As
soon as she was old enough to utter words, she spoke in
vivid detail of past events, of times long gone, and of days yet to come. In a
trance-like state, she would recount her life as a slave enduring a cruel
mistress, of running away to the swamplands of Florida and being taken in by
the Seminoles, of wallowing in the filth and despair of an asylum while waiting
on someone who never returned. In gruesome clarity, she would painstakingly
replay such events with the ability to name both places unknown and persons
unfamiliar to either of her parents.
In
her heart, she held tight to a belief not easily explained. She was convinced
she was from another place to which she would one day return. It was her faith
in this notion that fueled her existence. Everything she would do fell in line
with this conviction.
The intensity and lucidity with
which the two-year-old relayed such events frightened her father. “That was
just a dream, sweetheart,” he once offered. This only led, however, to an
unbridled emotional outburst,
previously unseen from the unusually placid child. From that day forward, her
father kept his thoughts to himself.
Later, when she turned five, he
invited her, instead, to write down her dreams and ideas and bought her a brown
leather journal for that sole purpose. He once picked it up with the intention
of reading it through, read one entry, and would never touch it again.
Every
morning at sunrise she would write in her journal her thoughts along with the
events of the previous day. The words starting each entry were always the same:
’Twas a beautiful day’. Oftentimes,
what she described thereafter was anything but beautiful. In fact, if you were
privy to some entries, you might delineate them as horrific. She would argue,
however, that it was just an experience in an otherwise beautiful day. Such was
the child’s disposition and yet another distinction between
her and everyone else.
When she turned six, a school
psychologist suggested she had a form of synesthesia. She did not see people the way you
and I would. She would look at you and first see the aura around you, the
colors emanating from your being. These colors would change around most people,
depending on their mood or disposition. Since
Shadows—as she referred to people—were led by their fluctuating emotions, their
auras would be in constant turmoil. Happiness might be conveyed by either an
orange or yellowish hue, depression, bluish or
purple. Anger or jealousy might be crimson. “But the Beautiful Ones,” she explained, “are constant. The spectrum—the
colors in the rainbow—envelope them, always.” In this lifetime, there was only
one other person she found befitting that description.
The child’s diagnosis by the school
psychologist was welcome news to her mother. Mrs. Waters fancied her daughter
to be—like herself—a misunderstood genius, a prodigy born at the wrong time and
to, unfortunately, the wrong parents. She felt she too, was misunderstood and
her talent wasted. She once had big plans for a brilliant future but fell in
love with a man whose religion she later adopted and found nobility in poverty.
Mrs. Kathleen Waters dreamt that
tomorrow had a prettier face, but instead,
every morning awoke to the truth. She did not want to be known as just another
dreamer, yet time was moving past her treadmill existence. In her early years,
she had been obsessed with achieving fame and, in her mind, was interviewed by
Oprah many times. At first it was Arsenio. When The Arsenio Hall Show was cancelled, she became distraught and
physically ill. She realized that every cancelled talk show brought her
face-to-face with the reality of her own obscurity. After her second daughter
turned two, she began reading scripts and rehearsing for roles in an effort to
escape the life that once held so much promise and was now filled with so much
despair.
This stifled artist, her husband,
and their two daughters lived in a northeast section of the Bronx called Throgs
Neck in a housing project that was good by housing-projects standards. Still it was a housing project, nonetheless. Eight
years earlier, at the height of their religious fervor, they sold their
Brooklyn condominium and most of their worldly possessions to rid themselves of
anything that would hinder a life of fulltime evangelism and moved to an area
where there would be more souls to
save.
Mrs. Waters had decided she would
leave her family if and when the right professional opportunity presented
itself and was lost in such thought when her older daughter came to her, bent
over and suffering from stomach pains. The girl had had such complaints for
over a week, and, as usual, Mrs. Waters administered a glass of warm ginger ale
and sent her to bed. At first, the child had gone to her father for help, but
he had been too busy at the time to be bothered with her childish grievances as
he was in the middle of preparations for the next day’s street service and saving souls. As a result, he
had advised his daughter to seek help from her mother.
The next day, the school nurse
called Kathleen Waters at her job. “Your daughter has just been rushed to
Jacobi Hospital,” she said. “She’s in very bad shape.”
The stomach aches, the doctors
would explain, were caused by gastrointestinal bleeding due to Crohn’s disease.
By the time the diagnosis was made, the aggressive condition was in an advanced
stage and the doctors moved to rush the child immediately to surgery in an
effort to save her life. Her parents, specifically her father, feared such a
hasty decision because their religion prohibited receiving medical blood
transfusions even in such dire cases as a life and death situation which,
according to the doctors, this certainly was. He thought it best to consult the Congregation Wise Men. The doctors argued there was
no time to waste, but Jack Waters insisted on waiting on the counsel of the “wise men” who were neither in
the medical field nor, as the doctors would later point out, wise.
