God's Will and Other Lies: Stories

By Penny Mickelbury

In this stunning departure from her mystery writing, Penny Mickelbury’s collection of stories God’s Will and Other Lies, attends to the lives of Black women, mostly aging and elderly, all determined to face life with strength and grace.

A nearly blind woman is determined to venture out into the world alone, and must fa

• Language: English
• Publisher: BLF Press LLC
• Release date: Mar 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578458861

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God’s Will and Other Lies

God’s Will and Other Lies

Penny Mickelbury

Clayton, NC

God’s Will and Other Lies: Stories Copyright © 2019 by Penny Mickelbury. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions at the address below.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2019

Cover Art: Mirlande Jean-Gilles

Cover Design: Lauren Curry

ISBN Print: 978-0-9972439-2-5

ISBN Ebook: 978-0-578-45886-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965512

BLF Press

PO Box 833

Clayton, NC 27528

www.blfpress.com

DEDICATION

This collection is dedicated with gratitude to some wonderful people who have supported me since my first book was published—and it is dedicated to the memory of one of them:

PEARL G. SAMPSON 22 February 1925-21 March 2017 and the other original members of the Sisters Reading Sisters Book Club of Atlanta, GA, still going strong after 26 years: Renata Turner, Regina Roberts, Nikki Marr, Suzy Ockleberry, Geraldine Wynn, Barbara Whitener, Pearl Sampson Marian Clements.

June P. Murray

Angela Y. Reid

Marshall and Veronica Thomas

Arthur and Cynthia Mickelbury

Table of Contents

God’s Will and Other Lies

I Scream Red

Like Trying to Hold Rain

Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep

Freedom’s Train

When We All Wanted to Look Like Angela Davis

Scene from the Porch

Into the Fire

"Sticks and stones will break my bones,

words will break my heart.

And once its ripped and torn apart,

not glue, not gold can make it whole."

A Poem. By Me.

God’s Will and Other Lies

She'd been talked about for as long as she could recall and she could recall every moment of her life beginning that blazing hot July day when her mother left her at her grandmother's while she went to look for work. She was six then and because she knew that jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth—everybody always said so—she waited two years, until she was eight, for her mother to return. During those two years the talk that flowed around her was largely charitable, if condescending, without a single mention of hen’s teeth. They Said she was the poor baby whose no-count mother ran off to heaven knows where with some man or another; she was the little something lucky enough to have a saint for a grandmother. They Said she was a smart, well-mannered child, even if she was too dark to have such a light mother and grandmother. They Said they felt sorry for her. They Said they'd pray for her. They Said stopped being words and assumed shape and form and the ability to make her feel, without her understanding how or why, pitiful and inadequate. She didn't like that feeling. It was as dark as They Said she was. Dark and ugly. She asked her grandmother why she'd been abandoned. Her grandmother said it was God's will.

So at eight, she seized life by its wild and woolly mane with both hands, hopped on, and rode bare-back into that place called herself. She ran, jumped, rode, fought, climbed, swam, shot, skated, read, studied, learned, went to church and prayed. And got talked about with such dedication you’d have thought it was somebody’s paid job.. They Said she was too smart for her own good and too big for her britches. They Said she was not respectful enough of her elders and too familiar with people in general. They Said she spent too much time playing with the boys and that she played too rough with the girls. They Said her hair was nappy and she sure was dark and getting darker by the year. Who was her daddy, anyway? They Said didn’t know and she didn’t either, and by that time, she’d forgotten what her mother looked like though she could hear and recall clearly her mother’s voice wondering why she had to live in a butt-ugly town at the butt-end of nowhere.

At the end of her first year in high school she had the highest grades in her class, was a soloist in the school and church choirs, an anchor on the girls track team, treasurer-elect of the sophomore class, and a youth leader in the Bible study group at church. And she had no friends. She asked her grandmother why and her grandmother said it was God's will. They Said it was because she was so uppity. Always trying to be smarter and better at everything than everybody else. They Said she was trying to compensate for the fact that she was so dark and nappy-headed and without a father and with a mother who'd abandoned her.

