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Stacia L. Brown

  • Baptism

    July 27th, 2008

    She didn’t know there was a man in the lighthouse. When she peeled off her white halter, wiggled out of a denim mini, and slipped flat, straw sandals from her feet, Kylie Stevens didn’t know she was being watched. The descent to shore was long and familiar. Her heels and toes slid along the steep sand drifts, leaving behind broad grooves instead of scattered footprints.

    It was by those wide swaths that the watchman led two coroners down the beach hours later. And it was from that shore that four local news affiliates interviewed them  the next morning, crediting them with finding the body of former child star, Kylie Stevens. Her trademark blonde tresses were splayed and limp like wheat after rain. Seaweed tangled itself around her neck and ankles. The more highbrow reporters referenced Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot. The more sensational ones spared cultural reference in favor of overblown coroner’s photos and jarring headlines like, “Once-Beloved Star Takes Own Life.” The watchman was on record as saying it was a “definite suicide,” because he’d seen her with his own two eyes, and she walked straight out there, naked, like she was sure she could walk on water, and no matter how high the waves rose around her, she kept on, not even bothering to swim. She just… walked until she was under. When he saw that she wasn’t bobbing back to the surface, that she wasn’t kicking or splashing or flailing, he rushed down the beach, stumbling the whole way. He dove in, but there was no light. He groped the circumference of water around him and came up empty. He would not see her again until he returned to the lighthouse.

    But what none of the people gathered at the ocean that day could have guessed was how fiercely she had, in fact, struggled. They couldn’t have known how salvageable a bad life appears as one’s losing it or the mystic despair that rises behind the breasts in those overlong minutes before the lungs decide to burst. She’d walked in of her own will, just as the watchman said. But in the time it took him to tumble down from his vantage, no one was there to see her but the spirits she’d only half-believed real, those unseen devils and angels that scholars labor to disprove and theologians insist are there, dispatched by heaven or hell to engage in a celestial tug-of-war for men’s souls. Kylie herself had nodded through many a sermon declaring the existence of unseen forces, but her agreement was superficial, never taking root between benedictions and wholly informed by her arduous, clumsy infatuation with the married man preaching these sermons.

    That was years ago. An uncrossable chasm had widened between her and those flowery beliefs since then. She wanted no more of the fear that accompanied those churchy convictions. Nothing was out there, battling for her soul. She’d been certain enough of that to walk under the waves and sit cross-legged in the shallows and her confidence strengthened as she sat there, eyes closed, mind crystalline. There were few things so simple as suicide, a quiet passage into the larger nothing. She’d watched enough of herself. It was time to tune out. “This is what happens when you never emerge from baptism,” she thought. “This is how it is when they push you under and just… let you go.”

  • The Struggle.

    July 24th, 2008

    “Rams.”

    “What?”

    “Give me five dollars.”

    “For what?”

    “For the struggle.”

    “Whose struggle?”

    “The Original Asiatic Black Man’s. The fatherless children of political prisoners’. The Brothers and Sisters in the Movement. Don’t ask me which Movement. Take your pick.”

    “Whatever, nigga. I ain’t loanin’ you shit. You never pay back.”

    “I ain’t ask for no loan. I said, ‘Give me five dollars.’”

    He jousted his elbow into her ribs. They laughed and things were light between them for a minute. Then he turned to face her.

    “You know I’d give you anything you ask for, right? The head of the last nigga who did you wrong, the earrings of whatever girl tormented you in high school… with the lobes still attached…”

    Ramsey’s macabre edge never let her forget he’d been raised by addicts. His loyalty was fiercer than warranted, and his threats, however dark, were never idle. She was relieved he had so few friends. Were there more, he’d likely be doing a bid for one of them right now.

    “You know, right?” His eyes bored into her forehead, like he was testing out his telekinesis.

    She shrugged and hopped off the wall.

    “When’s the last time you seen your Pops? I been lookin’ for him.”

    “If you find him, hook me up with his coordinates. His ass been off the grid.”

    “Been that long, huh?”

    “When he’s on that stuff, he’s damn near unrecognizable. I be seein’ this saucer-eyed bum wanderin’-mostly ‘round Edmondson-and it look like it might be him. But I never stop to make sure it is. To be honest, I don’t really wanna know.”

