Something She Can Feel

by Grace Octavia

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been out here since I was in high school,” he said, and we started walking toward the stream.

  “Not at the Throat,” I said. “I mean, why are you in Alabama? I saw Benji at the church.”

  “I know. I sent him there.”

  “For what?”

  “What do you think?” he asked. “I told him to go there and just see what happened. If you saw him and asked about me, then he’d tell you I was here, and if not ... it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “But there are thousands of people in the church. How could you know I’d see him?”

  “In a room full of a million people, if there’s one thing you want, you’ll see it.”

  “Oh, you’re so sure of yourself.”

  “I have reason to be.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I am who I am.”

  “You’re ...” I shook my head, trying to remember where I’d heard that quote in the Bible. “Exodus—”

  “3:14.” He grinned, knowing I didn’t expect him to know where that came from.

  “That’s blasphemy!” I couldn’t help but grin back as I said this.

  “What?”

  “You’re too cocky.”

  “I should be cocky. I’m a black man.”

  “Here we go again.”

  “No. No. No.” He reached out for me, placing his hand between my arm and torso. “You want to know why I’m really cocky today?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m here with you.”

  I looked away, knowing my cheeks revealed my excitement at hearing that.

  He pulled me closer to the side of the stream where a big, flat rock sat right in the middle.

  “Let’s sit down.” He pointed to the rock, but there was a little pool of water between the dirt where we were standing and the rock.

  “I’ll never make it in these shoes,” I said, looking at my heels.

  “Okay,” he said, putting out his arms to pick me up.

  “Oh no, you can’t pick me up. I’m too big,” I said. “I’ll just take off my shoes and—ohh!”

  I was up in the air. Before I could finish my statement, Dame picked me up and hopped onto the rock light and assured like it was a lily pad. He let me down slowly and easily as if he could hold me for another five hours and I felt so light. So impossibly light and just manageable. After easing down to my feet with his arms still held at my sides, I realized I had no clue how big or small I was right then. It didn’t matter. In front of him I purely felt like a woman. A graceful, precious, feminine woman who was okay ... as is. My diet was permanently over.

  “I know you said you didn’t want to see me again, but I can’t do that again. I just can’t stop thinking about you,” he said after we sat down. “Since you came to Atlanta, it seems like everything else in my world is just dead.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing, too,” I said.

  “I can’t go back to that. I can’t pretend anymore.”

  “But I—”

  “Wait, before you say that, let me say something,” he said, pulling me down to sit on the rock beside him. “I don’t care about my image, my fans, the industry—I don’t give a damn what anyone in that club the other night thought about what I had to say about how I feel about you. I’m open and I’m not going to hide it anymore.” He paused and looked at me. “Now, all I want to hear from you right now is what you really feel—not what you believe you should feel or should say. I want to know what you really feel about me because that’s all I’m giving you. I’m not hiding anything.”

  He pitched a rock he’d picked up out into the stream, and the yellowhammer appeared again, flying from a branch along the canopy. Another followed behind it.

  “You make me feel like I’m ten years younger—and not like I did when I really was ten years younger—with duties and promises—my life set out in front of me like a map I couldn’t change. Maybe like I should’ve felt then. Like I could do anything. Go anywhere. And that’s something because before, I was so comfortable, and now ... well, I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Afraid somebody might find out. But that fear—that rush—has made me see everything differently. Like what I would do if I could just pick up that map and tear it up and walk away ... just leave everybody,” I said, looking at him. “And when I think about walking away—even though I know I can’t—I think about you. About your energy. Your kindness. How everyone just looks when you walk into a room. It’s like you’re electric. You own yourself and you don’t care what people think. And no matter how old you are, that’s the most manly thing I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Dame said, sliding his hand between my legs. He handed me a rock and I pitched it this time ... way out into the middle of the water where the ripples would take some time to reach us.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I met Dame out there the next morning. Just like we’d planned, a bit before dawn, I drove along the throat to where the bottom of the trees were as black as tar and the dirt was so soft it felt like peat moss. I did this ... not once ... but every “ just before dawn” that week before graduation. And every time I got there, Dame’s Bentley would already be at the foot of the trees, sleepy and quiet, seeming to wait for me to knock on the window to wake it up. He had Mr. Green drive him to Tuscaloosa from Atlanta each night after he left a show or the studio. He’d sleep the whole way during the drive and wake just in time for me. Then Dame would get out or I’d get in and we’d talk a bit and giggle and sometimes hold hands and walk out into the water to watch the sun rise. I’d let go of telling myself this was all nothing on the first day with the yellowhammer. And by the second, I knew it was something I wanted so badly that I’d wake up long before the moon went to bed and the roosters came out to post. It was a rush that kept me feeling more alive than I could recall, just tingling up the middle of my back and happy just because. It was like I was a fish and Dame was the lake. I had to get to it. To hear his stories, his radical and sometimes visionary ideas. To have him listen to mine ... really listen to mine and encourage me and remind me of what it felt like to really believe I was brilliant.

