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Stacia L. Brown

  • Delusions and Candor.

    December 6th, 2008

    You are no flea in petrified amber, no exoskeleton for the world to fossilize. You are not the serendipitous cadaver whose arrival on a research slab will result in the healing of cancers. You are merely a woman of twenty-nine years. If you go, there are few who will mourn you. There will be Marcheline and there will be Hadley, whose eyes will, at first, bubble over like hot springs ever time the number nine is mentioned. Then, over time, even they will only remember to weep for you as they push their fingers into pie crusts and recall your fondness for doughy fruit cobblers.

    Your lover will suddenly realize how desperately he wishes to marry, despite the eight vowless years you spent coaxing him toward that commitment, and four months after your burial, he will make some 22-year-old virgin from an AME church his wife. They will have the two sandy-skinned children with coarse, copper hair you’d hoped for. Cumin-colored freckles will cover their angular cheekbones, and one day, while they surreptitiously rummage through the box their father keeps tucked in the attic, their fingers will flutter over the scrapbook cellophane protecting the only photograph of you that he’s kept. For days thereafter, they will wonder who you were, but they will fear their father’s mercurial moods too much to investigate.

    Your own father will drink vodka until it renders what’s left of his recollection sterile. He will not allow himself the sobriety required to mourn you, but occasionally, he will find himself plumbing the vestiges, after dementia has scooped out the meatier parts of his memory like a melon-baller. Before long, you will receive word of his arrival in a district adjacent to your own, and when you meet again, you will be strangers.

    But none of this should weigh upon your decision to return to Marcheline or to Hadley, to your lover or to your father. None of this has much bearing at all. The illness was congenital. That you would one day find yourself overexerted, then tumble balletically into unconsciousness was inevitable. But the myriad comforts you’ve discovered in this comatose state were not intended. And some day quite soon, you will be forced to emerge, either with open eyes and independent breaths or divorcing from eyes and becoming breath itself.

  • The Store.

    November 24th, 2008

    Jesus works a series of doubles at the only checkout counter that’s ever open, the one where the flickering globular light overhead seems ever in need of repair. Jesus is just over six feet tall, making the long, burgundy, pocketed smock he wears seem prominent and absurd. The smock is unmarked, as are the paper and plastic bags hanging from a revolving corral no higher than his hip, nameless, as is the off-white awning that arches over the entrance.

    Under the smock, he is customarily clad in jeans, fraying at the hems, and a white linen shirt with loose stitching. He seems to have a vast array of white linen shirts with loose stitching. His hair, a thick, dusky mass of loose curls about six inches long, is held away from his olive-skinned face by an athletic sweatband. He has the kind of toes one would imagine, long and slender, with sand in the crevices of the nail beds. His footwear tends to vary, within the narrow range of huaraches and flip-flops and Birks. His eyes are an unremarkable brown, but his lips are exquisitely full. He has the nimble, four-inch fingers of a basketball player and Nine has grown to love watching him, as he keys in esoteric codes on the cash register touch screen.

    Today is like the others. She, untethered from the trappings of consciousness, finds herself unceremoniously present with no recollection of arrival. Soon, she will materialize in some other holding cell, perhaps among an unusually vivid array of memories or in a dark corridor amplified with self-narration. And when she does leave Jesus’s curious company, it’s unlikely she’ll recall how she exited.

    Until then, here she is, wanly pushing her empty cart, allowing herself to be zigged about by its rickety front wheels.

    Jesus spritzes the conveyor belt with Windex before pushing a cloth in circular patterns across it. After watching it streaklessly dry, he folds the damp cloth and tosses it into a bin below the counter.

    Like ivy along old brick, an inexorable pity creeps all over Nine. “This store is a front, isn’t it,” she whispers, more to herself than to Jesus, who chooses to ignore her, as is sometimes his wont.

