The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  “Where’s Helena?” Ava asked her.

  “Gone. She left last night with Paul.”

  Ava looked around the room. Helena’s things were gone.

  Downstairs, the house was warm, but not hot the way it had been for days. The hum of unsettled things that had risen up, that had clung heavy and greasy to every surface, had faded away. The sense of ghosts had gone. Ava went into the living room and stood at the front window, peering out. The congregation of Blessed Chapel was heading to Sunday service the same as always. They moved up and across Radnor Street, the women in their linen dresses and wide-brimmed hats, the men in their short-sleeved dress-shirts and wide ties, the children in shoes that snapped against the concrete sidewalk like fingers snapping to the choir music that wafted through the air. Ava watched as a little girl in a dress with lacy collar and cuffs stopped in the middle of the street and spun, the pink of her skirt making a twirl of blush around her. She saw Doris and Dexter Liddy walking down their front steps, Doris’ dyed-red hair peeking out from under her blue-feathered hat. Across the street, Malcolm Hansberry waved to them as he came out of his front door. As she stood there watching, she saw Hattie Mitchell and Clarence Nelson and Antoinette Brown, and she was struck by the fact that so many people had stayed on this block for so many years. Most of their children had grown up and moved away, but they remained, attached to the community and church they loved and felt part of. As they made their way to the church, Ava thought how strange it was that nothing outside her house had changed in the last week, while to her almost everything and everyone inside it felt different.

  She left the window and went to the kitchen, suddenly craving coffee and butter. She put coffee on, and made toast, and she was getting the butter from the refrigerator when the doorbell rang. Despite the week she’d had, the sound was as strange and unexpected as ever, only now she hurried, interested and eager, to see who was there.

  When Ava pulled open the door, Helena turned, and this time Ava did not feel the rush of confused emotions, or the overwhelming urge to reach out. This time she felt joy, all by itself, pure and unbemused. She stepped out onto the porch. “I thought you left,” she said.

  Helena nodded. “I took Paul to our cousin’s.”

  “All your things are gone.”

  “Well, I couldn’t stay here forever, Ava.”

  Ava knew that, understood that, but she didn’t like it one bit. She was getting her mouth ready to say so, when Helena said, “I took that place out in Wynnefield.”

  “You didn’t!”

  Helena laughed. “I did.”

  Ava came forward and threw her arms around Helena, and Helena held her, too, so tightly that she could hardly breathe, but she didn’t care, because just breathing wasn’t the most important thing. After a long, long moment, Helena said, “People are watching us.”

  “Good,” Ava said. “This is just the kind of thing they need to see.”

  They stood there like that for a long time, wrapped up in each other, and for the first time since she was thirteen years old, Ava felt free.

  1983

  Regina lay awake in her bed, on a cool Saturday morning in September, listening to the sound of death coming up the stairs. When George’s illness had advanced to the point of no return, she had moved him out of his bedroom and onto the sofa-bed, at his request, because he didn’t want to spend his last days alone in that room, he’d said, where he had hidden himself so much over the years. So, it was from the living room that the sound came, the death growl, that morning. It was very early, just dawn, and the light coming in through Regina’s window had a pinkish hue. She thought about her father, and her son, and she wondered where they were now, and what awaited her husband. All her life she had believed in heaven, but lately that idea had made less sense to her. It was too random, death, too indifferent, to possibly lead anywhere as ordered as a perfect, pearly-gated heaven.

  She considered getting up and going downstairs, sitting beside George and holding his hand. In the last few years, with their children gone from the house, the two of them had made something of amends, an unspoken agreement not to despise each other anymore. She had let him go on and live his secret life without interference or questions or dirty looks. And he, in turn, had done his best to reconnect with her, to rediscover some small part of the love they had shared so long ago. They’d almost become friends again, the two of them creeping around that old house, cooking and watching television together. “We almost like a old married couple,” George had said. Regina had laughed. “Almost.”

  She decided against going downstairs, though, that morning, as she heard him breathing his dying breaths. Not because she didn’t care. Not because she didn’t love him or because she thought he deserved to die alone. But simply because she was afraid to. She had seen death up close too much already, and it had made her sick and crazy once before. She thought it best to keep her distance from it now, as best she could. In the pink light coming in through the window, Regina whispered a prayer for her husband, and listened as he passed away.