They never said these things to her directly but she always heard or overheard what they said and it always hurt, even though her grandmother urged her to repeat sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me. But the words did hurt and her grandmother said it must be God’s will, because nothing happened that was not. Good or bad, if it happened, it was God’s will.

That’s how she knew it was God’s will that the family who moved in next door that summer at the end of her second year in high school had a boy her age who wanted to be her friend. That he didn't want to play hide-and-seek or kickball or king of the hill, that he didn't want to go to summer school or the library or to vacation Bible school, that he didn't go to church at all, that he didn't swim or dance or skate or have a bicycle, did not seem odd to her. What seemed odd was that he wanted to be her friend.

She was fat by Christmas and didn't understand why until the pain ripped her apart at Easter; and even when she looked at the baby girl for the first time and understood for the first time the why of the pain, she didn’t understand why or how the baby girl came to be within her. Her grandmother said it was God's will. They Said it was because of what they'd known all along: She was a ho’, just like her mama. They Said she ought to give the baby away. They Said she'd never be able to take care of the child. They Said she ought to have the decency to hang her head in shame instead of pushing that baby all over God's earth in that tacky little wagon—the baby carriage she'd created from an abandoned grocery store cart. But by that time, They Said had used up all her empty spaces so she'd stopped listening, stopped hearing. They hadn't stopped talking. They Said she'd never find work, being dark and uneducated and uppity as she was. She worked three jobs, six days a week, for six years, until her grandmother crossed over to the other side and left her the paid-for little house and a bigger bank account than should have been possible for a domestic. She was twenty-one years old and she had a six year old daughter.

By the time she entered her teens, the daughter and the mother were the same height and size and so much alike that it was difficult to determine where one began and the other ended. They talked, walked, looked alike, except, They Said, the daughter was light like her grandmothers, and had good hair like them. Everything they did, they did together, mother and daughter, daughter and mother. They shared every thought, every idea, every fear, every worry. They emptied their insides to each other and used what they found there to build around themselves a barrier of protection against They Said, and they still said plenty. The fortress held until the nurse-friend from the hospital where the mother worked began to visit ever more frequently. Then the nurse-friend began to spend the night on occasion. Then the nurse-friend moved in with the mother and daughter. They Said that was the last straw. They Said they wouldn't tolerate sin and disgrace. They Said unnatural acts were against the laws of God and man. They Said women like the nurse shouldn't be allowed to care for the sick. The wall of protection crumbled and fell and the nurse moved to another town to work at another hospital and the mother and daughter doubted whether they had left enough material to build a new wall. The mother wondered whether God had willed the loss of the nurse. The daughter wondered why God cared that the nurse loved her mother since He didn't. They Said wasn't it a shame that all three women—nurse and mother and daughter—wore their hair in those nappy, nasty braids they never combed? Dred-something. Dread is right, They Said.

When she was fifteen, the daughter was raped by the minister's son inside the girls' locker room at the high school where she earned extra money by cleaning up after school. Two boys held her down behind the lockers and the minister's son raped her. They decided together, mother and daughter, to keep the crime a secret because neither had sufficient strength to withstand a They Said onslaught. And when the daughter missed two menstrual cycles they decided together to terminate the pregnancy, in small part because of what They Said would say, but in larger part because neither wanted the daughter to work three jobs, six days a week. And when something went wrong and the daughter bled to death in the mother's arms, They Said had so much to say and they said it so loudly that the noise reverberated off the empty walls of her soul for days. For weeks. For months. She didn't know how long. She went away, far out into the countryside, far enough away that there was no sound of things or people. She would have to silence They Said or she would explode. That's when she decided that either there was no God or that her grandmother and everybody else had lied about the things God willed. Nothing else would explain the loss of that precious gift that had been all the meaning in her life. Surely that was not God's will. It was easier to believe that there was no God than to believe that He could will such despair. So, if there was no God, there was no reason for her not to exact retribution. If, however, it happened that there was a God, she convinced herself that He would graciously share with her His claim to vengeance.

