The Summer We Got Free (36 page)

1983

R
egina lay awake
in her bed, on a cool Saturday morning in September, listening to the sound of
death coming up the stairs. When George’s illness had advanced to the point of
no return, she had moved him out of his bedroom and onto the sofa-bed, at his
request, because he didn’t want to spend his last days alone in that room, he’d
said, where he had hidden himself so much over the years. So, it was from the
living room that the sound came, the death growl, that morning. It was very
early,
just dawn, and the light coming in through Regina’s
window had a pinkish hue. She thought about her father, and her son, and she
wondered where they were now, and what awaited her husband. All her life she
had believed in heaven, but lately that idea had made less sense to her. It was
too random, death, too indifferent, to possibly lead anywhere as
ordered
as a perfect, pearly-gated heaven.

She considered getting up and going downstairs,
sitting beside George and holding his hand. In the last few years, with their
children gone from the house, the two of them had made something of amends, an
unspoken agreement not to despise each other anymore. She had let him go on and
live his secret life without interference or questions or dirty looks. And he,
in turn, had done his best to reconnect with her, to rediscover some small part
of the love they had shared so long ago. They’d almost become friends again,
the two of them creeping around that old house, cooking and watching television
together. “We almost like a old married couple,” George had said. Regina had
laughed. “Almost.”

She decided against going downstairs, though, that
morning, as she heard him breathing his dying breaths. Not because she didn’t
care. Not because she didn’t love him or because she thought he deserved to die
alone.
But simply because she was afraid to.
She had
seen death up close too much already, and it had made her sick and crazy once
before. She thought it best to keep her distance from it now, as best she
could. In the pink light coming in through the window, Regina whispered a
prayer for her husband, and listened as he passed away.

George’s senses were the first parts of his soul to
die, so that the boundaries of one passed away into the others, and for a few
of his last moments in the world he could see touch, and hear smell, and feel
taste. As he lay sunken in his sickbed, undignified and emaciated, little more
than a pile of twigs, a cricket of a man, on the threshold of a shameful death,
he suddenly remembered his boyhood.
Down Georgia.
Where he once ran barefooted in tobacco fields, his feet barely touching the
hot ground, his face to the sun. As he lay in his bed, now too weak to move,
the crumbly smell of Georgia bird songs danced before his clouded eyes. The
salty tastes of down-south sunsets were loud on his
lesioned
skin. And he remembered knowing he was good then. A good boy who did what he
was told and helped his mother with the washing and knew God. He remembered
climbing trees and how his skinny legs looked like two more branches as he sat
high and leaned his head against the breathing trunk. He had known then that he
was part of creation, made by God with intention, pure and right as grass and
bees. He did not know the moment when he had forgotten it, the moment when his
desire for other boys’ mouths and hands and
things
started to mean that he was not good, not something the Lord had made. He had
spent his life since moving from moment to moment between longing and shame,
and as he lay on his deathbed he could no longer remember or understand the
self-hatred he had carried for so long a time. He could no longer taste the
scorn, once like a stew on which he had gorged and fattened himself almost all
the days of his life. But he could remember the taste of Chuck’s quiet eyes,
and the ruddy smell of Butch’s voice. He could hear Robert’s smooth skin now,
and see James’ silly and abundant heart.
And the same for all
of them.
Louis. And Bud. And Tony. And Richard. And Red. And the boy
with the cigarette behind his ear and the eight-shaped scar above his lip, who
never said a word but smiled almost to laughing the whole time they were together.
And the man behind the shed by the train tracks, who shuddered and cried like a
child when he came, and held George to him for hours in the dark.
And so many others.
He remembered them now, not with the
deep hatred of himself with which he had always tried to forget them, a deep hatred
which
his dying mind and body could no longer clearly
recall, but with as much joy and light as the coming of sure death would allow
him. They had all been so beautiful, black and soft, brown and wiry, red and
lithe. Southern boys the color of Georgia earth, who had run in the same
tobacco fields, with their faces to the same sun and the sounds of birds on their
same skin. They had been more than his lovers, more than secret tousles in
tree-hidden places. They had been his
kin,
too, they
had been
of
him, and of God. In his
last moments, he did not have to wish that he had seen that truth before, that
he had understood more, that he had loved them better, and himself. When the
shame fell away,
ashenly
, quietly forgotten, it was
as if he had always known, and that trick of memory was a tender mercy before
he died.

Sarah stood by her bedroom window, watching the sun
coming up pink and soft on the horizon. Beside her, her husband leaned his
shoulder into hers and said, “Pretty, huh?” raising his eyebrows toward the
sky. “Maybe it’s a sign from your Daddy.”

Sarah thought
the sunrise always looked like that on September mornings, but she knew he was trying
to comfort her, so she nodded and tried to smile.

Regina had
called only a few moments ago to tell them that George had passed away. Sarah
wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, no tears would come. For the last few weeks of
her father’s life, she had helped her mother tend to him: feed him and clean
him, and keep him company. A few times, in the last days, she had wanted to say
things to him, things she knew she should say before he died because if she
didn’t she’d spend the rest of her life regretting it, but she didn’t say them.
The last thing she said to him, the evening before the morning he died, was, “I’ll
come by and read you the funnies tomorrow.”

“I’m gone get dressed and go on over to the house,”
Sarah told her husband now.

