Enough? (Character Creation 3/3)
Spring, 1924.
The Black Belt, Chicago
The world was hung between the divine and the normal, it sometimes seemed. Between moments where she wondered just where the world was, and moments where she wondered just where heaven could possibly be. She had a good life, and she understood that, all things considered, she should be content. And in many ways she was.
She saw what anger could do to a person, wrap them so far up into themselves that they could not see the writing on the wall, and if she had not seen it end bloodily, that was because she was fifteen and most of the people she saw were far too ordinary and far too young for that, neonates in the art of folly.
And so too was she, because she lived in a nice house and when she went to school, surrounded by 'new settlers' whose very way of talking made her have to pause and think through each sentence, though she didn't want to say that to ma or pop, and teachers who could have been worse but might have been better...she did well. She managed to get through, and get good grades, and her parents tolerated what couldn't be changed and changed what couldn't be tolerated, and she lived and was glad of it.
So she told herself, and say a thing enough and it sounds like truth in anyone's mind. It's how minds worked, sometimes.
After all, things could be worse, and had been worse, though she heard the talk about how things had been better during the war, when all the jobs had flowed in, when the white men had all gone overseas for a war that had ended all war, but what she remembered was her skinny little ten year old self huddled in her bed upstairs, glancing over at baseball gloves and toy whistles and other little trinkets and wondering whether she'd have to gather them all up, as Moses and the Slaves must have done, to get out of there. Because that's what the whites had wanted.
They'd wanted negroes gone, and they'd not been picky about how they'd tried to achieve it. And there was certainly a part of her that smiled when she saw even the storefront churches, saw the way the tide had swamped the entire neighborhood, even if it made her feel as if the world was shifting beneath her feet. Some friends moved, farther south to be away from the less settled settlers.
Thirty eight dead. Thirty eight dead, and now there are thousands and thousands more, and that was something, wasn't it? And if some of them jazzed it up or played the numbers game, that happened, didn't it? History was full of people who were less than perfect doing things that were greater than enough. Though that thought could get tricky if extrapolated too much, because if good could come from evil (or at least from selfish intentions, the way tons did) then what did that mean about now? How did you tell what was good and what was bad in the long run?
So she took her faith and made that the foundation of it. Her father's church, Holy Trinity Baptist, had been doing very well since he'd learned to bend. It was not the largest baptist church in Chicago, but ever since he'd started to allow a little shouting[1] and started to loosen up his style to start out with plenty of careful references--she knew far more about Greek and Hebrew than she should as a girl who did not, in fact, know either language, just from listening to what her father said about what he'd learned--and ending in fury and emotion, in power that burst forth, sometimes in a way that made it clear to her, if perhaps not the audience, had been planned well in advance.
But often enough, it was as if God had seized him, or at least a sort of fervor and passion that he didn't always have. Because Douglas was a man who always seemed to have his cool, even when he was upbraiding Uncle Jack. He moved in a straight line, and if he nodded his head and knew how to respect his betters, or those who thought they were, he was a leader in the community, a man who had gone to schools and learned plenty, who had graduated Seminary and who had a mind that seemed at times to her to be impossible.
He had the bible memorized, it seemed like, even the parts that nobody ever read, the ones about begating or the parts that only the Catholics cared about. She'd learned plenty at his side, but she'd also known that there were barriers. Sometimes it seemed as if what she knew about him were guesses, and perhaps Uncle Jack helped that.
Short, playful Uncle Jack, with a grin on his face and sometimes a flask on his hip, though rarely enough because he was not a fool in raising father's ire. Her father, like her and all good thinking people, supported prohibition, but that was in some ways a lonely stand. After all, there was an actual Stand[2] full of liquor and other vices.
But Uncle Jack? He liked bearding the lion, and sometimes it seemed that the only things they could agree on, and then only briefly, were politics. Jack sometimes talked about how, as if it worked to throw back the bible in her father's face, "your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering" but then it'd always wind up getting into a feud, because Uncle Jack was probably a little bit red? One of those communists? Or perhaps not.