    He leans against the cash drawer, slinging one long leg in front of the other before folding his arms over his broad chest and lifting his wrist to aim the tiny remote control in his hand at the black and white surveillance monitors dangling over the automatic sliding doors.

    It must be awful, Nine muses, to have to hang out in the abandoned recesses of someone else’s body, waiting for decisions to be made. She watches Jesus yawn, and there’s something endearing about the oval his lips form and the satisfied little sigh that escapes his throat.

    He’s as stuck here as she is.

  • Do Disturb.

    November 12th, 2008

    Contrary to her family’s expectations, Nine had made herself at home in the sterile, freakish underworld of St. Mary’s Hospital. She liked the crinkle of the accordion tubing and sacks that wheezed and sighed as often as she did. The rubbery footfalls of the nurses and the snatches of their gossip and gripes she’d gathered since her arrival provided a great distraction from the constant cinema flickering inside the dark cavern her brain had become. Nine also enjoyed the metal clack of her chart whenever the doctor opened it, the perfunctory snap of the occasional latex glove, and the understanding that, ever so often, needles and chutes were curled into her veins like crochet needles, eliciting a pain that would be excruciating if she were still able to feel it. While, for others, the constant drip of saline may have seemed ominous, she rather relished the music the liquid created. And the warm sponges squeezed into basins beside her daily reminded her of a woodland stream and, by extension, she often imagined a red-cloaked heroine in the Hans Christian Andersen tradition, foolishly courageous, skipping through a slalom of tall, barren trees.

    But there were also sensations she did not favor. She did not, for instance, enjoy the company of visitors and willfully closed her ears to their nervous chatter. She did not like their nostrils and the suddenness with which they honked or slurped back snot. She detested the soggy, germ-soaked Kleenex they left to harden in her only wastebasket. She did not like the smell of the carnations they left behind, once the water grew murky and the velvety petals browned. And there were other agitations, far less superficial and more alarming than these others: the strange awareness that preceded her heart’s intent to stop; the sizzle of defibrillator panels as they shot electricity through her greasy skin; the jolt of expectation to open her eyes when her sluggish heartbeat reluctantly returned; the firmness of her boyfriend’s touch, waning with each increasingly infrequent visit.

    These were the occurrences that reminded her. There are decisions to be made, came a voice over the PA system of her subconscious. The store is closing.

  • Retracing.

    October 31st, 2008

    Work backward. Think of the moment they married, between the 8 and 11 o’clock services at your church on that July Sunday when you were ten. Think of the accordion partition, cordoning off their nuptials from the simultaneous Youth, Singles, and General Sunday School classes being held in various other sections of the sanctuary. Think of iridescent streamers that should’ve been there, descending from the walls in curling tendrils, or the tiny votive candles with their wavering yellow-orange flames, or the delicate boxes of cherry cordials offered as party favors. Pity that you had to dream them. Pity that they were whipped from the same imaginative froth that conjured unicorns, castles, and faeries to fill all your lonely spaces. Think of the eleven or so guests–three of whom you did not recognize–gawking at the vow exchange like a side-ring act at the circus.

    Remember that you felt pretty. Your hair had been hot-combed for the occasion and wrangled into a menagerie of rubberbands, twisted into a series of puffy little ropes. You could hear the plastic pink barrettes at the ends clacking gently whenever you turned your head. You were turning your head all day, eager to hear all the overlapping grown folks’ conversations. Like a chorus in the round, there were toasts and traditions and whispers of lingerie.

    There were no warnings.

    Consider the pomp and the tumult: the non-alcoholic champagne for toasting; your grandmother’s ex-boyfriend, pitching his lilting baritone above the din of clinking glasses; your mother’s cavernous absence, once as she absconds to Centennial Lake for wedding photographs, then later, as night falls and her new husband whisks her off to Delaware.

    Who honeymoons in Delaware? You should have noted that. You should have recognized forboding when you felt it.

