“I'm just walking around the track outside for an hour.” I added, “You should come, too.”
“But it's Friday!”
“And?”
“And ... it's your birthday weekend. You'll be thirty-three on Sunday.” She sat down in the chair next to my desk and whimpered helplessly. “We need to start celebrating now.”
“Celebrating what? It's just another year.”
“You're one year growner!”
“Growner?”
“More grown ... whatever.” She flipped her hand at me.
“Okay, English teacher.”
“Just ... why don't you seem excited? Not even a little bit?”
“I'm excited,” I said, hearing the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.
“Then come eat with me, pleeeeassee,” she begged.
“But I have to walk today. I promised myself. I have to do something with these bad boys by summer.” I pointed to the round hips that seemed to be stretching my size eighteen slacks into the next cut. “I'm not trying to be the Southern cliché of a black womanâin the church, singing ... and big.”
“Please, J. You know the brothers love those country curves.”
“Not Evan.”
“Well,
the
Mr. Evan Deeee-Long is a different breed. Everybody has to be picture perfect around himâsince he wants to be the first black president of the universeâ”
“Well, Obama's already on the way!” I said and we both laughed.
“Exactly. But I say, bump perfection ... when there's a tasty sandwich shop waiting to feed us. Come on, girl!” She grinned and waved her hands rhythmically in front of my face to entice me.
“That's easy for you to say; you're a size 6,” I said, laughing as I slid off my shoes and began putting on the sneakers. One of the smartest, boldest people I'd ever known, Billie was the kind of pretty girl other pretty girls hated to walk into a party with. For her, beauty was something she didn't have to work at. Billie's chestnut skin, doe eyes, and slender cheeks made her an eyeful even when she was asleepâand I lived with her for four years in college at Alabama, so I knew.
“Size doesn't matter when no one's there to look at it,” she said, her voice sinking. “Sometimes, I feel like I could be a size 2 or 202 and that fool still wouldn't notice.”
In high school, Billie was voted “Best Looking,” and we expected some Prince Charming from New York or Atlanta to come swooping down to see her beauty and take her far away from Tuscaloosa. But she had other plans. The love of her heart, Clyde Pierce, wasn't from New York or Atlanta and he'd sworn long ago that he wasn't ever leaving his father's land. He graduated from Stillman College the year before we left the University of Alabama and took a job teaching gym and coaching the varsity football team at Black Warrior. No one was surprised when Billie signed up for a teaching job the following yearâeven though she was a finance major.
“Oh, Billie, don't bring up Clyde. I thought you were finally moving on ... remember?” I said.
“I know, but it's hard to have his shit just all up in my face like this, you know?” She leaned her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in the palm of her hand.
As coach of the football team, Clyde had been enjoying his own form of celebrity in Tuscaloosa. And for years, he'd had a long line of fans linked up behind Billie. The biggest problem he had was crowd controlâespecially with the other female teachers at the school. But Billie loved even the sweat that bubbled on Clyde's brow, and while she usually wrote off his philandering and slipping in and out of janitorial closets as rumors, the last chitchat hit her like a bucket of his sweat in her face. Nearly a ringer for a younger Billie, the new physics teacher, Ms. Lindsey, was twenty-one, petite, and so cute the senior class voted to have her put on the list for their “Best Looking.” Last year, when word spread around the “grown people senior class”âthat's what we called the facultyâthat Roscoe the janitor caught Clyde and Ms. Lindsey in his storage closet, giggling like teenagers ... and naked, Billie broke it off and she'd dedicated herself to finding a good man ever since. I was happy that she'd had the strength to move on, but also thrown off by the fact that unlike every time before, it seemed that this time the breakup was final. And not from Billie's position either. Unlike the others, Clyde seemed serious about Ms. Lindsey. He paraded her around town, and sometimes I caught him looking at her the same way he'd looked at Billie when she was twenty-one and vibrant, her mind not caught up in the desires of a grown woman looking for a husband and family. This, of course, I never told Billie.
“How's the Internet dating thing going?” I asked, trying to change the subject from Clyde.
“It's great.” She perked up suddenly. “In fact, do you remember the guy I've been writing? Mustafa?”
“Mustafa?”
