Not Past: Terror in Contemporary Black Literature

Racial terror is not past—not in society and not in the literature that articulates it.

Collected Excerpts by Matthew Clair, Winter 2014

*

If there is one thing that distinguishes black literature, particularly black literature of the American South, it is racial terror.

Indeed, terror—whether existential or everyday—has dominated the lives of southern blacks for generations. A recent post in the Daily Kos reminds us that it was terror—the “random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people”—that structured the daily lives of blacks before the civil rights movement. In the form of lynching, sexual assault, and imprisonment, a racial order was enforced that held blacks at the mercy of individual and institutional domination.

But here I mean to speak of terror in the present tense. Terror is not past—not in society and not in the literature that articulates it.

Of course there are those who argue that racism is dead; a related argument applies to black literature. Kenneth Warren, a professor at the University of Chicago, has written that black literature—which he defines as the political literature responding to Jim Crow racism—no longer exists because the overt forms of racism it engaged no longer exist. But embedded in this provoking interpretation of black literature is the intimate relationship between literature and terror. To be sure, racialized terror has manifestations that go beyond lynchings and state-sanctioned injustices.

While times have changed, racialized terror lingers in elaborately covert ways, in the South as well as in the rest of the nation. It lingers in our schools, our prisons, our justice system, and our minds. In the social sciences, theories have arisen to interpret all of this: “institutional racism” and “laissez-faire racism” are articulations of the covert ways racism subsists. These conceptions of racism are helpful and significant, for they lend a legitimated form of objectivity to our understandings of the persistence of racial inequality. They offer us precise measurement of racism over time, providing avenues for social justice. And yet, social science often misses what literature captures best—the intimate and dramatized portrayal of subjective experiences of racism.

What follows is a collection of some of the most chilling accounts of terror in Southern black literature of the past decade. Excerpted from novels and essays, these sketches, clipped from their larger (con)texts and placed in proximity to one another, tell contemporary stories of terror in a decentered way. If nothing else, this excerpted-chaos only adds to the visceral and nonsensical nature of racial terror.

“How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” (essay, 2013), Kiese Laymon:

A few weeks earlier, George Harmon, the President of Millsaps, shuts down the campus paper in response to a satirical essay I wrote on communal masturbation and sends a letter to over 12,000 overwhelmingly white Millsaps students, friends and alumnae. The letter states that the "Key Essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues."

After the President's letter goes out, my life kinda hurts.

I receive a sweet letter in the mail with the burnt up ashes of my essays. The letter says that if I don't stop writing and give myself "over to right," my life would end up like the ashes of my writing.

The tires of my Mama's car are slashed when her car was left on campus. I'm given a single room after the Dean of Students thinks it's too dangerous for me to have a roommate. Finally, Greg Miller, an English Professor, writes an essay about how and why a student in his Liberal Studies class says, "Kiese should be killed for what he's writing." I feel a lot when I read those words, but mainly I wonder what's wrong with me.

It's bid day at Millsaps.

Shonda and I are headed to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun, a fake ass Chuck E. Cheese behind Northpark Mall. We're wearing royal blue shirts with a strange smiling animal and Ton-o-Fun on the left titty. The shirts of the other boy workers at Ton-o-Fun fit them better than mine. My shirt is tight in the wrong places and slightly less royal blue. I like to add a taste of bleach so I don't stank.

As we walk out to the parking lot of my dorm, the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternities are in front of our dorm receiving their new members. They've been up drinking all night. Some of them have on black face and others have on Afro wigs and Confederate capes.

We get close to Shonda's Saturn and one of the men says, "Kiese, write about this!" Then another voice calls me a "Nigger" and Shonda, a "Nigger bitch." I think and feel a lot but mostly I feel that I can't do anything to make the boys feel like they've made us feel right there, so I go back to my dorm room to get something.

“Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice” (essay, 2013), Ta-Nehisi Coates:

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

One need only look the criminalization of Martin across the country. Perhaps you have been lucky enough to not receive the above "portrait" of Trayvon Martin and its accompanying text. The portrait is actually of a 32-year old man. Perhaps you were lucky enough to not see the Trayvon Martin imagery used for target practice (by law enforcement, no less.) Perhaps you did not see the iPhone games. Or maybe you missed the theory presently being floated by Zimmerman's family that Martin was a gun-runner and drug-dealer in training, that texts and tweets he sent mark him as a criminal in waiting. Or the theory floated that the mere donning of a hoodie marks you a thug, leaving one wondering why this guy is a criminal and this one is not.

We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewood and the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.

You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen.

“Snakes” (short story, 2010), Danielle Evans:

“Don’t you get smart with me,” said my grandmother. “I never took lip from your mother and I certainly won’t take it from you.”

“Daddy says you took everything from my mother,” I said, more innocently than was honest. There was a thick feeling in my throat.

My grandmother’s eyes narrowed. She was silent for some minutes. When she left the room I could hear my breath coming rapidly in tune with her retreating then returning footsteps. In the moment I first saw the gleam of metal in her hand, I truly believed she was going to stab me.

She never said a word. She started snipping quickly, unevenly, the rhythm of her anger punctuated by the growing pile of tight black curls on the floor. It didn’t occur to me to run. It didn’t occur to me that there was anywhere to go. I don’t know how long Allison had been watching. I only know that when it was over, and all but half an inch of my shoulder-length-when-it-lay-flat hair was piled on the floor, Allison was in the doorway, looking straight at my grandmother.