    Recall how unaccustomed you still were then, to the tenor of your stepfather’s accent, how it still reminded you of coconut and calypso. Because you were young, you were full of stereotypes. Because you were young, you knew nothing of Jamaicans you hadn’t gleaned while watching the “Hey, Mon!” skits on In Living Color. Because you were young, you thought brown skin meant common culture, that Black Americans and Black Jamaicans understood one another. You did not know that patois was not language, but lifestyle.

    But you mustn’t drift into the lofty.

    Think of the Peptol pink of your dress and how you grinned and you grinned and you grinned. Think of the navy blue suit worn by your best friend in the world, a boy (named Kenya). Note now, as you never could have then, that he was your insulation. He, of the goofy faces and marathon games of tag, he whose single-mother upbringing left him mannered and intuitive and kind. He, who encouraged you to forget what you were getting into and allowed you a well-deserved respite from all your tiring precocity. You would love him, long before you understood why and long after he disappeared.

    Pull the recollections around you like an electric blanket. Pull, until you’re so uncomfortable that you smother and wriggle and sweat. Pull until you have no choice but to let go.

    Only then will it become apparent that when they were pronounced man and wife, you called him Dad because your own father was missing. In those days, you uttered the word with abandon. You uttered, unaware of what would come: the ten-year litany of accusations; your volleying waltz across their marital chessboard; your mother’s cavernous absence.

  • Dejame.

    October 21st, 2008

    Nine was born Ninah Jude Brown in a cold single-bed room at Sparrow Hospital. It was 1979 in Lansing, Michigan, which meant that the White nurses were merciless in their “care” for her unmarried mother, Marcheline, as she writhed and shook her legs at the sheets like they were puppies nipping her ankles. These angels of mercy in their trapezoidal bonnets and bobby socks pursed their lips disapprovingly at Marcheline’s bare ring finger. Knowing there’d be no hovering husband to complain on her behalf, they refused her a cold compress as sweat poured from her feverish forehead, denied her ice chips when her lips cracked and her tongue went coarse, and would not hold her hand as her uterus contracted, for fear that the melanin would rub off.

    In her epidural haze, she even thought she heard one of them tsk, “When will these nigger-girls ever learn?” Months later, Marcheline would rather absently repeat this to her mother, who stood several feet away, pushing pureed carrots beyond Nine’s puckered lips. Her back turned, Marcheline would fail to notice how her words bolted up her mother’s spine and rocked her for a moment, right where she stood, baby spoon suspended just out of Nine’s reach. Then came the tremble with unspeakable anger at her own hospital ward tale, wherein the nurses weren’t White but were just as full as vitriol and there was no sweet anesthetic to muffle their judgmental asides. Just as Nine would begin her hungry whimpers, her grandmother would emerge from her swoon of recollection and Marcheline would rush away from the bathroom mirror with makeup impeccably applied and race for the honking car downstairs in a sweater dress seemingly designed to make her date forget her new motherhood.

    (more…)

  • Nine.

    October 16th, 2008

    Nine had always found the house on Joshua Tree Court dystopian. The entire community, lined with imported saplings and prefabricated town-homes, felt like something shiny the leaders of a New World would build after decimating every person, place, or thing that came before them. That the shutters were painted a pretty shade of purple was little consolation.

    While her parents were picking out cheap interior fixtures—railings that would become rickety within a year of wear; faucets that would soon lose water pressure; sinks that never seemed to drain right; and taupe-colored carpeting that would mottle within months–Nine wistfully imagined her family back in their two-bedroom apartment across town, where the high school she’d attended for the past three years was just two streets away and her semi-estranged grandmother lived in a building one block over.

    After her family settled in, Nine’s stepfather, Paul, who she’d been inexplicably calling “Dad” since she was ten years old, planted star-gazing lilies in the tiny front yard, because they were her mother’s favorite flower. This also did little to hearten Nine, who felt a prickling heat crawl up her arms, like a warm-legged troupe of invisible tarantulas, for the entire first year that they lived there.

