Rhythms of Grace (7 page)

She stood, pointing at me. “You see what you’ve done to her? This is your fault, you know. You’ve encouraged it. Letting her go over to that heathen dance class—”

“There’s nothing wrong with that class and you know it. Joyce prays with those girls every practice. Their performances are all based on the Word.”

My mother shook her head then, raining plastic rollers down on my bed. Pink, yellow, mint green, they showered down like oversized candies. “I don’t care what she prays or what she says, I know what she is. You see what happened to that other girl, the Dixons’ daughter? That’s not going to happen to mine. You hear me? You shall know them by their fruit. Saved girls don’t need to be dancing anyhow. Dating either. I’m not going to let this boy use her up, knock her up, and then leave her for the first blond he meets in college. I’m not! And if you won’t protect her, I will.”

I sat down on my bed, letting their angry words float over my head. How could she talk about Diana like that? And Miss Joyce too? There was no point in trying to tell Mama anything. She could only hear what she wanted to hear. And Daddy? His voice only seemed to work in church.

“The boy just wants to spend time with us, to see if things can work out between them. You can’t protect that girl forever. You’re pushing them too hard. They’re kids. Just let the boy come over for dinner after church tomorrow.”

My heartbeat was all I could hear. Ron had never said anything about talking to my father. Maybe they hadn’t seen my notebook at all. Maybe they had seen something even more telling: Ron’s heart. Maybe there was a chance for us.

In seconds, I knew better. My mother threw her head back and laughed and not because anything was funny. It was mad laughter, like Macbeth or some other Shakespearean head case. Every woman has her limits and somehow, my father and I had just surpassed hers. There was no point in stopping now.

“No,” she said, half screaming, half laughing. “Noooooooo!”

“But, Mama, just give him a chance. He loves me—”

The slap came then, forceful and unexpected. I knew from the look in her eyes that it was meant to knock what she thought was the devil out of me, to shake me to my senses. As I wiped the blood from my mouth, I thought that my senses were more awake than they’d ever been.

My father moved quickly, quietly, pulling Mama’s hands behind her back. He spoke into her neck with his preacher voice. “Don’t hit her again. That’s enough.”

She twisted in his grip and worked one hand free, reaching for me. “It will never work, don’t you see? It never has. His mother will spit in your black face. Eva should have never brought that boy to the church in the first place. She knows better than anybody how folks are around here. Look what they done to her boy! That white girl said she loved him too.”

Daddy jerked her back then, hitched his arms under each of hers and began to pull her from the room. Before he shut the door, he looked back at me, and I blinked back the tears threatening in my eyes. Tears I knew would never fall.

“Forgive your mama, Birdie. And forgive me. I should have never let her go this far.”

I fell back on the pillow and closed my eyes, clutching the notebook inside the cloth to my face. Birdie. Ron called me that too, even before he knew it was my nickname. What would happen to us now in this town where race was the invisible elephant in every room, even after so much time? I could hear Ron’s answer in my heart, quiet and clear: If the elephant won’t leave, then we’ll ride him . . . all the way to our wedding.

Laughter kissed my bloody lips. Daddy was right. It never should have gone this far.

6

When the letter came announcing my scholarship, everyone cheered. I was too tired, too broken, too empty to celebrate. It had been a long, hard year, each day like sandpaper on a wound, love in short supply. Mama and Daddy were both determined now to plan my future: for her, wedding; for him, my graduation. Ron was preaching now and then, trying his best to avoid my eyes. Our secret love was now broken open before everyone, weeping everywhere we went like an open wound.

I never knew what they said to him, did to him, to make him turn from me, but I knew him well enough to know it hurt him deeply. Cut him to the bone. Only once had he said anything to me, in the hall after choir practice when everyone else had gone.

“Can you see the scar?” he’d said softly.

“From what?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

“From you,” he said, tracing my face with his finger. “From where they cut us apart.”

There was movement then, on the stairs. Someone coming for sheet music they’d left behind. We turned and ran in opposite directions and we’d been running ever since. Tonight was different. We were older now, both eighteen. Eva was frail, dying, and Ron had found a place of his own. I wondered how Brian felt about that, but I’d probably never know. My mother and some of the other families had never been kind to him. People said things but I never passed them on. Life was hard enough, I was learning, without other folks’ problems.

My own mother was sick tonight, too sick to protest when Joyce had thrown all of her students who’d earned scholarships, which really meant all of us, a party. The DJ was playing something that I’d heard when cars went by on the block, but nothing I knew the words to. Nothing I’d be singing in church anytime soon. Ron seemed to know it. I wasn’t surprised.

“Dance with me?” It was more a statement than a question, more an inevitability than a command. While other couples started for the dance floor led by a hand, Ron steered me with his body, pressed tight behind me. He stopped at the edge of the carpet and waited, spiking the front of his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I should go.” Contradicting his words, his hands touched my hair, his lips to my eyelids.

Our classmates pushed us back, edging us onto the carpet, shielding us from the eyes of chaperones and church mothers. My arms strained to circle his neck, despite my last-minute growth spurt. He bent down to shorten the distance between us, which wasn’t any distance at all.

I waited all night for him to give me my first and only kiss, but he didn’t. Instead we danced slow and close, even on the fast songs, mourning our lost love.

“I hope he’s good to you,” he whispered finally. “I told him to be.”

Ron choked up some then. I did too.

If my mother had been there, she would have been worried how I might look to Jeremiah if he came in. “No prince wants something wasted,” she’d said days before on the night of my graduation. “Virtue is all a girl gets in this man’s world. Spend it wisely. You can never get it back.”

