 Crystelle MourningClick to order via Amazon Hardcover: 224 pages AALBC.com #1 selling book for May/June 2006
Excerpt. ' Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Darkness resonated in an upward spiral, pushing away the past. She could hear the silence. Then she heard the schoolyard across the street, the traffic, her alarm. She reached out to press down, to quiet the nearest noise, and turned over in her bed, slept soundly for a few moments. And then sudden blare reverberated, reached a certain consciousness, hovering like a bone chilling fog where spirals stemmed. Crystelle opened her eyes, saw nothing, then closed her eyes again. Mist clearing. She threw her hands over her face, listened to the music, and the laughter, and the time. Timelessness shifted places with now as soon as Crystelle opened her eyes. So when her lids drifted down, all she could see was the office where she sat and tried to sell hot chemicals for Black women to pour over their hair. Relaxers. She needed to get ready to go to work. She pulled the covers over her head. She had to go to work. Now she could see the pile of old ad copy on her drafting table. That campaign was over, but a new one would be starting soon. She would have to meet with clients early next week. She would have to do some research, come up with new ideas. What should the model say while she rolls her neck to sell the stuff that straightened hair like hers? 'Post that question in your mind,' she whispered into the crushed fold of white sheets. Shadows against light rose walls flickered to the rhythm of wind. Lace lifted and hard wood floors creaked and Crystelle's sigh echoed. She rose and dressed and left her building, but she had gathered only enough strength to get to the roar of trains charging toward her underground. With the rush of old air, Crystelle raised her head and looked down into the dark subway tunnel. As a train approached, she backed up, feeling the grime she couldn't see as it landed on her face, stuck to her lipstick. She wanted to lick. She wanted to use her tongue to get the dirt off her lips but she reached for a tissue instead. Against the dash of bodies moving off and on, the dirt and rogue-stained tissue in her hand, Crystelle stood still. Grime against waxy red against white, and the crush of flesh annoyed her. Too much. Too much like what had been. She backed away from the closing doors and turned. Turned away from the pile of ads and the check each pile brought. Away from the stacks of Black women in two-dimensional gloss selling products, away from the money she earned so she could buy them. Turned toward home. As the train lurched forward, Crystelle was already heading toward the stairwell. She could see herself: 'Climb back to the street. Call in sick. Lie in bed, and be sick.' She knew she could get past the noisy schoolyard, through the late-rushing traffic, and climb the brownstone steps. She could climb the carpeted stairs, too, unlock her own door, walk the hard wood, maybe even sleep. So Crystelle walked across the street with her head held high but her spirit low. So low it gathered bits and flecks of earth as she walked. Against the weaving traffic she saw patterns of steel and exhaust shift. Clouds of smoke and shifting hulks of metal whirred. A man was selling incense on a folding table. Past that, another man was selling videotapes and winter hats. Beyond them all, a man was selling God through a portable microphone. She walked across the street and back into her apartment and there she could lock the door. Her spirit sat down beside her and her head hung low now. It hung so low she could see the flecks and bits caught in the hems of her spirit's skirt. She picked them out. Scooping with her nails like a rake, she gathered the dirt her spirit gathered and she tasted it. So much soil clinging to her disconnected self. Now on her own fingers. Now in her own self. She pressed the gathered earth against her tongue and swallowed the metallic smack of no longer living, of so much decomposed flesh and leaf fertilizing soil. Even in New York City, she could taste death feeding land everywhere. Suddenly she knew the very reason why people pray before putting food into their mouths, the primal instinct to somehow bless this plate of everyday sacrifice. 'Remember this,' her disconnected self said out loud in her head. 