“You cannot let your daughter
receive a blood transfusion and sacrifice her everlasting life for this
temporary one.” The gray eyes of the fresh-faced, acned, young white man, all
of twenty-something, held a grave look.
“Jack, you know this.”
“If your daughter does not get a
transfusion, she will die,” a hospital administrator said sternly. He spoke directly to Kathleen
Waters in an obvious appeal to
her maternal instincts. She held her
head low as to not make direct eye contact.
“You’re trying to save her
temporary life,” the other wise man shouted back. “We’re trying to save her
eternal soul.”
And so the surreal battle went on,
back and forth, Jack and Kathleen Waters becoming mere spectators as their
older daughter, all of eight, lay
moaning in a bed only a few feet away. While men of religion advised to
let her die and medical personnel stormed out of the room, the machines hooked
to the little girl beeped and whirred.
Jack Waters was a man of faith.
Years earlier, as a young man
trying to make his way, he would embarrass himself with the overindulgence of
drink. He would express his love for people and in this state he’d share his dreams
and aspirations. A man craving respect, he would then spend whole weekends
regretting what he must have done on Friday nights and avoid seeing anyone who
might replay his transgressions when he would be of sober mind. He thought the
birth of his first daughter would help him kick the habit,
then the second, but still, he found himself in situations of
celebration–someone’s birthday, landing a new account, a promotion, a death, a
birth, a holiday—that would inevitably lead him to being the man he so wanted
not to be. Finally, a chance meeting with a former schoolmate introduced him to
the way of the Lord which meant forgiveness of past sins and a real reason to
quit the drink.
When his older daughter had come to him, he
had been preparing a sermon on the story of Lot found in the book of Genesis.
For some reason, he realized the date. It had been four years, to the day,
since his last drink. He could sure use one now, with his child in the hospital
and the deteriorating state of his marriage, but now was not the time to dwell
on such thoughts.
Presently, he was having a hard
time wrapping his mind around the story of Lot in the city of Sodom and
Gomorrah. The father of two young girls, himself, he was struggling to understand why Lot,
while harboring the two angels in human male form from a homosexual mob
hell-bent on raping them, would offer his virgin daughters to the mob instead,.
Was this something he could gloss over? Could the lesson be, simply, hospitality?
No, too frivolous, he concluded. Sacrifice? That was it. Sacrifice. Would the congregation understand his sacrifice of his
own daughter at that very moment and see the parallel between him and Lot?
Would they see the connection between Lot’s wife and his own, turning back,
yearning for the temporary life filled with fool’s gold? He was wrestling with
such thoughts when Kenyatta, his older daughter’s best friend, knocked on the
door. “Young brother Thomas. What can I do you for, this evening?” he said in
greeting.
Kenyatta smiled weakly. “She needs
her school bag,” he said as he entered the
apartment and went straight to his best friend’s room.
Normally, such a presumptuous act
would never be tolerated, but this was Kenyatta Thomas. The relationship the
boy had with Jack Waters’ daughter was almost supernatural, other-worldly. They
would talk for hours on end or just read books in each other’s company. They
were both eight years old but seemed more like an old married couple that had
been together for years past retirement. Their relationship was closer than
that of his own marriage, Jack Waters often thought, but there was something
about the boy–something about him that slightly unnerved Jack, made him just a
bit uncomfortable. He could never put his finger on it, but it was definitely
there. And every time he was in the boy’s presence, he tried to pinpoint
exactly what it was.
***
It was
his eyes. That is what Jack had finally found was disturbing about him. Large, sad, and reticent, they
would frequently elicit a “what’s wrong?” from a curious adult. Once Kenyatta
gave his usual response, “nothing,” the initial concern would turn to
irritation. This made it difficult for Kenyatta to keep friends as most parents
urged their children to shun the child with the low, black cloud seemingly shadowing
his very existence.
The Waters were no exception, the
only difference being that their daughter paid no attention to their warnings.
Her only friend, he visited her daily in the hospital. Before and after school,
he would come by with notes or work or cookies he would bring from class tucked
into paper napkins. Their relationship bemused the staff. They often wondered if he really understood
the gravity of her condition and if that was the reason he would always look so
sad.
Kenyatta Thomas was the son of
Louisa Thomas, the most religious woman in Throgs Neck. Old-timers in the
neighborhood would remember Kenyatta as tall and thin. He was a strange, quiet
child with a pleasant enough smile who’d visit them bright and early on weekend
mornings to peddle religious reading material. Oftentimes, he’d recite a
scripted sentence or two about the importance of pleasing God and studying His
Holy Word. Before leaving their door, he would politely request a small
donation to cover the minimal cost of the printed material he would attempt to
leave.
