by Pearl Cleage
“We haven’t discussed it,” I said, sounding prim.
Joyce grinned at me like she always does when I’m tap-dancing around the truth, but I didn’t break. I was headed for San Francisco because I needed a new life and a new lover. The suggestion that maybe I was about to find all that in my own backyard was still just a little too Candide for me.
“Okay,” Joyce said, shifting gears to throw me off. “If I’ve only got another six weeks, I better put you to work.”
“I don’t have to start tonight, do I?” I yawned. All I wanted to do was fall into bed and wait for my dreams to show up.
“No, sweetie.” Joyce squeezed my shoulders and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. She smelled like home. I hugged her.
“I’ll start first thing tomorrow,” I said. “Bright and early.”
“It’s a deal,” she said. “Now, get some sleep.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, heading for the hallway before I remembered how dangerous it is to give Joyce an open-ended agreement. “Joyce?”
“Yes?”
“What is it exactly that you want me to do?”
She grinned at me. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
Just before I fell asleep, I wondered how I’d feel the next time I saw Eddie. Well, that’s not really true. I knew how I’d feel. I was worried about him. About whether or not he’d regret anything once he had a chance to think it through. I had been truly exhilarated by our first exchange. I was nervous at first, we both were, but we just kept trying this and touching that and we laughed a lot.
That was the best surprise. Most brothers are so worried about being the biggest or the baddest or the best you ever had that having fun ain’t even in it. Not Eddie. He knew how to make me feel good and he knew how to let me make him feel good. That’s the other thing a lot of brothers don’t understand. When it comes to making love, reciprocity is everything.
I decided I was too exhausted and too satisfied to worry about what was going to happen next. I closed my eyes and whispered a thank-you to whatever spirits were hovering in the darkness, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t ask for a damn thing. I’m not greedy, and as of tonight, by any measure I can think of to apply, I’m already a little bit ahead.
• 20
even though i thought I’d sleep until noon, I woke up at six o’clock like an alarm had gone off inside my head. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t. I had so much energy I felt like I could run the marathon. Nothing like some good lovin’ to give you a new lease on life.
I didn’t hear Joyce and Imani up yet, so I put on my sweats and my walking shoes quietly and I slipped out the back door. If Eddie was feeling anything like I was, I figured he’d be around sooner rather than later. My plan was to do my walk, take a quick shower, and be casually arranged on the back porch looking good by the time he pulled up.
The only problem was, when I rounded the first curve of the road, I saw Eddie coming my way. I guess we both had that energy surge.
“You’re up early,” I said, glad he greeted me with a kiss as warm and sweet as the one he’d said good-bye with last night.
“So are you.”
He touched my cheek gently and smiled. I leaned into his hand and loved the strength I felt there. “How did you sleep?” he asked.
I was amazed to feel myself blushing. “Like a baby,” I said.
He laughed that laugh for me and I wanted to bury my face in the softness of all that hair. “Good. Want some company or are you walking solo this morning by choice?”
“I’d love some company,” I said, and he fell in beside me like we’d planned it.
We walked for almost an hour, and every time I felt like I needed to say something, by the time I turned toward Eddie, I realized there was nothing to be said. It was the most comfortable kind of silence. All I heard was the birds waking up, the summer swish of the trees over our heads and the sound of the gravel road crunching under our feet.
By the time we wound our way back to Eddie’s dock, the sun was up and sparkling on the placid surface of the lake and a cardinal was singing so loud it sounded like somebody paid him.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,” Eddie said after we’d been sitting there for a minute.
“I said a lot of stuff last night as I recall.”
“About this,” he said. “About knowing what this is.”
“And what did you decide?”
He put his arm around me and pulled me over closer to him. I could feel the warmth of his skin beneath his T-shirt and his breath against my cheek.
“It’s love,” he whispered. “And you know what else?”
“What?” I said, whispering back.
“It ain’t gonna get nothin’ but better.”
I truly wanted to believe him. “You promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
I let myself relax against his arm.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
• 21
when aretha came by Friday for her haircut, I thought she’d be nervous, but she was ready. I sat her down on a stool in the middle of the kitchen floor and draped her in a sheet. Imani and Joyce were an attentive audience and I gave Aretha the full treatment.
“Do you want to watch?” I said, handing her the mirror, but she shook her head.
“I trust you.”
I laid the mirror facedown on the table and walked around to face Aretha. I put my hand under her chin and gently turned her head so I could see both profiles. I walked a complete circle around her. Joyce jiggled Imani gently against her shoulder and waited. So did Aretha.
“This is going to be the perfect haircut,” I said, “to take you into the next phase of your life.”
“Really?” she said, wide-eyed and delighted.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Only free women can wear their hair this short.”
“What about Joyce?” said Aretha, nodding at Joyce’s braids.