Prison was not at all an unpleasant experience. She got eight hours of sleep every night, three meals every day, regular exercise, twice weekly library visits where she read everything on paper and experimented with writing poetry, and she only had to work twenty hours a week, first in the laundry and then in the cafeteria. She hadn't had it so good since before her daughter came. She learned she also would, while in prison, be able to finish high school and begin college.

The women who ran the prison and the library and the cafeteria thought she was a model prisoner and wanted to recommend her for early release. The prison psychiatrist wasn’t so sure about that. Hadn’t they noticed, the psychiatrist asked, that the prisoner never smiled? So what, the women who supervised daily life and work in the prison said? She was pleasant and polite and she worked harder than everybody else. It’s not normal, the psychiatrist said, and demanded time and time again, every visit, to know why the prisoner didn’t ever smile, until finally she gave the doctor and answer: Because, she said, that part of my face is broken. The part that makes smiles is broken. After that she had to talk to the psychiatrist twice a week, which she didn’t mind, though she didn’t understand why. She knew the reason for the original once a week sessions and that knowledge almost made her broken face smile: It was because the judge found out that she was a crack shot and could easily have killed the boy instead of merely guaranteeing that he would never again do to another girl what he'd done to her daughter. She had aimed the gun at his heart but lowered it when she saw the fear in his eyes. She wanted him to live forever with that fear. She wanted him to live forever with the memory of her daughter. She wanted him to live forever with everything They Said ringing in his ears because by now They Said knew what he had done and what he would never do again and they had plenty to say about him. The judge called that depraved indifference. She called it God's will.

I Scream Red

I am one of the oldest somebodies I know so who’s to tell me I can or can’t do a thing?

Miss Nellie McDowell spoke aloud as she hustled her eighty-eight-year old self down the hallway, her crepe-soled feet practically silent on the highly polished and gleaming wood. Mama and Papa are long gone, and I’m not related to anybody in here. Her cane was tucked securely under her left arm, from the crook of which dangled her everyday black leather purse and her Macy’s shopping bag. She was guiding and supporting and propelling herself forward by grasping, with her right hand, the worn-smooth wooden railing that lined all the walls of the building, walls that heard everything but revealed nothing.

Nellie’s verbalized thoughts provided as much support and propulsion as the polished wood rail. She’d started talking out loud to herself four years ago when her best friend, Virginia Perry, died in her sleep in the room right next door. Virginia had moved in here after her husband died and to escape what she considered her children’s meddling. I know they’re just showing their concern and I appreciate it, but some of what they want to know is none of their beeswax. Nellie had moved in, too, since she had neither husband nor children and no reason to continue living alone in her family home. After Virginia died Nellie felt there no longer was anybody to share conversation with, so she adopted the habit of out-loud self-conversation: She talked to herself and she listened to herself, and that was enough conversation for her. Too bad the people who ran the place didn’t get the message.

There aren’t but about 75 million young people in the country and it seems like half of them spend their time telling me what to do. Millennials they call themselves. Pains in booty I call them. Suppose we told them what to do? It would be wasted breath because they ignore us even when we’re not talking to them. Nellie turned right at the glass-enclosed breezeway that joined the two buildings and stopped to catch her breath. Talking while quick-stepping used too much breath and if she wanted to reach the safety of her room without being seen, she needed every bit of the breath her now-tired lungs could provide, and they seemed to grow more tired every day along with her eyes and her memory, though the doctor didn’t know about the memory. Not yet. She had to have some part of herself that still was hers.

She had reached the half-way point in her return home from her defiant outing, and while she still insisted to herself that she was old enough to go out shopping if wanted to, it was better if she could return unseen, thereby sparing both management and herself any upset. She could go from here blindfolded: Through the door, down the length of the breezeway, turn left, six steps to the elevator, then ride to the sixth floor, and home to her own little room. They called it a suite, sometimes an apartment, but it was a room. Larger and nicer, perhaps, than a conventional nursing home room, but it was not (to her mind) an apartment or a suite. It was a room, though furnished with her own belongings: a pretty little flowered love seat and her favorite reclining chair and the larger of her Chinese rugs with one of the matching Empire tables at one end, and her mother’s brass