Of all of the things she'd learned of him, and he was a topic of her thoughts on occasion, for he was so different than her, the one thing she was sure of is that he enjoyed bearding the lion in his own den. So she watched and she learned, and she noted that despite all of this, he still visited.
Douglas had a soft spot for his younger brother, as he did for all those who were suffering and wayward, and this soft spot was something she cherished seeing, because her father wouldn't be her father without it, and it reminded her how blessed she was to have it. Like when she wanted to go see an alley ball game when she should be working on her bible readings, he'd given way. And when she'd brought in a sick, half-crippled dog, he'd allowed it to stay for what time it had left, the poor thing.
He'd allowed a lot, within the confines. He did not want a girl who grew up ramrod straight, who came out of one of those factory molds they had, but someone who was straight because she stood upright, morally and spiritually and mentally. She'd grown up on the bible and Just So Stories and Treasure Island, and later on all sorts of other books, devoured perhaps a little too fast, and stories of the civil war and civil rights, and then Frederick Douglass and Dubois and Washington, and she was perhaps sometimes too proud of herself, and she knew it a flaw. She was smart, but that was not everything, in fact.
But she paid attention, and that was something.
Her mother was in some ways a mirror of her father. She seemed kind and soft on the outside, and she was a good person, but she had been raised with class and raised well, from a higher station than her father. Eliza Doolittle, she'd been, and her father had been big--as such things were measured--in the black community of the 1900s. She was light skinned, lighter than Miriam or her father, her hair often held up in a bun. Her body was soft, but her wits were all the sharper for it, and she always knew what Miriam was up to. And she put her foot down just as her father did, but when she did, it was unexpected.
When she did, it was for a good reason, and she knew it. It was hard to see sometimes. "Mom, why're you--" she'd asked and whined when she was younger, before she realized that answers were not coming and didn't need to come. She'd learned at last to nod at it, and watch and wait and take in the world, like a student copiously writing down notes for some future test.
So the world drifted on in her fifteenth year. She went to school and watched baseball and sometimes played it, though plenty wouldn't play with her, and she had her animals at times and her books at others. She had her own room, and sometimes there she felt closer to…
But then wasn't that the thing? The world between two things was an illusion, a lie.
Yet sometimes it was hard to notice that. There was a veil of tears, after all, she thought to herself.
Sometimes she'd stare up at the inky blackness in her room, and on it she would picture the faces of people she knew at first. Isaac at school, a fiery, angry boy who spoke faster than anyone she knew when he got his dander up, and Mrs. Wright, who despite being a white woman--and her experience of white women teachers is that they could be hit or miss, as polite as one wanted to be about the fact--was genuinely nice to her. And she thought about people she liked and people she disliked, about what Uncle Jack was doing at the moment and what he wasn't doing.
She thought and thought until the thoughts seemed more solid than the world. And then she pictured the future, stretching out before her. Most women didn't go to college, let alone black women, but she'd heard about it happening, she knew it did. Maybe there was no way up from there to here, but she liked learning, and even if she never set foot in any sorta institution, she wasn't going to stop when she left high school.
Plenty of the people she knew in the Black Belt, as some people called it even then, gave up way before that. After all, they'd ask "what jobs can it get me?" A high school graduate polished boots like any other negro, often enough. It galled but then maybe it was true. At the very least, she'd only sometimes been able to convince them to get back to school.
So, she pictured the future, but it always came around to the past. Of course it did. That's the way the world worked, one long unbroken string from start to end. And her, right in the middle. Waiting. She often thought about it, though she knew she was no philosopher, just a fifteen year old girl.
The world existed, and God existed, and Jesus Christ had died for the world, but then what did that say about the world?
Her uncle had given her works of philosophy before, some of them serious and some of them inane. He'd encouraged her--and father hadn't disagreed--to read Plato and Socrates, though Jack said "They're the same guy, more or less" and dad had frowned and disagreed. And then later he'd given her poems and other things, including ones by Catholics, "Surely their poetry isn't a sin."