“Only free women can wear their hair like this,” I said, “but not all free women do wear their hair like this.”
“Oh,” said Aretha, and I was glad that was the right answer. We have such a mystical connection to our hair. Guilt and glory, pride and pain. I knew what it meant to be a sixteen-year-old black girl and cut your hair short. The sweet part was, Aretha knew it, too. She handed me the clippers.
Her hair had been pressed and permed and processed so many times, it didn’t know if it was coming or going, but once I trimmed it down to about two inches of new growth, it was soft and fluffy as lamb’s wool. I gave her a quick shampoo, including my world-famous hard wash and deep conditioner, cut it down to about a quarter of an inch, and shaped it into the prettiest little Afro you ever saw.
Now, Aretha may grow up to be a lovely woman. She may bloom in the glow of her first love. She may blossom with the birth of her children and wear her later years with full confidence in her glory, but I’ll tell you this: she will never be more beautiful than she was when I picked up that mirror and held it for her. She gasped. Joyce applauded.
“Is it okay?” I said.
Aretha never took her eyes from the mirror. “It looks like me,” she said softly.
“It is you,” Joyce said, but I knew what Aretha meant. Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting. Faced with your own possibilities, the hard part is knowing a speech is not required. All you have to say is yes.
• 22
eddie swung back by this afternoon to give us a piece of bad news. Somebody broke into old Johnny Mack’s house last night and found him asleep in his bedroom. They put a pillow over his face so he couldn’t see them and then roughed him up a little. He wasn’t badly hurt, but the other oldsters are all terrified.
Eddie still thinks Frank and Tyrone are the ones doing the burglaries, but Joyce said she can’t see them doing something like this. She thinks it might be some of the migrant workers who stayed
around after the last picking jobs finished up.
“The man is old enough to be their great-grandfather. Plus, he didn’t hardly have anything to steal. They took a little old black-and-white TV with rabbit-ear antennae on the top and a bunch of change he had in a jar on the kitchen table.”
Joyce still doesn’t understand that this is what crack addicts do. Eddie understands it, though. He told Joyce whoever it is, we ought to start keeping a shotgun in the house. Joyce is scared of guns, so that freaked her out big time.
“Think of it as living on the frontier,” I said. “Peace-loving black women used to have shotguns around all the time as a way of keeping things peaceful.”
Joyce knew we were right, but she didn’t have to like it. Finally she just shook her head at Eddie like a disappointed Sunday school teacher.
“And you call yourself a Buddhist!”
We just looked at her for a minute and then we all started laughing. When we calmed down, Eddie said, “You know I love Brother Buddha, but until he reincarnates as a black man in America, I think we better go with what we know.”
Joyce said she’d think about it, but I know she doesn’t want to have a gun in here. I think she figures if it was Frank and Tyrone, she could talk them out of it. People always think that, but they’re wrong. Crack changes everything. It’s why Eartha could leave Imani and not look back. I’ll be willing to bet all the money I got from selling the salon that the first thing she did when she left the hospital was go looking for the crack man. Her daughter was the last thing on her mind.
I remember when the stories started coming out about mothers on crack. A woman has a baby in the bathtub of the crack house, cuts the cord, and leaves it there to die while she goes back in the bedroom to get high. A woman gives her preadolescent daughter to the crack dealer in exchange for some rock. A woman shoots her grandmother who wouldn’t keep her kids and give her money to buy crack.
I kept reading these stories and it was real clear to me that something basic was changing. What kind of life can you possibly conceive of when you’re nine years old and your mama delivers you to the dope man because your virginity is all she’s got left to trade?
I guess I was naive to think that Idlewild could escape all of that. It almost doesn’t matter what black community you go in now, the problems are exactly the same. The kids are angry. The men are shell-shocked. The women are alone and the drugs are everywhere.
I sure picked a hell of a time to fall in love.
• 23
yesterday eddie started teaching us a little t’ai chi. Imani sat in her baby seat looking at us twisting around on the grass in our bare feet. I swear she must have thought we were crazed. Joyce is still pretty out of shape even though we’ve been walking two miles a day, so she quit after a few minutes, but I was liking it. I wanted to get good enough to do it like Eddie. His arms and legs just flow into the motions like water. It’s almost a dance. He just smiles and leans to the left. Smiles and leans to the right.
Looks easy as pie, but don’t believe it. I almost killed myself. When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t hardly sit up. When I told Eddie, he just smiled and said the soreness would go away once I got back in shape. I liked that he said back in shape. Made it sound like I’d been there before and just stepped out for a minute.
Joyce wants to build an altar. She’s been reading all these books about the Goddess. When she prays before we eat, now she says Mother/Father God. It’s weird, but I like it. I never saw God as an old white guy anyway. In my mind he always looks sort of like my grandfather: tall and tan and like he’s been working too hard.
