it is. If my vibrant, self-sufficient, patchouli-smelling aunt said she had a postmenopausal vision that brought her to my door, I wanted to hear all of it.
“I believe you,” I said. “It's just hard to talk about this stuff without feeling a little self-conscious.”
“It's just like oral sex, dear,” she said. “It seems silly at first, but you'll get used to it. Just try to keep an open mind,” she said with an encouraging smile. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Here's the deal. There's a man in Atlanta who's been looking for you across time.”
“What?”
“Oh, wait! That shouldn't come first. I should talk about the journey first.”
I felt my head sinking beneath the waves. “What journey?”
“To Atlanta.” She stood up suddenly. “Wait a second. I need to get my notes.”
She hurried out of the room on her little satin mary janes and up the steps to the second floor. I heard a drawer open and close, and she returned quickly with a well-worn reporter's notebook. She flipped it open and smiled her relief.
“All right! This will make it easier for me to tell you exactly. I was right! The journey comes first. And she specifically says it's a journey you don't want to take.” She looked up at me. “That's how I knew you had to go to Atlanta. Because you truly didn't want to.”
I nodded like any of this made sense. It didn't.
She consulted her notes again. “A journey … okay. I did that one. Here! You must complete a task for a fallen friend.”
That sent a little chill through me. I was going to Atlanta to do a project about the life and work of a go
od friend of mine who died in New York last September. I had loved him and lost him, but he had saved my life, and I owed him one.
“Go on.”
“And the third thing is—don't laugh.”
“I'm not laughing.”
“The third thing she said you have to do is rescue a damsel in distress.”
“I'm the damsel in distress,” I said.
Aunt Abbie gave her head a little impatient shake. “You can't be the damsel in distress. You're the shero.”
“I am?”
“Of course. If you can't be the star of your own story, what's the point?”
She had me there. “What am I rescuing her from?”
Aunt Abbie flipped a page of her notebook. “My notes don't say, but since she used the word damsel, I'd say some kind of dragon wouldn't be out of the question.”
“A fire-breathing dragon?”
She chuckled. “Of course not. A symbolic dragon, dear.”
That didn't make me feel much better. Dragons of any kind tend to make me nervous.
“What about the guy?” I said.
“What guy?”
“The one who's been searching for me across time.”
She flipped a few more pages. “He's in Atlanta, like I said, which works out nice, and he'll know you as soon as he sees you, but you probably won't recognize him except for his eyes.”
“What about his eyes?” I had a sudden flash of Rosemary's Baby, with those weird yellow orbs the devil left behind.
“They're blue.”
“He's a white man?” I almost shrieked.
“I didn't say he was white. I said he had blue eyes. The exact words she used were, ‘He has the ocean in his eyes.’ That's lovely, don't you think?”
“How many black people do you know with blue eyes?”
“It's not the color that's important,” she said gently, trying to calm me down. “He had to have some way of being sure you'd recognize him. He's convinced he just missed you the last time around and he's determined not to let it happen again.”
“But why blue eyes? Why couldn't he just be real tall or something?”
She frowned. “Because you could make a mistake and end up with Rick Fox and then where would you be?”
I resigned myself to blue eyes. “What else does it say about this guy?”
“She. What else does she say.” Aunt Abbie corrected me gently, but firmly.
“My apologies. What else does she say?”
“She said he sings an ancient song.”
I rolled my eyes. “That's all I need. A blue-eyed brother who sings Gregorian chants.”
She ignored me. “And he's not who he appears to be.”
I groaned. “He's a con man, too?”
“I didn't say anything about his being a con man.” She was scanning the page again. “There was one more thing she said … oh! Here it is. At the end of your journey, you'll bring him home to meet your aunt—that would be me!—and take his vows.”
I wondered if that was before or after we slayed the dragon. “What vows are those?”
She closed the notebook and beamed at me. “Wedding vows, of course. Didn't I say you're going to marry him?”
I looked at her. “You know this vision is asking me to do some things I never thought I'd do.”
She patted my hand gently. “I know, dear, but you know what? Sometimes that's exactly what you should do. Whatever it is you thought you'd never do.”
I was not convinced. “I'm too old for fairy tales.”
She grinned at me and shook her head. “Baby girl, please! You are in your prime!”
3
FIRST-CLASS ACCOMMODATIONS on the Southern Crescent take all the sting out of overnight travel. Not only do you have your own tiny little bathroom, but a smiling brother in a blue sweater vest and sensible shoes comes to pull down your bed whenever you're ready to get in it. Aunt Abbie did me a good turn by getting this ticket. Traveling this way is peaceful. It slows you down instead of hyping you up like airports do, and that is just what I had in mind. I need time to think. Who knows what I'll be walking into once I get to Atlanta. The only thing I'd bet on is that it has nothing to do with what Beth Davis told me on the phone. Legacy Project my ass, but if she's willing to pay me thirty grand to do it, she can consider it done.