She'd read it all, frowning thoughtfully. She knew that Plato was the foundation of a lot of Christian Philosophy, she'd read it in a book somewhere, and so she sought out more, and then Jack handed her Aristotle and others, or switched it up and gave a book that seemed to have nothing to do with anything. Once he learned that she had the desire, the drive to learn--even if she wasn't sure what she was going to do with it, even if she sometimes felt like she was waiting for something--he'd have a book for her to read, a new one, every time they met.
Her uncle was a strange man. Generous and yet sometimes cold. And sometimes that's where her thoughts ended. The city was large, and she joined the sleeping millions.
But sometimes she kept on thinking, and she thought about the line "in this world and not of it" and yet, had not God made it? Made it for better and worse, even if one lived and existed for the world hereafter, one did so here.
Human and divine seemed, in those night moments, where sleep should have claimed her but it had not, not quite, closer than that. After all, wasn't that how history was? You didn't know when you were stepping to the edge of great change, you didn't know when you rode past the man who would kill a King, or when you were crucified next to the son of God, and for an act of kindness and truth, were saved hereafter. "And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong," he had said, and in that moment a thief had seen through the world, like a crack in a wall that you put your eye at to see the room beyond.
It was sudden, it was inexplicable, it was grace as the foundation. Saved by works? No, but by grace that was always, always met with works.
But it was also explicable, wasn't it? The thief was who he was, and Jesus knew what he was doing, and his will though free had been predicted, and…
And there it broke down into a jumble of thoughts, but also the realization that it went both ways. That which was expected didn't happen, and the unexpected happened. People after the fact saw the causes of the earthquake, but didn't seem to ask why they didn't know them before.
They looked and saw and the world stretched out before them, and yet there were moments when it all shifted.
So, in this world but not of it? But God had made it.
Yet, a poem came to her, or a piece of one. "The world is charged with the Grandeur of God/ It will flame out like shining from sook foil/It gathers to a greatness like ooze of oil…"
The world he'd viewed was one where generations had 'trod had trod had trod' over the world. He'd loved nature as a sign of God. And yet he'd also seen the world as something corrupted, and it seemed like the two things needed to balance.
Like algebra equations.
And so in the world one lived, and in the world one existed, and in the world sometimes there was a moment of grace, a miracle, whether of physics or emotion. You felt, she thought, had to feel transported sometimes, transported above. Platonic ideals seemed to her a little silly, but perhaps they weren't. She was fifteen, and that meant she had a lot more to learn about the world before she knew better than adults about some of these things.
Yet she wanted to know more, and so she thought about it. If in every moment rested the possibility of grace, like a chicken in an egg, like Augustine's view of nature unfolding that she'd read about, all of it right there and yet never seen.
It was a heady thought, but it was one that brought her back from highs to the moment, and from a moment to a high point that didn't actually happen. Had she ever felt the grace of God? In church, of course, but where else? She had to consider herself if she was to understand herself, and like a lamp in a room, where she was placed changed what she illuminated.
And so in the darkness, she closed her eyes and all but dragged herself to sleep, her thoughts twirling and whirling, sometimes in this way, and sometimes in other directions, about history or life, about what her Mom wanted, or what she wanted.
But it all came back to perspective.
*****
See her then, leaning against the wall of the place that had been her home for five years, ever since they'd moved in reaction to the migration and crowding, and also against the devastation that had rained down in the riots of '19. She's tall for her age, see it in how she stands, straight, with a very good posture. 5'6, just about, and perhaps she'll gain another inch somewhere in there, it might be said. She was certainly impressive in her way. Her hands were not smooth, but her skin was well enough, a rich brown that was lighter than her father's, but was not the tawny-brown lightness of her mother. She had a snub nose, and thin, hard lips, but teeth that made up for it when she smiled, and dark eyes. Her hair was simple often held in a bun or other contrivance. Unlike some girls her age, she didn't straighten her hair, and so she let it act as it may, as long as it obeyed her.
She'd be dressed in a skirt that would let her move, and stockings that were not, in fact, flesh toned. The shoes, there would be a compromise that she'd win, and the blouse would be, say, a green or a blue, usually something darker.
