Max is chiming in correcting all the details, every other breath come outa my mouth. And then when we all get up to go sit in the parlor again, it come out that Yvonne has sneaked that tape recording machine in here under that African poncho she got on, and has got down every word I said.
When time come to say good night, I’m thankful, for once, that Yvonne insist on driving me home—though it ain’t even a whole mile. The rain ain’t let up all evening, and is coming down in bucketfuls while we in the car. I’m half soaked just running from the car to the front door.
Yvonne is drove off down the street, and I’m halfway through the front door, when it hit me all of a sudden that the door ain’t been locked. Now my mind may be getting a little threadbare in spots, but it ain’t wore out yet. I know it’s easy for me to slip back into doing things the way I done em twenty or thirty years ago, but I could swear I distinctly remember locking this door and hooking the key ring back on my belt loop, just fore Yvonne drove up in front. And now here’s the door been open all this time.
Not a sign a nobody been here. Everything in its place, just like I left it. The slipcovers on the couch is smooth and neat. The candy dishes and ash trays and photographs is sitting just where they belong, on the end tables. Not even so much as a throw rug been moved a inch. I can feel my heart start to thumping like a blowout tire.
Must be, whoever come in here ain’t left yet.
The idea of somebody got a nerve like that make me more mad than scared, and I know I’m gonna find out who it is broke in my house, even if it don’t turn out to be nobody but them little peach-thieving rascals from round the block. Which I wouldn’t be surprised if it ain’t. I’m scooting from room to room, snatching open closet doors and whipping back curtains—tiptoeing down the hall and then flicking on the lights real sudden.
When I been in every room, I go back through everywhere I been, real slow, looking in all the drawers, and under the old glass doorstop in the hall, and in the back of the recipe box in the kitchen—and other places where I keep things. But it ain’t nothing missing. No money—nothing.
In the end, ain’t nothing left for me to do but go to bed. But I’m still feeling real uneasy. I know somebody or something done got in here while I was gone. And ain’t left yet. I lay wake in the bed a long time, cause I ain’t too particular about falling asleep tonight. Anyway, all this rain just make my joints swell up worse, and the pains in my knees just don’t let up.
The next thing I know Gracie waking me up. She lying next to me and kissing me all over my face. I wake up laughing, and she say, “I never could see no use in shaking somebody I rather be kissing.” I can feel the laughing running all through her body and mine, holding her up against my chest in the dark—knowing there must be a reason why she woke me up in the middle of the night, and pretty sure I can guess what it is. She kissing under my chin now, and starting to undo my buttons. It seem like so long since we done this. My whole body is all a shimmer with this sweet, sweet craving. My blood is racing, singing, and her fingers is sliding inside my nightshirt. “Take it easy,” I say in her ear. Cause I want this to take us a long, long time.
Outside, the sky is still wide open—the storm is throbbing and beating down on the roof over our heads, and pressing its wet self up against the window. I catch ahold of her fingers and bring em to my lips. Then I roll us both over so I can see her face. She smiling up at me through the dark, and her eyes is wide and shiny. And I run my fingers down along her breast, underneath her own nightgown….
I wake up in the bed alone. It’s still night. Like a flash I’m across the room, knowing I’m going after her, this time. The carpet treads is nubby and rough, flying past underneath my bare feet, and the kitchen linoleum cold and smooth. The back door standing wide open, and I push through the screen.
The storm is moved on. That fresh air feel good on my skin through the cotton nightshirt. Smell good, too, rising up outa the wet earth, and I can see the water sparkling on the leaves of the collards and kale, twinkling in the vines on the bean poles. The moon is riding high up over Thompson’s field, spilling moonlight all over the yard, and setting all them blossoms on the fence, to shining pure white.
There ain’t a leaf twitching and there ain’t a sound. I ain’t moving either. I’m just gonna stay right here on this back porch. And hold still. And listen close. Cause I know Gracie somewhere in this garden. And she waiting for me.
ALEXIS DEVEAUX
[1948–]
Poet and playwright Alexis DeVeaux was born in Harlem and raised by her extended family, who assisted the author’s mother and eight siblings. She began a lifelong affiliation with community activism in 1969, taking jobs with the New York Urban League, The Frederick Douglass Community Arts Center, and the Bronx Office of Probations. In 1977, DeVeaux created the Flamboyant Ladies Theater Company, a Brooklyn-based black women’s performance salon, and three years later she formed the Gap Toothed Girlfriends Writing Workshop, which published two books of poetry and fiction. Receiving her undergraduate degree from Empire State College in 1976, the author went on to earn an MA degree in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo in 1989.
DeVeaux is the author of seven plays, perhaps most notably her two works produced for national public television, Circles (1972) and The Tapestry (1976). Her protest play No (1981), a woman-identified work that has been compared favorably to For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, brought unexpected notoriety when its Harlem performance instigated a series of angry letters and reviews, one written by a disgruntled male critic who went so far as to argue the nonexistence of lesbianism in Africa. Among DeVeaux’s most popular nontheatrical works are a young adult novel, An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987); a fictional biography of Billie Holiday, Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980); and a poetry collection, Blue Heat: Poems and Drawings (1985). The recipient of a Creative Artists in Public Service grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1981, DeVeaux served as editor-at-large for Essence magazine throughout the 1980s.
