Read Something She Can Feel Online

Authors: Grace Octavia

Something She Can Feel (10 page)

We got up and walked to the door and I tried to make reason of what she'd said. My mother always had a way of making everything sound so easy.
“Now I don't remember fighting over apples at all,” she added. “The joke was really about the way people see things.”
We stopped in the doorway and she turned to look at me, her honey eyes soft and calm.
“Your life is what you perceive it to be, Journey. If you want to be happy, you will be. If you don't want to be happy, you won't. It's that simple. You have a good life. You just have to take time to look at it,” she finished, rummaging in her purse as we both searched for our keys before walking out of the airconditioned opening.
“Oh, no,” she said, peering down in the bag. “I think I left my keys on the table.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“I had to.”
“Don't worry. I'll get them.”
“You don't have to,” she offered when I'd already turned to retrieve the keys.
As I headed back toward the door, I noticed my mother standing outside talking to Deacon Gresham—one of my parents' childhood friends who'd been with the church forever. He was a handsome man, one whose good looks hadn't faded with gray hair and a cane-assisted step. Deacon Gresham was always sharply dressed and wearing or carrying a hat to match his handkerchief-donned jackets. A retired attorney, his wife of forty years had died a little over a year ago and he'd become the choice chatter of my mother's circle. Grandmothers and some great-grandmothers, they sounded like teenagers when they plotted over dessert as to who'd get with Deacon Gresham.
I could see that his face looked stressed, his jaw was tight, and he hadn't smiled. He looked at me and then shifted his eyes very sternly back to my mother. She turned to me, shooting a blank stare, as he said something and then walked away.
“You found the keys,” my mother said, smiling nimbly when I came out.
“Yeah, they were on the table.” I handed her the keys and looked down the street to see the back of Deacon Gresham. “Why didn't he stay to say hello?”
“Oh, Journey, I don't think he saw you.”
“He looked right at me.”
“We were,” she started slowly, “supposed to have lunch.”
“I thought you said you canceled a business meeting.”
“We just meet for lunch sometimes. He's still very sad about Emma, so we talk about old times.”
“Okay, but I just don't understand why he walked off like that.” I looked back down the street. He was gone now. “Anyway, I'd better get going. I have to meet Billie.” I looked at my watch.
“Give her my love,” my mother said, asking not one more question about where we were meeting or what we were doing. This was more than a rarity, but a welcomed departure I was in no position to question.
“Okay,” I said quickly.
We traded pleasant kisses and departed.
 
 
In the car ride home to meet Billie and take the pregnancy tests, the discussion I had with my mother reverberated throughout my mind. Here, I'd signed up to start a new life and it seemed I had no clue how I fit into my own. Now how was that? How was I thirty-three and so unsure about everything around me? I wanted to put on my high-heel shoes, click around confidently like Kayla, chasing love and life like I knew exactly where I wanted to be. When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being bold like that. Of just doing what I wanted to do and not caring about what other people thought. But at some point, I just went numb and accepted less from myself.
“That's how life's lined up,” Jr said to me when I was sitting in the passenger seat of his car after he'd been sent to get me from a party in shack town my parents specifically told me I couldn't attend when I was fourteen. Billie was in the backseat and we both had our arms folded over our chests, angry at the world that he'd barged in and embarrassed us. “You can't go acting however you want out in public. You're a wild child, Journey, but you'll learn that people don't like to see you step out of line.”
And he was right. After years of being kicked in place, I realized that I was just happier when people liked to see me. I hated to think about that. How I'd learned to stand in line and like it. How I'd been numbed.
But was my mother right? Was I ... was Kayla ... seeking apples that weren't sweeter than the ones we had?
If being a happy adult meant being thirty-three with a mortgage, husband, tenured job, and loving family and friends, then I'd done that. I was something my family could be proud of, healthy and as happy as I'd expected I could be in my grown mind. Yes, I still had unfulfilled fantasies and got tired of being where I was
being
, but in no story I knew had an adult not felt that way. It seemed that, like my mother said, people were always just chasing something else. Maybe she was right.
