The trip away from home, a home spotted by abuse and deep love, into the torment of graduate study and first love. All with a psychic gift lurking in the shadows.
What does it mean to be young, Black, female, intelligent, gifted with second sight, on your way to a Ph.D. and in love for the first time? The Journey presents us with exactly this young woman. The pivotal question becomes is she sane and he deceitful, or has she lost her mind? The answer is both. Not an easy, cohesive ride, the narrative thread of an African American female mystic falling deeply in love with a white psychiatrist is complicated by a gently suggested history of abuse, graduate school, and the subtle racism of still largely white academia. The Journey strokes the American psyche from within a very personal story of love and vision: she is in love; he is not, but he leads her in a merry dance, never quite revealing what emotion lies behind his warm brown eyes.
Excerpt
LOOM
249 words
In the gloom all I could see was his strangling of my mouth. His scent around my neck, surer than hands, squeezing with a gaze. It haunted me months after the escape, the driving from town, his insistence that I was losing everything: home, stability; I needed sanctuary; couldn’t I see that?
And no, I couldn’t; I was blind to everything but six feet of eye, flat footed, a scent that followed me 2,700 miles, showing up in a perfumeria on the opposite coast.
I bought it of course, though he had cost me everything except the Ph.D. If I don’t get cracking by the first I’ll lose that too. Pricey that scent. But it was the brow, the always furrowed brow, he seemed forever distraught in my presence.
Yet I am the one with the prescription, the life rebuilt from shambles. My awareness of him is strongest at four in the morning when I have no idea where he is. A man between my legs, satisfying me, yet all I can touch is the sheet between my fingers.
The gloom is of pre-dawn four a.m. light; he strikes surest then. I wait, having known no passion so conclusive; it fits in with my measured pills; teaching phase; learning curve. I welcome the loss of breath, the cutting off of circulation, for this is what paroxysm of desire feels like when your lover is a chimera and his touch dangerous as a man of medicine who’s lost his way.
###
PROLOGUE FOR 'TEMIO
245 words
You never said a word and yet I see their hazard faces. They are not stupid. Their blood is the liquid danger. It curdles and crusts on your eyelids as the aid flows on.
You never cried Artemio, and I would have liked that. I have dreamed of being at your feet with a tissue. You spent days making me understand. I am still in that classroom wearing a face because the words from your yellow notebook made no sense. You are still stopping to whisper "Queremos ser independientes" and the words suddenly become clear. Your ancient conquerors were fighting something real.
It is not that you stopped the entire class to acquaint me with Bolivar--it is the order of your yellow notebook. They are all there in your clean white pages. I want every world in those notebooks.
You were such a good professor, Artemio. That is why I mourn. You left the university, and I never dreamed your stiff walk was the writing of torturers. I stole the Latin American tale because it was the only brown person's story offered to me. The heroes I visualized could not be nineteenth century, white, or American.
You waited so long, Artemio, and I didn't know you were looking for a colleague. I couldn't read your eyes. You wanted me to accept the pain and go past it. I didn't know then how to give my racism on a platter and hack it to pieces.
###
PAINT
1,090 words
I came home and there was a letter from the old man in Kansas, he of the white hair, cane, redheaded wife. The brave old man who befriends me via waves of internet blinking. Online writers forum bound us, that and paint. The old man brave enough to meet blank canvas, start somewhere, end somewhere, to send me his favorite painting instructor on PBS video. Me, I specialize in staying afraid of what I want, wondering if his wife knew; she, the silent cipher. So many times I hear only from the men. The doc in Australia also an internet blink, and significant other to an equally silent wife who sends me framed camellias. No man ever of my own.
I come home to old man’s letter after day of Ramzi, Ramzi the raging bald Palestinian whose bulk I love and whose weight, solidity I get lost in. Some might call it fat, but I have seen him up close, napping in awkward positions on my sofa, and know that he is solid, thick, not one expected to negotiate. Sleep a challenge for him. He snores on my sofa, does not know why.
It is months, weeks before his shouted breakdown—him screaming into the phone, exploding, me, unaware, the asker of innocent questions, no idea that the end of my query is an uncle who raped him at five years old. It is months, weeks before the shouted breakdown, before I find out why he cannot love me, and I am the one who falls apart. Did I mention that it was raining? Thunderstorming as we retraced our steps into Philly proper from an excursion to the Great Northeast. Franklin Mills to shop. Splitting up, reuniting for dinner. Packages in the trunk, worrying if they’ll stay dry. Other things on my mind, no idea what is on his.
We park in front of graduate student housing; I live on Broad Street and my life, my rent, my very brain belongs to Temple University. He is an older undergrad; I am struggling toward a Ph.D. The rain pours down in sheets, and I feel as though I am on a movie set. The rain falls straight, as though directed, and we are huddled in his car having a silent conversation about whether or not to wait it out. No one wants to speak, or get out, or haul packages or get soaked through. I am content to be intimate, close, in the car, but the big hulking Palestinian and I do not have a kissing relationship. I am clear, but he does not know what he wants. He is caring, gentle, distant. Withholds what I most want, what I leave unrequested: permission to curl up in his body. It is months, weeks before the shouted revelation. Before I am thrown into knowledge of his pedophilic uncle.
And as the rain poured down upon us, I sat there wanting to kiss him more than I've ever wanted to kiss anyone in my life, and sometimes he was talking and I was listening, and sometimes I was just doing what my doctor told me and examining how it felt to sit by the river ("Feelings are like a river you can sit on the bank and watch them go by") and feel my body flutter and my reproductive organs give way and if I'd been standing I would have fallen. We talked for hours. I sat there and watched my body and turned away when I couldn't look at him.