“Yeah, the hot Nigerian man? We've been chatting for like a month. Anyway, he's coming to visit me this weekend.”
“Visit you? Did you check him out? Are you sure he's not a part of some credit card scam or trying to marry you so he can get a green card? Did he ask you to transfer money into an account? I saw an e-mail about that.”
While I'd accepted the fact that the chances of Billie meeting a single man above the age of twenty-five in Tuscaloosa was nil, and that next to driving to Birmingham every weekend, the Internet provided the next best way for her to fulfill her grown lady resolution, I was still a bit nervous about the men she'd been meeting online.
“Don't be so closed-minded, J. You know better. Mustafa is a good man. He has his own business and money. He's single. No kids. Lives alone,” she rattled off but something in her voice was so rehearsed. I just couldn't figure out what it was. “He has it going on. And with the shortage of good men over here in the States, a sister had to expand her options to the Motherland.” She started doing a ridiculous African dance and we both laughed.
“I'm just sayingâhe's coming here to see you? All the way from Africa? Does he know anything about Tuscaloosa? This isn't exactly a melting pot.”
“Well, he has a little extra money and neither of us wants to wait ... so, we figured ... why not? We're grown.”
“That's a good attitude, I guess,” I said, running out of questions. “At least you know he's real and not some kid in Wisconsin with braces and a humpback.”
“And I'm bringing him to church, so you guys can meet him.”
“Bringing him to church?” I repeated. This was a serious “don't” for a single woman in the South. Bringing a man to church came with too many complications, including aunties assuming you two were getting married now (and saying prayers out loud over that very thing) and other single women trying to steal him away before the service was over. “This seems pretty serious.” I stood up and began walking toward the door in my sneakers.
“I hope so. I want to get married, too! Get me a mansion and a Muuu-say-deess, Mrs. DeeeeLong,” she teased.
“You're so funny.” I laughed.
“So, I guess I won't see you until Sunday, then,” Billie sighed, walking out of the classroom behind me.
“You know Evan has all these plans.”
“Dang, I thought I'd at least get some time for girls' day at the mall. We need to get you some new clothes.”
“New clothes? What's wrong with my clothes? I look fine.” I looked down at my tan suit.
“Girl, it's time to step away from those two-piece sales at Belk,” she said, eyeing me. “You look like you're going to church everywhere we go. Workâsuit ... picnicâsuit ... I think you wore a suit last week when we met up for dinner.”
“I like my suits,” I declared, laughing at her little list. “And I can't fit the itty-bitty teenager clothes you wear. I'm too big for that.”
“First, you're not that big. And second, haven't you seen one Ashley Stewart?” she asked. “Thick girls are dressing divas now, too.”
“I know, but I'm not trying on that stuff. I'll look silly.”
“Don't knock it til you tried it!” She sucked her teeth slyly.
“Well, I'll have to âtry it' some other time. Because, like I said, this weekend, I'll be wearing
my suit
to hang out with
my husband
.”
“Evan. Evan. Evan.”
“Hater.” I laughed. “I'll see you Sunday. We're having dinner at my parents' house after church, so you can come celebrate with me there.”
“Will do, Ms. Journey. Will do. Ohh ... What do you think Evan got you this year? I know it's something amazing. Evan knows how to give a gift.” She rubbed her hands together in anticipation.
“I already got my gift.”
“What?”
“My Juliet,” I replied. “Last week, Evan finally had a contractor come out to the house to cut the Juliet balcony into the side wall of the bedroom. Now I can look out into the sky as I fall asleep. See the moon. It's like I'm sleeping outside. You know I always wanted to do that.”
“Now that's good living, ain't it?” she said as we both imagined the Alabamian star show I'd been enjoying beside my bed each night.
“It is. It sure is.”
Â
Â
As I walked around the track, sweating fiercely beneath the lunchtime sun with the track team and a gym class running what seemed like light speeds ahead of me, I thought of what Billie had said about me not being excited about my birthday. I hadn't realized how passive I was being. She was right. I wasn't exactly running toward itânot the way I'd raced with cuddly kitten-clad calendars tacked up on my bedroom wall like posters for my thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and even twenty-first birthdays. Then, I was unable to be contained, felt free by the turn in time. My hips spread and swayed, my stance and step became more confident and in my heart, I believed the next year would be better, simply because I was older.