She walked over to me and grabbed my hand, dragging me toward the front door. I didn’t know what to believe about snakes anymore, but at that moment I would have preferred being inside a python’s belly to seeing my grandmother look at my practically bald head like she had proved something to me. I followed Allison down to our lake, climbed with her to the top of our tree. We were out of stories, or we were out of words. We didn’t pretend to be my mother in the Amazon, or hers on a cruise ship, because we knew what we were right then: people too small to stop the things we didn’t want to happen from happening anyway. The bottoms of my jeans and Allison’s thin ankles were muddy then, our socks wet from a puddle I could not remember having stepped in. I looked down before I remembered not to. I saw our watery reflections blending into one on the water’s wet canvas, pink and peach and beige and denim softly swirling, and wondered how my grandmother managed to see two of us so clearly.

Rebel Yell (novel, 2009), Alice Randall:

You and the father are in your room. It is a Saturday. You have just turned thirteen. The father has come to give you a whipping. When he closes the door to the room you are shivering. He is hissing words you have not heard him speak.

“Fuck them,” the father says. “They can’t do anything but scare you. Fuck them, child.”

You hate the sound of his voice saying “fuck.” You hate the fact he has fucked and you haven’t. You hate the way he swaggers through a world of grown folks and strands you in a world of children. You don’t hate him enough to say any of that. “What’s wrong, child?” he asks.

The door is closed and locked and quiet. Your pants are folded neatly on a chair. Your boxers, soon to be around your ankles, are snug about your waist. All is black and red. All is death and blood. There are no other colors and nothing else the colors mean: not apple, not pomegranate, not stop, not alarm, just blood; not night, not coal, not emphatic, not ink, not raven, just death.

Blood is running down your nose. He hasn’t touched you. There is blood on your fingertips. Your nose is bleeding. Because you think you are about to die, you tell the truth.

“I wet myself,” you say.

“I’ve seen men in the war wet themselves,” the daddy says. His tenderness is a heavy weight. Your thought is narrow, compressed, flattening. The father is the weight pressing your thought down. You say, “You. Ashamed of you, Daddy,” you say.

“This Kind of Red” (short story, 2009), Helen Elaine Lee:

And there was a day I realized, just by his tone of voice, that he was turning on Lamar, that he was next. He could go for him in the night time, and in the morning, say that he was sorry and be proud.

Proud of his desk and his starched white shirt. Don’t let no one dis him or ignore him when he was plant manager, working evenings. I hope, I hope, Lord, please let him meet his quota today. Always checking in the mirror that his clothes, his hair, his shave was right.

The only good thing about the piece of stainless steel that fills in for a mirror is that I don’t have to hide from my body, and the sad, sad story it tells. The soft stomach and stretch marks from being pregnant and the saggy breasts that I swear still aches sometimes from the babies lost to me now. The fat I carry now from the starchy food in here and from being penned, and the healing my skin has done. Faded marks where his cigarettes burned the softest, hidden flesh, and the torn places that did their best to close. Who care about it anyways? No one sees me and this body’s just a shell that never did belong to me.

“Searching for Zion” (essay, 2007), Emily Raboteau:

That’s when they grabbed my luggage, whisked me to the basement, stripped off my clothes and probed every orifice of my body for explosives. When they didn’t find any, they focused on my tattoo, a Japanese character which means different, precious, unique. I was completely naked, and the room was cold. My nipples were hard. I tried to cover myself with my hands. I remember feeling incredibly thirsty. One of them flicked my left shoulder with a latex glove. “What does it mean?” he asked. This was the first time I’d ever been racially profiled, not that the experience would have been any less humiliating had it been my five hundredth. “It means Fuck you,” I wanted to say, not because they’d stripped me of my dignity, but because they’d shoved my face into my own rootlessness. I have never felt more black in my life than I did when I was mistaken for an Arab.

 *

Matthew Clair is a PhD student in sociology at Harvard University. 

Tongues

Poetry by Christine Amezquita, Fall 2013

* 

I am picking pears

from the backyard tree

singing:

Ah beh sey

            de eh efe hey

I am

              the sun      at dusk,

he tells me

Duérmete,

vete        ya es tiempo.

acheh e hota ka

              ellay       emay

                           ehney ehnay

      undressed,

water                 from the river

and rises to my tobillos.

         the tendons

of mi abuelita’s chestnut skin,

a topography map de su apellido

         to this bath,

as her hand drives

through the tina

to shower on my head.

oh peh ku

                   errrrrrreh        teh

To pour heated leche

necesitas a cuidarse. Wrap the handle

in una toalla and             away

from oneself.

ou veh

              exis             zeta

There is night

on the tongue

*

Christine Amezquita is currently an MFA candidate at Georgia College and State University. She is originally from the Midwest. 

Filthy Animals

Any minute I will wake up alone in bed. I’ll open my eyes and feel my lungs filling with water. I’ll write down the dream I had about the girl and the time we had sex in the river, and I’ll feel shame at being alone. I’ll bark and point and howl and wither away to dust.

Fiction by Dominic Laing, Fall 2013

***

If we lie low, it can’t catch us. At seven in the morning, it sees the top of her toes. Fifteen minutes later it’s at her calves. By half past seven it’s settled into the small of her back. 

I’ve been watching the sun inch its way up her body for thirty minutes before she finally opens her eyes. A peck on the cheek.

“You sleep okay?”

I nod. “You?”

Her hand drapes over my stomach. “I had a bad dream.”

I peck her back. “You feel like doing much today?”

She shakes her head. Then. “Oh!” An exclamation. She sits up and looks down at me. “I could make breakfast.”

I smile and suppress laughter.

“Don’t laugh at me. I’ll burn your toast.”

“I’m not laughing at you.”

“Then what?”

I point. She glances down and sees the sun presiding over her breasts, its bright sight striped straight across her chest. Her eyes turn up and stare down morning light.

