CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
What’s the Lesson When You Let the Past Pass?
Richard Jafolla, in Soul Surgery
Soul Surgery changes our consciousness. And in changing our consciousness it releases us from our problems and prepares us for our good. But unless our consciousness remains changed problems will always return. Unless we can sustain the freedom from false beliefs … We run the risk of having our consciousness attract back to us the same or similar situations as before.
AS I LAY ON THE FLOOR of my office, it all became clear. There had been a moment, however brief, when I tried to live life on my terms. I had taken my eyes off God and tried to do my own thing. Perhaps that was why I tried to negotiate the contract for myself. Maybe it was when I let myself be talked into staying somewhere I knew I didn’t belong. I knew that I had given someone control of my decision-making process. But none of that mattered now. The bottom line was that I had hired Karen because the moment I took my eyes off God and tried to live on my own power, I felt powerless. That state of powerlessness brought up all of Rhonda’s stuff, and I had fallen into her pattern of being a victim. My goodness! What a revelation!
It was time for a happy bath. Happy baths are the kind you take when you light candles and put on music you can sing along with. I think I’ll do Luther. No. That will give my husband ideas, and I’m not finished yet. Maybe I’ll do Patti. “Somebody Loves You, Baby.” No, I think I’ll do Al Jarreau. “Tenderness.” That’s exactly what I need—to be tender. I need to be tender with myself, with my thoughts about Rhonda, and especially with my thoughts about Karen. I understood that what I had done had been very unloving. I hadn’t meant for it to be, but it was. Whenever we make someone else responsible for our lives, we are not demonstrating love. It was Karen’s job to sell my work, but I now understood how I had taken it way beyond that. I had made her responsible for me. I had mixed business and friendship, and I had not honored my boundaries.
As the tub began to fill, I let my thoughts wander. I guess it’s hard to have boundaries when you were allowed none as a child. There is never a place for you to just go and be with yourself. You have no privacy. Wherever you are, somebody else is there. When you find a temporary place to be, you never know if or when somebody is going to walk up on you. I didn’t have a room or a door as a child. Rhonda had no place to retreat to, no place to go. Besides that, the adults in her life violated all of the boundaries she did have. I had carried that into my adult life. I gave up my boundaries much too easily. I needed to remember that business is business, friendship is friendship, and my life is my life. Whenever I lost sight of that, things got confused. Roles got confused. Now I could see how many times it had happened before. How many times I had lost sight of my boundaries for fear of making someone mad. Or when I thought I needed someone in order to survive. When I thought my survival was at stake, I would allow a person to be in my life in a way they had no right to be. In a way that I did not want them to be.
Slipping into the tub, I remembered something Aunt Mabel told me. It was something that she told me about my mother, Sarah.
I had found Aunt Mabel’s telephone number among the handwritten papers that my father had left for me. For some reason, her name stuck out in my mind. I remembered her from Atlantic City and the Saturday night basement parties. I also remembered hearing that Aunt Mabel was Sarah’s sister. I needed to know. I needed to know the truth.
Without thinking about how I would explain who I was, or wondering whether or not she would remember me, I called Aunt Mabel. I remember thinking to myself, Your mother’s sister will know exactly who you are. She answered the telephone on the first ring. I was so startled, she had to repeat her hello.
“Is this Mabel?”
“Yes. Who’s speaking, please?”
“Mabel, I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Ronnie. I am Sarah’s daughter.” That was the first time in my life those words had ever come across my lips. There was silence on the other end. I was just about to call her name again, when she spoke.
“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Father! You don’t know how long I have been waiting. Thank you, Jesus! You don’t know how long my baby sister has been waiting. Oh my God, my God. How are you? How are you, my precious baby?”
We were both crying. Aunt Mabel was thanking God at the end of every question without giving me an opportunity to answer.