At the time, her words were like some kind of torture device, ripping back and forth a piece of me desperately trying to heal. Later, I would see the wisdom in those words, the love in her motivations.

Much later.

Tonight, I only saw the forbidden and the required, both pulling at me with deadly force, striking me dumb, making me numb.

“I will miss you,” I told him.

In truth I’d always been missing him, since the first day I saw him, long before he’d come to the church. He and Brian had been racing at the Charles C and a child’s bike was in the way. Brian hurdled over it, but Ron stopped and wheeled around the corner to the sound of a little boy’s cry.

No one else saw but me.

And now it was me crying, only no sound was coming out. We danced for four songs, but it seemed like forever. At the end of the last tune, a bone-deep Anita Baker ballad that even a church girl like me knew the words to, we let go, biting our lips and choking back everything that could have been.

And then I saw him.

Jeremiah, half drunk and wearing his letter jacket even though it was June. In one hand he held a beer, in the other, the thigh of the homecoming queen of the school across town. She’d made the cheerleading squad at Central State, where he’d be playing football, first string. I made it too, but not without a fight from Mama. Too much temptation, she said.

She gave in eventually, urging me to stay away from Jeremiah as much as possible. I even had a bishop’s daughter for a roommate to keep an eye on me. Not that I needed to be watched, my mother said when making the arrangement. It was the boys she worried about. Always the boys.

I backed into the shadows as Jeremiah dropped his beer and attended to things with both hands. My hands, empty now, covered my mouth as my future stared me in the face. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t win.

When the first punch landed, I heard it but didn’t know what it was. But the words that came after couldn’t be denied. Though he weighed less than Jeremiah, Ron used his quickness. His heartbreak too.

“I told you not to . . . I told you!”

Jeremiah’s high crashed down and he held Ron back. He argued at first, but then they both fell in a heap of frustration. They’d become close now this last year with Brian slipping away, turning into some angry cloud ready to burst at any moment. These two had prayed together, played together, talked about anything and everything.

Except me.

Jeremiah banged his head on the wall. The cheerleader slipped from under him and disappeared into the crowd, straightening her skirt as she went. I didn’t know whether to hate her or admire her. Whatever this game was, I was certainly losing.

Jeremiah couldn’t keep score either. “Man, I don’t know what I’m doing. Everybody has a plan for me. God wants me to preach. Mama wants me to marry Birdie. Daddy wants me to play football. I’m losing it, Red. I just want to do something because I want to, not because I have to.”

Ron started to say something, but I ran out before he did. I couldn’t bear to hear how I’d wrecked his life too.

Jeremiah tried to grab me when I passed by, but I slipped through his hands. Ron wouldn’t let me go so easy. He dived and caught me just as we fell through the front door.

He took his time with me at first, there on the floor of his almost empty apartment. Wouldn’t even let me in his bedroom so I could see his only furniture—a twin-size bed and a black-and-white TV. He kept saying he was going to get the TV set or take me home, he couldn’t settle on which. All I could see was his eyes. I’d never seen them this close in this much light. Or with this much love.

Ron’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he kept swallowing it down, that love, trying to carry on a conversation. It was hot in there, but he kept on his jacket.

I took off my shoes.

He closed his eyes then and I knew that he was praying. I wanted to, but I didn’t know what to pray. I’d been so sorry for so long that I didn’t know what to be sorry for. I just wanted to sit here with Ron and look at his eyes.

“Put your shoes on, Birdie,” he said, taking off his jacket. “Please.”

I heard him, but by then I didn’t see my shoes. I saw Mama and Jeremiah and Miss Eva’s dead son who had fallen in love with a white girl and drowned in the shallow end of the public pool. A pool where if you looked real close when you were under the water, right near the bottom, you could still see the words WHITES ONLY, words that people said northern towns didn’t have. I saw Ron’s fiery hair and his generous eyes. I heard his steady, silent applause for my every achievement, desired his earnest love that my mother said would be the death of me.

Mama, I think I’m dead already.

And before I left this world for good, I only wanted one thing: to be kissed by a man who loved me, a man who loved God. Before tonight, I’d accepted that it would be enough for the man to love God, but now it wouldn’t have been enough. Jeremiah would have never kissed me like he had kissed that cheerleader. I wouldn’t want him to kiss me now anyway. There was only one man I wanted to do that.

I only had to ask once.

It was beautiful, that kiss and all the ones that came after. We laid there, quiet, knowing there’d probably be no more of this. Perhaps that was best. He got up and went to the door. He even got my purse.

“I don’t want to sin against you, Birdie. Let me take you home.”

That’s when I began to sing.

7

Brian

I wanted to play the djembe when my mother died, to beat it up high and down low: palms, knuckles, the sides of my hands. I wanted to strap it on my belly and go barefoot by the pulpit. I wanted to scream.

They wouldn’t let me.

Not that I could blame them. I’d gone a bit crazy by then, the kind of crazy that I was always scared of. Strange even. Not that it surprised anyone. Ron still came around, gave me our secret handshake, shrugged his shoulders when people raised eyebrows at me, told them, “Oh he’s all right. Don’t be like that.”

But I wasn’t all right. I hadn’t been. Not for a very long time. Not since a Sunday in my junior year when Mama was too tired to come to church and I came alone. For the first time, alone. The deacon gave me a thin smile at the door. The whispers that I’d always thought I’d heard before, the ones that Mama told me were my imagination, echoed in my ears like screams.

“Eva’s down sick, they say. What is that child going to do now?”

“Chile, I don’t know. He’s always been a bit grown, but everybody needs a mama. Now that’s a fact.”