“Pervert.”

*

 “She brightens me.”

I was talking with friends, and it was about her, and it was one of those times where I meant to say something else, but the words mixed together and what I said was “she brightens me.”

So that’s what I always tell people.

We hike. Follow the river. She takes off her shoes at the water’s edge.

“Feel like taking a swim?”

“With you, maybe.”

“Deal.” And then she strips to nothing. And then she leaps into the water.

Now it’s the sun, hitting the water, filtered into rays of light, shimmering across her body.

I open my palm and I feel the same sun she feels. My bare feet enter the water, and it’s the same water rushing over her body.

I kiss her and pull her close. I raise her from the dirt and feel the mud streaked against her bare back. I feel my knees start to sink in the shoreline. I feel light on my shoulders.

Now it’s her breath. Now it’s her hand caressing my cheek and sliding down my neck, down my chest. She grips me and pulls me inside.

Good clean love with our two dirty bodies.

“She brightens me.”

*

On the drive back from the river, she props her dirty feet up against the windshield and warms her soles. She taps her big toes against the glass.

“Having fun?”

“I think so; the sun feels great.”

I smile. “You’re getting the window dirty.” She sighs and pulls her feet to the ground.

A few blocks up the road, I signal to make a right turn. My eyes shift to the passenger side mirror.

And there she is; her two footprints, the detailed lines receding away as they draw down toward her heel. I see the arch of her feet and all her little piggies.

Right mirroring left. Like a butterfly ready-winged; like a flake of snow, suspended.

*

We’re at a table, waiting for coffee. Cars speed into and out of view. Conversations around us dip close and then retreat. There is no current in which to rest.

My hand trembles. I can’t hold on to anything here.

I peel her hand open and try tracing the lines of her palm. “Hmm. Interesting.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Says you wound up with the wrong fella.”

“No kidding?”

“Mmm. Shoulda hooked up with that Brazilian soccer player.”

“You don’t say.”

“Or that lawyer. He was a catch.”

“Wow. And you can read all of that in my hand?”

Silence. I feel the meat of her palm. It is not a tea leaf or a tarot card. I cannot look up its make and model. It is not gold sifted from the river. It is not a compass.

My fingers pull back from her palm, and I press my head to her shoulder. I imagine my body crumbling like ice caps. I imagine my body melting and running down her knuckles. Out of my melting come words. “...I did a good job this week; told lots of people where to put their money.” I feel shackles in my breath. Heave. Exhale.

She watches my shoulders. She counts my gray hairs. “Did they listen?”

I nod. “Everyone got more money. Everyone’s happy.”

“So now they’ve got more money and they’re happy. Good for them.”

I nod again. “It’s because I’m good at what I do...I know what to do with stuff. Do you know what to do with stuff? I do. Make sure it gets plenty of sun. Keep out of reach of children. When stuff collects too much dust, move it.”

“And is that who you are? Someone who tells people which shelf to put their stuff on?”

My hands feel small. My shoulders pull tight and sink. “...I’m a hunting dog. I bark, and I point, and I howl.” My open palm hovers above her forearm. I pull my fingers in, then stretch them out again. “They feed me and give me a place to sleep, and I’m grateful for their affection.” I trace my shadow on her skin. “I am an animal on the end of their leash.” I pull my hand back and hold it to my thigh.

Without realizing, I’ve pushed my chair back from hers. “I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know how to hold onto you or care for you.” I close my eyes and press my palms against my eyelids. I hear my breath. I feel my heart.

“I don’t know what comes next with you.”

Any minute I will wake up alone in bed. I’ll open my eyes and feel my lungs filling with water. I’ll write down the dream I had about the girl and the time we had sex in the river, and I’ll feel shame at being alone. I’ll bark and point and howl and wither away to dust.

Heave. Exhale.

But it’s now, at my darkest, when I feel her fingers trace shapes on my back. Slow and sure. “What are you doing?”

“I’m drawing you a tree.”

The lines ripple out and skip across my skin. I squirm. “Stop.”

“Why?” She continues drawing. The lines grow roots and hook into my lungs.

“I don’t want you drawing on me.”

“Liar.” Her fingers find every knot and fist. Steady are her lines; chalk upon stone.

My mind flows backward through flickering sun; to her feet on the windshield, to the light on the surface of the water, to her hand across my stomach.

My eyes turn glassy and bloom tears.

“Hey. See this? This is the scar from when I fell coming out of the shower. This is the third time I’ve worn this dress without washing it. I’ve been wanting to fart for about ten minutes, but I’m afraid it’ll smell.

“You don’t know how to hold onto me? Says the man who’s just as good in a riverbed as he is a mattress. Bullshit. You know how to hold me.

“Rejoice, babe, and don’t mistake me for stuff. I’m not yours to covet, keep, or guard. I’m not Damsel, and I’m not Distressed. I’m not the weight you must bear. I’m not a queen, and you’re not a hunting dog.”

“Yes, your majesty.”

She grabs me and pinches my face tight in her grip. “I think it’s great that you’re not an asshole, but I can’t love you if you hate yourself.” Her lines swirl and surround my heart, now caught in her fisher’s net.

Then she breaks and gazes down at her hand. She smiles, then kisses the top of her palm. “Mwah,” she says. “Pretty Beast.” She kisses the top of my palm. “Mwah,” she says. “Pretty Beauty.” She kisses the top of her palm again. “Mwah,” she says. “Pretty Pauper.” She kisses the top of my palm again. “Mwah,” she says. “Pretty Prince.”

“I’m not the Pretty Prince.”

“Of course you are.”

“Says who?”

“Me.”

“Yeah, well...”

“Well, what?”

“...I don’t believe you.”

