The Book of Colors: A Novel

By Raymond Barfield

How can a 19-year-old, mixed-race girl who grew up in a crack house and is now pregnant be so innocent? Yslea is full of contradictions, though, seeming both young and old, innocent and wise. Her spirit is surprising, given all the pain she has endured, and that's the counterpoint this story offerswhile she sees pain and suffering all around her, Yslea overcomes in her own quiet way.

What Yslea struggles with is expressing her thoughts. And she wonders if she will have something of substance to say to her baby. It's the baby growing inside her that begins to wake her up, that causes her to start thinking about things in a different way.

Yslea drifts into the lives of four people who occupy three dilapidated row houses along the train tracks outside of Memphis: "The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unbridled Books
• Release date: Apr 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781609531164

Raymond Barfield

Raymond Barfield is Professor of Pediatrics and Christian Philosophy at Duke University. He is a pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician, and he directs the Medical Humanities program in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine at Duke. He is the author of The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (2011), Life in the Blind Spot (2012), Wager: Beauty, Suffering, and Being in the World (2017), and a novel called The Book of Colors (2015).

Book preview

THE BOOK OF COLORS

Raymond Barfield

Unbridled Books

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Unbridled Books

Copyright © 2015 by Raymond Barfield

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not be reproduced in any form

without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barfield, Raymond, 1964-

The book of colors / by Raymond Barfield. -- First edition.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-1-60953-115-7 (softcover)

1. Pregnant women--Tennessee--Memphis--Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)

in women--Fiction. 3. Self-realization in women--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.A77536B66 2015

813’.6--dc23

2014047940

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by SH • CV

First Printing

For Alexandra

Black Rose on a White Deathbed

     Rose called out to me.

Yslea. Yslea, are you there?

I’m here.

I can’t feel my feet again.

You been dreaming?

No. I been thinking.

What about?

Big things. Nothing to worry your mind about.

What big things?

Don’t mind me.

You want me to rub your feet?

Maybe in a while.

I sat down by Rose’s bed, hoping dinner cooked before the stove stopped working, and I rubbed my belly, round under the flowers of my dress. My belly button had smoothed out in the past few weeks.

I think about big things as much as anyone, maybe more, even though I almost never talk to anyone about them. I go to bed thinking about them. Wake up thinking about them. My baby for example. While it was growing it was so calm it scared me sometimes. I used to know girls who’d wake up in the middle of the night with a foot stuck in their ribs and they’d laugh telling about it. I wanted my baby to do that, just to say hello.

Rose looked up from her bed and sniffed around a little bit. What you cooking tonight, Yslea?

It was a wonder she could still smell with all the bug spray in her room. She had me spray it at least twice a day. Jimmy brought pork chops from work.

Those gray ones?

They taste the same once they’re cooked. He gets them half price.

I’m not complaining. I’m not hungry anyway. Rose relaxed into her pillow. That was about the only thing to tell you she was tense—watching her relax. She couldn’t move much on her own. Not that she was so big anymore. She was before, but she stopped eating enough to stay big. Somehow she still seemed big when you thought about her, though.

My own bigness was new. That was the difference. If you looked at me you’d think I was small, even though my belly had started filling up my lap. I never used to think much about having a body until this other body started growing inside mine. I just wished it’d move more. I wondered what it was gonna do when it got into the world and just lay there. That’s not how the world works.

When Rose started snoring I watched her sleeping like I sometimes did to get used to how she’d look when she’s dead. I hadn’t seen many dead people. I needed to not be scared, and Jimmy wasn’t much good except for meat from the butcher shop. And if I ever got thin again, for love. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore.

I hadn’t been with Rose long. A few months. To start with, Rose didn’t know a thing about me but she brought me in as a favor to Jimmy, even though she didn’t think much of Jimmy. Most likely at first she was more interested in the little thing growing in me than in me or Jimmy. That’s okay. Once I moved in we got on so well she asked me to be the one to dress her when she died.

I’d only been living with Jimmy next door for a couple of months when I figured out I was pregnant, but I’d known him for a while before I moved in and I’d see Rose on her porch. I agreed to dress her when she died because I figure that if a baby can grow from nothing in that time so can that kind of relation between me and Rose.

They say you shouldn’t eat fried foods when you’re pregnant, but that’s the only way to get the pork chops cooked since the oven in the house didn’t work so well, probably because Rose always used it too much in the winter to heat the house.

The other thing I worried about was Rose’s bug spray. They say you shouldn’t be around bug spray if you’re pregnant. For someone who kept saying God is in control of the world Rose sure was scared of bugs. I asked her about it and she said she once woke up with a roach attached to her ear. I didn’t know roaches did that, although I did hear once of a baby dying when a roach crawled into its windpipe. That might do it. Maybe it’s better to be around bug spray than to have a roach crawl into your child’s mouth. At least that’s what I told myself.

Dinnertime is one of the times the train comes by. It’s loud enough to stir up a valley of dry bones, but Rose always slept right through it. I’ve always wondered at what people can get used to. A person growing inside you. Or the idea that you might just up and die.

Even though I’m not a Catholic I started going to the Catholic church down the street. All sorts of people come. It’s the strangest time of my week when people who I might not even be able to get into their offices kneel down beside me and we eat the flesh and drink the blood of God and I always leave feeling clean and happy. The only other time I feel that way is when I’m reading Robinson Crusoe, which is the book I own.