But the older I got, the more I learned that being older only meant less freedom, less spread and sway, and more of an acceptance that things were probably not going to change. It was flat-out hard to be excited about that. I supposed Billie and I were trying to avoid this feeling by making our resolutions to slow things down a bit, but so far, little was happening. On an impulse, I'd applied for my passport and carried it with me everywhere I went, just hoping that having it with me would help me plan my trip to anywhere sometime. But Evan was too busy with work and I couldn't go alone, so the thing just collected dust at the bottom of my purse. And it had company there, tooâright next to the passport was the empty pad I'd bought to write all of my new songs in ... whenever or wherever I was inspired by something. So far, I hadn't been inspired and, therefore, I hadn't written a single word beyond “Please Return To” and “Journey.” The only thing I had going for me on that resolution list was my weight loss. I lost a few pounds over the months and if I wanted to keep them off, I had to keep on walking. Lunch could wait.
Chapter Three
E
xodus
13:17. That's what Sunday is like for me at my father's brainchild of a church, Greater Prophet House. In the Bible, that's when God leads Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt through a desert road that leads to the mouth of the Red Sea. The Egyptians are coming up behind, and then old Moses lifts his staff and the entire sea cooperates, opening up a pathway for the fearful people to pass through safely.
In magnitude and magnificence, “The House,” as everyone calls it, couldn't sit in the shadows of the Red Sea, but it was certainly getting there. The church my father,
the
Reverend Dr. Jethro Cash, started with just four members (my mother, older brother Jethro Jr, me, and my Nana Jessie) was now ministering to 20,000. Over thirty-one years, I watched from the front pew in my Sunday clothes and patent leather Mary Janes as my father's beard grayed and the choir loft grew from my mother holding a microphone with her gloved hands to a competition-ready chorus of 1,600 singers in seventeen choirs. Behind me, the pews bustled and busted out of control as we outgrew three sanctuaries, the second of which we marked with the birth of my rambunctious baby brother, Justin, and finally ended up in “The Big House”âa huge dome of pews that seemed to stretch out to the sky. It had seating for 25,000 and always filled upâeven the overflow auditorium had additional overflow space. While the expected logistical chaos and traffic nightmare that was required to get worshippers into the sanctuary to hear the sermon was despised by everyone in the city from the mayor to my own mother, my father said he wouldn't stop adding on to the House until he had enough seats to make Bryant-Denny Stadium's 92,138 seats look like a pigpenâonly instead of the Crimson Tide, we'd be “cheering for the Lord.” And that was a big calling, because in our town, people christened their own babies in the name of the Tide.
Now as many screaming babies, casket-sharp men, and women in sun-shading church hats and nylons as there were in the House, when Evan and I got there, the bulging sea of people seemed to subside as we made our way to wherever my parents' orders were taking me. The people didn't turn their backs or walk in silence in another direction. Instead, they smiled and waved in the familial, responsible way people tend to look at preachers' kids they've watched grow up.
By the time we made our way to our seats, my cheeks were red from countless sweet kisses from church mothers and deaconesses. Evan's arms were weighed down with shiny gift bags, and his hands were filled with cards. Against Billie's wishes, I was wearing a teal and black pantsuit that hid the curves I didn't want to be seen and Evan complemented me in a black suit with a teal bowtie and handkerchief. I always told him we didn't need to match quite so much, but he loved doing it on special occasions. He said it looked better in pictures.
Around us, the church was coming alive with preparation. There were teleprompters and flatscreen TVs. A section for the hearing impaired and blind. The quiet room with the long windows toward the back where they took the women with the white prayer hats who'd gotten the Holy Ghost and needed to be rested. Dressed in their long red and black robes, the choir assembled on the bleachers, the band was in the pit, and the noble deacons and immaculate ushers were lining up and organizing the maze of rows like the officers had done to the cars outside. From where I was sitting, the House looked like it was preparing a crowd for the kickoff at a championship football game. While I'd known or brushed shoulders with most of the people inside, in the rows in front of me, their faces bled into a crowd of expectant onlookers. Worshippers who came to see something happen.