In “Bird of Paradise” (1992), DeVeaux’s use of lyrical, poetic language and laconic sentence fragments evoke a powerful emotional landscape as Camille, a young archaeology student, tells her mother for the first time about her girlfriend.
Bird of Paradise
[1992]
Dig One:
Up here on the fourth floor is cold with a hint of spring to come Camille’s first month back in Harlem. Snow falls a thin cantata against their windows in the light of night light. Under her pink pastel nightgown the mother Phelia stretches. Her hand fine as gold dust powder runs along her stomach over her navel. This umbilical cord of feelings the body never forgets the rip of tissue that was childbirth. After she said her piece Camille waited for Phelia to speak.
Where you meet her?
She’s from Kingston.
She dig up stuff too?
No. She’s a singer. You’ll like her.
Don’t tell me who to like.
She turns her back to the daughter. In the only bed their matchbox apartment ever had so they shared it all these years. Shared the habits of sleeping that were a comfort without question to each of them from the first day Phelia brought Camille home from the hospital. Phelia’s still opened eyes blaze a blackness with the grip of quicksand. She did not have to like what she didn’t understand. Like how the child spoke French fluently. The big words Camille used that made her feel stupid. The names of rocks and stones that fell easily from Camille’s young lips. And this. Laying beside her. A woman. With a woman for a lover. Was she going to be happy? Have children of her own one day? Know when it was time to let them go?
When Camille awakes abruptly it is 5am. Her mother is not in bed.
Phelia?
Is not in the bathroom. Or the kitchen down the hall. Phelia?
Is barely lit with the light of morning the small livingroom holds against a somber blue wall. Phelia is a s
hadow on the edge of the sofa. She flicks her cigarette in an ashtray atop the coffee table.
You coming back to bed?
All that education you got girl you ain’t learned to sleep by yourself yet?
Camille stands in the livingroom doorway. Everything in this room she thinks everything the television sofa and matching armchair the shelves of knick-knacks and Atlantic City mementos the white lamps and mahogany endtables the pictures of herself and Phelia the one picture of her father everything including the window and this arched doorway has gotten doll house small the two years she’s been away digging up evidence of escaped slaves and maroon societies deep in the hills of Jamaica. Some bones don’t want to be dug up Camille thinks but does not say. Some animals eat their young.
Dig Two:
It was the first room she stopped in every day after school. She’d sprawl on the bed. Stare at the chiseled face of her great grandmother framed in the faded black and white Civil War photograph staring back at her from the wall. It was Phelia’s face in there. In the history of those coal black cheeks. In her needle sharp gaze carved by the meanness of slavery. In this alcove of a room in the afternoon quiet when Phelia had the day shift at the bar the redskinned moon faced girl entertained herself making up stories. About the dark glass bottles of Shalimar Perfume and lavender waters her mother kept atop the maple vanity chest. And the love letters from Camille’s father Phelia kept in the bottom drawer. Stories about who he was half Cherokee. How Phelia said he was built like a boxer. Walked low to the ground. Like that night at the bar when Phelia met him. He said he was from N’Awlins and preferred the name Talking Brook to Curtis. And then one day he said baby I got to go.
Dig Three:
How come you don’t have no lover Phelia?
Had your father.
What about now?
All I want now is for you to finish college. Become a famous archaeologist like you want to.
That’s all you want?
Whatchu want Camille?
To know how you feel.
I feel tired when I get off work.
Dig Four:
When Phelia came home from work she went straight to the bathroom. To wash off the smell of bar stories and tips. In the steam of the shower she’d rinse clean of the night’s back and forth on her feet. Juggling glasses and broken conversations. From one side of the bar to the other. Pouring drinks. Mixing one part liquor to three parts I’m a damn good barmaid proud of what I do. Which kept them fed and clothed. With a roof over their heads. Whenever Camille needed extra money for books Phelia laid on the table what the girl’s scholarship did not cover. The longed for getting it done done now.
Dig Five:
At the kitchen window the evening quarter moon watches Camille watch Phelia scrape what is left of her dinner into the garbage can. Watches as the daughter turns the mother turns in the orbit of motherhood.
Bring your friend by the bar Phelia says time for me to meet her.
Who knows when the front door closes behind Phelia gone to work what the moon sees in the afterbirth of mother–daughter love. What stars feel in the quiver of its throat. What a shard of moon sees on the breast of night.
Dig Six:
When Phelia opened the door she saw it right away. On the kitchen table. Was a note from Camille. And the one bird of paradise its royal plumage orange and electric purple in a glass vase next to the note was a flower she had never seen before. Phelia sat down at the table staring at it. Secretly tickled. It was just like Camille. Something new to see whether she understood it or not. She’d done a good job raising the girl alone. There was nothing to regret. In her heart she knew that. And let go.
