The Revisioners. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
her to weed out all the jealousy, the pain, the heartache.” She looks around. “Somebody in here got some grief as big as this room; ask her to dig it out of you right now, and she’ll do it. Ask her to lift it off your chest. You don’t need it anymore.” She shifts to a whisper. “Feel her release it from you, she loves it, you don’t have to be embarrassed to hand it off, it’s her joy to receive it, see her cradle it, see her rock it in her love, and watch it turn golden. Watch it turn golden,” she repeats. She stands there for a while in silence, then she walks back to the front of the room and sits again. She just turned fifty-eight, but she seems lovelier each year. She doesn’t do makeup, doesn’t need to. Her waist-length dredlocks are wrapped in a bright blue-and-pink patterned scarf, and she wears a long cotton black dress that hugs her soft curves when it sways. She has cancer though. Has for three years, and won’t get chemo for it.
She calls it poison, and she takes her herbs and seems to live at the acupuncture clinic on Canal. I don’t worry about her in a way that shows, but in the back of my mind I’m always primed for the phone to ring.
She releases the girls in a prayer, and they approach her one by one to say goodbye.
“Love you, Gladys,” they whisper in her ear as they embrace.
They are teenage girls, many with two jobs, none with stable housing; they’ve got baby daddies and bills holding them below water, like me, but my mother has lifted them to another state just now, and it’s miraculous to behold.
When it’s just us, she walks over and tries to hug me, and I allow it for a minute but not much longer.
I know she’s not going to be happy with me, moving in with the other side, so I want to lay it out fast.
“Mama,” I say, but she cuts me off.
“Girl with the yellow braids lost her baby last time. She needs a lot of support. A lot of support.” She looks up at me like she’s coming out of a trance. “Anyway, I knew you were coming over today. I dreamed that I was on an airplane and we turned back before it ascended fully. Knew immediately what it meant.”
“Mama, what does an airplane have to do with me?”
“Expect the unexpected, it said. My grandmother, Lucille, she talks to me through transportation. Anyway, you look good, glowing. You off from work?”
“More or less,” I say.
“Uh oh. More or less, come into the kitchen. I’m going to need my tea for ‘more or less.’ Expect the unexpected,” she repeats as we walk.
Her kitchen was updated years ago but it still seems new with her granite island countertop overlooking the living room and the beige-and-coffee-brown tiled backsplash. Her floors are hardwood but there are Persian rugs that pop with color, piercing blues and orange and African masks on the wall from a trip to Zimbabwe two winters ago. She framed her favorite inspirational phrases, God is all there is. He is in me and he is me. There’s a pot of jambalaya on the stove. No sausage or shrimp inside, of course, but you wouldn’t know it from the smell, and I might as well be ten years old again wondering if I can have a scoop of ice cream after dinner for dessert.
“Mama, I moved,” I say.
She places a kettle of water on to boil and then walks over to stand beside me.
I know what she’s thinking, Again, and I wait for her to say it but it doesn’t come.
“It must be nice,” she says smiling. “You look happy, it must be nice.” She sounds almost desperate to believe what she’s saying.
“It is, Mama. I want you to see it. It’s really nice.”
“Well, where is it?” she asks. I hear the kettle go off. But she doesn’t get up to pour the water. She just looks at me.
“I moved in with Grandma Martha,” I say, and she takes it in. I remember when King was a baby and I would tell him no. He wouldn’t always react right away; sometimes he had to find his way over to the scream.
I keep talking to fill the void.
“She needed extra help at night. I was just laid off, and even when I was working, I was missing King. Some of the kids at school were after him. I told you about the fight.”
She nods.
“She’s paying me my old salary. Double when you consider it’s rent-free. Can you imagine what I can do with that money? No rent to pay. By the end of the year, I was thinking I could have enough saved up to buy.” I lower my voice. I’m scared just saying it. “A townhouse or something, nothing too big, but . . .”
She smiles, and I feel the release of the weight of the words inside me.
“What do you think?” I ask. “I would have asked you first, but it just came to me, like inspiration, you always say, and I didn’t want to have to ask for permission. I’m thirty-four now. I’m a grown-ass woman, and I guess I just got tired of running everything by my mama first.” I want to keep talking to smooth over the awkwardness building, but there’s nothing more to say.
She doesn’t respond for a while, just keeps staring at me.
“You did the right thing,” she says finally. “It seems to me you did the right thing.” She nods, while she thinks it over, like somebody tasting food, considering if she should add salt. “I mean, I always thought you would be such a good doula. If you wanted to try that now, it seems like it’d be the perfect time. You just have a special way with people when they’re not at their best. When you were a little girl, you’d always know when I needed an extra hug. On airplanes, grown people would sit next to you, tell you their secrets, stories they’d never shared with anyone else.” She stops herself. “Never mind, you did right, girl. I’m proud of you,” and she is that warm and loving woman I’ve glimpsed more with her clients than with me, but I’ll take it, especially because I never have to wonder what my mother is thinking. If she says it, it’s real.
“Thank you, Mama,” I say.
She goes for the tea.
“King in school,” she goes on. “You all closer with each other.” She is still nodding as she passes me my cup. “That all sounds right on, baby girl,” she repeats.
“Thank you, Mama,” I say. “I’m so relieved to hear you say that.”
She pauses to drink. “I’m not going to be here forever, you know.”
I set my own cup down. I hate it when she talks like this.
“It’s true, it’s true. Might as well face it, it’s the one thing we can count on. And you need to be self-sufficient once I’m gone, like you’re doing,” she adds. “Like you’re doing.”
I see her skin has become looser around the neck. I’ve heard enough this week about mortality, so when she suggests going to the back to work in her garden, I am right behind her.
She is nimble and quick on her feet. There’s a chair planted in the dirt and I sit and watch her while she knifes the stems of okra just above their caps. She talks while she works: she says that she still remembers the smell of the earth on her grandmother Lucille’s farm, that she never met her great-great-grandmother but that she knew she was a slave, that she’s been thinking about her more and more lately.
“Josephine,” she says, like I’ve never heard her say the name before. “Isn’t that pretty? I almost named you after her, but your daddy—” she shakes her head.