Prologue
.
Just like someone rising to the surface of a pool
filled with ink. I slowly awoke from what felt like a month-long coma. My eyelids flickered, but they were two tiny lead curtains slamming closed repeatedly until I managed with determined effort to keep them open. Shadows swirled and wavered and then gradually came into focus. However, the shapes they began to form made no immediate sense to me.
Something was roaring in my ears. For a moment I thought I was right beside a waterfall, and then as my eyes focused. I read the instructions on the back of the seat in front of me: KEEP YOUR SEAT BELT BUCKLED WHEN IN FLIGHT.
In flight?
I lifted my head and looked about. I was in a small airplane that had room for what looked like twenty or so people. and I wasn't just buckled in the seat. A thick, black leather strap was around my upper body, tightened just below my elbows, keeping my
arms so close to my sides I could barely move my hands.
No one else was in the plane!
I had been in an airplane only once before in my life when Daddy and Mama took me to see Daddy's father in an old-age home in Richmond just before he died. I was only five at the time. but I never forgot being on a plane. Mama wouldn't let me sit by the window. She wanted me between her and Daddy so I wouldn't really think about being up in an airplane. Daddy thought she should let me sit by the window, but she wouldn't have it.
"I don't want no kid screamin' and cryin ,,bout being afraid. It's enough I agreed to go on this depressing trip." she declared.
Mama never cared about raising her voice in public, and the only way Daddy could stop it was by looking away and stopping the argument.
I wasn't afraid of being in a plane. Actually. I was fascinated with everything, especially the feeling of being lifted into the sky. When my heart started to pound. I closed my eyes and smiled to myself It was better than the time Daddy had taken me on the Ferris wheel, However, when it came to my getting up to go to the bathroom. I was nervous. Daddy wanted Mama to take me and she was annoyed.
"She can go to the bathroom herself at home. She can go in a plane." she told him.
I went myself, and when I came back to my seat. I curled up and fell asleep. The next thing I knew we were getting off the plane in Richmond. Because I'd behaved well. Mama let me sit by the window on the way back. I couldn't stop looking at the clouds and the earth below where houses looked like toys. I thought to myself that this was the way God saw the world every day. He rode inside a cloud or on the back of the wind.
But this plane ride was different, so different. I felt I was being transported from one dream to another. Was this real? Or would I wake up any moment and realize it had all been a terrible nightmare?
I was so busy looking around that I didn't realize immediately how I was dressed. Gone were my clothes. Instead. I wore what looked like a thick, faded white nightgown created from an old potato sack. It was that coarse. Whatever was on beneath it didn't feel like my panties either. Where were my jeans and blouse? And my watch? Even the ruby ring Daddy had brought back for me from one of his sales trips was gone.
I squirmed in the seat and glanced down at my feet. I was wearing white stockings, the sort of stockings I saw nurses wear, and instead of my pink and white sneakers, I wore a pair of the ugliestlooking black shoes with thick heels I think I had ever seen.
What was going on? "Hello!" I screamed.
The only response was the continually monotonous roar of the engines. Whoever was in the cockpit might not be able to hear me. I thought.
I looked around the plane again. How had I gotten here? Who had strapped me into this seat?
I struggled through the maze of blurred memories, desperately trying to understand, to remember, and then, as if a dam in my brain had broken, it all came rushing back over me, and as soon as it had. I wished it hadn't.
After Mama had left Daddy and me and I had been in trouble too often in Atlanta. Daddy had convinced Mama's sister and brother-in-law, my aunt Mae Louise and uncle Buster Howard, to take me into their suburban home in Stone Mountain and enroll me into a better school. Daddy was on the road too much to keep an eye on me. Unfortunately, I got into trouble quickly with a boy there named Ashley Porter, who came from a wealthy white family, and then after Daddy had been killed in the car accident. I had decided to run off.
I had learned that Mama had been left in a clinic where she was being treated for substance abuse. and I was headed there. I was hoping she would be well enough to get out and go somewhere where she and I could start a new life. I was hoping she would be as excited about that as I was, but when I arrived at the clinic and went to see her, she was so confused. She just couldn't or wouldn't understand what I was telling her about Daddy being killed in a car accident and me being forced to live with her sister. Mae Louise.