“...Fine. Don’t believe me. Hey. Look. I’ll be okay without you, sweetie. Right? I’ll love someone else.

But I don’t want to love someone. I want to love you. I want you next to me, alongside me; not picking up after me, not walking behind me.”

My neck thaws and allows for the slightest of nods.

She continues drawing. “Don’t think so highly of yourself that you would deserve or not deserve anything. Neither of us were given such ground on which to stand.”

She retraces her lines. Slow and sure. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” She plants kisses at the roots of my tree. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit...”

“...for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.” She smiles. My hands fall to my side. “What do

you want me to do, then?”

“Hold onto me, and think of me.”

“Because you want me to?”

“...Because I think of you.”

*

The waiter drops off our coffee and snacks. She slides her hands around the cup, and she stares at the still surface. A grin appears.

“What?”

“I think I’ve still got dirt on my legs.”

“From the river?”

“Mmm.” 

“...You filthy animal.”

She grins and holds her hand over the cup, letting the steam wrap around her fingers.

Then she rubs her thighs together, and dried Earth falls out from under her skirt. I sit in silence as her high priest legs perform His holy work and create an altar of dirt between bare feet.

“...Your filthy animal.”

Her eyes meet mine. My eyes meet hers. Our eyes meet each other’s.

Then she reels me in and smashes her face against mine, and her lips are jammed into my ear, and they’re soft and wet and I squirm, but her arms grow long and pull me tighter and tighter, and now I’m filling in all her curves and empty spaces, and now it’s her hot breath against my hair, and now it’s her arms knotted round my body, and now I’m melting, melting...melting...

“...Your filthy animal.”

*

...And warm light spread across the tree on my back.

***

Dominic Laing lives and works in Philadelphia as a member of Neighborhood Film Company. He's a writer, drummer and uncle to three beautiful nieces. 

Fireflies

With the right chemicals, the fire would barely touch our skin; a lot of us had streaks of hairless skin on our arms from repeated close encounters. We cultivated these streaks. They were our battle scars.

Fiction by Amelie Daigle, Fall 2013

*

If we hadn’t been resurrected through rubble, if our knees hadn’t been cut by kneeling on gravel, this might never have happened, any of it. We were living in a small city that had once been great, and we spent our days in abandoned houses, burning dead leaves and unrecognizable relics. We doused our skin in chemicals and let the flames play gently over our arms. We made patterns with flammable liquids on the ground. When cars drove by we lay flat on our stomachs wherever we were. Once someone didn’t lower herself down carefully enough and her hair caught on fire. She screamed a little, but we just pointed to Diego’s eyebrows, which were missing, singed from an explosion that occurred only almost-too-close to his face. Diego was on the ground at the time, crouching over some substance he’d pawned from the chem lab, and it was obvious that his personal safety was the last thing on his mind; he touched the vials calmly and lovingly, although he always looked alarmed in a grotesque way, eyebrowless.

After that the girl who smelled like burning hair said she wasn’t going to do this anymore because it was dangerous and we said alright, fine. And she walked away. “Who was that, anyway?” I asked, and someone told me her name was Cassie, and I laughed and licked my finger and ran it through a small flame, which was a nervous habit of mine at the time. It’s hard to stop touching fire compulsively, once you know it’s possible. It’s like poking a bruise. Only instead of being surprised by pain, you’re surprised by the absence of pain; you’re surprised that this substance you’ve been told all your life is forbidden is actually harmless, almost domestic.

With the right chemicals, the fire would barely touch our skin; a lot of us had streaks of hairless skin on our arms from repeated close encounters. We cultivated these streaks. They were our battle scars.

I couldn’t remember the names of chemical compounds, so I’d tell Diego to give me that one that made fire dance painlessly on my arm, and he’d laugh and call me a poet. Sometimes, if he wasn’t busy doing something else, he’d spread it over my skin himself, and he’d light the fire and watch as it raced down to the palm of my hand in one quick flash. It was a soft, warm, tingly feeling. I liked to clench my fist at the moment before the fire ran out of chemical and extinguished itself, and every muscle in my arm would stand out glowing blue-bright, and I’d feel like a god, at that moment, sitting on the floor of the skeleton of a house that someone had lived in, someone had actually inhabited this place only a year ago, everything so fragile and perilous in the dusk and the ceiling maybe about to collapse on all of our heads. “I want flames on the tips of my nails, Diego.”

Diego instructed me to press my five fingertips together. He dipped them in something that felt cool and had the liquid-dry feeling of rubbing alcohol.

Diego was the only person I knew who lit cigarettes with flint and steel, rather than a lighter. He never inhaled the cigarette smoke, or even held the cigarette in his mouth when lit; he called smoking a socially acceptable way to watch things burn in public. This meant he was never in any real hurry to get the cigarette lit, and I’d seen him spend up to ten minutes trying to aim the spark at the cigarette’s tip. My chemical-drenched fingers were an easier target. “Open them,” Diego commanded, and in the falling darkness I watched five little fireflies burn on the tips of my fingers. I held my hand away from my face and wiggled my fingers; the fireflies danced.

Somebody said: “If I got a dragon tattoo, could you make it breathe fire?”

“Yeah,” Diego said, returning to his customary crouched position over a vial of magnesium something. “Does anyone have a fruit, like an apple or something?”

“I’ve got an orange.” I didn’t know the name of the somebody, but I knew her face; small and impressively angular, with features that seemed to slope away from a central point. Distinctive.

“Can I have it?” Diego asked her.

“No. You’ll make it explode.”

“So?”

“So I want to eat it.”

“So why even tell me you have it?”