The Storyteller
June 23, 2008
Afternoon in the Sky
 
“W
ere you pregnant?” Kweku asked, sitting up impatiently. The dignified demeanor he maintained when we boarded the plane at sunrise in Accra had now been reduced to that of a high school girl sitting in the bleachers, listening to the latest gossip. “What happened at the house with Billie and what was going on with that deacon at the restaurant? Did you ask your mother about it again?”
It was early afternoon. And the flight attendants announced that we were halfway to a layover in Amsterdam. Kweku and I eased into our routine as neighbors, chatting and passing snacks and drinks along when the flight attendants did their rounds. The baby a few rows back was crying again, but we'd been in the air for a long time now and Kweku and I joked that she must be wondering why on God's earth her mother still had her on that plane. “Let me off,” we joked, translating her cries.
Kweku was a great listener and even though he was a man, I felt so comfortable sharing even the most intimate things with him—some things that two months ago, I wouldn't have dreamed of uttering to another person beyond Billie. But here I was, not giggling or covering my mouth, but sharing my story like a grown woman and knowing deep down that this was a good thing. I needed to hear my story. To remind myself of how things were before that plane touched down. In this way, I guessed Kweku wasn't a friend or even the guy who was just sitting next to me on the plane. He was an ear. And I really needed someone to listen.
“No, I wasn't pregnant,” I said. “Billie and I did all fourteen of those tests and each time we saw a ‘negative.' ”
Kweku repositioned himself worriedly.
“I wasn't upset,” I said, patting his arm. “It was odd, but when I realized I wasn't pregnant, I felt kind of relieved. Like ... maybe it wasn't meant to be or ... maybe it wasn't time yet. Evan and I hadn't been trying long and if we really wanted a baby, it would come. God would see to it. I had to trust that.”
“Faith is sometimes the only thing that can get you through times like that.”
“That and a little uncertainty,” I said. “Maybe God knew I needed a little time.”
“So what did Ms. Billie have to say about it?” Kweku asked. He seemed to like hearing about her.
“She's my best friend, so she had my back either way. We hugged and she said it would be okay. But really, I think she knew what I was thinking inside about it. Your friends tend to know what you're really feeling—even if they don't say it aloud.”
Kweku turned and looked through the sliver of space between our seats at a white man who'd been listening, I was sure, to most of my story. Each time I lowered my voice, I saw him nod forward. And sometimes, when we were laughing, I heard a chuckle come from behind.
“Are you okay ?” Kweku asked the man gruffly.
“Yes.” He responded and turned his head as if to say he was no longer listening to us, but I knew better.
“Anyway,” Kweku went on. “I'm afraid to ask, but what about the deacon?”
“At the time, I just kept thinking of reasons why my mother would be meeting with Deacon Gresham. I mean, it was clear something was going on. My mother was no liar and ‘lie' was written all over her face. And then when I got to the house, I ran it past Billie and she reminded me of what Deacon Gresham did for a living.”
“What?”
“He's a divorce attorney. One of the biggest in the city. And if my mother was meeting up with him for lunch ...”
“She was trying to get a divorce?”
“You've already heard—my father wasn't the easiest man to be married to. And with everything she was complaining about at lunch, it had to be so,” I said. “And the sad thing was that I was only a little upset. I was more concerned about my mother and that she was obviously going through this on her own. I wished I could be there for her, but she wasn't the kind of woman I could call up and say, ‘Are you trying to divorce Daddy ?' That would break her heart. She still thought of me as a baby. I had to wait and catch her at the right time.”
“I know this. My mother, whenever you say too much she doesn't want to hear, she just stops listening. Like she's deaf. You call her, and she says nothing,” Kweku said, and we both laughed ... along with the man behind me.
“American mothers do the same thing. Just block you out. I think it comes with giving birth.”
“So, was your husband sad about your not getting pregnant ?” Kweku asked, folding back to the start of our conversation.