'Life feasts on death.' It would stay inside her forever that taste -- of so many slaughtered for sustenance -- and she flicked the earth out of her nails and into the Ziploc bag. It held so much. Flowers that were really weeds that were no longer dried but really curled and withered. Stiff and hard, too. She spied the wallet-size photo, yellowed and torn on the edges, that she had stashed so many years ago. Dirt fell out of her own nails and along the treated paper. His image peered out at her, smiling wide, mouth open like the smiler was singing a promise song she couldn't hear because his sounds were muted by the clear plastic. Crystelle's life began when she was born. But it began again when he died. He was Jimmie, and for all the love she had inside herself to give, much of it poured in from him. She had carried around the weight of his life, the heavy weight of his death. Everything that had ever been on Frazier Street was a dream. The place where he grew to die. Home. The memories fell like rainwater -- sometimes just a drop, clear, but small. Sometimes, the dream fell so hard, so fast, the wind so strong, it hurt. Crystelle was dreaming whenever she closed her eyes. She shifted from the now to the then. There was no bridge from where she had loved to where she lived. Nothing existed between the two. She closed the drawer holding the Ziploc bag. Everything her life had been in the beginning and everything it would be in the end was right there. With him gone, she'd surrounded herself with someone else. It was time to think about what had been and what would be. The truth was sometimes hard to believe: that after everything that had happened in her life, there was still more to be. When Hamp came into her life, she thought nothing much. But that he was still around, poking and probing her spirit, was something to consider. It worked in his favor even if nothing else did -- but much more did, even though it still felt like too little. And that meant she would have to consider. What would be enough? She stood and stripped and collapsed on her bed, and her spirit fell down inside her. In and out of sleep, back and forth in time, she lay still and hot. In the place between wake and sleep she tried to move, tried to simply open her eyes, but her spirit was too low now, and she was, of course, alone. Hamp would be at work, thinking of her (he said he did), but probably not calling (too busy, too busy till afternoon -- sometimes evening, sometimes night). Everyone except her colleagues at the agency would think she was working, too. She whispered, "I want to wake up now," so out of sleep cycled ahead of her slumber. She lifted both eyelids. Lashes parted and, for a moment, Crystelle started counting the tiny hairs. Then she remembered that was impossible. "I can't do that," she whispered, and she couldn't. Her brown knuckles turned almost white in the next space of time -- almost seven minutes. She knew because she counted each tick against her wall as she gripped air in her hands. "That's six minutes and thirty-two seconds," and she turned her neck, blinked, focused, and eyed the rhythmic hand, the one counting each second against the face of the deep-wood clock. "Brown," whooshed out of her cracked lips, and the second-hand bureau, the smoky glass mirror, the four posts in each corner of the white bed, all the possessions that she'd gathered in Brooklyn loomed into view. She blinked at the nightstand she found on the sidewalk right outside her home one morning. She had been gazing out her six-foot living room window, sipping tea. 'Why would anyone throw it away?' she thought again, reaching out to follow rough patterns, the grain in the wood, with her fingers. She held her hand against a circle, a knot someone had smoothed into a ring. She traced the edges with her thumb. "I can't count anymore," going around. Clear beads formed everywhere, her skin spit bubbles. The "City of Brotherly Love" shirt, damp, exposed her left breast, where she was burning. She remembered paying a South Street vendor for the T-shirt. He was the guy, he'd said, who crossed out "Love," silk-screened "Shove." It really read "The City of Brotherly Shove." Crystelle had laughed at that. She remembered laughing and the man's eyes slanting into hers, crinkled and blue. A cloud of mist rose out of the wet ring near her heart. Breezes blew, pushing the mist back. Crystelle closed her eyes because she was so tired, but she opened them again when she heard a little boy laughing. Then she fell asleep, and in the sleep she saw more, heard herself wheeze. Jimmie danced from far away, danced up to her and stood, laughing, so close she could touch him. But she couldn't touch him. They never touched. "Hey, now." Talk to me. "What you want me to say?" She smelled cocoa butter and sweat, and his skin glowed through the dim haze and she knew she was asleep again. It was a dream she knew was a dream just as it was happening. But Crystelle had never smelled Jimmie before -- after. Ever since the terrible night and his passing, ever since the dreams began, she could hear him, see him, but never touch. And never smell -- until now. Crystelle breathed in deep, even in her dream, and inhaled the cloud of Old Spice poised above her own quiet face. She opened her mouth to ask him about the new sense he was sending her, but Jimmie's words rushed in first. Talk about you. I wanna hear all about you. "What about me?" He grinned. Silly, start from the beginning. You gotta start from before."I gotta start from when?" Start with Aunt Opal."Ma -- ?" Yeah. Crystelle thought about her family while the curtains lifted and fell, lifted and fell, lifted and fell nine times. She could smile, thinking about home, and she licked her lips. A water glass rattled against the hard wood under her bed. For a moment that was all she could see. |
