Ill fly away, p.8
I'll Fly Away, page 8
Why I Write
BY CAREEN JENNINGS*
My great-great-great-uncle marched with General Sherman’s army through Georgia in 1865. Back home in Indiana after the war, he took up his quill pen and wrote: “In the city of Savannah a colored school was now established and the children liberated by the sword sat with books in their hands and teachers before them on the same platform where slaves had but a short time before been bought and sold like brutes. Tears filled the eyes of parents as they gazed in wonder and thankfulness to God.”
My mother wrote of her girlhood in the 1920s: “I remember waking to the clip-clop, clip-clop of horses’ hooves just after daybreak on weekday mornings. Farmers were taking produce to town. The milkman rattled his bottles saying, ‘Giddap’ and ‘Whoa’ alternately. During summer vacation the horse brought the ice. We children gathered round saying, ‘May I have a piece of ice?’ He gave us each a chip.”
Photos from the past are priceless, but words from the past give meaning to the lives of those who have died.
Why did they write? I think it was to help them remember that they had seen and done something significant, and they wanted to share their lives with others, others they would never meet. They knew that their lives meant something, and they wanted to speak to the future.
Why do I write? As was my great-great-great-uncle, I have been a witness to history. I was in the crowd of college students when Martin Luther King Jr. rallied us for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I was sitting at the makeshift press table (no one cared in those days of innocence) when Robert Kennedy came to a nighttime rally for his brother John, who was trying to win the Democratic nomination for president.
But like my mother, I mostly write of my own life: my childhood, my own children, my losses, my joys, fears, dreams, angers, questions. I write in order to be able to think, to sort out confused emotions, to record my life and the lives of those around me, to find meaning, to Be.
As he was dying from brain cancer, my twenty-seven-year-old son said, “Remember me.” He’d never read much Shakespeare, but Hamlet’s father returned from the dead to speak these same words to his son.
So I remember my great-great-great-uncle who died many decades before I was born. I remember my mother’s childhood. And maybe my writing will be read by my unborn great-grandchildren, and they will learn of my world—not as the history books will describe it, but as I lived in it. Maybe they will remember me.
Lavender and Vanilla
BY KIMBERLY WALKER
Mom lies still
in the hospital bed—
lavender and vanilla
radiating from her skin.
Spirit at peace, body at rest,
she is in her father’s arms.
Upon her face,
glorious light shines.
The wind blows
I love you kisses.
The rain falls,
tears of I miss you.
The scents of lavender and vanilla
say, I will always be with you.
A Gift
BY ROBIN LEDBETTER
I stared in disbelief at my grandmother’s door—the locked entrance to the apartment where I’d spent most of my life. “What do you mean, ‘How are you?’” I shouted. “You’re not even going to open the god-damned door?”
“I’m glad you’re all right,” she called out. “Okay, then. Bye.”
I pounded the door with my fists and screamed. “Grandma! Grandma! I can’t believe you!” But I could. My grandmother had three major flaws: number one was too much pride; number two was her secretiveness; and number three—her worst flaw—was her ability to completely ignore any situation or conversation that caused her the slightest discomfort. And that was exactly what Grandma was doing.
I turned to Barbara, my new foster sister, who had come with me. She was staring strangely at me, her normally pale skin flushed, her big brown eyes large with fear. “Sorry, Barbie. I thought she’d…” My words trailed off and I rested my head against the apartment door and began to cry. I was thirteen. I hadn’t lived with my grandmother for almost two years, and when I had, I’d always felt like an intruder. But for some reason I didn’t really understand, I still considered her place home.
I’d gone to live with my grandmother when I was five years old. My parents were drug addicts and couldn’t raise me, so Gram had stepped in, offering me a home inside the red brick building in the projects where she lived. Life with Grandma had been isolating. She was as proud as she was uneducated, and because she lived in fear that her limitations might be exposed, she lived a very private life, with few connections to the outside world. I was, for the most part, a good kid, but by the age of ten I had become restless. I’d found my voice, too—a voice of indignation and ferocious rebellion. Grandma’s apartment became a battleground, and each day the war between us escalated. By the time I was eleven, Gram had had enough and kicked me out.
In the two years that followed, I’d bounced from the apartments of other family members to mental hospitals, from shelters to group homes. Now, at thirteen, I’d landed at my current residence, a foster home I loved. Despite the battles I’d waged against my grandmother, despite all the bad blood between us, I wanted to reconnect with her—to show her how well I was doing and introduce her to my new foster sister. What I wanted most of all was Grandma’s approval, and in my youthful ignorance, I thought I could show up at her house by surprise and she would toss aside my history of bad behavior, throw open the door, and welcome me in with open arms. So her “How are you?” from behind the locked door was a slap in the face—a stinging wallop back to the reality that she had never fully accepted me. She didn’t want to see me? Not even through a crack in the door with the safety chain on? A hundred painful emotions churned inside of me, and with them came the involuntary tears I was furious at myself for shedding.
“You won’t open the door? It’s okay. Fuck you!” I screamed. “Come on!” I ordered Barbara, flying past her and down the hall, out the doors of the apartment building, down the front stairs.