“Car,” Jeremiah said, one sharp bark, and we all dropped to the ground. Only maybe somebody was a little slow, because this time the car didn’t drive on by. We listened to the sound of a stalled engine.

“Is it a cop?” someone hissed. “Did anyone see?”

“Naw, man, it’s just some middle-aged woman.”

“The hell is she stopping here for?” Diego breathed in my ear. He always smelled like smoke.

“I dunno, you think she saw?”

“Even if she did she won’t come in, would you? Most she’ll do is call someone and drive off. We’ve just got to wait.”

Diego smelled a lot like smoke. Somebody hissed: “Diego, put that shit out, man.”

“That shit’s been out, man.”

“Then where’s the smoke from?”

I rolled over a bit to look up, and there was a thin plume of smoke rising above Diego. I looked down. He was only smoldering a little bit, but I rolled away before I said “Diego, look at your shoe.”

“Diego, get your shit under control, man, you’ll screw us all over.”

“Ah, shit,” Diego said. He raised himself up on his arms and started grinding his foot against the ground.

“Is it okay, Diego?” I asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, but the fire wasn’t going away. He kicked off his shoe. “Someone hand me a jacket.” I gave him mine, and he threw it over the shoe, which was now burning with a real fire, a real red fire that devoured the light cardigan I’d thrown over my shoulders as I left my house.

“The hell did you spill on your shoe, Diego?”

“Mierda, it’s not going out.”

“Dude, you just set her jacket on fire.”

“Shit, man, this is bad, this is bad, we gotta go, man, we gotta go.”

“We can’t just leave.”

“But look at the  smoke man we’ve gotta go.”

“Ah, shit.”

A thick plastic-smelling smoke rising out of the shoe (“Diego man what the hell did you do?”) and everyone scattered. I wanted to watch but I wanted to run but I didn’t know where to go so I was relieved when I heard Diego hiss from behind a wooden fence half a block away. When I joined him on the other side he was pale and one-shoed and shaking, leaning against the fence like he couldn’t hold himself up.

“Diego?” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask.

He stepped towards me and leaned forward so that the weight of his head was on my shoulder. “You know what?” he said. “You know what I did? I left all the chemicals in there. I left them in the burning building.”

A plume of smoke rose from the top of the house, grey against twilight.

“I bet that woman had a cell phone,” I said. “I bet she’ll call the cops and they’ll come down here and see. Someone will put it out.”

“Yeah,” Diego said.

There was a loud noise and a blinding light; I could feel Diego tremble. His eyes were pressing into my shoulder, so I was the one who watched the building erupt into flame, who saw the fire blossom outwards, crackling savagely. The air was heavy with smoke. Little particles of dust and flame floated on the breeze, flickering, landing on the ground in front of me. I watched a spark float to the ground, flare on impact, sputter, and die.

I looked down at my hand.

*

Amelie Daigle holds a bachelor's degree in English Writing from Loyola University New Orleans, where she has had the pleasure of editing and contributing to two English department journals, Revisions and The Reader's Response. She currently attends Boston College, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in the field of English Literature.

When Everything is Gone

I had envisioned my mother’s house ransacked, but standing in the two-story entryway, I am surprised by how normal everything appears, as if no drug addicts had been in and out of her house over the last week, taking what they wanted and rifling through everything she owns.

Memoir by Yasmin Tong

*

Panic strikes the moment I see hip-high brown weeds covering the front yard where grass used to grow. My tires crunch the white quartz in the circular driveway, and before I can turn off the engine, my mother is standing by my car, smiling. She has greeted me this way countless times: when I came home from college for Christmas and Thanksgiving, when I invited twenty friends to spend the weekend attending the local rodeo and eating her barbecue.  When I needed to be taken care of, she was my sanctuary; I had always felt comforted by her embrace, but now our roles have reversed.  

Stepping into the furnace blast of Fresno’s August heat, I melt in my mother’s sticky arms, and ask, “How are you?” 

“I’m all right,” she says. I want to believe her, even though her answer is only a half-truth. “The sheriff was here for three hours yesterday, dusting for fingerprints.” 

Last night on the phone, my mother sounded remarkably calm, but that was just like her, indifferent to crisis and determined to keep up appearances. After a week in San Francisco for her sorority’s reunion, my mother opened the front door to find two guys going through every drawer in search of valuables. The burglars got away with her silver and a television, but left their fingerprints in every room and their crank pipe on her desk in the mahogany-paneled library. 

*

I had envisioned my mother’s house ransacked, but standing in the two-story entryway, I am surprised by how normal everything appears, as if no drug addicts had been in and out of her house over the last week, taking what they wanted and rifling through everything she owns.  The silver candelabras are missing from the dining room table, but everything else looks the same as ever:  the glossy black grand piano is still in the living room, and the framed college diplomas conferred to my brothers and me are prominent on the living room wall, a silent reminder to all who enter:  my kids attended Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth. The lives of her children are her crowning achievement. We all took flight from her well-decorated nest. Yet my mother seems trapped, unable and, perhaps most important, unwilling to leave. 

*

I march up the circular stairs, following her to her bedroom. “It’s the last room that I have to clean up,” she says. “They made such a mess.” 

Standing in the doorway I tell myself that when she is dead, I will miss the smell of her, but I am uneasy inhaling the lingering scent of Estée Lauder Youth-Dew perfume and sweat that permeates everything in her forest-green bedroom with wall-to-wall leopard-print carpet. Two paces from the doorway is her enormous bed, a California King, with two mounds of pillows, piles of paper, and a staggering collection of belts wound in concentric circles. Stacks of VHS videotapes, her late-night companions since she and my father divorced fifteen years earlier, cover every windowsill, and nook and cranny of the armoire immediately to my left. 