“Hallelujah,” I heard my father's voice boom through the sound system before he walked onto the altar. “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
While I'd heard that voice and even those same words a million times before, I smiled at the familiarity and like everyone else, I stood up as my mother and father walked into the sanctuary, flanked by the assistant pastor Jack Newsome, a random circle of deacons, and the church secretaries.
Just as they did every Sunday, the band struck up the tune and the choir began to sing the words my father had just uttered. The praise dancers, girls and boys with happy, brown faces dressed in angel costumes, glided down the aisles, carrying colorful streamers, waving them on beat to our singing. The place came alive with people singing and holding their hands up and out in joy for the moment.
My mother turned beet red when she saw me. Breaking ranks with the procession, she dashed toward me with her arms extended.
“Yes, Lord,” she cried, pulling me into her center. She added a drawl at the end of all of her words. And her sweet voice was decidedly and unapologetically Southern. “Thought you'd moved to Mexico.”
“No, Mama,” I said.
“Well, I called you last night, at 12 a.m. on the nose. Had to wish my only baby girl a happy birthday.”
“I saw, but I was sleeping,” I tried, shouting over the voices around us.
“No time for your mama? Not even on the day I gave birth to you.” She grinned and hugged my brother Jethro Jr, who was standing beside me.
Jr was only five years older than me, but he assumed all of the righteous dignity of a Buddhist monkâeven when he wasn't being righteous or dignified. He was a good-looking man with skin lighter than mineâalmost like the insides of my handsâand serious, thick eyebrows. But like my father, what was most striking about my big brother was his size. At 6 feet 7 inches and 275 pounds, he and my father almost had to be leaders, because everyone had to look up to them. Jr, of course, ran with this. He'd served as the church's ministerial director since his senior year of college, and fought endlessly with Jack Newsome over who'd take my father's place when and
if
he ever retired.
While Jr looked like my father, my mother looked like someone had taken a video recording of me and pressed fast forward. She had skin the color of mozzarella cheese and eyes that were amber in the shade of my grandmother's front porch, but then lit up like fiery embers when the sun hit them. She was lovely to look at, pretty in the kind of way that reminded people in the South of how ironic it was that something so beautiful could come from the ugly things that happened during what they now called with an intentional drawl, “a long time ago.”
“Little Journey made it to the Lord's house,” my father said, making his way up to me from behind my mother. “And now a father can rest.”
We hugged and people around us beamed at the sight. It was the family's tradition to hug in front of the congregation and sit together. It proved that our family was still close and leading the church. Even when we were all mad at each other and ready to draw blood, we did this because it was what was best for the church.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said, nestling my head into his massive chest. While I was three, maybe four times the size I was when I had my first memories of resting my head there, he still seemed larger and more solid than anything in my world. Jethro Sr had his flaws, but being a good father to me and my brothers wasn't one of them. Yeah, he could be pushy and controlling, but he was there and when he gathered me and my bleeding knee, cut elbow, or hurt feelings up into his arms, I believed anything he said and knew the pain would go away with just one of Daddy's magical kisses. He was what people were speaking of when they said “he's a good father.” Daddy loved his family, his church, and God. Over the years, I'd seen many men try to be him. Some were successfulâthey'd gone out and started their own churches in Huntsville and Mobile. And many more failed. Looking at my two brothers, I knew that neither outcome was easy.
Jack Newsome went through church news and greeted the visitors and church sons as we took our seats. Daddy and Mama sat in the first seats with the visiting sons and Newsome's seat beside them. In the next row, I sat beside Evan, Jr and his wife, May, Nana Jessie, and the heads of the largest ministries. Last in the row was the empty seat. It belonged to my younger brother, Justin. While he'd moved to Atlanta to go to an art school, which (according to paperwork my mother kept away from my father) he'd deenrolled from after one semester, my father insisted that we leave a seat open for him in case he returned. Justin was always kind of an outsiderâboth in our family and in Tuscaloosa. He was sensitive, didn't really like to wrestle and compete the same way Jr did. He preferred to sit in the house and gossip with me, play with dolls and help me pick out their outfits. By the time he was in high school, he had a kind of sway to his step that led to the rumors swirling around him to grow from “he's soft” to “he's gay.” It bothered him a lot. He always swore it wasn't true and even pointed to girls he liked, but inside I felt otherwise and thought he just didn't know it yet. Our upbringing hadn't left him space to know it. When he said he was moving to Atlanta, I secretly prayed Justin would find himselfâgay or not gay. I dared not tell anyone, but it really didn't matter to me. I just wanted him to be happy.