The Sofa People

The first time I saw Rose was the first time I saw Jimmy. They were sitting on their porches, Rose on hers, Jimmy on his. Their neighbor Layla was there too sitting on her porch as far away from Jimmy and Rose as she could sit with her girl Ambrosia cross-legged rocking like she always does, slowly turning the pages of her little cardboard book of colors like she always does.

The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty. But those folk not talking, just feeling what little breeze there was, each one of them with a ragged sofa on their porch—it was better than trudging along the train track ready to die of thirst and seeing nothing but more track.

Can you spare a glass of water? I asked and I had my hands on the post and I see now that I tried to look good for the man Jimmy, innocent for the old woman Rose, and interested only in water for the young woman Layla until I had things figured out. Not that I thought of it that way at the time, but my brain sort of chatters to me all the time if I’m not paying attention to something like reading my book or cutting an onion, which is fine if I’m just remembering things but it gets in the way sometimes if I’m trying to listen to a sermon or a radio show because it’s always like two people are talking at the same time.

Rose wiped her face but Jimmy answered first with his thumb pointing toward the back screen door. Glass’s inside.

If I only had a second to describe the world or tell a story I’d say that’s how it came about that somebody started growing inside me. But things seemed leisurely in those days since I had almost nothing else to do.

So I went on inside. I thought he’d said glasses but he said glass’s and I could only find one glass and it was dirty so if he didn’t have that man’s look about him I’d have drunk straight from the faucet.

The water was tepid. I should have let it run longer and bubble up from the cooler parts below Memphis but I was thirsty. I looked around. Was I glad that I didn’t see any signs of a woman? It didn’t really occur to me that way at the time, but maybe. That’s what I mean about the chatter.

The sofas outside were the colors of a squash (Rose’s), a green bean (Jimmy’s), and a fresh-dug yam (Layla’s). They were tilted but stable like everything else in my life at the time.

Jimmy’s house was a bone of a house lodged between two houses that were bones of houses. I thought as I left that first day and almost stepped into the mess of a dead raccoon sprawled on the railroad track that their houses were like three broken ribs stuck off to the side of the railroad spine.

So I got my water and took a couple of eyefuls of Jimmy’s spare little shack, all dull gray, covered in faded old sheets to keep the stuffing of various things in, and out of the drab background the chemical-blue eye of a computer screen with its soft hum stared. Hmmmm, I said to myself and put the glass in his empty dirty sink.

I pushed open the flimsy frame of the screen door like every old screen door that catches at the top and then lets go and slams into the wall stretching the spring across the hinge.

Sorry, I said. But nobody had jumped.

You care to sit a spell? Rose asked from the next porch.

And for some reason I said, No, ma’am, thank you. And thank you to Jimmy for the water. And I nodded to Layla but she wasn’t paying me no mind and neither was Ambrosia who sat there rocking with such swings I thought the girl would rock right off the porch. Layla was my age or younger. Lord, I thought, Ambrosia must be six. What’d Layla do? Have her when she was thirteen?

That was when I turned and waved and almost stepped into the mess of the half-rotten raccoon I mentioned.

I stayed in a shelter for ladies in Memphis and strolled out past the three houses every now and then whenever we got bored of playing the used video game someone left with a bag of socks and canned goods one weekend with a note that said they hoped God would bless us all in the coming year. When Jimmy came around to asking me to stay he did it from his sofa right in front of Rose, Layla, and Ambrosia like they were all too tired from the heat to care. I didn’t have anything but what I wore, so I climbed up on Jimmy’s porch and sat on the lower end of his sofa colored like a green bean, and I started staring across the tracks waiting for the train like everybody else.

Somehow when a little donkey walked by the front porches and continued on around to the other side I wasn’t surprised and nobody said anything about it. At the time I didn’t even bother asking.

One Month Free

It didn’t take me much time to learn that Jimmy had four parts to his day. Working at the butcher shop. Sitting on the sofa. Loving my body. Working on his computer.

I had never used a computer and Jimmy eventually showed me all kinds of things, some good, some bad, some I can’t think about. He got the computer for nearly nothing through a help-the-poor shebang. Then he set up a plan to get a month free from the Internet service, then switched to another month free from someone else, and so on, then back to the first company.

Watching Jimmy in the daytime you’d never know the kinds of things he found on that computer in the nighttime. I’ve always been able to sit for a long time and not get bored or get fidgety. So I was still enough for him to forget me while he sat with all the lights out, glowing in the blue like baby Jesus in the manger.

Jimmy in front of the computer screen was like me in front of a magazine rack. I told him that once, but when he was watching the computer he hardly heard a thing.

He said the computer was how he was getting out. I didn’t ask him what he was getting out of because some things you get out of but you don’t have to move, like owing money. Other things I didn’t want to think about at the time.

There were all sorts of educational programs. When I first moved in he was mostly looking at meat-processing sites. They’d give him ideas about how to be a better butcher. I couldn’t hardly look at the stuff. All the details of animals strung up by their back feet or thrown into a crate by their legs in the case of chickens was better left to professionals, if you ask me. He agreed it took time to get a stomach for the work. And maybe not everyone can handle it. But if you can, it can become a favorite