For years I have been prodding her to purge her belongings, to cull out only what she needs, but with everything in her room out in plain sight, I realize that the scale of the house, with all its built-in, cedar-lined closets, disguises her hoarding and the enormity of the dilemma that will face us soon enough. A row of two dozen worn-out shoes in varying shades of red at the foot of the bed, including some that I doubt have been worn since the early 1980s, makes me want to give up even before I start to clean up. 

“So what do you want me to do?” I ask.  “Where do I start?” 

“Just go in the dressing room and try to straighten that up.” 

A knee-high pile of clothes is on the floor of the dressing room—a walk-in closet with a built-in vanity, drawers, shelves, and cedar-lined cabinets that connects her bathroom to the bedroom. Most of the clothes she will never wear again, but she hangs on to them, like everything else in this house, because “they’re too good to throw away.”  

I find a bright yellow sweater with tassels that my mother wore in college, sweaters I wore in college, and rugby jerseys my brother wore in college. Holding a cashmere sweater lacy with moth holes that had its heyday before any of us were in college, I say, “Let’s throw this away.” 

“OK, but let’s keep the button,” she says. 

I do not ask why she wants to save the button; it is beautiful, but it will never be reused because she no longer has the necessary focus for the intricate crafts projects she used to execute in a weekend. Instead, I obey, as I always have, and find a pair of scissors to remove the rhinestone clasp. 

“Will you check the hall closet to make sure they didn’t take my dolls?” she asks.

I hate those dolls and don’t want to touch them because they smell of mildew, but instead of objecting, I do as I am told.  Standing on my grandmother’s shower stool, which has not been touched since she died a decade ago, I take out each one of my mother’s Madame Alexander Little Women storybook dolls. 

“Little Jo and Meg are still here,” I say, batting the dust off their hoopskirts and aprons.  They all have wooden stands so that they can be stored upright, in someplace like a curio cabinet. 

“Oh, good,” she says. She finds plastic bags to cover them and I return them to the closet’s top shelf. I find a disintegrating teddy bear with no arms and the stitching on the mouth and eyes worn away, which is nearly seventy years old, same age as my mother. 

“We can throw this away, right?” I ask, holding the bear with my fingertips. 

“No,” she says and puts it back on the shelf. 

“I don’t think there’s anything else I can do to help you,” I say, patting the dust and cobwebs from my clothes before closing the closet door. “I want to clean up, make things look neat, and throw away a bunch of stuff, but you don’t want to let go.” 

“This is very helpful,” she says. “It’s just that I have a lot of ongoing projects and papers and you can’t just throw things out because I still need to sort through them.” 

*

About three years ago, my mother started calling to ask to borrow money. Sometimes she needed a few hundred dollars, sometimes she asked for a thousand dollars, and at some point she called asking for help with her mortgage. I clued into the severity of her financial problems when my youngest brother told me that to help her he had agreed to make monthly payments on a second mortgage he had convinced our father to take out. Soon after, I asked for, and she had cooperated in giving me, enough of her financial information to prepare financial statements. I presented her with a plan for restructuring her assets and liabilities, which included filing for bankruptcy and moving into an apartment building that she had owned. 

Instead of taking action, she did nothing. Now she is upside down on her mortgage and cannot afford to make mortgage payments.  She liquidated all of her assets to pay for spa treatments at five-star hotels in South Africa, chartered yachts in Brazil, cruises in Dubai, and clothes, the kinds of luxuries she could hardly afford when her parents and my father paid her bills. All the rental properties she had owned, the million dollars in cash and securities that she had received from my father in their divorce settlement, absolutely everything is gone, and I am counting the days until the sheriff locks her out of her house. 

She went from being the daughter of a doctor to being wife of a doctor and never really had to take financial responsibility for herself, despite her apparent ability to do so:  she has a BA, an MS, and a JD; yet she lives on Social Security.  Her law practice, started after I had graduated from college, was a vanity project subsidized my father, and much like the house, is part of the highly burnished image of a sophisticated and successful person she has cultivated throughout her life. 

My relationship with my mother makes me feel like my compass is broken and I can’t find my true north. I resent her for putting our family in this position and leaving my brothers and me to deal with the fall out from her lack of maturity and self-discipline, and yet my heart breaks every time I don’t pick up the phone when she calls for fear that she needs to ask for money. All the years we confided in one another, I felt like I knew her so well, but now that I see her as she really is, I feel as if I have been deceived.  Never again will she be the person I wanted her to be.  

When I take her to dinner at the local Szechuan Kitchen near her house, I realize how she sees herself. 

“What’s your plan?” I ask. “What does your future look like?” 

“I want to move in three or four years to a senior community,” she says. “I know I need to make more money.” 

“Any ideas about that?”  I ask, eating my chow fun with a fork. 

“I want to teach a class at the university about women in business.” 

*

Sometimes I think I barely recognize my mother, with this house falling down around her and her finances a level-four train wreck. But I have to remind myself that her powers of self- sabotage and delusion are highly developed, and I have been both spectator and participant in her version of Kabuki theater my entire life. About thirty years earlier I glimpsed her truth, which forever shaped me. We were in the library at her house and she held an application to Stanford Medical School in her hands. 

“I can’t go through with it,” she said. “It will tear our family apart.” 

“You should do it anyway,” I said, fearful of what my life would be like with my parents divorced, but convinced it would ultimately improve if she were financially independent from my father. Then she told me a story about taking a college course with my father. The professor had told my father, instead of my mother, that she needed to re-take the final exam or flunk.  My father never told my mother to see the professor, and she flunked the class, despite being in the honors society Phi Beta Kappa, at the time. As a result my father attended medical school and she never was admitted. 