Billie always said that from her seat, my family looked like the happiest black people she'd ever seen. People talked about us. They watched as Jr tapped my father on the back and they shared a laugh. Loved it when my mother's face lit up every Sunday when she walked in the doors and saw me. And they thought Evan and I looked like we'd have perfect “pretty” babies. But it was what they weren't talking about in our presence that made us not so perfect. At the top of that list was Justin's absence and my father's indiscretions.
“I'm humbled, church,” my father said after finally making his way to the altar with my mother by his side. “Every year, on this day, at this time, I'm humbled. . . because I'm reminded that I'm a daddy.... Not just a father or dadâmy sons call me âDad,' you know? But a âDaddy.' And there ain't but one person in this whole, big world that calls me that,” he continued. “My baby girl. Now, I expect only the other âdaddys' in the room to understand what I'm talking about. It's a beautiful thing, you hear? When you have the love of a daughter. Nothing else in the world compares to how she looks at you. To how she holds on to you. To how it feels when she calls out to you, and you know that everyone knows that if nobody can't stop her from crying, her daddy can.”
“Pastor ain't never lied!” a man cried from the front, standing up with his daughter in his arms. I looked a few rows ahead of him to see Newsome's mother, Sister Iris Newsome, being escorted to her seat in the front row by one of the ushers. She smiled toward Jack and through the corner of my eye, I saw Jr shift in his seat and whisper something to May.
“Now, Journey, you may have someone new to kiss your boo-boos and pay your bills,” Daddy went on, looking at me as everyone laughed at his usual humor. “Evan, you'd better be paying her bills!” He squinted his eyes as Evan laughed and kissed me on the cheek. “But today, on your birthday, your daddy wants you to know that he's always gonna be here. You can be grown. You can even be gone. But you got only one daddy. And I have only one Journey. I love you. Happy Birthday!”
“Thank you, Daddy,” I mouthed and then blew him a kiss.
“I promised myself I wouldn't cry,” my mother said, taking the microphone. She'd been saying that for years, but I'd never seen that woman miss an opportunity to cry in public. She wiped a tear from her eye. “It's only once every few years that your birthday falls on the same day of the week. And whenever it's a Sunday, as a child of God, I like to make reason of it.” Her voice turned strong and she looked out into the crowd with focus. While my mother taught elementary school for many years when I was young, she now led the women's ministry and served as the CEO of our church's women's center downtown. It took a while and a lot of nerve for her to finally take up a leadership role in the church. While most people loved her, there were some detractorsâa constituency of five or so women who'd been linked or linked themselves to my father through nasty gossip and church chatter over the years. It always seemed like some woman who'd refused to leave the church was claiming my father was her man and leaving my mother. And while it hurt her deeply and I could see the distrust building in her eyes, he never left us and the rumors always eventually subsided. While I knew much of what peopleâmostly lonely and desperate women who'd turned from worshipping with him to actually worshipping my fatherâsaid was untrue, like my mother, I knew some had to be otherwise. And whenever we walked into a room, I felt her doubt and anxiety as she wondered who'd been in the company of her husband. But that anxiety had long faded and my father was growing too tired to fill up his calendar. So my mother grew stronger with her new attention and with that came her Word at the pulpit. Which everyone seemed to love.
“Today, my daughter celebrates her thirty-third birthday on a Sunday. Those of you who know your Word know that this is her Jesus year.”
Daddy shook his head and the older people began to clap.
“The Bible lets us know that our Savior died at the age of thirty-three,” she went on. “Now, I'm not saying this to bring you down. We don't need tears today. But when you really think about it, no one should be crying anyway. Because the day Jesus died also marks the day we were given eternal life. Something was renewed that day on Calvary. Yes, Lord. Something was reborn.”