“I didn't even tell him. Evan and I were having so much fun just being lovers again that I didn't want to ruin it. I figured I'd keep things quiet until he asked. And there was the business of his running for office. The school. The church. We were already dealing with a lot. Mentioning the test would just make the baby thing a race. That's his way.”
“Yes, and this Dame fellow,” Kweku said and I felt my heart flush its blood out everywhere. “It sounds like that was troubling you, too.”
“Yeah,” I started and pressed myself back into my seat. “That was another part of the story.”
I looked out of the window and saw that the sky was so bright that it seemed it didn't expect that sunset would ever come.
I gasped and tapped at the glass, covering one of the clouds with my fingertips.
Was I ready to tell this part of the story ? I wondered in my long pause. Was I ready to remember those good times ?
PART TWO
Taste
Chapter Nine
April 29, 2008
Tuscaloosa, AL
 
E
verybody was moving. From here. To there. Over and around. The school was like an ant farm turned upside down. And not just the teachers either. The kids. Girls and boys I hadn't seen in months were posted up in the hallways giggling and holding books in their arms I knew they hadn't seen since the first day of school. I had full attendance in all of my morning classes and even a few students who didn't have my class were trying to get in. And I couldn't say no. The cafeteria was overflowing. From the cafeteria workers to the oldest teachers who knew nothing about Dame or his music, it was apparent that this was the biggest thing that had ever happened at Black Warrior. The most attention we'd gotten from the world in ... forever. Television crews? A star? In our school?
Our
school? The little old school for black kids that was started in a farmhouse on a plantation that once had slaves? Everyone was beside themselves. But I'd yet to feel the excitement.
I was still uneasy about my role in this whole thing, but a new piano, instruments for the band, and a proper sound system made it easier to accept the check from Dame. “You heard your father at dinner,” Evan said, bringing up the topic again one night as we sat out on the lake talking. “That boy has a bad reputation and that could hurt me later on. Those white boys downtown would love to tie me to some rapper when I run for mayor. That's all they need. But if you do it, we can say he was one of your students and that'll be it. Besides, he asked for you.”
When fourth period came, and we were all just a few seconds shy of Dame's arrival, I stood in the lobby of the school with my fourth-period students collected in a huddle of excitement behind me. Along with a few other classes, mine was selected to greet Dame at the door for his tour with the camera crews from BET, while the other students waited in the auditorium.
“When he coming?” Opal asked after I'd just managed to calm down my class again. Like a few other girls, she was wearing a T-shirt that read “The Same Dame” across the front and had a picture of Dame with no shirt on, oiled completely and flexing in the middle.
“My cousin say his tour bus just left the Waffle House on McFarland,” Devin King, the jokester of the class, said, tucking his cell phone into his pocket.
“What, that fool want his hash browns scattered, covered and smothered or something?” someone said, and everyone laughed.
“Yeah,” Opal jumped in, fanning herself. “Get his order. I want to know what he's eating, so I can make it in the morning.”
“Girl, you ain't got to worry about nobody being with you in the morning with those buck teeth you got,” Devin said, and the laughter grew louder.
“Okay. Okay. You all calm down or we're going back to the classroom,” I threatened, beginning to feel their anxiousness.
The BET camera crew was busy setting up. Men dressed in T-shirts and shorts with equipment hanging from their hips pointed to this and that and recalculated measurements for some other thing. Bright flood lights were perched here and there in the lobby like we were on a real television set. And while I'd opted to do my own makeup, they even had Evan in a folding chair in the bathroom with a stylist. He decided to wear his favorite tan suit with a blue shirt and golden tie. He looked like a regular good ol' frat boy. Just one of the guys.
“Move fast!” I heard one of the crew people say to a man carrying a camera as they ran by. “I want to get a shot of him walking in. Shoot him and then these people standing all around.”
“You guys ready?” another crew member asked, standing on a ladder and trying to organize the growing crowd. “Dame's about to come in here and we'll all get a glimpse of him. Let's just remember to be patient.”
