Blues Dancing
Page 30
“Awl, Mama, you still crying over Auntie,” Verdi said as she squeezed her mother to her.
“That, plus she’s just overcome with the magnitude of her husband’s love,” Leroy said as he made circles in Hortense’s back.
Verdi pinched her father’s cheek and ushered them all inside and was about to go in herself but hung back, just to gulp some more of this new yellow air that was filled with motion that she now recognized as possibilities. And even before she turned around to take in the scene on this block she knew that he’d be sitting there way up the street looking at her through the opened window of the maroon Grand Am, knew that he wouldn’t want to get too close to the house.
She walked off the porch then, up to the corner, she swung her arms in wide sweeps and swallowed hard so that she wouldn’t cry when she got to the car. And she was crying anyhow when she looked at his face that was stony and intense the way it always was at the first sight of her. She stooped and leaned her arms against the window frame; he wiped her face with his fingers.
“Would you like to come in and have a bit of breakfast before you hit the road?”
“You cooked?” And they both laughed and now Johnson’s eyes were filled up too.
“Verdi, I—I can’t go in there—”
“You could meet my parents, you never met my parents, you’d always make yourself scarce whenever they came into town.”
“But that’s where you and he—”
She touched his arm. “I understand, Johnson, I really do. And I’m not begging you; no more begging; no more giving up power that’s not even mine to give up, nor yours to take.”
He felt a surge move through him when she said that, like a mild eruption of the neurons running through his ear canal, as if their only reason for being right now was to vibrate at this moment and transmit to his brain the utterance she’d just made. His mouth dropped and he was about to ask her what dramatic thing had happened between last night and today to cause this revolution in her perspective; he understood the nature of revolution, knew that it always happened in that pivot between submitting once and for all to the hell of oppression or accepting that there were other possibilities, ready then to fight for the possibilities. Was just about to ask her what hell she’d seen between last night and today, but he stopped then, focused on her house, Verdi too because Kitt had run onto the porch, hollering and dancing, arms flinging like somebody the Spirit had just hit. “Verdi, oh my God, she said ‘Verdi,’ Lord have mercy, my child just said ‘Verdi.’”
Verdi ran to Kitt, arms open, they met on the sidewalk, hugging and jumping and stomping and going in circles as if they were partners in some childhood game of rope. And Kitt started to sob and to weaken at the knees and Verdi sat her on the steps and took her head on her shoulder, and thought how different it felt to take the weight of somebody against her shoulder for a change. Felt good. She squeezed Kitt’s shoulder. “Just calm down, cousin, calm down, not sentences yet, but it’s a start. It’s a word. It’s a miracle in a word.”
And Kitt said that she had to go in and call Posie. “Mama always said your working with Sage would make the difference.”
Verdi stayed on the steps as she listened to Kitt’s incantations of “Thank You, Lord” fade behind the ornate wood-and-stained-glass door. She didn’t want to stand and look down the street, knew that she’d see an empty hole where the Grand Am had been. She had to though. And a brick dropped in the center of her chest as she followed the fresh tire marks his car had just made, even as the merrymaking from inside the house sifted outside and covered her and she was filled up all over again as she listened to Sage’s new voice mixing with the gaiety. “Verdi, Verdi, Verdi,” she said slowly, deliberately, her voice so husky, so fresh. And Verdi didn’t even notice that the tire tracks made a sudden swerve inward, heading straight for her front door, she felt them though as she walked up the steps, her arms high and wide in a hallelujah way, felt the tire tracks rolling, rolling, gently rolling, nearer and nearer to her heart they came. She heard the gentle squeal of the brakes, the transmission engaged in park, the soulful thump of the car door closing, his footsteps rising out of the concrete, following her up the steps to join the others on the porch. So unencumbered his footsteps were to her now as she swirled around on the porch and basked in the embraces of her family and their friends. It would be different this time she thought, as she heard him clear his throat and say, “Sir, it’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you. My name is Johnson and I’ve been in love with your beautiful daughter for the past twenty years.”
So different this time. This time the path to her heart had been cleared.
About the Author
Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the author of Tumbling, a national bestseller, Tempest Rising, Blues Dancing, and Leaving Cecil Street. She teaches fiction at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Greg, and (from time to time) their college-age twin daughter and son, Taiwo and Kehinde.
www.mckinney-whetstone.com
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Resounding praise for
DIANE McKINNEY-WHETSTONE
and
BLUES DANCING
“A skilled storyteller.”
Washington Post Book World
“Diane McKinney-Whetstone has a gift for secrets—personal secrets, family secrets, childhood secrets. She excels…allowing tensions to build to a breaking point before clearing the air with a dramatic revelation. Blues Dancing is no exception, with multiple secrets and drama to spare.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Novelist Diane McKinney-Whetstone makes readers settle in and get comfortable. Closing her latest book, Blues Dancing, is reminiscent of moving from a beloved neighborhood and leaving behind friends who are like family.”
Emerge
“She ought to be classified among the best of all contemporary fiction writers, period.”
Detroit Free Press
“[A] stirring novel.”
Baltimore Sun
“McKinney-Whetstone gives a rhapsodic performance in this story of self-discovery that moves seamlessly between the early 1970s and early ’90s…. Pitch-perfect dialogue and a keen eye capture the spirit and cadences of the early ’70s…. Flashbacks to the early days of the erstwhile lovers’ relationship shimmer with the intoxication of first love, while their later encounters powerfully reveal their vulnerability to old desires…. Readers [become] passionately involved in the fates of these winning characters.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“A writer of obvious talent.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“An author who, like a good blues singer, is strong on style and interpretation…. A gifted prose writer with a tremendous sense of place.”
Kirkus Reviews
“In an era when most writers bank on hype and hook to grab a reader’s attention, McKinney-Whetstone has amassed an enthusiastic cadre of readers by writing engaging characters supported by enchanting language.”
BET Weekend
“Is McKinney-Whetstone the next Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, or Anne Tyler? In terms of critical success, perhaps she is or will be. But more important, her work offers just what readers are looking for—a fresh new voice, strong and clear, wise and warm.”
New Orleans Times-Picayune
“McKinney-Whetstone’s strength—apparent in all her work, including Blues Dancing—is plot development. Her novels have a page-turning quality, long the most overlooked skill in novel writing. Blues Dancing is McKinney-Whetstone’s most writerly novel to date.”
Philadelphia Weekly
“An author apart from the usual and ordinary…Her lyricism has been compared to Toni Morrison and her perception of family to Tina Ansa. Her characters are always unpredictable and multi-layered.”
Newport News Daily Press
“A fine tale…The author wraps the char
acters in emotions so acute that readers can virtually taste Johnson’s sadness, Verdi’s innocence, and Rowe’s manipulation.”
Black Issues Book Review
“McKinney-Whetstone’s gifts as a writer continue to fascinate.”
San Francisco Chronicle
Books by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Trading Dreams at Midnight
Leaving Cecil Street
Blues Dancing
Tempest Rising
Tumbling
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLUES DANCING. Copyright © 1999 by Diane McKinney-Whetstone. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2008 ISBN: 9780061876707
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