    Akousa felt incredibly sad when he said that, sad and suddenly grateful that her own Dad was the super-suspicious freak that he was. He wouldn’t even smoke grass unless he’d grown it himself. He wouldn’t have touched crack with a pole. Still, a slight shift in circumstance and they both could’ve been sitting there, commiserating the loss of their Revolutionary Deadbeat Dads.

    “I’m sorry, Rams.”

    He shrugged and even under a forest of facial hair, she saw the boyish helplessness settling onto his face.

    “He always finds me when he gets cleaned up.”

    “So you’re pretty sure he’s relapsed, then? I just saw him last month. He looked clean.”

    “You know how long a month is for a junkie?”

    She reached out and pressed her palm to his cheek. His beard was a lot softer than she expected, and she recoiled.

    “What do you want with him, anyway?”

    She thought his voice sounded a little hard, but she couldn’t place why. It was her turn to shrug again. “Somethin’ I wanna ask him.”

    He looked like he wanted her to go on, but he didn’t say anything. He just stared at her until she expected him to lean down and kiss her, until she discovered she was disappointed that he didn’t. “Anyway,” she said, backing away from him, “If you see him again soon, tell him I want to talk to him, cleaned up or not.”

    Ramsey nodded and pushed a keychain button to disarm his car alarm.

  • PostBourgie on Omar Tyree’s Retirement.

    July 1st, 2008

    Check out my piece on “Street Lit pioneer” Omar Tyree’s absurd open letter of retirement over at PostBourgie:

    A few things strike us as eyebrow-raising about this opening paragraph of Tyree’s open letter to both his loyal reading audience and the retailers who’ve been primarily responsible for the sale of 1.5 million copies of fifteen of his arguably mediocre serviceable books.

    Tyree is insulting his readership by assuming that, because his readers complained about the content/quality of the fourteen books following his first two, they’re unwilling or unable to “develop a liking for fresh material.” Dude, you just admitted to writing sixteen novels in the “urban fiction game.” How can you gauge what other kinds of material audiences may prefer, when you’ve deepened the ridges of your own one-track rut for close to two decades now?

    Read the rest here.

  • Update.

    June 30th, 2008

    I completed a draft of my manuscript today (!) and will be submitting it to the person I hope will become my agent (!!) this afternoon.

    Now that the memoir’s out of my hands for a while, I probably won’t be posting any more excerpts from it. I’ll keep you posted on its progress.

    Be on the look out for more PostBourgie updates and excerpts from the novel which will now have my attention for the balance of summer.

    That said, I would like to continue our discourse on faith (or the lack thereof), so keep posting comments to the four excerpts in the archives, and I’ll try to address our dialogue in entries exclusively available on this blog.

    Best,

    s.

  • “Prodigal”

    June 30th, 2008

    I do not believe I am prodigal. To proclaim me as such would mean assuming that I left the churches I attended or questioned my beliefs because I thought I knew better. You’d have to believe that I’m arrogant and need desperately to be humbled. You’d have to say that, even though I’ve asked Christ to redeem me, one or more of my actions thereafter have voided that redemption.

    Though I adore Jesus’ parable, I cannot say that I relate to the son who demanded an early inheritance and swaggered boastfully off to destroy himself. I am not penniless in a pig’s trough and neither are any of my wandering, currently churchless friends. I’m confused and broken and spent, to be sure, and on occasion, I long for the days of old when the tufts of wool adorning my eyes still felt warm and comforting.

    (more…)

  • Phantom Limbs

    June 25th, 2008

    On occasion, I hear hymns. I hear Hosanna Integrity and Dayspring songs on AM radio. I see an infomercial about purchasing the latest Christian Contemporary compilation CD and watch as seas of tear-streaked faces gaze at ceilings with their arms upstretched and their fingers splayed, while 30-second snippets of Third Day and MercyMe songs play.

    Other times, I find myself in a room full of people, and I happen to hear one guest greet the other.

    “God is good!” the woman in the knee-length skirt calls.

    “All the time,” the lady standing next to her answers.

    “And all the time?” a man nearby chimes in.

    “God is good!” they happily exclaim in unison.

    Recently, I asked a fellow adjunct professor if she was considering the pursuit of a PhD, and she answered, “Only if that’s what God wants for me. I’d have to be intentional about it and make sure it’s His will. Otherwise, I’m not sure how far I’d get, trying to do it on my own.”