Having stepped away from my students to stand in a row of teachers who lined the head of the crowd blocking the doorway, I looked up to see Billie's eyes frozen, transfixed on the door. “He's coming,” she said breathlessly as she might have at a Bobby Brown concert when we were thirteen. Her brown eyes were opened wide and the flashes from cameras flickered there for a second.
The roar from the lobby came without warning. The crowd pushed forward, the doors came open and all the cameras fell into position as Dame walked into the building. I inched up a bit, leveraging myself with Billie's arm, so I could get a good look. From the door, shaking hands with Evan, he looked different than I expected. Than I remembered. Bigger in some way. He was dressed in a plain white T-shirt that was small enough to show his muscles, blue jeans with designs hop-scotched all over them, and extrawhite sneakers. Aside from the crew buzzing around him, he didn't look flashy or out of place. And even from my position, about six feet away, I could tell by the shine in his eyes that he was just as excited as we were.
The man on the ladder signaled for the crowd to quiet down as Dame and Evan shook hands and chatted a bit in front of the cameras. Evan went to put his arm around Dame for one of the photographers who was with the local newspaper. It was a welcoming gesture, like one of the old guys was welcoming a kid made good back to town.
Dame made his way toward me, shaking hands down a line of teachers who'd taught him. I could see that he really had grown up. Puberty or testosterone or something had changed even his skin. I remembered him having a caramel complexion with common cocoa eyes, but now everything in his face was smoky. His brown skin was now a lacquered dark chocolate and his eyes were more mysterious and pointed. Even his hair had changed. Far from the little pointy sticks he used to sit in the back of the classroom and twist as he wrote in his notebook, his locks were now long and feral in a way that warned of enticing danger. Just a bit darker than his skin, it looked clean and soft like pre-spun cashmere rinsed in myrrh. It almost begged to be touched. Looking at the magazine cover I had at the house, I'd thought this was airbrushing or the effect of celebrity lighting, but no, it was the real thing. He smiled and his perfect, white teeth contrasted against his skin, making him shine effortlessly. He looked like a star. And as he walked the greeting line, one by one, the grown-up female teachers turned into grinning girls with crushes. How ridiculous they looked, I thought ... until it was happening to me, too.
As I watched him move, everything around me grew so loud, but all I could hear was my insides turning. Saliva spinning at the back of my throat. My pulse tickling the insides of my wrists. My breathing going slow, slow, and then the vibration of air tunneling down the center of my chest before an exhale whistled out of my shuddering body. It was like I was at a concert, catching a fever of emotion from everyone circled around me. It was a surprise that I'd felt this way, but I couldn't ignore the energy and pretty soon, the excitement was inside of me. I looked down to see that my right foot had turned coyly toward my left ankle. I was standing there like a little girl. I wondered if anyone had noticed and quickly moved my foot back into position.
“Ms. Cash?” Dame stopped suddenly as he was talking to another teacher a ways down from me. “Say it ain't so,” he said, laughing as he strutted toward me with the cameras behind him. “My favorite teacher! Ms. Cash!”
He scooped me up into his arms and spun me around so quickly I had to catch my breath. As he opened his arms and I slid back to my feet, I could feel the muscles in his chest.
“Oh,” I said, smiling and telling myself not to look at his arms in front of the camera. “I'm Mrs. DeLong now. I got married,” I blathered, and so I flashed my ring in front of the camera as proof.
“What?” Dame looked over at Evan grouped with some other people from the school board. “You married Dr. DeLong?”
“Sure did,” I smiled, inadvertently waving my ring again. “And we're so happy to have you here to visit the school you once called home,” I said and one of the crew members whispered for me to look at Dame and not at the camera when I spoke.
“I couldn't think of a better place to be,” Dame said sincerely. “When my manager said I had some time off before my world tour, I told him to cut me a check and book me a plane ticket home. I had to come see about my people. The Black Warriors.”
Benji Young, a boy I used to see writing rhymes in the back of the classroom with Dame, hollered, “Warriors” the way the kids did at pep rallies and other school functions, and the kids replied, “Warriors,” and everyone began to clap.