It was on such an occasion, while
accompanying his mother one Saturday morning into the white section of Throgs
Neck called Edgewater - basically a trailer park built on swampland on the outskirts of the projects - when a middle-aged man sicced his German Shepherd on Mrs.
Thomas. The incident left her limping from a bloody gash in her
coffee-stockinged leg for the rest of her tour. Whether the man had been disgruntled with black people on his
property, or religious folks, or because of the early hour, or all of the
above, Kenyatta would never know. He
just knew that from that moment on, if people chose to go to hell, he wanted
nothing to do with helping them in their decision one way or the other.
It was also around
this time of his childhood, when he was about six or seven, that his maternal
grandfather fell terminally ill. You see, one would be remiss in telling the
story about Kenyatta Thomas’ peripatetic, clinophobic life without mentioning a
thing or two about his grandfather. Pa, as his grandfather was called, was not
in The Truth, the religion that governed the lives of his wife and four daughters,
so they considered him worldly and dismissed him as an outsider. His opinions
and advice were seldom solicited, and when his girls grew older and found
themselves husbands who shared their views, he became a mere figurehead,
similar to an outdated monarch of a country long since converted to democracy.
“Oh, and this is
our dad,” they would say to fellow believers.
Pa’s dreams in
life were never realized. He lost his freedom to decide his own future when
he returned home
from the war and impregnated the new neighbor that had
moved in across the street from his family’s middle-class home while he was off
fighting the good fight. They were married some months later, and in a few
short years added three more daughters to their roster.
He worked. It
never mattered what type of job he had. He hated them all, but he worked hard
and provided a comfortable life for his wife and children who would eventually
become zealots. It was only after his daughters became the age of young women
that he started to feel defeated. They had chosen the religion of their mother
over life, and he was gravely disappointed in them. He was hoping to see the
fruition of his sacrificed dreams manifested somehow in their lives—at least in one of them. Instead, they chose to have
religious doctrine dictate their thoughts and ideas of right and wrong, and as
he bemoaned the loss of his younger years, his daughters grew to despise him.
As Kenyatta grew
older, memories would resurface in the form of dreams, but the memory of the
last time he saw his grandfather was not one of those. He carried that memory consciously around with him
forever. He never forgot.
“You’ll have at
least one chance,” Pa whispered to the young boy from his deathbed, enunciating
as best he could. He wiped bile from the corners of his mouth. “I had a chance
once. Twice, maybe. But I was so shackled with…” His voice trailed off as if he
were looking at something in the distant past. “I told your mother and her sisters
about it when they were in their twenties. Your mother, Louisa, may have been
thirty by then. But they didn’t want to hear me. They don’t want to hear
nothin’ that’s not in agreement with their…beliefs.”
He said the last word the way some people pronounce cuss words.
Any time Kenyatta
would hear that word, he would think of Pa. Even some twenty years later,
Kenyatta could close his eyes and hear that one word, distinct from all the
words he heard that day.
“I had my chance,”
Pa continued. His voice trembled. “Now, I don’t know where I’m going.” The old
man turned his head away and began to sob. His tears rolled down the deep
creases of his face.
Kenyatta patted
his grandfather’s old and wrinkled hand in a child’s attempt to comfort. “It’s
all right Pa-Pa. It’s all right.” It would be the last time he would see his
grandfather and his only lasting image of him.
***
Kenyatta made his way along the eleventh-floor
corridor of Calgary Hospital on his way to visit his friend in room 1130.
Calgary was the place where all terminal cases were sent, and the staff was
known for its bedside manner in a patient’s last days.The large oak board
Kenyatta’s mother had made him wear hanging from a rope around his neck,
announcing his sinful ways, made a rustling sound and impeded his gait.
Nurses, doctors, and orderlies all
stopped their work to look, reading the black, blocked letters with the word thief spelled theif on the board that covered most of his torso. Some just shook
their heads while others held their hands over their mouths. One worker ran to
get another and pointed in disbelief.
Kenyatta barely noticed the ruckus
his presence caused. He poked his head into room 1130 before entering.
His friend was not on the window
sill immersed in writing in her journal as she usually was when he visited.
This day, she was lying in bed. A large, bright rainbow colored in crayon
stretched across the wall above her bed near the window.
He looked down at her in sleep and
noticed her head had been shaved, her earrings the only indication of her
femininity. He felt bad for staring. The strangeness of the situation reminded
him of a dream he had the night before that had awakened and frightened him.
