1.
I forgot what blessed meant
because the preacher said it so much.
Like “amen” & “hosannah” its meaning stripped away.
At times I thought blessed meant happy.
Other times it meant lucky. Favored.
In a certain way, I guess it means being in the right place at the right time.
And not in the immediate sense.
Not like, “oh thank God I wasn’t on Douglass Street when they shot those kids,”
Or like when we take grandma to play the numbers
“Blessed” is like luck in slow motion.
The long drawn out process of goodness flowing to you. Through you.
And you don’t get credit for that. It just happens.
I don’t know why some get it and others don’t.
2.
I never felt a part of any nation.
When the nation is “doing well”, I don’t feel a difference.
Sometimes the politicians come to town and talk about freedom.
But then they leave.
At school, teacher talks about history and Emma raises her hand and asks,
“Why is history only about kings and nations and wars?”
The teacher becomes strict, and says something vague
about not repeating the same mistakes.
But Emma is right.
The history of music doesn’t have to be learned.
The history of dance is in our bones.
We feel the history of America
when we watch our mothers talk to their bosses.
Or when we keep track of whose daddy is in church and whose daddy is in prison.
3.
I once tore a photo of Gene Kelly out of a magazine
somebody dropped on the floor of the back of the bus.
I hung it above my bed and I talk to him at night.
“If you can do it, I can do it.” I say.
I don’t want to be famous.
I just want to look as elegant as he looks in the photo.
5.
The preacher says that God hates the wicked.
But the wicked seem to rule the world.
This confuses me and makes me doubt the preacher.
If God loved me and my family,
wouldn’t he make me a princess and my mother a queen?
Emma talks about something called karma.
“What goes around comes around,” she says.
This also seems too simple.
Some people get away with evil while mother fights tears when
she watches young lovers holding hands.
6.
Momma tells me if I need to cry
I should always go to another room.
“Crying is good for your soul,” she says.
“But it’s not good for other people to see.”
I imagine at night, everybody in their own room crying to a God who won’t listen.
Thinking they are the only one.
8.
I think what I like about movie stars is that
They don’t seem to be in any danger.
They have no enemies. No avengers.
Movie stars seem to be more blessed than anybody.
The most blessed people of all!
We all want to watch them.
We all want to be them.
Does Gene Kelly go to bed at night knowing he’s a star?
Do movie stars cry alone in their beds at night?
9.
“God to me,” says Emma, “is the space our parents go to survive.”
We are throwing rocks into the river.
“So do you believe in it?” I ask.
“Well, yeah,” she says.
A moment goes by. I notice a cardinal chirping on a nearby branch.
“I mean, if they didn’t have that space….neither of us would exist.”
“But maybe they make that space up. Maybe it’s imaginary.”
“That’s my point.”
11.
At night, I take refuge in writing stories.
I pretend I am my characters.
I am a Chinese geisha, trying to unwrap her feet.
I am a blue-bird in an endless sea of red cardinals.
I am a crewman on Odysseus's ship. But being deaf, I don’t fall under the Siren’s spell.
I am a rich kid who lives near the Capitol building. His parents are mean to him.
“How do you know anything about what it’s like to be ________?” Emma asks.
I shrug and say, “I like to imagine.”
Sometimes, I imagine that I’m a fictional character
being written by somebody
who doesn’t really actually know
much about what it’s like to be somebody like me
But that’s why they're writing. To try.
12.
The preacher talking again about Jesus favoring the poor
And the people all lift their hands in Amen.
I would roll my eyes if Mom wouldn’t smack me.
I found a copy of The Sound and the Fury at school
I hide in the woods so I can read it
Mom would say I’m too young.
I find in books the missing puzzle pieces.
The things the preacher leaves out when he’s preaching.
I need to be inspired.
But I also need to be smart.
I’d like to write Mr. Faulkner a letter
14.
I don’t like stories where characters have dreams.
It seems too easy.
Every time they read about an angel appearing in a dream
I think that nobody I’ve known ever saw an angel
Where did all the angels go?
I used to draw angels with crayons when I was younger.
Mom would pin them to the wall in my room.
A neighbor boy saw them once while we were playing
Hide and seek and said,
“Those angels look like fags.”
I punched him in the face.
15.
When she isn’t home, I’ll go into Mom’s bedroom
With the big mirror and take off all my clothes and stare
At myself in the mirror and think,
That I may be the most beautiful boy in all of Charleston.
I practice laughing over my shoulder like I’m at a fancy party.
16.
One time, I walked home five minutes before a kid
On our street was beat-up.
The night our old house set on fire, I slept over at
Emma’s house. Something I never did.
“You got guardian angels,” Mom says,
“You are favored by the Lord.”
And though I don’t believe it the way she does,
I carry this luck around with me like a secret diamond.
17.
Mom has her friend from the kitchen over.
They drink iced tea and whiskey and are hootin and hollerin.
I want to be one of the grown-ups but I know I’m just a kid.
I lean on my hands, elbow on the table and rock back and forth
Between them as they perform a dance of laughter and gossip.
They talk about women like they are nothing but crazy.
And men like they are nothing but trouble.
They talk about how the rich ladies are acting like heroes because
now they are working because the men have all
been sent overseas.
Rosie the Riveter cracks them up.
I love when Mom laughs so hard she cries.
I’ve never been able to do that.
I usually just watch, smiling with awkward amusement
My lips covering my teeth.
18.
Mom found the Faulkner book and asked where I got it.
She threw it in the garbage.
She wasn’t mean about it, but I’m sad. I was almost finished with it.
I think I’m going to go to college when I’m older.
I don’t know how.
I don’t know many kids like me who have been to college but
I want to read more books and….I don’t know….
I don’t know if I want to be a movie star or a professor.
I wish I could be both.
Maybe I could be a movie star who plays a professor.
19.
I play a game with myself whenever Mom makes me
Go with her to a party.
I call it “opposites.”
I pretend that the prettiest lady is the ugliest.
That the fattest ugliest smelliest is the most beautiful.
I pretend that the funniest person in the room is the most bashful.
That the most bashful is the most loved and venorated.
The person with the fancy car becomes the poorest.
I pretend that the person who acts the most intelligent is the dumbest.
And that the tallest is the shortest and the shortest is the tallest.
I carry all these opposites inside me
like polar magnets tugging at a metal top that won’t stop spinning.
20.
May the school teachers feed us when we are hungry
May the police come our aid and protect us when we are assaulted
May the fathers who never came home, come back home
May the mothers’ tears contain magic that wards off more pain
May the preachers cultivate our pain the way a gardener uses damaged fruit as fertilizer
May we grow so strong and beautiful, our humanity cannot be denied.
May they look at us and shrink at our nobility.
21.
Emma finds me reading Hemingway in the forest
“who the hell do you think you are?” she grabs the book from me
And starts reading out loud like a stiff.
“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is
going by and you're not taking advantage of it?
Do you realize you've lived nearly half
the time you have to live already?”
“Shit,” she says, “that’s deep."
23.
God is Mom’s reason for everything.
I shall not question.
He makes her feel hope and that’s good enough for me.
Gives us something to do on Sunday, I suppose.
Gives us friends.
For all the days of my life, I don’t think I’ll ever really know what I truly believe.
Books and music are my only comfort. And even they, sometimes, can fail me.
I tell Emma I’ll believe in Jesus when people stop killing each other.
But at church I still sing the hymns and pretend that it’s real for me.