  George’s senses were the first parts of his soul to die, so that the boundaries of one passed away into the others, and for a few of his last moments in the world he could see touch, and hear smell, and feel taste. As he lay sunken in his sickbed, undignified and emaciated, little more than a pile of twigs, a cricket of a man, on the threshold of a shameful death, he suddenly remembered his boyhood. Down Georgia. Where he once ran barefooted in tobacco fields, his feet barely touching the hot ground, his face to the sun. As he lay in his bed, now too weak to move, the crumbly smell of Georgia bird songs danced before his clouded eyes. The salty tastes of down-south sunsets were loud on his lesioned skin. And he remembered knowing he was good then. A good boy who did what he was told and helped his mother with the washing and knew God. He remembered climbing trees and how his skinny legs looked like two more branches as he sat high and leaned his head against the breathing trunk. He had known then that he was part of creation, made by God with intention, pure and right as grass and bees. He did not know the moment when he had forgotten it, the moment when his desire for other boys’ mouths and hands and things started to mean that he was not good, not something the Lord had made. He had spent his life since moving from moment to moment between longing and shame, and as he lay on his deathbed he could no longer remember or understand the self-hatred he had carried for so long a time. He could no longer taste the scorn, once like a stew on which he had gorged and fattened himself almost all the days of his life. But he could remember the taste of Chuck’s quiet eyes, and the ruddy smell of Butch’s voice. He could hear Robert’s smooth skin now, and see James’ silly and abundant heart. And the same for all of them. Louis. And Bud. And Tony. And Richard. And Red. And the boy with the cigarette behind his ear and the eight-shaped scar above his lip, who never said a word but smiled almost to laughing the whole time they were together. And the man behind the shed by the train tracks, who shuddered and cried like a child when he came, and held George to him for hours in the dark. And so many others. He remembered them now, not with the deep hatred of himself with which he had always tried to forget them, a deep hatred which his dying mind and body could no longer clearly recall, but with as much joy and light as the coming of sure death would allow him. They had all been so beautiful, black and soft, brown and wiry, red and lithe. Southern boys the color of Georgia earth, who had run in the same tobacco fields, with their faces to the same sun and the sounds of birds on their same skin. They had been more than his lovers, more than secret tousles in tree-hidden places. They had been his kin, too, they had been of him, and of God. In his last moments, he did not have to wish that he had seen that truth before, that he had understood more, that he had loved them better, and himself. When the shame fell away, ashenly, quietly forgotten, it was as if he had always known, and that trick of memory was a tender mercy before he died.

  Sarah stood by her bedroom window, watching the sun coming up pink and soft on the ho
rizon. Beside her, her husband leaned his shoulder into hers and said, “Pretty, huh?” raising his eyebrows toward the sky. “Maybe it’s a sign from your Daddy.”

  Sarah thought the sunrise always looked like that on September mornings, but she knew he was trying to comfort her, so she nodded and tried to smile.

  Regina had called only a few moments ago to tell them that George had passed away. Sarah wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, no tears would come. For the last few weeks of her father’s life, she had helped her mother tend to him: feed him and clean him, and keep him company. A few times, in the last days, she had wanted to say things to him, things she knew she should say before he died because if she didn’t she’d spend the rest of her life regretting it, but she didn’t say them. The last thing she said to him, the evening before the morning he died, was, “I’ll come by and read you the funnies tomorrow.”

  “I’m gone get dressed and go on over to the house,” Sarah told her husband now.

  He nodded. “Alright.”

  She sighed. “Mama said Ava is coming down from New York right away. Helena, too.” She glanced at him.

  “Well. You want me to call off work?” he asked. “So I can be there for you today?”

  She shrugged. “You don’t have to.”

  He put his arms around her. “I will.”

  Sarah rested her head against his chest.

  “You can go ahead and cry if you want to,” he said. “I got you.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  But she didn’t. Instead, she looked out at the pink sky and said a silent prayer for her father.

  Ava and Helena took the train from New York City and then the el from the train station and as they walked the rest of the way to Radnor Street, Ava said, “I wish he’d told me. I wish he hadn’t had to get sick for me to find out.”

  She’d said it half a dozen times since her father had been diagnosed, and Helena said now what she’d said each time before. “I guess he never came to terms with it himself.”