After the greetings and me getting my students settled in the auditorium, I escorted Dame and the crew around the school, so he could show off his old locker, the basketball courts, and the bathroom where he jokingly said he'd almost lost his virginity until the girl's boyfriend walked in. As we walked around the school, Dame had the whole crew laughing, me included, with his memories of Tuscaloosa. While most people would think someone his age didn't care about the place, Dame seemed to remember everything that made Tuscaloosa special and unique and every time he said, “Let me tell y'all about the time ...” everyone gathered and listened intently.
When we finally made our way to the chorus room, I was beginning to feel like a celebrity myself. Between takes, a woman popped out of nowhere and smoothed my hair, gave me a sip of water and redotted my lips with the gloss I'd given her—I still didn't trust her to touch my makeup.
“This is where it all began,” Dame said. He dashed up the steps that led to the back of the room and sat right in the seat he once inhabited. “I used to sit right here and write my rhymes with T-Brill and Benji. We'd be in here bugging out ... just dreaming of making it big someday.” He stood back up and walked down toward my desk where I was standing behind the camera. After everyone shifted around, he looked at me. “And now I'm big ... and I have you to thank for that.”
“You're very welcome,” I said.
“I know sometimes you must've felt like you weren't teaching us a damn thing ... man, we were so damn bad!” He laughed and I nodded in agreement. “But you were teaching us. Just being in here and listening to your music and seeing you do something you loved ... sometimes that was all we needed to learn. We was coming out the projects and seeing what it was like to have a job where ain't nobody looking to take you out. You know? That's real talk.” His eyes grew more serious. “I know that ain't something you can measure on a test, but it saved my life. It gave me a vision that I could do what I loved and not have to answer to anybody. I took that and ran with it. Literally! I ran right out the classroom and ain't never come back.” Everyone except Dame and I laughed at his story. We kept our eyes on each other. “But now I'm here,” he said, lowering his voice. “I'm back home.”
 
 
When Dame and I finally made our way into the school auditorium, it was standing room only. The noise was so loud, Dame had to take the microphone himself to get everyone settled down. I was standing on the stage beside him. Evan and Mr. Williams were a few steps away.
While I'd sung in front of crowds at the church and traveled with the choir to places where audiences were twice as large, knowing so many people were watching and filming made me nervous. Was I standing too close to Dame? Too far away? Was my hair messed up? Should I have let the woman do my makeup? Did I look shiny? Did I sound crazy? And pretty soon, I had so many questions that I just wondered, Why am I on this stage?
“I'm one of you,” Dame said when he finally got all the kids to sit down and relax just enough so he could speak. “I'm not from the ‘dirty'; I'm from the dirt. Where folks got less than nothing. Got to go outside and eat fruit all day because that's the only thing that grows free in your grandmama's yard. I know some of y'all know what I'm talking about.” Their eyes locked on Dame, the students grew quiet. I'd never seen them so focused.
“And when that fruit runs out ... when them collards run out,” he went on, “you're fast to do anything to feed yourself—to feed your family. And you know it's wrong, but you're hungry. Ain't nothing worse than being hungry. I ain't talking about the clothes you wear or the car you drive. Where you live. I'm talking about being hungry. And when my stomach was empty, I used to dream about someday just doing anything. Anything somebody would let me do. A garbage man. Anything. So I wouldn't have to be hungry no more. But ain't nobody give me a chance, so I went out in the street. And when that ran out, when folks started getting popped and the game got real bloody, I realized I wasn't no street dude. Not really. I realized that I had to hustle to live for myself. So I could be Dame. Not what the world expects me to be.”
“We love you, Dame,” a girl cried out from the crowd.
“And I love you back,” he said and the auditorium filled with the sound of laughter and screaming girls. “And I love you so much that I'm giving this school, my school, a little bit of what I got out of hustling for myself. This money I'm giving is just for you. So you don't have to be hungry in your school. So you don't have to want someone to let you be anything. So you don't have to get in the drug game and lose respect for your community and keep bringing us down.”

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