The Seventh Queen, In Waiting: The Creole Woman, the treasure of some, the prey of others.

By G. A. Haley

This novel covers the quiet traumas some women mend in silence. When society looks at them, they see beauty, intelligence, maybe even grace. What isn't shown on their faces are the wounds that love, life, and betrayal can leave. Lacerations that permeate the skin and coil around the heart and soul of the prey. The saying, "Show me a bea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arts of Avea Publishing
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781087951591

G. A. Haley

G. A. Haley, a visionary, composer, and author brings her southern upbringing and lust for travel to this story of one young woman's desperate journey to escape the confines of her reality. A college dropout, Haley followed her own path to success that she found herself constantly redefining. Known for her quiet temperment, tenacity and talent, she tediously began the process of showing the world her gifts.

Book preview

Prologue

How am I going to face her family? I don’t even know what happened. This has been the worst week of my life, and traveling to New Orleans, LA all the way from Berlin has been exhausting. My soul is exhausted, and flying commercial makes it twenty-times worse. I usually like traveling this way, but I hear her voice in strangers. I smell the honey and lilac scent of her hair and turn to look, and it’s never her. Somehow those letdowns are more than I can bear. She was supposed to be here next to me but leaving from Budapest. I cancelled our flight and booked another, for myself, to leave a few days later.

Three and a half months ago, I met the woman of my dreams. And now that I replay all of what’s happened and what she told me, Was there something I missed? She disappeared. Her family, authorities, and I have been trying to discover where she might have gone to. If she’s okay. No surveillance being available I can get my hands on is beyond frustrating. It’s gut-wrenching to say the least. Yet, I have hope.

It didn’t take long to realize that no one truly knew how to track Nicole down. Her life is so private that even her close circle of people, who know her, don’t know where she vanishes to frequently. She’s the only in her immediate family with a passport and knowledge of other countries. I’ve learned she’s always been hard to read, and tedious to locate. ‘Always has been that way.’ her mother, Angela, said twice on our last call before I departed Tegel Airport in Berlin, headed to her, towards America. Adding that she’s had to report Nicole missing a couple times as a child.

We should be descending in thirty minutes or so, and I cannot help replay that morning in my head.

Two days ago, I woke up to a groggy migraine. In the dark, for a few minutes, I didn’t know where I was. Once I couldn’t feel my phone, to use it’s flash, I saw that sliver of light under the bottom of the door. I must’ve jumped toward it, probably more like fell out of it. I was still in Ron’s basement studio. I kept wondering, Where are they?. It was the weirdest feeling. Something was majorly off.

I found Ron asleep in his leased home’s master bedroom, a huge narcissistic display of his ego. He picked homes that were extravagant to say the least. I stood there for a minute and watched him. Picked up one of his tennis shoes and threw it to the corner of the room to wake him up. He quickly sat up and glared at me.

I asked, Where is Nicole? still feeling cloudy and nauseous.

He was on his feet quickly, yelling, How the fuck should I know where your woman is?!

I tried to knock his head off his shoulders. Had it not been for Clifane pulling me off of him, maybe I would have killed him. I should have.

The last I saw of my fiancé was with all of us in his basement studio. I must’ve drank too much because I passed out. Only to awaken in pitch black.

I brought Nicole to Budapest to meet Ron. I wanted her to use her talent of music professionally. Ron is well-known internationally, and my closest friend. I knew him for years and tried to surprise both of them by bringing them together. I wanted him to help connect her to his people. The music industry is notoriously cutthroat and I needed to protect her. Now she was nowhere to be found. I failed her.

I left that morning by car service after searching Ron’s entire house and basement like a maniac. All the while he talked shit from the second level. Telling me repeatedly that She probably came to her senses and left you, Z. We’re bros above everything!. That he’d slept and never returned to the basement because me and her were in there. Even while I hollered for him to Shut up!!!, in the back of my mind I hoped he wasn’t right. Nicole had told me prior that she runs from relationships, especially when her feelings got involved. I thought she and I had moved passed that possibility.

I can’t shake the feeling that something else happened. Why was I so foggy when I woke up? Why wouldn’t she say anything? Why would she leave while we were in Hungary? None of it made sense. None of it.

Ron was behind this, I felt it. I just needed to find her first and then I’d deal with him later. I can’t accuse him of something I can only feel and not prove.

I flew back to Berlin after stopping at my Budapest timeshare where our luggage was, retraced our route we took to Ron’s, and still nothing. All of her clothes were still at the condo, the way we’d left it a few days before. I finally broke down and cried so hard sitting on my bed. I haven’t felt right since waking up that morning. Why would she leave like this?, I thought. I planned to spend my life with her and she just ghosted me, in the worst way. After everything? After meeting my family.

