Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (3 page)

“Sorry.”

“Don't be sorry,” she said. “Estrogen is fine, but it definitely blocks a lot of female magic, especially the stuff having to do with being able to see the past and the present and the future as all part of the same bolt of cloth. As long as you can have babies, you can't really focus on this stuff. You've got to have time to let your mind wander for it to come through. Especially the voices. Which is why I've only been hearing them for about five years. It's like as soon as the hot flashes went away, I could hear things coming through on a whole different wavelength.”

It sounded a little crazy, but I do believe in the existence of untapped wells of female gifts and magic, and menopause could as easily be a font of special wisdom and spirituality as the time of diminished powers and depression people sometimes want us to think it is. If my vibrant, self-sufficient, patchouli-smelling aunt said she had a postmenopausal vision that brought her to my door, I wanted to hear
all
of it.

“I believe you,” I said. “It's just hard to talk about this stuff without feeling a little self-conscious.”

“It's just like oral sex, dear,” she said. “It seems silly at first, but you'll get used to it. Just try to keep an open mind,” she said with an encouraging smile. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Here's the deal. There's a man in Atlanta who's been looking for you across time.”

“What?”

“Oh, wait! That shouldn't come first. I should talk about the journey first.”

I felt my head sinking beneath the waves. “What journey?”

“To Atlanta.” She stood up suddenly. “Wait a second. I need to get my notes.”

She hurried out of the room on her little satin mary janes and up the steps to the second floor. I heard a drawer open and close, and she returned quickly with a well-worn reporter's notebook. She flipped it open and smiled her relief.

“All right! This will make it easier for me to tell you exactly. I was right! The journey comes first. And she specifically says it's a journey you don't want to take.” She looked up at me. “That's how I knew you had to go to Atlanta. Because you truly didn't want to.”

I nodded like any of this made sense. It didn't.

She consulted her notes again. “A journey … okay. I did that one. Here! You must complete a task for a fallen friend.”

That sent a little chill through me. I was going to Atlanta to do a project about the life and work of a good friend of mine who died in New York last September. I had loved him and lost him, but he had saved my life, and I owed him one.

“Go on.”

“And the third thing is—
don't laugh
.”

“I'm not laughing.”

“The third thing she said you have to do is rescue a damsel in distress.”

“
I'm
the damsel in distress,” I said.

Aunt Abbie gave her head a little impatient shake. “You can't be the damsel in distress. You're the
shero
.”

“I am?”

“Of course. If you can't be the star of your own story, what's the point?”

She had me there. “What am I rescuing her from?”

Aunt Abbie flipped a page of her notebook. “My notes don't say, but since she used the word
damsel
, I'd say some kind of dragon wouldn't be out of the question.”

“A fire-breathing dragon?”

She chuckled. “Of course not. A
symbolic
dragon, dear.”

That didn't make me feel much better. Dragons of any kind tend to make me nervous.

“What about the guy?” I said.

“What guy?”

“The one who's been searching for me across time.”

She flipped a few more pages. “He's in Atlanta, like I said, which works out nice, and he'll know you as soon as he sees you, but you probably won't recognize him except for his eyes.”

“What about his eyes?” I had a sudden flash of
Rosemary's Baby
, with those weird yellow orbs the devil left behind.

“They're blue.”

“He's a white man?”
I almost shrieked.

“I didn't say he was white. I said he had blue eyes. The exact words she used were, ‘He has the ocean in his eyes.’ That's lovely, don't you think?”

“How many black people do you know with blue eyes?”

“It's not the color that's important,” she said gently, trying to calm me down. “He had to have some way of being sure you'd recognize him. He's convinced he just missed you the last time around and he's determined not to let it happen again.”

“But why blue eyes? Why couldn't he just be real tall or something?”

She frowned. “Because you could make a mistake and end up with Rick Fox and then where would you be?”

I resigned myself to blue eyes. “What else does it say about this guy?”

“
She.
What else does
she
say.” Aunt Abbie corrected me gently, but firmly.

“My apologies. What else does she say?”

“She said he sings an ancient song.”

I rolled my eyes. “That's all I need. A blue-eyed brother who sings Gregorian chants.”

She ignored me. “And he's not who he appears to be.”

I groaned. “He's a con man, too?”

“I didn't say anything about his being a con man.” She was scanning the page again. “There was one more thing she said … oh! Here it is. At the end of your journey, you'll bring him home to meet your aunt—that would be me!—and take his vows.”

I wondered if that was before or after we slayed the dragon. “What vows are those?”

She closed the notebook and beamed at me. “Wedding vows, of course. Didn't I say you're going to marry him?”

I looked at her. “You know this vision is asking me to do some things I never thought I'd do.”