  Even after Ava had moved to Wynnfield with Helena, even when the two of them had moved together to New York, George had continued to keep his secret from her. He had accepted her relationship with Helena, begrudgingly, once he was sure there was nothing he could do about it, but he had never revealed to either of them the truth about himself. After he got sick, Ava had asked Helena whether she had ever suspected, and Helena said she’d known from the day she met him, that Saturday morning in the foyer when he’d been unable to look her in the eyes for fear of what she might be able to see. She hadn’t ever told Ava, she said, because it wasn’t hers to tell.

  “I hope,” Ava said now, “that he made some peace with it before he died.”

  They turned the corner onto Radnor Street then, and found the block buzzing with activity. News of her father’s death that morning had brought people out onto their porches, no doubt inspiring lengthy exercises in speculation across banisters and at curbsides. In the last seven years the harassment of Ava’s family had ceased, maybe because once Ava and Paul and Sarah had all left Pastor Goode had decided he’d done enough, or maybe because he was just too tired to care anymore. He’d died of a heart attack three years ago.

  As Ava and Helena walked down the street, a hush fell over the block and every head turned and watched them. Dexter Liddy folded his arms across his chest. Malcolm Hansberry leaned out over his porch railing and glared. Clarence Nelson shook his head, slowly, from side to side. Vic Jones spit into his front yard. Hattie Mitchell stared wide-eyed. Doris Liddy twisted her lips into a frown of near-cartoonish severity. Ava remembered that when she was a child they had watched her, too. Everywhere she went on that street, and in that church, eyes had followed her. Back then it had been wonder, an attraction to whatever they saw in her that seemed bigger, brighter, more than what they knew. She looked out at them now, each of them displaying their own exaggerated but silent disapproval, and she suddenly remembered their love. Their love, all warm and eager and sure. Though it had ended long ago, their love had helped her become who she was. As a child she hadn’t understood that, but she knew it now. Seeing herself in their eyes had helped her understand that she was special, and because she understood it she had been free to be it, the same way seeing herself in Helena’s eyes had helped her get free again. Silently, she thanked them.

  As she came up the front steps of the Delaney house, the flowers in the front yard screamed orange and red and yellow at her. They were the indirect descendants of the flowers Helena had planted there years ago, Regina having re-planted them each following spring. Ava looked down at the flowers, the fat bursts of happy pigment against the drab old house, and she felt giddy with color and promise.

  Acknowledgements

  This book has been a long time coming. I started it in college, more than sixteen years ago, and though it has changed and been reimagined so many times that it looks nothing now like what it was then, its heart, its pulse of family and community and womanhood and queerness has never changed. Over so many years, there have been so many people who have helped it along on its journey. Some of them are: my college writing teacher, Geeta Kothari, without whom I would not be the writer I am now or the writer I might someday become; Lighthouse Writers Workshop, for their support, encouragement and flattery; Lisa Volk, for her friendship and patronage; Nico Amador, for his editing help; and all the family and friends who have been waiting so long to read this book. Your anticipation helped fuel me. Thank you.

  Mia

  About the Author

  Mia McKenzie studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She is winner of the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She is soon to be published in The Kenyon Review (Spring ‘13). She is the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a popular online literary and activist forum. This is her first novel.

  Praise For The Summer We Got Free

  “...A BRILLIANT TAPESTRY FILLED WITH EXUBERANCE AND ANXIETY...”

  --Jewelle Gomez

  “...MAKES YOU MOAN OR, AS I DID, READ PASSAGES ALOUD AND NEGLECT SLEEP FOR WANT OF THE NEXT SAVORY MORSEL!”

  --Moya Bailey

  “McKenzie’s language calls to mind both Toni Morrison and Cherry Muhanji, in her expert use...and its ability to convey mystery, tenderness and terror while still being deceptively ordinary.”

  --Jewelle Gomez, American author, poet, critic and playwright

  “McKenzie’s masterful weaving of narrative belies an inaugural effort yet it is clearly an afrofuturistic vision of healing transformation and an affirmation that we have what we need. The text is saturated with an effortless queerity and a brush of magical realism that show what's possible when you focus off center.”

  -- Moya Bailey, writer, Crunk Feminist Collective