I told her to be careful with that altar stuff, though. I don’t want her to fool around and call up the wrong spirits.
august
• 1
now that her first meeting outside the church went so well, Joyce is busy trying to give a little more structure to the Sewing Circus so she can start formalizing the programs and raise some money. She wanted to start by changing the name, but the membership liked the old one. It reminded me of something a career campaign worker told me at the end of a long, drunken evening after his well-financed, well-spoken candidate crashed and burned at the polls.
“That’s the problem with democracy,” he said, pouring the last of his Jack Daniel’s into a thimble full of Coca-Cola. “The damn people get to make all the decisions.”
Of course, Joyce didn’t feel that way about it. She was more concerned about goals and programs. It’s like that old saying about being careful what you ask for because you just might get it. Joyce now had a group of young women who trusted her and were beginning to trust each other, enough money from Mitch’s life insurance to pay herself to create an ongoing center for them, and a grant already coming from the state to pay some of the operating and program costs. The question was, what kind of place was it going to be? She kept trying out ideas on me and I’d tell her when I thought she was on to something real and when I thought she wasn’t. I’d even add my two cents whenever she’d let me get a word in edgewise.
One morning she was up early, tapping something into the computer, so I strapped on the baby carrier and took Imani out with me for a walk. I loved walking early and Imani was good company. She’ll be six weeks old on Friday and I can’t remember what it felt like around here without her. I’m walking every morning now and I take Imani with me three or four days a week. She still doesn’t have a lot to say, even for a six-week-old baby, but she sure is a good listener. She made you want to tell her stuff, and no matter what you were talking about, she’d look at you real hard like she didn’t want to miss anything you had to say. Being a sucker for a good captive audience, I talked to her about whatever was on my mind. I figured even if she could understand, she couldn’t talk yet, so who was she going to tell?
When I was little, I read Mary Poppins, who was a lot more interesting in the books than she was once Julie Andrews got ahold of her, but what I always remember is that in one chapter or another, a baby was born into the house where old Mary was working. One day somebody set the kid’s bassinet down by an open window and a bluebird came by to say hello. This bird had a lot of sense, too, and was nothing like those cartoon bluebirds who show up zippadeedoodahing around poor Uncle Remus’ enslaved shoulders. This bird was cool and he had come there to hear the baby recite the story of its creation, which the baby did upon request in a paragraph or two that stays with me even now as one of the most beautiful birth stories I’ve ever heard. The bird thanked the baby, told her he had to take a little trip, and promised to come by immediately upon returning so he could hear the story again. The baby promised not to forget it before he got back.
The problem was, nobody in the baby’s family could understand what she was saying. To them it sounded like a lot of meaningless gurgling, which meant nothing and usually generated a lot of cooing and clucking that distracted and distressed the baby, who, in the face of such ignorance, rapidly lost touch with her real roots.
By the time the bird came back to visit a few weeks later and asked the baby where she came from, she said something silly about her mother finding her under a cabbage leaf or the stork flying her in, and the heartbroken bird realized that another helpless human baby had been brainwashed out of her rightful magic. He knew that by the time he got back from his next trip, she would no longer hear his words, but only remember the music of his song.
I told Imani about that baby one morning and she looked at me so hard I almost expected her to start telling me about how she had traveled here on the winds of the universe, but she didn’t.
By the time we got back from our walk, it was time for a bottle and a midmorning nap, so Joyce handed me a copy of what she’d been working on with instructions to read it while she fed Imani and tell her what I thought. I figured she was serious because she’d put on a pot of coffee so I could indulge my caffeine addiction while we talked.
At the bottom of the first page it said:
Statement of Purp
ose
To create and nurture women who are strong, mentally, physically, and spiritually; free of shackles, both internal and external; independent of the control of other human beings and dogma, religious or political; women who can take care of themselves and their children financially, choose their lovers based on mutual respect, emotional honesty, and sexual responsibility; women who raise their children to be contributors, not predators or parasites.
I had to smile. It just goes to show that if you give a sixties person an inch, they’ll have you picketing the White House by dinnertime. I could imagine trying to get a working definition of dogma from the sisters of the Sewing Circus. I liked the idea, though, probably because the woman Joyce wanted to create and nurture sounded a lot like me, give or take a few points off for bad judgment.
But the thing definitely needed a little less Karl Marx and a little more Oprah. I sat down at the kitchen table, picked up a pen, and wrote in the margin: to nurture free, independent women who can take care of themselves, choose their lovers wisely, and raise their children right.
I crossed that last t as Joyce came back in and sat down across from me.
“What did you change?” she said, trying to read it upside down.
I covered the note with my hand. “Just wait a second,” I said. “I’m not through yet.”