I had to have left her a couple dozen voicemails. Hundreds of texts. I know her phone is active because it goes straight to voicemail sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t. At least I hope it’s that and not just other calls interrupting my attempts.

I initially called The United States Embassy in Hungary, then Germany. Neither releasing knowledge of whether she’d taken a flight or not. Only advised to report her missing. They couldn’t even ping her cell because of some confusing rule I could barely understand.

Tried to crack open her email but couldn’t figure out the password. She was gone. I was helpless and triggered.

The flight attendant announced that we’d be landing momentarily, and my mind snapped back to the present. Heart started racing, palms sweating and somewhat blue from rubbing them on my jeans out of anxiousness.

I looked out of the window as we hit the tarmac. Descending over swamps, rivers, and lakes I could smell the difference of the city even through the plane’s vents. Once I’d gotten my carry-on bag from the overhead, I was enveloped by the humidity of the city wafting through the tunnel from aircraft to gate.

For a moment I felt like I blended in, once the flight’s departing crowd dissipated in different directions. I was left with my thoughts and the text from Nicole’s mother, telling me she had arrived and parked, and to meet her at gate one’s passenger pick-up.

It was as if I was walking into the lion’s den. I feel like I’d felt the day my cousin was murdered.

How is this my life? repeated in my mind with each step to what felt like my impending doom.

CHAPTER 1

The Seventh Queen, In Waiting

In the United States of America, the government promotes itself as the world’s leader. They are pioneers in the arts and culture. It offers the dream of being Who you want to be? and the profit from it. What they call significantly small money stretches extremely far for those less fortunate, even the less fortunate within their American borders. For immigrants and citizens, opportunities are not equal.

The dream so many flock to North America to attain is specifically designed to keep out the initially captive and disregarded people, the Africans.

Historically, six of the seven continents thought less of the people of Africa. Even with their beautiful, white-to-dark chocolate skin, touching every shade in between, African Americans were minimized, targeted, and dehumanized. Having their identities and heritage erased and replaced with pastel and olive complexions, even within stories originating in the world’s second-largest continent, perceived beauty was shined most upon in lighter hues.

In time, deep and horrendous trauma destroyed the Black American family. Each descendant feels some degree of the effects of slavery, reaching back four hundred years. The poison diluted through the generations, finding masked ways of hiding in plain sight. The cruel and rotten stench is still interwoven into everyday tragedies well into the twenty-first century.

A culture of African descendants inevitably developed and grew into something different entirely. French and Spaniard men who settled onto the soil of Louisiana mixed their genealogy with the women of Native American and Mulatto backgrounds, birthing Creole lineage.

It is also a well-known fact that the men and women of one nation deeply desire black bodies. Though those drenched in melanin hate to admit some mutual attraction was and is present, Black Americans adapted. The newly born subculture of fair-skinned, exotic-looking blacks was placed by society in the center of the racial divide.

Adopting many of the treacherous ways of enslavers, most notably divisive tactics and degradation, our modern-day black men and women did more damage to their own than any other demographic combined.

The cyclical depreciation of a Louisiana Creole woman, the treasure of many, the prey of others.

Nicole’s father had many demons. They kept him away from her after the age of five. Her mother, Angela, left him for her sanity. Angela had that same tone when telling those stories about her ex-husband, Nicole’s father, and why she disliked him, Nicole’s ex, Terrell. It was the pauses and quiet certainty; mothers know.

It was a constant for Nicole, tallying steps toward her goals. Her mind could take apart anything, dissect it, and put it back together like puzzle pieces. She craved stimulation. Everyone around her felt separate, only concerned with themselves. Struggling to find meaning in life, she fixated on things. She thought if she were in another country, maybe she’d be embraced. She felt more appreciated over there.

She would lie if asked whether she was co-dependent or not, knowing she couldn’t tell anyone she was. Nicole, her mother, and stepfather moved back to New Orleans in August of twenty-seventeen, just months after returning from her first international trip. She felt compelled to get her mother back to their hometown. After much persuading, Angela agreed, and her husband Jared was also satisfied with the idea.

With teamwork, Nicole, Angela, and Jared packed up their home and belongings. Shipping everything but two weeks’ worth of clothing, all three made the two-day trek from Las Vegas, Nevada, to New Orleans, Louisiana. All while avoiding Hurricane Harvey, which was soon about to ravage Houston, Texas.

