Something She Can Feel

“No! They have it up here now,” Dame said. “A chain. Commerce. Capitalism. Dreamland is taking over.”

“Is it as good?”

“Hell, no. You know the best barbecue is in Tuscaloosa. But it’ll have to do.”

“I guess it will,” I said.

Dame pushed the button for the elevator, and we just stood there quietly. He hadn’t lost his tan and his skin looked so impeccably black, an onyx sculpture could be made of him. He was still a beautiful man. And I knew right then that we’d be friends forever.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I smiled and made myself a promise I wouldn’t look at his arms during lunch. But I knew I would. “It’s just nice to see you wearing something other than a white T-shirt for a change.”

“Oh, you like the new look?” he asked, chuckling. “It’s my grown-man-trying-to-stay-out-of-jail swagger.”

“Let’s hope it works,” I said, chuckling now, too.

An empty elevator arrived and we both walked inside. I reached inside my purse and pulled out my cell phone.

“You need to make a call?” he asked nosily.

“I need to call my mama and tell her what happened today,” I said.

“Call your mama? I thought you were on your Ms. Independent thing.”

“I may be independent, but I’m not stupid.”

HEAR

TASTE

SEE

SMELL

Feel Yourself First

If you enjoyed the Something She Can Feel, don’t miss

Should Have Known Better

Available in November 2011 at your local bookstore

Here’s an excerpt from Should Have Known Better ...

Fire

I never really believed in God. Not a god. Not “Thee God” that you probably believe in. I know that must sound peculiar coming from a preacher’s daughter. But, you know, I just never had a reason to honestly think someone or something other than myself would show up to save me when the whole universe was crashing in and burning me to bits. And that’s what God is—what we really say he is—a savior. Some big hand to hold you together when you’re a pile of hot ash. And I’d been there before. My son has autism. Mild autism. When he was three years old, he stopped saying, “Mama.” Just stopped one day and then a man with a gray beard in a white jacket told me that he had a disease I could hardly pronounce. There was no cure. There was no cause. They couldn’t say where it came from. “It came from me,” I cried and sobbed in the bathtub with my hands resting over my vagina. The water was boiling all around me, and turning to lava, scorching me alive. I didn’t think any God would come then. And no God came. I got myself out of that fire. I fought to save my son. I was the only one there.

That wasn’t the God the good Reverend Herbert George II talked about on the pulpit every Sunday at First Salvation Church of God in Southwest, Atlanta. No. Sitting there in the first row beside my mother in one of her lavender suits with sparkly lilac rhinestones around the collar, I listened as my father talked about a god who saved and fixed and came “just in the nick of time!” That “on time” God. Right?

I always knew it was a lie. It couldn’t be true.

Nothing my daddy ever said was true.

The good Reverend Herbert George II killed my mother everyday. But “Thou shall not kill”? God should’ve put something more direct in that chapter of his good book. Like don’t kick your wife so hard in the stomach that she can’t have anymore babies.

There was no God.