She patted my hand gently. “I know, dear, but you know what? Sometimes that's exactly what you should do. Whatever it is you thought you'd never do.”

I was not convinced. “I'm too old for fairy tales.”

She grinned at me and shook her head. “Baby girl, please! You are in your prime!”

3

F
IRST-CLASS ACCOMMODATIONS
on the Southern Crescent take all the sting out of overnight travel. Not only do you have your own tiny little bathroom, but a smiling brother in a blue sweater vest and sensible shoes comes to pull down your bed whenever you're ready to get in it. Aunt Abbie did me a good turn by getting this ticket. Traveling this way is peaceful. It slows you down instead of hyping you up like airports do, and that is just what I had in mind. I need time to think. Who knows what I'll be walking into once I get to Atlanta. The only thing I'd bet on is that it has nothing to do with what Beth Davis told me on the phone.
Legacy Project
my ass, but if she's willing to pay me thirty grand to do it, she can consider it done.

I couldn't believe she had the nerve to call me. I haven't even seen Beth since her son broke my heart two years ago on the most important date night in a hundred years. Dick Clark was counting down to the millennium and my fiancé was apologizing for not being able to stand up to his mother who was loudly accusing me of disloyalty above and beyond the call of duty.

In one awful instant, my love life and my dream job were both wiped out. Alone and unemployed was not where I had planned to be at thirty-two, so I packed up my car, drove back home to D.C., and discovered cocaine. My parents had passed, and I was alone in the world with no job to go to, a broken heart, and a nice inheritance to dip into. I was a coke dealer's dream, and the feeling was mutual.

When I was high, I didn't have to think about how scared I was. When I was high, I knew the answers to all the hard questions and would share them at the drop of a hat. Even better, when I was buying, I never had to be alone. That's how I almost lost the house. Buying company.

I did that from January of the millennium year until September 11 of the next one. On that morning, having sold everything I could sell and borrowed against the rest, I was on the phone trying to wheedle my longtime dealer into extending me some credit since I was down to crumbs and the week wasn't even half over.

The television had been on all night and the drone of the
Today
show was simply background noise like the traffic in the street outside. I had just decided to have sex with this guy in exchange for the drugs I wanted when I looked at the TV in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. I dropped the phone, flushed the last of my pitiful stash, and started praying. I checked myself into rehab that same day.

I didn't know Son Davis had died there until I read it in the newspaper. It made me feel terrible, no matter what had happened between us at the end. He wasn't a bad guy. He was just weak. He didn't want to be. He just was. He lived his whole life being a creation of Beth's imagination, and it was a wonderful creation, but there was more to him than being the perfect son. A lot more.

We spent hours talking about what he was going to do once he went off on his own, but he never made a move. The closest he got was our trying to elope, and Beth snatched him back so hard it gave
me
whiplash. I think that's probably what attracted him to me in the first place, although I didn't know it at the time. He thought I was strong enough to pull him away from Beth, but nobody's that strong. Even now, she's still shaping his life to suit her purposes, whatever they are, which is what I'm still trying to figure out.

Beth Davis was born with the kind of charisma that changes people's lives. You might not see it if you pass her on the street. She looks like a million other short, round, just-missed-being-pretty brown-skinned women of
a certain age
. But wait until you see her in a roomful of mothers trying desperately to raise their hardheaded sons all by themselves. Wait until you hear her remind them they're allowed to have dreams. Wait until you hear her make the possibility of freedom sound so seductive you want to suck on it like a summer peach.

Beth's book,
Son Shine
, is the only self-published work ever to make the
Essence
,
USA Today
, and
New York Times
best-seller lists for the same six-month period. The book really isn't very well written, but it's so passionate and honest and hopeful about things that usually seem so hopeless, you can't put it down.

Son Shine
tells the story of Beth's amazing journey from being the daughter of an unmarried, illiterate single mother who named her after Elizabeth Taylor, to being a single mother herself at sixteen, to becoming a bestselling author and one of the top motivational speakers in the country. The heart of the book is the birth of Beth's only child, Theo, who she always called Son. After the book came out, nobody ever called him anything else.

“I knew the first time I looked into my baby's little brown face that he was perfect,” she writes in her introduction, “untouched by the madness of the world I had brought him into. That's when I knew whatever his daddy was or was not, could or could not do, I was going to raise him to be the kind of man I had hoped his father could be:
smart, strong, spiritual, sensual, and selfsufficient.
And if I did it right, when he was all grown up and some other mother's child opened her life's front door to my son, he wouldn't come up in there with a whole bunch of drama and confusion. He'd be bringing nothing but truth, good love, and
sunshine
.”