“Do you know how long I have been waiting and looking for you? Thank you, God. Where have you been? Thank you, Jesus. Nobody could tell me a thing. Thank you. Thank you. They all said they didn’t know. My God, my God. God promised me that I would see my sister’s children before I closed my eyes for the last time. I prayed and asked God. God answers prayer. Thank you, God. Where is your brother? Where is baby Ray?”
When Aunt Mabel calmed down, I told her that Ray was just fine. I did not tell her that he had a drinking problem. I told her about my children, I told her I had been through law school. When I said that, she started crying all over again. “You must be like your mother. She was smart as a whip.” Hearing that made me cry. She asked about Nett and Daddy. I told her about Daddy and that Nett was fine. We talked for nearly three hours. Aunt Mabel said that she had some pictures and that she wanted to see me and the children. I told her that my boyfriend was coming to D.C. in two weeks, and that I would come with him. She started crying again. When I hung up the telephone, I knew that Aunt Mabel had the information I needed to finally make sense of my life. I knew that if Nett was willing to acknowledge that she was not my mother, I needed to know a little something about my real mother.
Holding flowers in my hand and carrying framed pictures of my children in a shopping bag, I rang Aunt Mabel’s doorbell. When I heard feet shuffling up the hallway, my heart started to race. When the first lock turned, I broke out in a cold sweat. I wanted to run. I had to pee. I was freezing. The chain slid off. The doorknob turned. The door slowly opened. Standing before me was a picture of myself. I was short, about four feet ten inches tall. I had a beautiful head of salt-and-pepper hair that was mostly salt. I wore glasses. If it were not for the circles under my eyes and the age lines around my mouth, you would not have known how old I was. I had never seen myself like this before. I was beautiful. No. I was gorgeous.
We stood in the doorway, staring at each other and crying. She was thanking Jesus. I was mumbling, “Oh my God.” When she reached forward and touched me, the top of her head came to my chin. I rested my face on her head, and we cried some more. One of her neighbors opened their door and peeked out at us, so we went inside her apartment, still holding on to one another. I didn’t let go until I really did have to pee.
When I came out of the bathroom, she was waiting for me in the hallway. She took my hand and led me to the kitchen. She had prepared a lunch of cornbread, collard greens, and iced tea.
“I don’t eat no meat no more since I started suffering so bad with pressure. I had to change my diet.”
“That’s okay, Aunt Mabel. If you fixed this for me, it’s just fine.”
“Do you still like chicken? You children was some chicken-eatin’ somebodies. Your daddy and grandmomma was always travelin’ with a bag of chicken for you and your brother, Ray. He still like the wings?”
She knew everything. She knew all about me. I was so full I didn’t want to eat, but knowing that she would be upset, I took a few forkfuls before asking her the question. “What can you tell me about my mother. I mean, was she my mother? Was Sarah really my mother?”
“Oh, blessed Lord in heaven! Of course she was your mother. What do you mean? What do you want to know?”
“I never really knew for sure. No one ever talked about her much. I kept hearing little things, but nobody, not even Daddy, ever told me anything about her.”
“He wouldn’t, that lyin’ dog. I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but if I could get my hands on him, I would ring his pretty neck. Was he still pretty when he died? Bec
ause he was a real pretty boy when he was alive. And what about his momma? She still livin’?”
“Yes. As far as I know, she is.” Aunt Mabel walked out of the kitchen without saying a word. She returned with a large photo album. Using her apron, she dusted the cornbread crumbs off the table, put the album down, and began to give me my history.
Aunt Mabel had pictures of my mother’s side of the family dating back to the early 1900s. She was quick to point out all of the “real Africans.” Some of the pictures looked like they had been drawn and then photographed. Looking through that album, I met my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth. Her mother, Hortense. I met my grandfather, Samuel, and his mother, Francine. I met cousins and aunts and uncles, and then, I met my mother, Sarah Elizabeth Jefferson. She looked like an older version of Gemmia.