    “Dis child so insolent she doan know a good ting when she see it,” Paul lamented, watching Nine drift sullenly from room to room of their new home, openly, if silently, pined for the days before he was a part of her family. “In time she come to realize what she have.”

    But Nine’s uneasiness persisted, as did the idea that she was living in some alternate world, where dread numbed emotion better than Icy Hot.

    (more…)

  • I Hated “Lakeview Terrace.”

    October 2nd, 2008

    I really did. If you want to find out a bit more about why, check out my review over at PostBourgie.com:

    I should probably tell you right now that this movie isn’t about Abel Turner. It isn’t about Lisa. And it certainly isn’t about Ron Glass, who phones in a few scenes as her father, Harold Perreau.

    In fact, this film treats all of its Black cast as tertiary in order to reveal its true intent.

    This is a film about how hard it is to be a White man married to a Black woman.

    It gets better. Read on.

  • Update.

    September 6th, 2008

    You know that memoir I was writing? Well, it was roundly rejected by my agent. So I’m not sure what I’m doing with it at this point, besides shelfing it. But if you read this blog, and you’re interested in reading more of excerpts from it, let me know. It would do my heart good to know somebody, somewhere is reading the content of this book I spent the last year writing. Should I choose to revise, it’s likely the stuff in there won’t resemble the stuff you’d be reading here.

    In other news, the Fall ’08 Semester is well underway. I’m three weeks in at two of my three colleges, and about to start a second week at the third. Y’all, I’m teaching a LOT of kids/continuing ed folks. It’s kind of unreal and deeply overwhelming… so I try not to think about it when I don’t have to.

    That said, whenever I’m incredibly busy, I wind up writing more. When I’ve got nothing to do but write (i.e. the last four months/summer break), I slack and slack and travel and slack and my productivity really slows. So it’s likely you’ll be seeing some new material here soon.

    I wish I had more to report, wish there were some publications in the offing, wish I were being a Writer rather than an Adjunct alone, but this adjunct thing is really strengthening my people skills in ways I just wouldn’t have been able to anticipate otherwise.

    So there’s that.

    Also, if you go down to my category links and click “Faith” (where the memoir excerpts are), you’ll find that I’m tentatively working on a Jesus People Movement biography. And I do mean tentatively. So if you know anyone who was a part of that movement, I’d love to talk to him/her.

    Happy Autumn, keep reading Postbourgie.com, and I’ll get back at you later!

  • The Tao of Don.

    September 5th, 2008

    Watch me weigh in on the career trajectory of the illustrious Don Cheadle over at PostBourgie.com:

    It’s kind of interesting to note that Cheadle recently told the Detroit Free Press that he’d like to do a big, lighthearted comedy with no sociopolitical underpinnings. Whether or not anyone will cast him in one remains to be seen, although we can’t imagine it’d be too big a stretch for a studio to envision him in a comic role. A director need only dust off some old footage of Cheadle in that now-classic Fresh Prince ep where he guested as Hillary’s erstwhile love and Will’s loose cannon “friend from the hood,” Ice Tray.

  • Blacks and the Jesus People Movement.

    August 24th, 2008

    Image from http://www.hollywoodfreepaper.org.

    Greetings All!

    I’m working on a biography featuring African Americans who were integrally involved in the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and ’70s.

    History has long suggested that African American involvement in the Movement was minimal; however the
    music of artists like Andrae Crouch and Leon Patillo, as well as the story of South Chicago’s New Life Community (and its eventual fusion with Jesus People USA) suggest otherwise. The biography will focus on the pop cultural contributions; the unique challenges and triumphs; and the subsequent spiritual journeys
    of African American “Jesus People.”

    Current Jesus People USA members and former participants in the Movement who’d like to be interviewed for this book project should contact me here (in the comments section).

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