JEWELLE GOMEZ
[1948–]
BOSTON-BORN WRITER JEWELLE GOMEZ WAS RAISED BY HER working-class extended family, including a great-grandmother who instilled in the young author a strong appreciation of history and social activism. Coming of age during the civil rights era, she developed a political awareness that led her to the antiwar and black liberation movements of the 1960s and the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. A Columbia University School of Journalism graduate, she was among the original board members of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD), a gay media watchdog organization founded in 1985, as well as a member of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, a sex-positive group that countered the women’s movement to ban pornography.
Gomez is the author of two poetry collections, The Lipstick Papers (1980) and Flamingoes and Bears (1987); a book of essays, Forty-three Septembers (1993); and a short fiction collection, Don’t Explain (1998). Her best-known work, however, is the award-winning vampire novel The Gilda Stories (1991).
Told from the perspective of a black lesbian feminist, The Gilda Stories subverts the literary tradition of white male protagonists who dominate science fiction/horror stories. As with all of Gomez’s writing, issues of racial, sexual, and gender identity politics are integrated into a uniform analysis of societal oppression. Spanning two centuries, the novel opens in 1850 with a runaway slave known only as The Girl taking sanctuary in the home of Gilda, whose secret identity as a lesbian vampire is known only by her lesbian-vampire-lover and helpmate, Bird.
from The Gilda Stories
[1991]
In her lifetime, Gilda had killed reluctantly and infrequently. When she took the blood there was no need to take life. But she knew that there were those like her who gained power as much from the terror of their prey as from the life substance itself. She had learned many lessons in her time. The most important had been from Sorel and were summed up in a very few words: the source of power will tell in how long-lived that power is. He had pointed her and all of his children toward an enduring power that did not feed on death. Gilda was sustained by sharing the blood and by maintaining the vital connections to life. Her love for her family of friends had fed her for three hundred years. When Bird chose to join her in this life, Gilda was filled with both joy and dread. The weight of the years she had known subsided temporarily; at last there would be someone beside her to experience the passage of time. Bird’s first years at Woodard’s were remote now—Bird moving silently through their lives, subtly taking control of management, finding her place closer and closer to Gilda without having to speak of it.
Before she had even considered bringing Bird into her life she had wanted to feel her sleeping beside her. She had not been willing to risk their friendship, though, until she was certain. And Bird had opened to her, deliberately, to let her know her desires were the same as Gilda’s. When they first lay together, Gilda sensed that Bird already knew what world it was Gilda would ask her to enter. She had teased Gilda later with sly smiles, about time and rushing through life, until Gilda had finally been certain Bird was asking to join her.
Despite the years of joy they had known together, tonight, walking along the dark road, Gilda felt she had lived much too long. Only now was it clear to her why. The talk of war, the anger and brutality that was revealed daily in the townspeople, was a bitter taste in her mouth. She had seen enough war and hatred in her lifetime. And although her abolitionist sentiments had never been hidden, she didn’t know if she had the heart to withstand the rending effects of another war.
And as always, when Gilda reflected on these things she came back to Bird: Bird, who had chosen to be a part of this life, a choice she seemed to have made effortlessly. Gilda had never said the word vampire.
She had only asked if Bird would join her as partner in the business and in life. In the years since she’d come to the house she always knew as much as was needed and challenged Gilda any time she tried to hide information from her. Bird listened inside of Gilda’s words, hearing the years of isolation and discovery. There was in Gilda an unfathomable hunger—a dark, dry chasm that Bird thought she could help fill.
But now it was the touch of the sun and the ocean Gilda hungered for, and little else. She ached to rest, free from the intemperate demands of time. Often she
’d tried to explain this burden to Bird, the need to let go. And Bird saw it only as an escape from her—rather than a final embrace of freedom.
Thoughts jostled inside her as she moved—so quickly she was invisible—through the night. She slowed a few miles west of the Louisiana state line, then turned back toward her township. When she came to a road leading to a familiar horse ranch within miles of her farmhouse, she slackened her pace and walked to the rear of the woodframe building.
All of the windows were black as she slipped around to the small bunkhouse at the back where hands slept. She stood in the shadows listening. Once inside she approached the nearest man, the larger of the two she could see in the darkness. She began to probe his dreams, then sensed an uncleanness in his blood and recoiled. His sleeping face did not bear the mark of the disease that coursed through his body, but it was there. She was certain. Gilda was saddened as she moved to the smaller man who slept at the other end of the room.
He had fallen asleep in his clothes on top of the blankets and smelled of whiskey and horses. She slipped inside his thoughts as he dreamed of a chestnut-colored bay. Under his excitement lay anxiety, his fear of the challenge of this horse. Gilda held him in sleep while she sliced through the flesh of his neck, the line of her nail leaving a red trail. She extended his dream, making him king of the riders as she took her share of the blood. He smiled with triumph at his horsemanship, the warmth of the whiskey in him thundering through her. She caught her breath, and the other ranch hand tossed restlessly in his sleep. Although she no longer feared death she backed away, her instincts readying her hands to quiet the restless worker if he awoke. Her touch on the other sleeper sealed his wound cleanly. Soon his pulse was steady and he continued to explore the dreams she had left with him. As their breathing settled into a calm rhythm, Gilda ran from the bunkhouse, flushed with the fullness of blood and whiskey.
Black Like Us Page 37