Sarah was five feet eleven inches tall, which made her three inches taller than Daddy. She was slender, with very large breasts. There were pictures of her with shoulder-length hair, but in most of them, her hair was pulled into a bun that sat on top of her head. I saw pictures of her with my father, with her sisters, and with her mother. In some she posed on cars, in others she was standing on steps, or next to trees. When I saw the picture of my mother holding me in her arms, I fell to pieces. I knew then that the lady in the hospital room, at the cemetery, in the kitchen had been with me all of my life. I had a mother who loved me. She was real and she loved me.
Aunt Mabel told me all of the family stories and secrets, who begat who, who begat and lied about it, who begat and gave away. She had told me an hour’s worth of hilarious stories before she told me my parents’ story.
“Your mother fell in love with a married man when she was sixteen years old. She was headstrong. When she made up her mind, it was made up for good. Anyway, this guy ups and moves from Mississippi to New York, so your mother decides that she will follow him. She got a job working with the Pennsylvania Railroad as a porter. That way, she could travel back and forth to see him without havin’ to pay. Half the time, when she got to New York, he wouldn’t even see her, and that made her sick. When she and her girlfriends had time off, they would go partyin’ and drinkin’, tryin’ to help your momma get over her broken heart. Them friends was Dora and Nadine.
“Anyway, they was dancin’ in a club one night. Your momma sho’ could dance. She would swing her little skinny-legged self all over them guys in the club, and they loved it. One night she met your daddy and forgot all about that other no-good-fo-nothin’ man. Your daddy was a big-time gambler, and he was pretty. Sarah said she wanted a pretty man to be the daddy of her babies. She decided that your daddy was pretty fine. She called me and told me he was pretty enough to give her some babies.
“Nadine and Dora stopped workin’ the trains to get married. Your momma wanted Mr. Pretty Man to marry her, but he wouldn’t. We didn’t know he couldn’t ’cause he already had a wife. He would meet your momma every time she came to the clubs. But just before your brother was on the way, she took sick, had to stop workin’, and was stuck in New York.
“When she found out Ray was on the way, your daddy took her in, wouldn’t marry her, couldn’t marry her, but he took her into his mother’s house, right around the corner from where he lived with his wife. When the railroad told Sarah she had to come back to work, she was too sick to go. She had been workin’ for fifteen years, but they fired her anyway. Didn’t give her no kind of pay or nothin’, just fired her. It was when Ray was born that they told her about the cancer in her blood. She didn’t pay them doctors no mind. She kept on drinkin’ like nothing could ever stop her. By the time she had you, the disease was all in her breasts. Do you drink?”
“No. I never have.”
“Well, I guess not. Your mother drank so much carryin’ you, you could be drunk for the rest of your life. I think she drank because of the pain. She was always in a lot of pain. Maybe that’s why she fought all the time. She was a fighter, you know. We never said nothin’ to her about drinkin’, because she would fight. She used to fight your daddy. He beat her. Did you know that? Did you know that your daddy beat your mother right there in his mother’s house? It was a disgrace. His mother never lifted a hand to help Sarah, not even after she got so sick she couldn’t walk.
“We all tried to tell her not to have that last baby. She said she was goin’ to no matter what. Well, she had him, and Dora took him. Took him right outta the hospital. See, you and Ray were your mother’s children. That little boy was Dora’s from day one. Sarah kept you in a dresser drawer right near her bed, but she gave that other baby away. It almost killed her to have that baby. It did kill her. She wouldn’t let them take her breasts off. She said she would die first. She said if God let her live long enough to see Ray turn three, she would never take another drink. Ray was gonna be three March thirty-first. She passed on March twentieth. She wanted to give him a party.
“It wasn’t until we got to the cemetery that we realized what was goin’ on. Your father had her buried in a grave with a whole bunch of other people. When I saw that, I fainted right out there on the cold ground in the cemetery. If only he had asked, we would have put my sister away proper. He never asked. He was Mr. Big Shot. Anyway, I wanted you to come live with me, but your daddy said no. Your mother wanted you and Ray to stay together. Since your grandmother wanted Ray and not you, you both ended up there because your daddy was there.”