He had been standing in some sort
of cabin, and a woman stood before him, holding a bloodied axe. She did not
seem to be threatening him with it, but still, he felt unsettled by the image,
and it had kept him up for some time afterward. Now, visiting his friend in her hospital room, he somehow knew the
woman in his dream was her. No, not her,
perhaps, but rather some reincarnation of her.
“I see you peeking, Kenyatta.” She
sat up in her bed and gave her best effort to smile. “Come here, silly.”
Kenyatta stepped forward,
sheepishly.
She studied the bold words written
on the board he wore, the kind someone would wear handing out fliers in the
street advertising a service. “Do not talk to me. I’m a liar and a theif,” she read aloud. “Whatever are you wearing that silly thing for,
Kenyatta? Take it off before someone sees you.”
“I can’t. My mom says I have to
wear it for the whole day.”
“Why?”
“I took an extra cookie from Miss
Fortunato’s class on Friday without permission.”
“A cookie? Was it one of the ones
you brought to me? Take that off, Kenyatta, or you can just leave here now.”
Reluctantly, Kenyatta took off the
board and set it down, ever so carefully, near the door.
“That’s better. I need you to do
something for me.” She reached under her pillow and produced her leather-bound
journal, the book she had been writing her every thought and dream in every day
for the last three years, the book she never allowed anyone to even look at,
never mind hold. And now, she was extending it to him. “I want you to keep this
for me,” she said.
“Wh—what are you gonna write in if
I take it?” he asked.
“Just for a little while. The doctor
says I need to rest up, so I won’t be doing any writing for a while. I won’t
need it.”
Kenyatta studied the book for a
moment before slowly reaching out and taking it. He felt like Charlie Brown to
her Lucy and grabbed it quickly for fear she would pull the football away. It
was much lighter than he expected it to be. He had never held it before—no one
ever had. The leather binding automatically gave it significance and made it
feel like it was meant for an older person. Taking it felt like a larger responsibility
than he was ready for.
She looked at him. “I’ve loved you since before the earth had rings.
Don’t you remember me?” she asked, tears stinging her eyes.
Kenyatta was afraid to make eye
contact. Instead, he stared intently at the journal now in his possession. He
read the words she had written on the cover aloud: “The Beautiful One.”
“I never liked when anyone but you
called me that,” she said almost absently. She gazed deep into his eyes.
“Cowards get cooked, Kenyatta.”
Kenyatta, the boy with the
unusually large, sad eyes, looked at his friend and tried to make sense of what
was happening. He was not understanding anything she was saying. She was bald,
in a hospital bed, and had just given him her journal—her journal for which she
would fight someone for just staring at it too long.
She looked
at her friend, the sad eyes that seemed to infuriate adults, the confused
expression etched on his face. She glanced to the sandwich board he was to wear
that advertised him as a wicked boy. She rose and grabbed him by his shirt,
pulling him close. “I’ll never forget to remember you. You were a rainbow,
Kenyatta. You were a rainbow.”
Kenyatta, now even more startled
than just seconds earlier, took a few steps back without losing eye contact
with his friend. “I’ll see you after school,” he said, grabbing the board
before making his getaway.
***
Jack Waters sat on his daughter’s
empty hospital bed, staring into his personal abyss. A sound drew his attention
to the doorway.
Mrs. Waters entered the room carrying two suitcases. She set them down at her
feet. “My baby has not died in vain, and you will not kill me like you did her,
though you tried. You definitely tried. You’ll be seeing me, but I won’t ever see you, again.” She picked up her
bags and started to walk out, then paused. She turned back to the man she loved
once upon a time. “Just think of the irony, Jack.”
Jack Waters raised his head to see
the woman that was leaving him, the woman he had promised to love, honor,
cherish, and protect. He realized, for the first time, those were all but mere
words.
“You gave up alcohol and sin only
to worship a God that would bless your sacrifices by allowing your child to
die.” Mrs. Waters stayed a few seconds to make sure her words marinated through
to her husband’s psyche. When she once
again turned to leave, she noticed her daughter’s friend standing in the
doorway. “Kenyatta,” she said, looking at the closest friend to her child, “I am so sorry.”
Kenyatta
raced down the corridor, out of the hospital, and found himself in the street,
not even remembering if he had taken the elevator or the stairs. An
apologetic, feeble drizzle turned into a sudden downpour. The child had no destination in mind. He had no place
to go. He just ran.
The
real irony befallen to Jack Waters was simply this: while he
was consumed by religion and consulting scriptures in a constant search for
something beautiful, the most beautiful thing he would ever experience had been
right there with him for eight years.
A truth that only the child with
the despised eyes could see.
© 2018 (Alevan Thirty) Askia Farrell