    These are commonplace occurrences, though every time I hear a hymn or see a commercial full of earnest, tearful worshippers serenading Jesus with the lyrics of Jars of Clay or I try to make small talk with someone who only speaks Christianese, I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience.

    More…

  • Poking Fun at Tyra

    June 23rd, 2008

    PostBourgie just published my sort of tongue-in-cheek piece voicing my befuddlement over Tyra Banks’ Daytime Emmy win:

    Not to discount Ms. Banks’ accomplishments, but have you ever watched an episode of The Tyra Banks Show? You have??? So this is your fault.

    Seriously, though. We’re really over here trying to figure out how Tyra “Me Me Me” Banks won a Daytime Emmy Award—and in the category of Outstanding Talk Show – Informative, no less. I know I, for one, learned a great deal about John Edwards’ eating habits when he appeared on Tyra. Watching him refuse Wendy’s French fries because he only eats them with Elizabeth on their wedding anniversary was quite informative.

    Read the rest here.

    s.

  • Them

    June 18th, 2008

    They’re wondering what happened to us, the youth leaders we left behind, the deacons and prophets who watched us sing solos with the children’s choir or mumble through recitations in Easter pageants. They do not feel that they’ve failed us. They think that we have failed them.

    But we remember the day T.J. dropped dope in the men’s bathroom when he was fourteen and fatherless. We remember Eugene and Damont being gunned down before their twentieth birthdays. We remember the Park Heights cats with stony eyes and priors who rushed the stairs leading up to Youth Church, looking to jump Raheem. We remember the succession of girls whose bellies began to swell and recall how naively they loved, despite prophetic words and without prophylactics (because advocating teen birth control meant advocating sin). We still hear your voices hardening as you discussed them, as though all their adolescent missteps reduced them to footnotes in a series of cautionary tales.

    (more…)

  • “The Anomalous T.I.P.” at PostBourgie.

    June 12th, 2008

    Hey fam-

    My piece on Clifford “T.I.” Harris just went up over at Postbourgie.com.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    One month after his arrest, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster opened, with T.I. in a somewhat overhyped role that amounted to little more than a glorified cameo. (Your boy had 20 lines, tops.) Even with his limited screen time, T.I. seemed to possess that same hungry, young, brother-whose-life-is-one-wrong-turn-from-completely-derailing quality that Hollywood loves in its twenty-something Black actors (see: the entire black oeuvre of the 1990s). With the right management, business-savvy, and agent, dude probably could’ve reopened the glass divide between the mass of rappers-turned-actors who never had a chance of taking off in a non-niche market (read: DMX, 50 Cent, Nas, et al.) and the dudes who filmgoers under the age of 21 only know as actors, so consistent and prolific are their roles (read: Will Smith, Ice Cube).

    Too bad about those multiple felonies. Now T.I. is just another cautionary tale, right?

    Not so fast. If history is any indication, the last place you want to count T.I. down and out is in jail.

    Read the rest here.

    s.

  • Gilded

    June 11th, 2008

    Days before our annual New Year’s Eve Service, Pastor Robinson absently asked me to pen a poem and plan on reciting it some time after praise and worship and before his sermon. Because I had very little sense of self-preservation, I agreed.

    I did not tell him that commissioned art requires ample notice.

    I did not tell him that the rapid-fire performance pieces I recited didn’t spring from my head fully formed.

    I did not tell him what I believed then—that I couldn’t write poems for church services without spending time praying and hand-wringing and lamenting, without asking God if the often scathing criticism I snuck in by rattling it off too quickly for listeners to immediately process was actually okay to repeat aloud.

    I did not tell him that that settled, Yes, I do believe I’m free to write and recite this; No, I don’t need to further edit myself sensation—the one I was so sure then was the presence of God confirming the words He’d given me—simply could not be rushed.

    I simply nodded and agreed, then spent the next four or so days panicking and envisioning myself in a room filled with hundreds of sequin-clad onlookers with absolutely nothing to say.

    Somehow, I managed to get a poem written. I printed it out and spent the remaining day and a half before deadline desperately trying to commit the piece to memory. I was always terrified to stand in front of the church to share poems. Though all writing is nakedness, poetry is nakedness on a JumboTron; and I always found it comforting to have a page to hide behind. I’d approach the microphone, unable to hear any thought other than, Just get it over with. Just get it over with.

    keep reading…

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