“You okay?” Barbara called after me, her voice thick with concern and heavy with accent.
“I’m fine!” I declared, though I was anything but. Grandma had wounded me and I wanted to wound her back. My face cast downward, I wiped fiercely at my eyes and rounded the corner of the brick building where I’d been raised. I had no idea what I was going to do until I looked up at the parking lot behind the building. There was my grandmother’s beloved car, parked behind the crippled fence. “I got a trick for her ass,” I muttered to myself and headed toward the back of the building.
“What are you doing?” Barbara asked as she watched me struggle a few bricks loose from under the stairs of the back porch. Without answering her, I headed straight for Grandma’s silver Buick Thunderbird. She had bought it with the insurance money she’d gotten after a driver smashed into her other old clunker a few years earlier. A year ago, some kids had busted out one of the Thunderbird’s windows by accident and she’d been upset. Well, she’d be devastated by the time I finished with that car. The bricks I was holding fell to the ground—all but one. As I took aim at the front windshield, I felt strangely calm. With all my might, I hurled the brick. The alarm began wailing as soon as it made contact, but I’d only made a dent, not a smash. I picked up the brick again. I could see a few bystanders peering at me as I took aim the second time and fired.
It took four more hits before that front window was smashed to my satisfaction. I moved on to the passenger’s-side window. Again, I took aim—but this time, when the brick hit the glass, the window exploded. I think the mixture of exploding glass, shrieking car alarm, and my own fierce emotions made me high. By the time I’d busted out the last window, I was laughing and crying hysterically. The last thing I remember is my foster sister grabbing me by my arm and dragging me away from the scene of my crime. As she did, I caught a glimpse of my grandmother peering out of my old bedroom window. She was a shadowy figure behind a curtain, and I was a feverish thirteen-year-old in a yellow sundress and white sandals, an outfit I’d put on that morning to show her how well I was doing.
I know this sounds like the memory of a disturbed young girl—and it is. But it’s more than that. This is a story of gratitude for the gift of forgiveness—for the gift of abiding love.
A year after the window-smashing incident—the year I was fourteen—I was arrested for murder. Stretched out on my bunk on my first night in a juvenile detention center, I thought about how completely alone I was. Both of my parents were messed up, and as for the rest of my family, I’d let years of anger burn every bridge between them and me. There’d be no one in the world to stand by me while I fought to survive in the face of hopelessness and despair. So I was taken by surprise when, the next morning, I was called for a visit. And what surprised me even more was that the visitor was my reclusive grandmother—a woman who preferred solitude to company, isolation to connection. Yet there she was, in a floral dress and matching headband, walking her proud walk, her hands turned out to show off her ring. I braced myself as she approached me, thinking I was in for a verbal assault that I didn’t have the energy to endure. But the biggest surprise I got that morning was the kiss and the hug Grandma gave when she reached me. No judgment, no harsh words, no bitter tone.
We visited for two hours and she promised me she’d be back the next day—that she’d always be there for me as long as she had breath in her body. And you know what? She did come back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Grandma has continued to be there for me until this day ten years later. For that, I’m grateful beyond what these words can express.
My grandmother has never brought up that day I destroyed her car. On the day of her first visit—the first full day of my imprisoned life—she and I had a new beginning. I believe my grandmother has blessed me with many things over the years, but the most precious gift she has ever given me came ten years ago in that visiting room. To this day, I can see her approaching me in her colorful dress, walking across a bridge of love to give me the gift of a second start.
III.
Broken Dolls and Marionettes
The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or, again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.
—ANDREA DWORKIN
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
—ALICE MILLER
Broken Doll
BY LYNDA GARDNER
I begged Daddy to stop. I begged him not to.
“Please, Daddy! My skin is burning up. Please stop! I’ll be a good girl. I didn’t mean to make you so mad. I didn’t mean to be a bad girl, Daddy! Okay, I’ll stand in the closet with my arms out. But Daddy, it’s so hard to keep them up for such a long time—I’m only little, Daddy! Please don’t get mad at me again. My arm’s burning and it smells like bacon. Could you please put some of Mommy’s medicine on it to make it feel better because it hurts so much. It hurts bad, Daddy! I love you, Daddy, and I’m sorry I ate the last piece of cheese in the fridge! Please, Daddy! I won’t never, ever do it again. I promise, it’s just that…I was so hungry, Daddy. I’m sorry.”
Well, I couldn’t keep my arms out straight enough that day for him, so my stepfather proceeded to die out another cigarette in the same burn on my arm. And now, at fifty-six years old, I’m supposed to forgive him? I can’t. I hate his guts. I’m so damned angry because he made me into who I have been, what I became.