My mother once said, after waxing rhapsodic about the 1967 March on the Pentagon, that the beauty ofa successful demonstration is that it gives the protestors a chance to realize they're not alone. There's power in numbers, she said, but only if the powerless people making up those numbers are aware of their equally powerless comrades. First they have to recognize one another and say hello. Beth's work is about the business ofmaking introductions.

The first time I heard her speak to a roomful of shouting, stomping, weeping, laughing black women, and me hollering as loud as anybody even though I didn't even have a kid, I quit my job the next morning and went to work for her full-time. I was speechwriter, special assistant, advance team, and travel agent. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and I was as good at my part as Beth was at hers. The first three years I worked for her were probably the most exciting, exhausting, fulfilling years of my life.

Everywhere we went, women were energized. They bought the books, memorized the tapes, signed up for workshops, and, when she started asking them, they registered to vote. Son quit his law practice and formed Son Shine Enterprises once things really took off. I was their first full-time employee, and they couldn't have found a more willing worker.

It was probably inevitable that Son and I would get together. Being on the road constantly like we were, he was surrounded by women who wanted to sleep with him because they loved his mother, but he said having sex with them would be taking unfair advantage, not to mention, as he put it, exhibiting behavior unworthy of a man with his own considerable charms and assets.

The only problem was, in those days we were moving around so much that he never had a chance to explore those charms and assets with anybody but me. Add to that the fact that we were regularly having those marathon late-night conversations that are as intimate as sex with none of the risks of being sorry in the morning.
Of course I called it love.

I had been looking for someone like Son all my life. A collaborator. A comrade. Somebody who wanted to change the world as much as I did. I thought he was my soul mate, and I eagerly shared his dream of a life outside of Beth's orbit. Not that it wasn't exciting being with her. It was just that Beth, like a lot of charismatic people, is better appreciated at a distance.

But it wasn't just the charisma that drew me to Beth. She had a program. She was trying to change the world, one single mother at a time, and I wanted to help her do it. How could I resist? I was a child ofthe great movements who had never had one to call my own. My parents, college activists turned radical intellectuals, had raised me on stories of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and their days as student demonstrators at Howard University. Those stories were one of the reasons I went to Howard, but by 1985, the only movement my classmates were interested in was hip-hop, which wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Music is music, but in a revolution,
land and resources are supposed to change hands.

So I buried myself in the books, graduated in three years, and completed a master's in literature before I turned twenty-three. I accepted a teaching job at the University of the District of Columbia, thinking I could share my passion for
Poetic Language as a Tool for Liberation
—my master's topic—with black students eager to exchange ideas and insights with a bright new faculty member barely older than they were.

Two mind-deadening years later, I had yet to find any students who were as concerned about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez as they were about their upcoming tuitions, or their late periods, or whoever's new single was blasting on their car radios. In the course of one long weekend of self-examination when I attempted to answer the question of why was my life so totally messed up, I realized that I hated my job, had no romantic prospects and few friends, and the movement I was waiting for was still nowhere to be found. Sunday night, I let a friend talk me into going to one of Beth's speeches mainly because I was tired of bitching about my boring life. How could I have known everything was about to change?

And now it's about to change again. Beth didn't sound any different on the phone, a little nervous, but that's to be expected. She not only accused me of trying to ruin her business by stealing her son—she actually used the word
stealing
like he was a sweater from Saks—she called around to everybody I might have been able to ask for a job to say I couldn't be trusted and she just thought they ought to know.

Finding that out after months of mysterious rejections did nothing for my self-confidence or my cocaine consumption. In that sense, her needing my help is a vindication. She's desperate to get something done on time and done right. She needs the best, and she had to call
me
.

This Legacy Project she wants me to pull together is a tribute to Son's life and work. Since he died on a fundraising trip for his alma mater, she's presenting More- house College with Son's personal papers for their archives. In return, they're naming the new communications center in his honor at a big
to-do
on May 5. The only problem is, it's already the middle of March, the planning committee doesn't know what they're doing, and things are such a mess that they wanted to postpone the whole thing until next year. This was totally unacceptable to Beth, who told them she was bringing in a consultant to take charge of things. That would be me.

It would be my job to pull the program together, write her a speech for the occasion, and produce a quickie biographical video on Son's life. I could tell it was going to be a lot of work, but nothing I couldn't handle, especially for the kind of money she was prepared to pay. Son Shine Enterprises must be thriving. The other big plus, aside from the money, is that the project is finite. After May 5, this job is over. At that time, it is my intention to pick up my last check, buy another first-class train ticket home, and tell the weasel to remove me from his database. All I have to do between now and then is keep my wits about me and remember that, this time, whatever goes on between Beth and me is
business
, not personal.