  By day four, when I packed my gym bag and reminded a heavy-eyed Evan I was exercising before I went to work, I remembered what Kayla and Billie said about crazy love that night at Wilhagens. About the crazy, headless chicken, Bobby and Whitney, Luther and those love songs he sang. How love was supposed to make you feel something. Passion. Sick. Crazy. Walking out of the house to meet Dame, I thought maybe this was me now. I felt sick, out of breath, and suffocating whenever I wasn’t with him. And when I knew it was almost time for us to meet again, when I was just about to fall into a deeper sleep in my bed, passion would find me and like a headless chicken, I’d jump up out of bed and race to get to the river. None of this sounded comforting, but it felt so good. Like hot cookies right out of the oven, cooled by my lips, and then in my mouth. It was warm and cozy and something else I couldn’t describe, but anyone else who’d had that cookie before just knew. When I pulled up next to the Bentley, I remembered Billie and Kayla high-fiving over the table, oozing and agreeing about this feeling. Now, in my mind, I was high-fiving and oozing and agreeing with them. I knew this crazy feeling, the secret of the hot cookie. What Zenobia knew. What Ms. Lindsey knew. But back then, I had no real launching pad. And, I knew it was dangerous to compare Evan to Dame in this way. If I were a fish, Evan was another fish swimming in the lake beside me. That’s how we’d learned to love each other. For me, it wasn’t about longing or passion. It was about loving that he’d always swim beside me and was a fish just like me. This had been enough—I’ d been taught this was enough—for me forever. But by day five, when the week had ended and I’d been late for work every day but still arrived with a smile stapled to my face, I wondered if forever was enough.

  “You gonna tell us yet why you been smiling so much now, Mrs. DeLong?” Devin Kin
g said just before the fourth-period bell rang and I was still greeting the students as they walked into the room.

  “Excuse me?” I asked, trying now not to smile so brightly, but knowing it probably had the reverse effect—the smile was even bigger.

  “There it is—big, old Kool-Aid smile!” Opal said, pointing at me, and the other students started laughing.

  “Well, can’t your teacher just be happy?” I asked.

  “I ain’t never seen no grown person looking that happy,” Devin said. “Not unless they drunk or high.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I said, realizing that maybe I felt both drunk and high inside. Dame surprised me that morning with a recording of himself performing the song he’d written for me. Only this time, it was without a background. No music. No singing. He said when he got into the studio to record it, he felt like the music and the background singers were only hiding his words. That he wanted his feelings to be loud and clear, nude and unmistakable. He opened all of the windows and doors and turned the sound all the way up and played the song out loud to the whole forest. His love for me, how he saw me, echoed all around me. The birds knew. The squirrels knew. The trees knew. The lake knew. And now I knew, too. Not my big white house. Not my pretty red car, or even any gift my father or Evan had ever given me could amount to this. It was the biggest, most honest gesture I’d known. And unlike the house and car and jewels, no one could ever see these words. And then Dame promised that no one would ever hear them either. He wasn’t going to use the song on the next album. Not as long as I was with Evan.

  “Your husband must’ve gotten you something nice,” Zenobia said. She smiled and eased back into her seat. “Some diamonds or platinum.” In just two weeks, she had swollen to the size of a woman who was about to deliver. It seemed like she was carrying all of her love, all of her needs, right there in front of her. Only I knew that wouldn’t come out with the baby in six months. Fat or skinny, it would always be there until Zenobia learned to fulfill those needs herself.

  “Maybe he got her a new car!” Opal added and another student ran to the window to look out at the lot.

  “Sit down, silly,” I said, laughing. “There’s no new car.”

  “Then what is it?” someone asked.

  “I am just happy.” I walked over toward the organ to sit down to begin our warm-up. “Just happy.”

  After we finished warming up and we’d sung through the Negro anthem, to my satisfaction I was met with groans and rolling eyes when I played the first chords of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The music sheets were long gone and now we were supposed to be confident, singing with our bodies erect, faces up, and mouths wide, but I had none of this in front of me. They were slouching and looking down and not at all prepared to sing.

  “Come on, folks,” I said, getting up from the organ. “We only have a week until graduation. We can’t afford to look like this.”

  “We tired,” Opal acknowledged.

  “Tired of what?” I asked. “You all are too young to be tired.”

  “Not tired like that,” she answered.

  “We tired of singing this old people song,” Devin said, and they all chuckled just light enough not to offend me.

  “It’s not an old people; it’s your song,” I said. “Our song.”

  “We know all that. We know everything you told us about the slaves and how it’s supposed to be about hope, but really, to us, it don’t sound like hope,” Kim Davis, one of the lead sopranos, said. “People sing this song at funerals.”

  “That’s because it feels like death. Like we dying or something ... and we don’t want massa to hit us over the head with no shackle when we running off to freedom,” Devin added and his voice mimicked that of a stereotypical slave. The chuckle in the room went to a full laugh this time.