“Did he really beat her?”
“Listen, your momma loved that man, and when she loved, she loved forever. Your momma could not live without love. We loved her, but she needed the kind of love she got from a man. I want you to be different. Love God. If you love God, he will bring you a man. I love God so much he gave me a husband when I turned seventy-six years old. I just married an old man with a bad heart. But he makes me very happy.”
We talked awhile longer, and Aunt Mabel gave me pictures of my parents and other family members. We both knew that I did not want to leave her, but Adeyemi was waiting for me. We were standing in the hallway, holding on to one another, when Aunt Mabel reached up, took my face in both of her hands, and said to me, “When you were born, your mother called me and said, ‘Snookie’—she called me Snookie—‘she is going to be something great. I can see it in her eyes. Maybe she will write. Or maybe she will be a great and famous dancer. I am going to put my mark on her, because she is going to be somebody one day.’ Your momma didn’t say that about either of your brothers. She said it about you. Your mother loved you. She and I both knew that you were some kind of miracle. She knew that you were born to do God’s good work. I want you to know that. I want you to know I love you too.”
I never saw Aunt Mabel again. She died ten days after I walked out of her house.
The similarities between my mother and me were amazing. Aunt Mabel’s words kept ringing in my ears, “You have to be different.” Until that moment, I thought there was something wrong with being different. I was trying to be like everyone else, but I had to be different. The other thing that kept coming up in my brain was “a proper burial.” My mother had not had a proper burial, and neither had Rhonda.
When I asked my husband to dig a small hole in the back yard for me, he told me I was crazy.
“It’s midnight. It’s freezing, and we don’t have a shovel.”
“Use a spoon. I don’t want to bury somebody, I just need a little hole.”
“Aren’t you taking this a bit far? What are you putting in the hole?”
“A lot of crap. I need to bury the crap.” I knew if I kept talking, he would figure a way out of it. I turned and left him lying across the bed. I went into my office and started looking for pictures of Rhonda.
I was trying to find pictures of myself at every stage of my life before Balé gave me my name. I found teenage pictures, pictures of me when I was pregnant, pictures of me with John. I found a picture of myself smoking and another one where I was naked. I wonder who took that one? I laid them all in front of me on the desk, trying to remember the tim
es and experiences of my life. There were some tears and some smiles, but I knew the time had come for me to say good-bye. I needed closure. I realized that all of my efforts would be for naught until there was absolute closure between who I was and who I am. For me, it wasn’t enough to forgive, to surrender, or to make peace. I needed a concrete demonstration that it was over. That my life and everything about it up until the day I changed my name and nature was completely closed. I decided to write Rhonda a letter and tell her what I was planning to do. In all things be grateful.
Dear Rhonda Eva Harris, also known as Ronnie:
I write this letter to thank you for all you have been to me. I thank you for all you have been in my life, and for the many ways in which you have served me. We have had many great times together, and while our relationship was healthy and purposeful at one time, I find that our relationship no longer serves me. Our relationship no longer supports what I desire in my life, or the purpose I believe God intends for me. I find that we now have an unholy relationship, which I no longer choose to continue. Therefore, I now release you from any and all unconscious and conscious agreements we have made in the past to continue this relationship. I now forgive you totally and unconditionally for any and all conscious and unconscious thoughts, words, and actions committed by you that have had an unloving, nonsupportive, unhealthy impact on my life. I now ask for and claim your forgiveness for any and all conscious and unconscious thoughts, words, and actions of mine that have held you in a condition of lack, fear, anger, resentment, guilt, shame, or any other unhealthy emotion. You are now free to pursue your higher and greater good. I am now free to pursue my higher and greater good. I wish for you love, light, peace, and an abundance of every good thing in God’s kingdom. I release you. I surrender the energy of you in my being to the presence of the Holy Spirit and ask that any memory of you be transformed to productive and useful energy according to God’s perfect plan for my life. I love you. I bless you.
Yesterday, I Cried Page 30