I’m changing my life now, although the scars remain as harsh reminders. Some days, the burns look as raw and fresh as they were fifty-two years ago, and I’m just a bitter, self-centered person filled with pain and anger. My family consisted of my mother, my stepfather, five sisters, and a brother who died at eighteen months. My sisters are all blondes with blue or green eyes and very fair skin. And from what I have learned about my dead brother—there were no pictures of him—he was, too. And then there is me: dark brown hair, dark olive skin, and hazel eyes. I look like no one in my family. My sister Joyce would make comments like, “You’re a different breed than we are, and that’s why Daddy doesn’t love you!” Once she told me that the Rag Man had dropped me off at the door and would be coming back for me. I was terrified he would return in the night to snatch me away. Until years later, I never understood what “different breed” meant: that I was my mother’s child by another man.
My sister Nance felt bad for me and tried to protect me from him, to no avail. He was strong, and he even frightened her at times. Cindy, the sister who was most like him, took pleasure in saying through the door, “Watch out for the monster in there! He eats bad girls.” I thought my heart would explode from the pounding in my chest as I waited to be gobbled up. Cindy also told me that “slimy things” lived under my bed, so I slept with my Daisy rifle with a cork bullet next to me. Rather than risk getting my feet chewed up, I would pee the bed, hoping my stepfather wouldn’t find out. He always did.
This led to more beatings and more burns. He would call me “the dog,” and I would have to sit by his chair. If I dared move, he would yank my hair. When he went to the kitchen for a beer, he’d twist my hair around his hand like a leash, lift me off the ground, get his beer, and go back to his chair in the parlor. God help me if I should whimper or make even the slightest sound because if I did, he would kick me, hit me, and die out another cigarette against my flesh. I loved Dad and I hated him. I just wanted him to love me, to stop hurting me. But he didn’t. Later, I wanted him to stop breathing, to die, to choke to death—anything that would stop him. Nothing ever did.
What became of me? Weekends of drunken stupors, sick stomach, and sweaty palms, a lifetime of pain and misery. So many poor choices along the way, including two failed marriages. I’d been high most of my life. Through all of this experimenting and searching for meaning, I’d never found “me”—had never found the key to unlock the confusion and make sense of my life.
I left home and never saw Dad again, and when he died, I refused to go to his funeral. My mother and sisters were angry at me for that and couldn’t understand why I would “embarrass” them that way. But we had all lived under that same roof. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t understand.
Years later, I did visit the bastard’s gravesite. I peed and spit on his stone, hoping for relief from my pain. I didn’t get it. My stepfather was dead and I couldn’t hurt him like he’d hurt me. He’d even had the luxury of dying peacefully in his sleep. I’m still angry about that!
My mother eventually apologized to me for what Dad had done to me all those years while I was growing up. She blamed herself. She and my stepfather had separated for a while, and it was during this estrangement that Mom met my father, had a brief encounter, and became pregnant with me. Then she and my stepfather reconciled. It was only after he was dead that she told me this—after she felt safe. I understood. She had been his victim, too: scared of “or else” and knowing no way out. You see, my stepfather had been a detective for the police department where we lived. I remember him taunting her with, “Go ahead and call the cops, Theresa!” They would have told him to keep his wife and kids in line, patted him on the shoulder, and looked the other way. They would not have gotten involved because he was one of their own. They had a code—a blue wall of silence—when it came to one of their brothers. So my mother had remained silent all those years for survival’s sake.
As for me, after forty years of being high in order to escape the pain Dad had inflicted on my heart, my soul, and my mind, I was on my last roll of the dice. I’d numbed myself for so many years because it was the only way I could cope. Living without feeling, I had ended up in prison for being so high that I had gambled away not only my own but also someone else’s money. I’d done so without a thought about the consequences, or of how I would embarrass my family. I guess I just didn’t care.
I entered York CI three years ago. This has been the first time in forty years that I haven’t been high on drugs, alcohol, or gambling. And I’m scared shitless, because I feel. I feel hurt, sadness, and sorrow. Mostly, I feel anger about what Dad did.
Maybe if I’d been sober long enough to feel these emotions before now, I could have stopped racing down the destructive path my life took. But I only knew that being numb made me feel safe. I didn’t have to think about him, or the pain he’d inflicted. I didn’t have to think at all when I was high—I could be happy, or at least pretend to be. And in the pursuit of that “happiness,” I became an old lady pulling along a trunk full of junk: shame, guilt, distrust, disgust. At fifty-six, I’m just learning how to empty that trunk, little by little. It’s getting lighter. I’m no longer afraid of feeling.
It feels good not to worry about how much money I need today for drugs and gambling, and to build and rebuild relationships with my five children and nine grandchildren. I know this will take time, but I am getting my life back and seeing through bright eyes now—no fog, no haze.
This is good. This is real. This is me.
“No” Is Not Just a Word
BY CHRISTINA MACNAUGHTON
Backstage, I feel the weighted silence of audience anticipation deep in my bones. This simple community theater is where life is best; this is where I’m happiest. I wait anxiously for the cue to my main scene in Jane Eyre. Suddenly, Shawn comes up and presses himself against the back of my humongous period costume—a nightmare of petticoats, lace, and fleur-de-lis. His dark eyes and deep voice send shock waves through my already overheated body. “You look enchanting,” he tells me. “Brontë couldn’t have imagined a lovelier Blanche.”