She used neither makeup nor jewelry, and so she'd lean up against the wall and look over at her mom, dressed in an apron, who had a pencil held in her hands like a conductor's baton, ready to measure her growth.
It was a habit from the old house, as she'd watch herself spring up taller than her mother, though not yet up on her father's own gangly grace.
"Hold still, stop squirming Miriam. I know you're bored, but--"
Bored wasn't even the word for it. But Miriam nodded and tried to stand even straighter than she was, making sure not to stand on her toes or anything. She wanted to know how tall she was, not how tall she might be, but it was a nice spring day, and she could have been running around or doing...something. Anything. And yet, she smiled as her Mom said, "And then maybe you could help me with the cooking. It's a fine day, there'll be later."
There was a moment where she wanted to just say no. But then she allows herself to think about it, rather than reacting. Waits for her mind and heart to catch up to her nerves…
And she accepts this, because time with her mom has value as well, and it wasn't as if another spring day would not come.
See her as she sits in school. Her handwriting is very nice and neat, except for a tendency to scribble when she gets really fast. Wendell Phillips[3] has classes for those who are behind, for those who are immigrants or need help with that, but she's not in any of those. Now, lean down, over the desk, look at the paper, filling with formulas, and the determined look on her face. Math was one subject that she sometimes finds boring, but that merely meant that she tried to tackle it head on, moving as fast as she could.
A running start, that truly paid off, because she was done with the work before the others, and when called up by the stern, balding man, his skin as pasty as if he were made of dough, she always gets the right answers. Almost always, at least.
Others ask for her help, and sometimes she does it a little too much. Call it politeness, or perhaps call it being too kind, but while she never just gives the answers, sometimes she helps too much.
She always looks at the other boys and girls in school and wonders what their dreams are, what they are going to try to achieve, because she knows that everyone has a story. The two thiefs might have died and never been heard, except for meeting Jesus, and all throughout history chance had thrust people into the forefront, which made her wonder then whether it was merely chance, and whether these men were really as amazing as told.
Of course, she was also the person who always gave a report on Lincoln and the Civil War when it came up, even as the books were...okay. They were just okay, and it made her wonder, the way it elided around the subject, the way it danced like one of the young men and women who went to those dancing places to drink and enjoy themselves, or those ballrooms the white folks had, no alcohol (as far as she knew) but plenty of dancing and entertainment.
Slavery caused the war. It seemed so simple to say.
But she knew it wasn't, not always.
But when she walked through the halls of the school, looking at the faces--mostly negro, but some white--she wondered why it couldn't be. Why it couldn't be simple?
And she'd open her mouth, and look around, and not know what she was going to say. Because there had to be something she could say, something she could do. But even she knew, even then she knew.
It wasn't that simple. Simple as that.
See her sitting in a pew, listening intently. This, this comes easy. This was complicated, and yet ultimately simple. Her father was a good preacher, a father to his congregation, and so she does not let her attention stray. Sometimes there are even moments where she felt something, a sort of thrill, a sort of intense emotion that felt like it was overwhelming and amazing. And then she'd smile and if you caught her at that right moment, her face would take on new life. Thin lips would seem decisive, almost, dark eyes would overflow, snub nose would seem to recede, and her face would be filled with a sort of light.
Moments pass, but the faith that causes them does not, never passes. At least, not in her experience. Certain things do not pass away so easily, and the face she has at those moments knows it.
She's dressed up, in a nice long skirt and a nicer blouse, and she even had a purse. But she wasn't as dressed up as some who went to church in hats that could be medieval battlements, and she wasn't doing the same thing as some of them, who started dancing when they felt that the Lord was calling them to dance.
She didn't quite...agree with it. But she understood it. She understood that the Holy Spirit existed, and that she of all people shouldn't cling to more intellectual traditions, but it was difficult, sometimes. But she watched and thought and felt, and the more strongly she felt, the more she knew that this was what she wanted to do.