At the Welcome Back Home party, her aunt Mia casually told Nicole, A woman will only experience unconditional love from and for her own children. Nicole nodded in belief, hearing that sentence repeat in her mind for the rest of the night. Stirring up old feelings Nicole hid so well.

Not a soul knew Nicole had made motherhood her goal as a young girl; desperate and confident, she needed that type of love. The kind of love her aunt had just put a name to. She intentionally tried to get pregnant a few times in her early twenties but to no avail.

Nicole sat nervously but excitedly, filled with possibilities two weeks after the party. Aware that her long-time irregular cycle might have complicated things, she waited patiently to be called for her follow-up appointment with Dr. Gautier, her new Ob-Gyn, a heavier-set, sweet Creole woman and native to New Orleans.

Dr. Gautier caught Nicole before she blacked out in her office after delivering life-altering news.

New Orleans, 2018

The city moved with its usual signature slowness on a chilly Friday morning, a week and a day from the first day of winter. The lines of poverty and wealth blurred with no complaints from anyone. The birthplace of Creole cuisine, soft and melodic jazz, and spiritual mystique annually drew in thousands of curious souls and fools.

A red brick building covered in vines sat two blocks east of Canal Street, the main artery in the city that over three hundred and ninety thousand people called home.

Recording on video, alone in her living room, Nicole spoke slowly and confidently, Hi, I am Nicole Lockett, from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Spending my early years here exposed me to a deep and rich culture that has played a major part in who I’ve become, even when I traveled to and settled in other places throughout my life.

From the music to the food, to the people, it’s different from anywhere else. I’ve traveled to a few foreign places and major cities in the United States and nowhere compares. Yes, some places may be nicer, have cleaner streets and less crime, but the good outweighs the bad.

Louisiana is separate in many ways. Within my own Creole culture, we originated here and touched every corner of this earth. There is a true, great pride of that in all I do.

She paused and thought on the second question, continuing, I feel a conflict every day of my existence. I straddle the fence between privileged and oppressed. Never quite enough of either blackness or lack thereof to be accepted. If I’m being truthful, it’s more my people I feel the most isolated from. I’m respected, but with conditions. I’ve learned to embrace that uniqueness, but it’s heavy. I still love my people the most. I would die for them. The nation has caused our deep divisions, so I hope awakening births renewal and reconciliation.

The world never wanted to give us credit for the beauty of our being. They wanted everything we have but not us, Black American women. I struggle with that knowledge sometimes. It’s like you can’t even dream of certain things when you’re a person like me. I don’t see a queen of any country from where I’m from that looks like me. Black women hate me because Black men like me merely for my skin complexion and hair texture. White women look down on me, while their counterparts fetishize me before they even know my name. It’s a struggle.

I never asked to be born but must’ve asked for these circumstances. I’m convinced that we agree on our missions before each reincarnation. Before entering this particular lifetime, I asked for these tests and tribulations. Without a better word, we are always connected to a supreme entity, God. It’s that thing that has always been present, every second of my life, that has protected me beyond measure, yet I don’t always trust it. Still, with trembling legs, I throw my weight forward and proceed. Sometimes, I get petrified only when I reflect on certain accomplishments or moments. Scared of myself, of my tenacity.

There is a Lioness inside of me that is so powerful she scolds me when I don’t obey her. Each time we, I, emerge on the other side.

I’m the perfect artist for this program because modern history shows that Africa had many queens. North America has had none. I’ve always felt that I was being prepared for some Queen-ship, she chuckled, continuing, or something like it. Since childhood, I have fantasized about being the Queen, waiting to be discovered and immortalized. Waiting to be valued and appreciated.

The number seven resonates with me. It is also the most spiritual numeric vibration. I noticed that there will only be seven artists in this experience.

I know I have an extraordinary story. Showcasing my art and my life through that art is the most important piece of my legacy. I’d love to participate in this project for those reasons and many more.

She hit the ‘stop’ button and paused, seated in the middle of her empty second room with high ceilings, tracing the edges of the notecards she wrote the interview questions on:

1. What was it like growing up in your hometown?

2. How do you feel about yourself in the world?

And 3. Why should we pick you to showcase your life through art?

She felt the questions were answered as she introduced herself and covered all the points. She watched and listened to the video playback. Ignoring her over-critical thoughts about her appearance, she settled on that take while she still had the nerve.

With a few clicks of her mouse, her video application and portfolio were sent to the instructed admissions email address; her heart pounded in her chest. She was inhaling, exhaling, inhaling deeper, releasing the fear. What is the worst that could happen? The question she asked herself when she needed an extra gut punch of courage.

It was eleven AM, and she needed to leave for work at