“What did you do?” I asked her, feeling nauseated. 

“I decided then that if that was how things were going to be, he was going to have to take care of me,” she said. 

I knew more than any thirteen-year-old girl should about her parents’ marriage, and although I liked it when my parents’ friends called me mature, I felt burdened by keeping my mother’s confidences. That story of sabotage was as much a turning point for the balance of power in my parents’ marriage as it was for me personally, hearing it for the first time. I decided then, at the tender cusp of womanhood, to never get married and always make my own money. More than anything I wanted to be independent, unlike my mother.  At fourteen I initiated that quest, and I left my parents’ house to attend boarding school. After college I was always financially self-sufficient and also very distrustful of intimate relationships.  In my late thirties I divorced after only two years of marriage. 

*

Waking up the next morning, the bedroom looks the same as when I had first arrived—disheveled in faded luxury. I start throwing out perfume, makeup samples, and travel soaps in my mother’s bathroom, and when she leaves the house on an errand, I start to fill large green plastic garbage bags full of junk that she cannot stand to part with but, at the same time, won’t miss if I take it to the trash.  After three hours I notice a slight improvement. Sweaty and frustrated in the summer heat, I say, “I don’t feel like there’s anything more I can do to help you.” 

“I really appreciate you being here,” she says. “It’s a huge help to me.” 

“You really have to start throwing out some of this stuff,” I say. “You may not have the option of being in this house for as long as you want. You need to prepare yourself to have an orderly transition into some other living arrangement.” 

She nods in acknowledgement. She hears me but she is trapped in a psychological fortress of her own design. 

“I’m going to go over to Dad’s to say hi,” I say. “Then I will come back here and it will be time for me to go.” 

“Are you sure you don’t want to spend another night?” she asks. “You could leave early Monday morning.” 

The oppression of her isolation and loneliness, the disorder in her house and her life, and her stubborn denial surround me. Although I have tried all my life to make her happy and proud, her financial and emotional needs will pull me under if I allow them.  “No, I have to go home.” I will leave this house because there is nothing more I can do for her. 

 ***

Yasmin Tong is a finance and development consultant based in Los Angeles.  She writes frequently about affordable housing and foster care.   Her work has appeared in the Blue Lake Review, Superstition Review, Mary:  A Journal of New Writing, Los Angeles Times, and was anthologized in the New Asian Immigration.

Where We Find Her

She left us on a chilly December morning. Her little body was worn out. I could feel her leaving.

Memoir by Megan Vered

I

Several years ago, after one of Mom’s many unsuccessful flirtations with death, I said, Mom, when you get to the other side, promise me you will keep track of us. Utterly offended, she answered, You think that because I won’t be here that you will stop being my children? You will always be my children, and I will know exactly what you are doing.

She left us on a chilly December morning. We sat with her through the night in her tiny assisted-living-semblance-of-a-home, which was packed to the gills with photographs of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren; favorite blankets and artwork; the most fantastic stash of chocolate ever discovered. The hospice nurses advised us that Mom could be in the shadow of death for two weeks, but I knew better. Her little body was worn out. I could feel her leaving.

My husband and I sat vigil. Along with our adopted second mother, James, and our West Highland white terrier, Mac Duff. Though my mother did not believe in God, James brought her unfaltering belief in Jesus into the room, which never failed to provide comfort, despite the fact that we were Jewish and not a Jesus sort of family. James slept in my mother’s favorite turquoise upholstered chair; my husband curled up on the couch. Mac Duff, despite his irritable terrier nature, earned his therapy dog stripes that night, while I hovered at the bedside, singing our much-loved childhood lullaby in the hopes of soothing Mom’s fears the way she had, so many times, soothed mine.

My Pigeon house I open wide and set my pigeons free,

They fly so high they touch the sky and light on the tallest tree.

And when they return from their merry, merry flight I shut the door and I say good night,

Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo.

Mom and daughter.Just as my mother was witness to my first lusty, welcome breath, I was witness to her last. A final rattling gasp—which seemed to lift her skyward—followed by utter silence. I stood by her head, staring at her still, small body, which by now—a month shy of her ninety-first birthday—looked like vintage silk. Finally, I called my older sister Arla, Mom’s chief caretaker. Mom did it, I whispered. After all we’d been through—frantic visits to the ER, multiple hospitalizations, a medication list as long as a novel—I wanted it to sound triumphant, like a valiant crossing over.

You won’t believe this, Megan, but I am sleeping in her bed, and five minutes ago a small woman draped in white crossed over the foot of the bed. My sister was spot-on with the timing; it had taken five minutes for me to leave my mother’s side to pick up the phone and call my sister, who was now living in Mom’s house. My older sister doesn’t have a woo-woo bone in her body, a statement I cannot make about myself or my other four siblings. So if Arla, the straight shooter, saw a woman draped in white crossing the threshold of the bed, then that is exactly what happened.

I like to imagine the tiny draped woman bidding my sister farewell—on her way to meet my father, who had been gone for thirty years. I like to imagine him, hand extended, asking for a dance. I like to imagine them, together, entwined in a welcome embrace. 

II

One afternoon, toward the end of her life, Danza, my girlhood best friend, was lying in bed, staring out the window. She saw a beautiful, beckoning light. As the light became brighter, she noticed that her surroundings began to dim. She felt herself losing interest in the tangible world. The monotony of black and white could not compete with the brilliant infusion of color. This is it, she thought. She felt herself being pulled into the dazzle. As it turned out she did not complete the journey that day. Months later, she told me that this is when she released her fear of death because death is merely a parallel universe, separated from life by a thin veil; and that after she died, it was only a matter of time before the people she loved would join her.