I couldn't believe she had the nerve to call me. I haven't even seen Beth since her son broke my heart two years ago on the most important date night in a hundred years. Dick Clark was counting down to the millennium and my fiancé was apologizing for not being able to stand up to his mother who was loudly accusing me of disloyalty above and beyond the call of duty.
In one awful instant, my love life and my dream job were both wiped out. Alone and unemployed was not where I had planned to be at thirty-two, so I packed up my car, drove back home to D.C., and discovered cocaine. My parents had passed, and I was alone in the world with no job to go to, a broken heart, and a nice inheritance to dip into. I was a coke dealer's dream, and the feeling was mutual.
When I was high, I didn't have to think about how scared I was. When I was high, I knew the answers to all the hard questions and would share them at the drop of a hat. Even better, when I was buying, I never had to be alone. That's how I almost lost the house. Buying company.
I did that from January of the millennium year until September 11 of the next one. On that morning, having sold everything I could sell and borrowed against the rest, I was on the phone trying to wheedle my longtime dealer into extending me some credit since I was down to crumbs and the week wasn't even half over.
The television had been on all night and the drone of the Today show was simply background noise like the traffic in the street outside. I had just decided to have sex with this guy in exchange for the drugs I wanted when I looked at the TV in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I dropped the phone, flushed the last of my pitiful stash, and started praying. I checked myself into rehab that same day.
I didn't know Son Davis had died there until I read it in the newspaper. It made me feel terrible, no matter what had happened between us at the end. He wasn't a bad guy. He was just weak. He didn't want to be. He just was. He lived his whole life being a creation of Beth's imagination, and it was a wonderful creation, but there was more to him than being the perfect son. A lot more.
We spent hours talking about what he was going to do once he went off on his own, but he never made a move. The closest he got was our trying to elope, and Beth snatched him back so hard it gave me whiplash. I think that's probably what attracted him to me in the first place, although I didn't know it at the time. He thought I was strong enough to pull him away from Beth, but nobody's that strong. Even now, she's still shaping his life to suit her purposes, whatever they are, which is what I'm still trying to figure out.
Beth Davis was born with the kind of charisma that changes people's lives. You might not see it if you pass her on the street. She looks like a million other short, round, just-missed-being-pretty brown-skinned women of a certain age. But wait until you see her in a roomful of mothers trying desperately to raise their hardheaded sons all by themselves. Wait until you hear her remind them they're allowed to have dreams. Wait until you hear her make the possibility of freedom sound so seductive you want to suck on it like a summer peach.
Beth's book, Son Shine, is the only self-published work ever to make the Essence, USA Today, and New York Times best-seller lists for the same six-month period. The book really isn't very well written, but it's so passionate and honest and hopeful about things that usually seem so hopeless, you can't put it down.
Son Shine tells the story of Beth's amazing journey from being the daughter of an unmarried, illiterate single mother who named her after Elizabeth Taylor, to being a single mother herself at sixteen, to becoming a bestselling author and one of the top motivational speakers in the country. The heart of the book is the birth of Beth's only child, Theo, who she always called Son. After the book came ou
t, nobody ever called him anything else.
“I knew the first time I looked into my baby's little brown face that he was perfect,” she writes in her introduction, “untouched by the madness of the world I had brought him into. That's when I knew whatever his daddy was or was not, could or could not do, I was going to raise him to be the kind of man I had hoped his father could be: smart, strong, spiritual, sensual, and selfsufficient. And if I did it right, when he was all grown up and some other mother's child opened her life's front door to my son, he wouldn't come up in there with a whole bunch of drama and confusion. He'd be bringing nothing but truth, good love, and sunshine.”
My mother once said, after waxing rhapsodic about the 1967 March on the Pentagon, that the beauty ofa successful demonstration is that it gives the protestors a chance to realize they're not alone. There's power in numbers, she said, but only if the powerless people making up those numbers are aware of their equally powerless comrades. First they have to recognize one another and say hello. Beth's work is about the business ofmaking introductions.
The first time I heard her speak to a roomful of shouting, stomping, weeping, laughing black women, and me hollering as loud as anybody even though I didn't even have a kid, I quit my job the next morning and went to work for her full-time. I was speechwriter, special assistant, advance team, and travel agent. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and I was as good at my part as Beth was at hers. The first three years I worked for her were probably the most exciting, exhausting, fulfilling years of my life.
Everywhere we went, women were energized. They bought the books, memorized the tapes, signed up for workshops, and, when she started asking them, they registered to vote. Son quit his law practice and formed Son Shine Enterprises once things really took off. I was their first full-time employee, and they couldn't have found a more willing worker.
It was probably inevitable that Son and I would get together. Being on the road constantly like we were, he was surrounded by women who wanted to sleep with him because they loved his mother, but he said having sex with them would be taking unfair advantage, not to mention, as he put it, exhibiting behavior unworthy of a man with his own considerable charms and assets.