Finally the rain lessened, didn't stop, and he said "Get out of my car!" and I said "That hurt" and he said Nah, it didn't, and I said yes, it did, and he said Nah, but if we don't do it now we never will, and it's 3:04 in the morning and I don't know how long I sat on the toilet and cried, I don't know how long I poured over my brand new boxed set of van Gogh paintings and felt Vincent look at me; I ran my hands over his paintings and felt him with me and Old Man, designated grandfather, chosen relative, this is what I wanted to tell you, this is what I expected you would understand:
I can't deny myself anymore, Granpa Don; I just can't; my heart is breaking and I'm feeling it, really feeling it, and God, it is so good to be present for life even when it hurts like hell and you've spent the entire week hanging up on customer service operators and student financial services people. It's damn good to finally be present after all these years, and what I want, Old Man, what I desperately need is a big, old, dusty, abandoned warehouse of a building with many-paned windows and ceilings so high the air floats in on layers; an old warehouse, Granpa Don … a warehouse so big that I can hang a cloth along the wall--just one wall--and fling paint; fling it so hard I can't stand it; fling it so hard fast balls are going oh shit; fling it so hard my arm hurts and I can't lift another handful …
I wanna dig my hand in and bring up armfuls of bright fire engine red paint and fling it hard, fling it loud … I want to hear every goddamn splat; I want to fling it, Granpa Don, till I get so tired … I want to fling it and pause only to howl or cry or scream … I want lots and lots of air and light and SPACE cause I got a hell of a lot of flinging to do; armfuls and handfuls of it, Granpa; armfuls and handfuls; I want to fling until I don't need to anymore; fling until I feel goddamn better and maybe it doesn't hurt so much; I want to fling and scream and fling and cry and fling and cuss like the sailor who lives in my saintly Aunt Lissa, who has always been able to cuss like an angel …
Just fling, Granpa; fling till I reach you all the way in Kansas and feel your arms around me saying that's right, girl; you fling that paint; I'm flinging it for ya here; you fling that paint, girl, and air it all out; it's time; you're due; fling, girl; fling it hard and hit something! Hit that motherfucking wall!
Then pick up a brush and paint, like you've wanted to do all of your life.
###
BELOVED
667 words
I could not get up out of my seat as the credits rolled; I had to sit there long after the lights came up though it was the last showing of the night and the theatre was closing. I befriended two white women at the pay telephones as we called taxis; they were mother and daughter, and agreed with me that it was hell getting a cab on Saturday night in Philly. We tried to talk, but their kindness and interest did not save me from the need to be in Ramzi’s arms. I was so shook I fled to his house, and we didn't have that kind of understanding. I stood on his porch and faced his tall, angry Palestinian face--it was late and he was not a night owl like me--but did not wither; I had no resources left and he saw that. He looked in my eyes and knew that I was about to disintegrate like the souls Detective Stone used to send back to hell in the tv series Brimstone. I had one toenail on the planet and the rest of me was gone, elsewhere, spent.
I was okay, coping well, until the women from the church showed up to pray. When those women walked toward Sethe's house and gathered there to sing, hum, moan that spirit away from her I was no more good. I knew I needed that kind of healing, and that kind of healing took place in that theatre. It was fiction, this was make-believe, but I was in serious trouble before I saw Beloved, I was suicidal pretty much every day. The pressures of graduate school, repercussions from bonding so tightly with the faculty that now you feel as if your parents are divorcing and you are five years old all over again, and in the middle of all this you fall in love with a Palestinian who can't decide if he's crazy or not, if he loves men or women or not, a Palestinian who wants to buy you a car and caters to almost your every need.
I sat in that theatre, no strength whatsoever, and the voices spoke: "we knew Beloved would cut it.” Visions of a greater pain will do that, as will pantomime of a healing. The women in that circle touched me so deeply my demons didn't have a chance, and like Toni Cade's character in The Salt Eaters, I could answer the question of whether or not I wanted to be healed with an unequivocal yes. Those women sang and I made a choice: for life.
That's why I was exhausted afterwards. Exorcism changes you profoundly.
My friend had that same look of devotion in his eyes, of “I'ma stay with you til you through it” Paul D had when he was sitting by Sethe's side in the last scene. My friend may have been confused about a lot of things, but he knew enough to sense my fragility, my need for strong arms, and he held me. Refused to hold me in bed all night long, what I really wanted, but he held me with verbal love, talked me down from the precipice of exhaustion and not understanding what I’d just been through.
Beloved about a whole lot more than ticket money and millions made back; Oprah have no idea what she did. Her baby saved a life, and that something not many movies do, that not a power many movies have. In her hands that story called, and my soul answered without my understanding how or why or who was in charge. Now I am in a ring of safety, looking out from behind the doors of Sethe’s house, a woman in Black myself, one of the many women who will moan and sing and evict the next unwelcome spirit, the next demon bent on destruction. I look out from behind those doors, a woman in Black amongst many women, and soberly, I contemplate my next move.
Determined to confront the hazy memories of his troubled youth, Oliver Matthews, a retired detective and confirmed bachelor, returns to the picturesque town of Henley-on-Thames for the first time in years.
A teenage boy struggling with the coming-of-age issues of sexuality, religion, and peer approval is overwhelmed, but soldiers on. After several years, he comes to understand the family forces that have left him so deeply troubled, and the process of