That, now that wasn't a thought she could have in the dark. The dark was for the mind, for illuminating it as one might a candle service, bringing light into the darkness. But in the light of the church, which streamed through the windows, the church that might need to be moved if it kept on expanding, but was in good condition…
That made her feel the call of God. She could be a preacher if she wanted. It wasn't...common. But it had happened before, when women felt the call. Or at least, she could be her own...baptists weren't as rigid as some churches, and even if they were.
Even if they weren't, maybe it was too much to think of. But she thought of it as she prayed, and she shooed it away because she had to focus. And so she did. She focused and grew, and she felt alive then.
See her one last time, sitting in the stands, also feeling alive. She was dressed as simply as she can get away with, and wishes it were simpler, but there were limits. She wasn't the only girl there, and she cheered as loud as she could for the Chicago American Giants, or for any team that was from there. They were a great ball-team, and even if there were more arguments and the umpires were somewhat biased, she liked it more than white baseball. It was just something about it, and she knew this was bias and she didn't care. Every play, every run, every stolen base, she watched and watched.
She'd played when she was younger, and she was still a decent person for slugging balls, and she could run faster than one might expect, but there was only so much a girl could do, and she felt it sometimes.
It was this single moment of darkness in the light of the games, the opposite of the transcendent feelings at church. That this wouldn't go anywhere.
And then she'd tell herself, and then she'd mean (for a time) that she didn't care, that it was just good watching these athletes strut their stuff. Watching them run the bases and steal them as well, the only form of stealing she'd ever love, she thought to herself.
Different visions of the same girl. Different elements of the same mosaic.
And then the picture changed, just a little bit.
*****
Her father paced the hallways all that month. He couldn't sleep, and she understood that. There were too many things to think about, and so she allowed it. But then sometimes he'd go out, and then come back, and when Uncle Jack came around, he was cautious, unwilling to debate him.
Something was wrong.
There were girls who would have not done as she did, there were girls who would not listen in the room. But she was awake because she was a girl who sometimes stared into the darkness and tried to make sense of it. And because she was the smart girl who dedicated herself to patterns and taught herself as much as she could, she noted the pattern. Every Saturday night, for an entire month, he went out.
He returned shaken.
And because she was the girl that knew that there was no sin in stealing a base, she followed him.
And because she was religious, because she believed, and perhaps because she was lucky, she knew where he would walk, and she watched him the whole way as he walked into the church, dark now, the kind of darkness that for a moment made her think that the this wasn't in the city, that this wasn't Chicago at all.
And in she went. And her world changed.
What happened?
[] Obrimos: "What has he taught her? What has he taught you?" They ask it, again and again. She watches, coldly at first, thinking herself hidden, but then she steps out when her father backs up.
"Don't touch him!"
They turn to look at her, white, well-dressed, looking at her. "He's my father, anything...anything you try to do, I'll be there to--"
She amused them, she'll know that later. Of course she did. "What did he teach you?"
As if she should know who he is, or what they were referring to. "Nothing," she said, a child's reflexive desire.
She is questioned for a long time, and yet they seem to say nothing and she says nothing in return. There is a warning, nothing more, and then she returns home to think:
What DID 'he' teach me? What did I learn that was so dangerous. What did I know that was so important?
That night, staring into the darkness as she had before, though it was nearing dawn, trying to put the world together in her head, she hears a voice. 'It has a beginning but no end, and each moment is…'
Is what?
She remembered what she'd been told. This world was not Heaven, and yet it was made by God. The books she'd read, the thoughts she'd had. 'Have Trod have trod have trod' she remembers the poem going, moments of grace and miracle in the world, or perhaps they were just the ones we saw.
A voice spoke to her, every night for six nights, and on the seventh day, a Sunday, she walked along the storefront churches. The voice had said...nonsense. Madness.
Perhaps even blasphemy, but its voice was like the ringing of bells. So she goes to the storefront churches, and she listens to pastors preach to a dozen people, many of them badly. Badly but full of passion, full of emotion. Some of it is heresy, some of it makes sense, she doesn't know, but keeps on going...and at the end of the street, instead of ending, it goes on and on. And she follows it, follows it until it leads to a church like none she's ever seen.