I was with Danza five months later when she died of lymphoma at age forty-two. It was not long before I felt her—through the veil—one step ahead of me. Opening doors. She was ten months older than me in real life, which meant that she hit all the major milestones before me, especially when it came to seducing boys. It made total sense that even in death she would continue to be the daring trailblazer that she had been in life.

Danza.For a number of months after Mom passed, I could not find her. I kept returning to the image of the thin veil but always emerged disheartened. When I told our family rabbi that I didn’t know where my mother was, he answered, She’s in the same place as my parents because I don’t know where they are either. Yet strange things began to happen. 

Objects began to interconnect in uncanny ways. It happened the first time about a week after her death. I tossed my keys onto the kitchen counter and—as if they were independent beings—they hooked themselves around an eggbeater in a way that I would never be able to replicate. My girlfriend Quinn was a witness. This is how they talk to us, she said. Through exchange of energy. Things like this—energy forces colliding—began to happen every day. Clothing, jewelry, kitchen gadgets, and other inanimate objects appeared to be intentionally interconnecting in curious and seemingly deliberate ways. My response to the continued occurrence of these odd entanglements became a smile, followed by a quiet Hi Mom.

One evening at dusk, my husband went to check on our sailboat, only to find that the light by my side of the V-berth was on. In the three years that we had owned this boat, that light had never worked. It was one of those things that my husband was going to get to. Mom, holding high specifications about bedside reading lamps, apparently had lost patience. My husband created a myth that the salt air was affecting the electrical connections on the boat. I prefer to believe that Mom intervened.

Months later, the day of my niece’s Mexican destination wedding, I misplaced my wedding rings. I had tucked them, along with other jewelry, into a cloth bag, which I had placed in the safe. Upon retrieving the bag, I shook out the contents. Everything was there, but no rings. I pulled the sheets off the bed, upended the wastebasket, even crawled around on the cool tile floor. No luck, until my sister Eve—the practical problem solver—showed up. Patting the bed with her palm, she felt something hard in the packet of travel tissues near her right hand. We picked up the flimsy packet and out fell my rings. Mom had a thing about tissues. She not only bought little travel packets for us girls, but also snappy leather cases to add an air of elegance. It was essential for a woman to have tissues on board. Okay, Mom, I get it. We are all going to cry at Sarah’s wedding. I will act like a lady and put the tissues in my purse.

As time passed my siblings and I began to find her in heartwarming places. My brother Oran found her in the traces of pink and gray that line the sky during sunsets; my sister Eve, in the nimble hummingbirds that visit her Baja garden. I saw her in Utah while soaking in hot springs. As I looked up at the inky sky splattered with shimmering stars, a comet traversed the sky like a billowing scarf. Hi, Mom.

You think that because I won’t be here that you will stop being my children? You will always be my children, and I will know exactly what you are doing.

Perhaps I am guilty of attributing meaning where there is none, yet I am now convinced that, as she predicted, Mom is witnessing my every move. I imagine her, in full color, liberated from pain and sorrow. Across the veil. I find her.

III

The first anniversary of her death has passed and Mom is back. We cannot gauge her presence on a map. No pin drop can distinguish her whereabouts, because she is everywhere. Neither coming nor going, she is part of the deep river of consciousness that brews inside me. All-pervading, she is making herself known in a new way.

While I yearn to hear her singsong Hello on the other end of the phone and share my latest small-world story or dish about Miss America bathing suits, Academy Awards gowns, or recent political activity, I am adjusting my sense of hearing so I can receive her words. Mom is talking, but her voice has changed. No longer the MIA (Mildred Intelligence Agency), keeper of the family lore who tracked our individual stories with the determination of a bloodhound.

On December 28, the first anniversary of her death—anticipating a tough day—I treat myself to a facial with Nadine. Five minutes in, she asks, Megan, is there a song your mother used to sing to you?

I flutter my eyelashes, glance up at her. Yes, there is.

I don’t know what to tell you, but she’s telling me that when you’re sad and miss her, you need to sing that song.

That song. The one I sang to soothe the rhythm of her ragged breath. The one I hummed to help me through that final night. The soothing song she sang to us as she held us against her breast. The one the cantor sang at her final celebration of life.

My Pigeon house I open wide and set my pigeons free,

They fly so high they touch the sky and light on the tallest tree.

And when they return from their merry, merry flight I shut the door and I say good night,

Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. Cooroo. 

Cocooned in her song, I exhale. Nadine interrupts. Megan, your mother is such a chatterbox. She won’t stop talking. She says I have to show you this flower in my room. She insists that it’s beautiful and fragile like you. And she keeps telling me that you have to believe in yourself.

I wonder what the flower looks like and why my mother is so insistent. Her perception was always keen, but this feels different. Like she is reading between the lines etched by daily life. Barriers broken down, I assume she is telling me with her 360-degree vision that I am supposed to believe in myself. Believe in my creative abilities as a storyteller. Another veil lifted.

Mom's children.She shows up again during silent meditation the following evening at Friday night services. The first time I have gone to temple since the days immediately following her death. My eyes are closed, I am starting to well up, and suddenly Mom appears. Playful yet adamant, she is explicit. I want you to stop crying for me. You have a wonderful life ahead of you, and new doors are about to open. I want you to embrace your life and stop mourning the loss of mine. I open my eyes, look around. Did anyone else hear?

Her words come back to me. You think that because I won’t be here that you will stop being my children? You will always be my children, and I will know exactly what you are doing.

So now, for her sake, I try to release my sorrow. I open my eyes and wait. For new doors to open.

*

Megan Vered is a published author and avid storyteller. Following her mother's death, she sent a family story to her siblings every Friday. Where We Find Her is part of that collection.