from Fourteen Valentines: A Memoir of Love and Race
Prologue
In the beginning, I am the tooth puller and he is the one with the smile. A smile that burns so gradually into the underside of each eyelid that I walk past him a hundred times before I feel it. Before one hard blink, and then suddenly I imagine him mine.
It happens one night when I am headed for the same thought, for the same book in the same under-stuffed chair in the library. One night when the air above the campus is dark and thin. This night the idea of him gets in my way. Unexpectedly, his fingers against a tabletop hold my attention, become the sound of other sounds. Become ten tiny splashes to stop crickets. Rain upon my windowsill, upon the drums stretched across my eyelids. Like the tap of a jump rope against my heart.
When I open, everything has changed.
I know it is thievery to take from someone’s fingertips what they mean to keep for themselves. Even a hello, not reserved for me, I slip inside my pocket. It is foolish to look at a man who cannot trust you and insist that he can.
But I do. A thousand times he says no and still I do. Because I hear in the space between his words a silence that reminds me of yes. I know yes. From early on my mother tells me yes, and my father. Yes is what I find in the color blue spreading across the sky, the leathery smell of a grade school gymnasium, the clang of the radiator as sleep comes on. I find it in the crunching sound of thawing ice under the boot of a young girl, her jacket unzipped to the earliest warmth of the sun, mittens discarded, scarf loose. Deep in the promise of that very first day of spring, streaming between garage and garbage can and each sparkling pile of snow in that sun-drenched alley, I sense the wonderfully foolish possibility of insisting on yes.
I will tell you what I remember. The moments of my childhood, humid with love and belonging yet tangled with uneasiness, that carve out a tiny locket inside my heart to hold the space that he will become. People with faces that end up being his, that plead to be recognized despite thick glasses or crooked smiles. Each person, each experience writing upon the thin pages of youth, drawing me closer. I will tell you what I remember and more, so by the time I get to him, perhaps you will understand.
In the beginning, I am the tooth puller and he is the one with the smile. A smile that burns so gradually into the underside of each eyelid that I walk past him a hundred times before I feel it. Before one hard blink, and then suddenly I imagine him mine.
It happens one night when I am headed for the same thought, for the same book in the same under-stuffed chair in the library. One night when the air above the campus is dark and thin. This night the idea of him gets in my way. Unexpectedly, his fingers against a tabletop hold my attention, become the sound of other sounds. Become ten tiny splashes to stop crickets. Rain upon my windowsill, upon the drums stretched across my eyelids. Like the tap of a jump rope against my heart.
When I open, everything has changed.
I know it is thievery to take from someone’s fingertips what they mean to keep for themselves. Even a hello, not reserved for me, I slip inside my pocket. It is foolish to look at a man who cannot trust you and insist that he can.
But I do. A thousand times he says no and still I do. Because I hear in the space between his words a silence that reminds me of yes. I know yes. From early on my mother tells me yes, and my father. Yes is what I find in the color blue spreading across the sky, the leathery smell of a grade school gymnasium, the clang of the radiator as sleep comes on. I find it in the crunching sound of thawing ice under the boot of a young girl, her jacket unzipped to the earliest warmth of the sun, mittens discarded, scarf loose. Deep in the promise of that very first day of spring, streaming between garage and garbage can and each sparkling pile of snow in that sun-drenched alley, I sense the wonderfully foolish possibility of insisting on yes.
I will tell you what I remember. The moments of my childhood, humid with love and belonging yet tangled with uneasiness, that carve out a tiny locket inside my heart to hold the space that he will become. People with faces that end up being his, that plead to be recognized despite thick glasses or crooked smiles. Each person, each experience writing upon the thin pages of youth, drawing me closer. I will tell you what I remember and more, so by the time I get to him, perhaps you will understand.
Poems by pauline knaeble williams
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Love Knot
I stopped writing after you left me. Dropped all pretense of prophet, soothsayer, rainmaker. The clouded bottles of fine and coarse powders; crushed, under the weight of where your heel used to step. I loosened the love knot from my hair. Snatched from its chain the charm I once wore for you. All the same, the remedy for your return draws a taste from my tongue and the discarded spells I stitched together blow open, at the strangest hour. |
Not Since Eve
I became a writer soon after the women arrived They came in while I slept and left before dawn They came dressed in colors that rose to the ceiling They spoke softly and quickly in languages I could not understand But I knew why they had come Their grief was apparent the smell of rain in their hair and as we began to cry they smoothed the tears into our cheeks so that when I awoke most of them had already gone and those who remained set their jaw like they meant it and I was told that not since Eve had anyone been through this alone |
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. James Baldwin, Letter to Angela Davis