excerpt from conception:

     From the inside looking out, life doesn’t appear rose-colored when you know most people—including yourself—may one day die just like a rose:  dried out by trouble and time, fragile and shriveled, scent faded to odor, color bled away, shrunken parts vulnerable to each and every touch, head bowed and apologetic in demise.  Now I know better than to mourn when my life ends before it begins.  How much more graceful to be cut from a bush and turned upside down immediately after bloom, preserved for a near eternity before a crumbling explosion of blossoms too ash-like to ever be put back together again.  I’m content to remain like a flower seed, tumbling in and around and throughout the Earth, languishing in possibility and potential because birth always brings the consequences of confusion, sadness, disappointment, then, death.

      But I could be a Black child soon.  One day.  Maybe.  I haven’t been born yet, but I want to be. I want to live in the world: clothed, fed, loved, guided, educated, magnificent, important, essential and good.  I want to contribute, do something important that might make the world go round just a little bit easier, change a few other lives when I finally get to live my own.  But I must be born first. I’ve had chances, but I never made it.

      Suddenly, I see myself at six years old, jumping rope in a windstorm.  Always before I come back, flashes of a future startle me right before I awake.  These scenes in my mind break the promises they make; I’m never born so I never get to see them happen in an actual life.  This time, I see I’ll have red, green and black beads hanging on the end of my cornrows, locked in place with a tight tip of aluminum foil.  When I bounce up from my toes the beads smack me back in the face. An old woman, maybe my grandma, opens the front door and lets her cooking smells out.  She hangs from the tattered screen with her purple duster flying open just enough to see all the brown stardust scattered between her breasts.   Who is she?  And why do I mind her?  She has a cotton white rag wound around her head.  She doesn’t have to move her mouth to get me to throw down my rope.

       If I have to tell you one more time…. is what her eyes say.

      I think about smacking my lips.  I protest silently instead, leaving the rope she bought for me on the sidewalk, knowing it is vulnerable to the wind.  Who is she?  Will I ever find out?  The roses planted in front of the house the old woman always dreamed of calling her own are being ripped from the ground, along with some planted basil and the dandelion weeds I give her for the dinner table on Sundays.  Tiny, fast-moving black ants disperse and swirl because the wind has demolished their sandcastles.  I hope more don’t come out of the ground and start biting my legs because they are now like all the grownups I’ve known, furious they have worked so hard for nothing.  I ignore the gusty currents of dust and open my mouth to taste the dirt.  Then I catch my old woman a rose as it shoots past like a kamikaze.  My palm closes around a menacing thorn.  I walk up to the dull, leaning, one-story yellow house with the flower in my hand and a little blood running down my wrist.  Behind me, I see a rusted chain link fence with circles like a honeycomb.  I imagine bees on their way to sting me, then I hear the bark of a big dog coming from somewhere inside.  But I’m not afraid of any of this.  People are the only things which disturb me.  I don’t like when this woman twists her mouth at me, like she’s wondering why she ever liked me in the first place.  I want to make her happy.  I want her to think I can live forever, rise in smoke if I was burned and not even hundred mile per hour winds are strong enough to carry away my ashes. So I don’t cry although it hurts.  Instead, I hold up my hand and say, “Ma’am, look at me.  Now, I’m just like Jesus.”  And I really wanted to be.

      For as long as I had known of myself, earlier than this dream vision of a blustery day which hasn’t happened yet, I was a dark soul floating through the arcane, craving the journey of birth, fashioning a life from God-given visions and my own make-believe.  From the forever sleep I’ve awakened, in many times and many places, only to be forced to close my eyes and simply wait, forever and again. It was 1992 when it seemed ready to happen for sure, in a winter on the cusp of millenniums, in a no-name Pennsylvania town on the road from Chicago to New York City, when a girl named Shivana Montgomery fell in love with a boy who was not my father.  She was strong enough to conjure the courage to embark on a quest less hopeless than being a magical but completely invisible Black girl on a crowded street in Chicago.  She was fifteen, already aching for a purposeful life: to be a mother was a calling.

      All the women who had conceived my soul but lost my life in the past had believed the same.  And there were many before her—the sweet Yoshi, the spitfire Darlene and the tragedy, Tawana.  But faith alone had not been strong enough to anchor me to their wombs.  I never grieved when I died; I tried again, though I wasn’t itching to find myself dropped into the vicious worlds I saw waiting for me through their eyes.  When the months crept on and I grew older inside Shivana than with any others in the past, I started to believe I could see my face on the outside of my dreams.  It was up to me to convince Shivana to want to see my face on the outside of her own dreams.

      I knew I was eventually meant to make it—one day.  I just wanted it to be a day when my life would be right.  Until that day, I found solace in imagination’s peace, the pondering of the “what ifs”:  What if the women had been White?  What if the women had been privileged?  What if the men had been taught how to love them?  To those questions, I drew my own conclusions.  I wish I could have shared them with all my mothers, if they could have heard me.  And if I had found out, in time, how our shared story would finally end. 

backtalk

  That’s how it sounds when a little voice inside of you splits your thoughts in half.  Splashes the half-empty glass against the mirror you think through so you can consider it was fuller than you had thought.  Makes you look past the tiny beads of your perspective to finally see yourself, and everyone else, as the shredded design of a kaleidoscope:  complicated, unpredictable, subject to change but no less beautiful because of it.  Sometimes more beautiful because of it.

      I heard something speaking to me, could tell something was trying to talk to me, and still tried to ignore everything I heard.  I don’t care who she is, how much money she has, where she comes from, how good she believes her man is, or what the circumstances of her own coming into this world were.  Every woman is going to have some questions when she finds out she has another life inside.  And she will have doubts. And fears. Deciding on the life of somebody else isn’t the best place to be when you’re deciding on your own.

      And so that’s where I was when I started hearing and knowing things I otherwise shouldn’t have known.  That’s where I was when the whole world started to make some sense, become a little more focused and narrow.  That’s where I was when I really saw and understood where I was in the world, in the order of things.  I wasn’t a mote in God’s eye.  He probably couldn’t have even found me had he looked for me through a microscope.  I was living on the South side of Chicago.  I was barely passing school.  I was poor but didn’t know it.  I was never happy, or around people who were.  I was going through slow motions that had already been set for me and that nobody was trying to accelerate.  I was dreamless.  I was unable to imagine me beyond the day I was in at the moment. I was sad about all the sadness around me. I was indifferent.  Then I found out I was pregnant.

      It’s hard to remember when exactly it began, how I ended up where I did and how I did, the way I did.  There may not be enough pages to really start at the beginning, to remember or tell it all.  But I guess if I really had to think back as far as I could about how and when I could tell somebody was fighting me, arguing and debating and challenging me, pushing me to grab a hold of my life, screaming at me though I couldn’t see the source of sound, it would be a couple days before that somebody could have even been there. It would have been the fight, I think back.  Because whenever I go back to think of all I could have done differently in those last months, it starts with the last fight with my mother.  The change that changed me forever really started then.  Some man may have burst the seed of life inside of me, but I know now it had always been there.

Copyright 2008/Kalisha Buckhanon