  “Look, I understand,” I started, and the little yet grown-looking, faces around me went to looking like they’d never heard me say I understood them before. “It does sound old. And sometimes it does sound sad ... but ...” I tried, but I couldn’t think of any encouragement I hadn’t already said. Yes, there was hope. Yes, there was history. Yes, there was tradition. But sometimes, even those things needed a face-lift. If the children weren’t feeling anything ... they weren’t feeling anything. Maybe they needed something else.

  I paused and gazed out the windows. I saw the trees out by the edge of the parking lot, looking tall and smart. They knew what to say. They knew all of the secrets. Caught every echo we’d ever uttered.

  “Let’s try something different,” I said, turning back to the class. “You say it sounds old. You say it feels like death. Let’s take the sound away.” I walked past the organ and right to the middle of the floor. “Let’s take the sound away. And give it our own sound and our feeling.”

  “You mean, sing it a cappella?” Kim asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you said the music is just as important as the song,” she added. “It’s the tradition.”

  “Why hide behind the music?” I asked rhetorically. “If we want people to feel the words, let’s give them something they can feel ... our voices.”

  “You joking, right?” Zenobia asked.

  “No. Let’s do it.” I clapped and went to hit the key, so they could remember the pitch. “When I raise my hands—just like I do with the music—you guys just start on this chord.” I hit the key a few times so they could hear it.

  Each on their own time, they straightened up at this new challenge. Listened to the note and watched eagerly for me to begin. I’d seen them, time and again, at their best, but with this experiment, they seemed better than their best—they were interested. They had to depend upon one another to hear where they were to go to next. The sopranos looked at one another. The tenors stood more closely together. And the altos turned their ears to the center of the crowd. And while we had some bumps and struggles along the way and had to begin again a few times, what I heard and what they heard, what the trees outside heard, was beautiful.

  Without the music, the youth in their voices could be heard. The song was reborn with new life.

  “We really gonna get to sing the song like that at graduation?” Opal asked after class had ended.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “But it was good. It sounded real good. Don’t you think?”

  “It did. But it would need a lot of practice to be ready to present to everyone. It’s not easy to sing a cappella. Especially not out in a field in front of a thousand people who are used to hearing it a different way.”

  “But what if we practice every day and get better?”

  “We only have five more days to practice next week,” I said. “And half of you already refuse to come after school.”

  “Please!” she begged, grabbing my arm. “It’ll be the bomb.”

  “Oh, girl, calm down,” I said. “I’ll think about it and let you know. But I’ll tell you right now, we may be able to do a new arrangement, but we’ll probably need accompaniment. People are used to hearing it that way at our graduation. It’s all about tradition.”

  “Okay!” She grinned, straightened up and darted out of the classroom with the rest of her friends.

  “She might be onto something,” Kayla said, coming into the classroom.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  “You all sound great.”

  “Thanks. We were just trying something different today. It’s hard to keep them interested. Especially so late in the year.”

  “They sounded interested to me,” she said. “Usually, I can’t hear them above the music. But today, they were quite a force.”

  “What are you doing back here?” I asked. The math and science classes were in a whole different wing. Nothing was at the back of the hallway by the chorus room, except one of the janitor’s closets and a door that led to the parking lot.

  “Richard.” She grinned, and I saw hot cookies all over her smile. “He sneaks up here before fourth period and we have a
soda together.”

  “A soda? You sound like you’re in high school.”

  “That’s what it feels like,” she said. “And I love it.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said.

  “What about you?” she asked nonchalantly. “You seem a little sweet, too, lately. Got everyone talking about how happy you look. Some of the students say you’re pregnant.”

  “Me?” I laughed. “Oh, no. I’m not pregnant. I’m just ... I’m ...”

  “What?” she pushed to break my nervous pause.

  “I’m happy.”

  “Happy,” she repeated, smiling. “Well, that’s good. Because you deserve to be happy. We all do.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. And I think, what if that happiness makes everyone around you sad? Like, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way—”

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t you ever think of Richard’s wife. How sad she might be.... Of course you guys are happy together. But someone else is suffering.”

  “No one should have to be with someone that isn’t in love with them—someone who’s just staying because of time and obligation, and rings, and other people’s expectations. That’s not marriage. That’s a lie. They were both suffering, putting everything they had into a relationship that was dead,” she said. “Now, I know everything I did wasn’t perfect. But at least now, that woman stands a chance of finding someone else. Of finding the love she deserves.”

  “I see,” I replied carefully.

  “I hope you do,” Kayla said. “Because, as I said, you deserve the same thing.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “When are you going to kiss me?” Dame asked softly. He was lying beside me underneath a cover on the floor of the black limousine he’d been coming to see me in since Monday. When Mr. Green opened the door to let me in, he’d whispered, “He’s still asleep,” and handed me a blanket from the trunk. I crawled up beside Dame and covered him with the blanket. While he usually woke up, he didn’t say a word. Half asleep and awake, he just opened his arms for me to lie with him.