He nodded. “Alright.”

She sighed.
“Mama said Ava is coming down from New York right away. Helena, too.” She
glanced at him.

“Well. You want
me to call off work?” he asked. “So I can be there for you today?”

She shrugged.
“You don’t have to.”

He put his arms
around her. “I will.”

Sarah rested her
head against his chest.

“You can go ahead
and cry if you want to,” he said. “I got you.”

“Maybe I will.”

But she didn’t.
Instead, she looked out at the pink sky and said a silent prayer for her
father.

Ava and Helena took the train from New York City and
then the el from the train station and as they walked the rest of the way to Radnor
Street, Ava said, “I wish he’d told me. I wish he hadn’t had to get sick for me
to find out.”

She’d said it half a dozen times since her father had been
diagnosed, and Helena said now what she’d said each time before. “I guess he
never came to terms with it himself.”

Even after Ava
had moved to
Wynnfield
with Helena, even when the two
of them had moved together to New York, George had continued to keep his secret
from her. He had accepted her relationship with Helena, begrudgingly, once he
was sure there was nothing he could do about it, but he had never revealed to
either of them the truth about himself. After he got sick, Ava had asked Helena
whether she had ever suspected, and Helena said she’d known from the day she
met him, that Saturday morning in the foyer when he’d been unable to look her
in the eyes for fear of what she might be able to see. She hadn’t ever told
Ava, she said, because it wasn’t hers to tell.

“I hope,”
Ava
said now, “that he made some peace with it before he
died.”

They turned the
corner onto Radnor Street then, and found the block buzzing with activity. News
of her father’s death that morning had brought people out onto their porches, no
doubt inspiring lengthy exercises in speculation across banisters and at
curbsides. In the last seven years the harassment of Ava’s family had ceased,
maybe because once Ava and Paul and Sarah had all left Pastor Goode had decided
he’d done enough, or maybe because he was just too tired to care anymore. He’d
died of a heart attack three years ago.

As Ava and
Helena walked down the street, a hush fell over the block and every head turned
and watched them. Dexter
Liddy
folded his arms across
his chest. Malcolm Hansberry leaned out over his porch railing and glared.
Clarence Nelson shook his head, slowly, from side to side. Vic Jones spit into
his front yard. Hattie Mitchell stared wide-eyed. Doris
Liddy
twisted her lips into a frown of near-cartoonish severity. Ava remembered that
when she was a child they had watched her, too. Everywhere she went on that
street, and in that church, eyes had followed her. Back then it had been
wonder, an attraction to whatever they saw in her that seemed bigger, brighter,
more than what they knew. She looked out at them now, each of them displaying
their own exaggerated but silent disapproval, and she suddenly remembered their
love.
Their love, all warm and eager and sure.
Though
it had ended long ago, their love had helped her become who she was. As a child
she hadn’t understood that, but she knew it now. Seeing herself in their eyes
had helped her understand that she was special, and because she understood it
she had been free to
be
it, the same
way seeing herself in Helena’s eyes had helped her get free again. Silently,
she thanked them.

As she came up the front steps of the Delaney house,
the flowers in the front yard screamed orange and red and yellow at her. They
were the indirect descendants of the flowers Helena had planted there years
ago, Regina having re-planted them each following spring. Ava looked down at
the flowers, the fat bursts of happy pigment against the drab old house, and she
felt giddy with color and promise.

Acknowledgements

This
book has been a long time coming. I started it in college, more than sixteen
years ago, and though it has changed and been reimagined so many times that it
looks nothing now like what it was then, its heart, its pulse of family and
community and womanhood and queerness has never changed. Over so many years,
there have been so many people who have helped it along on its journey. Some of
them are: my college writing teacher,
Geeta
Kothari,
without whom I would not be the writer I am now or the writer I might someday
become; Lighthouse Writers Workshop, for their support, encouragement and
flattery; Lisa Volk, for her friendship and patronage;
Nico
Amador, for his editing help; and all the family and friends who have been
waiting so long to read this book. Your anticipation helped fuel me. Thank you.

Mia

About the Author

Mia
McKenzie studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She is winner of the
Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation
Award. She is soon to be published in
The
Kenyon Review
(Spring ‘13). She is the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a
popular online literary and activist forum. This is her first novel.

Praise For The Summer We Got Free

“...A BRILLIANT TAPESTRY FILLED WITH EXUBERANCE AND
ANXIETY...”

--
Jewelle
Gomez

“...MAKES YOU MOAN OR, AS I DID, READ PASSAGES ALOUD
AND NEGLECT SLEEP FOR WANT OF THE NEXT SAVORY MORSEL!”

--
Moya
Bailey

“McKenzie’s language calls to mind both Toni Morrison
and Cherry
Muhanji
, in her expert use...and its
ability to convey mystery, tenderness and terror while still being deceptively
ordinary.”

--
Jewelle
Gomez,
American author, poet, critic and playwright

“McKenzie’s masterful weaving of narrative belies an
inaugural effort yet it is clearly an
afrofuturistic
vision of healing transformation and an affirmation that we have what we need.
The text is saturated with an
effortless
queerity
and a brush of magical realism that show what's
possible when you focus off center.”

--
Moya
Bailey, writer,
Crunk
Feminist Collective