It is like a piece of gothic architecture, and at the top of the church is a bell...and that bell is a familiar voice. She goes in to worship, feeling as if she's...as if this is the sermon she's been waiting for her whole life.
The Holy Spirit takes her, halfway through, and she begins Shouting...
[] Thyrsus: She hears but little of what she might later learn would matter. Instead, what first tipped her off, what first made her think, was something a little more obvious. Before she'd done more than just see them, standing in the nave, a cat that she knew hung around here, one she'd helped before, told her to "run."
A cat. Had spoken.
Strangely, she had listened.
She had turned and ran, and when she got home, perhaps her father wasn't willing to call her on it. She was restless in school now, and every so often she'd hear voices, or suddenly feel as if animals were staring at her. She'd go and play baseball, with herself if nobody else would, antsy and confused.
She begins to explore a little. Just a little, down narrow streets, until at last a winding street, almost a month and a half into her explorations, takes her to a crumbling city filled with animals, ones that speak to her. Ones that fight and die and live, the same as people do. Ones that feel as if they are something more, because she sees other things, passing through. Bones and cinders, gears and...forms of things.
Representations, perhaps?
She can't live here for long, because when she gets back, she's been missing for only one day, and yet she meets someone, and she fights someone, and she almost dies and certainly lives, and when she reaches the edge of the city, there rests a single animal. She has a baseball bat, somehow, and there is blood on it, somehow. it is not hers. She has never, has never, should never, and yet...and yet.
The animal has a glove, and asks for her autograph, and when she searches for something to write with, it gestures to her bat.
She writes in blood.
[] Mastigos: In the church, they stood. Facing her father. They threaten him, they break him with words. She hears it, and hears her name. And understand that they see her. That they know she's there, and yet they're pretending. Always pretending. And then, when they leave, her father is there. Eyes hard. They don't speak of it, not yet. But she heard it, heard her father back down. Her father, of all people, and not out of kindness, but fear. But why should she care? She beats herself up over it. It's a little fury, and she is used to it, but now it seems to hold her. It's because she has always known it. She knows how to give way, and she knows how to stretch out her mind, and she runs over it, again and again. What happened, the words. How to deal with it. She has nightmares. She knows who is involved in it, she knows that...that there's something she doesn't know. Perhaps it is the height of arrogance, that leads her to think through it again and again. Now her nights staring into the darkness fall into dreams. She wants to do something. Her father forbids her from doing anything.
She spends later out for a time, goes to more baseball games. Throws herself into a dozen things and then wonders which is real. At church, she even grew bored for long enough to shock her, because...her father. What was he involved in, why should she…
Her mind does not seem to be working right. That's the thing. She shouldn't obsess. She'd thought that she had a sufficient life, and yet now she keeps on having doubts about who exactly she was. Who her father was.
Who her Uncle was.
Who they were?
And then one night she has a dream. They're playing baseball in the churches and selling slaves in the classrooms. They're praying in the dugouts and rioting in the streets. It's the city itself, and it's her, or perhaps what she thinks is her. They throw the ball to her and jeer for her to join in. They auction her off, counting her grades as worth a few dollars, her interest in baseball being 'useful trivia' worth a dollar, her skin as being too dark to truly be intelligent. They rip her to shreds and count each shred, and she gets angrier and angrier. They proscribe Kashmir and a whip, they--for the men who had torn her father down and turned him into a whipped dog had been white, well dressed, men--sneered at her. And was she supposed to turn the other cheek?
In her hands was a baseball. In her soul was the fact that even though they were across the room, that the distance between the ball in them was in fact an illusion, a lie. That this was her mind, she suddenly realized, and that that meant that…
Turn the other cheek.
Her mind railed, rebelled. She read philosophy, she ran in the streets. She learned and worked and struggled and yet now, here, the distance was gone. She was next to the rest of them, another negro, to them. She hated these men, and she shouldn't because that was not...that wasn't.
There was only one necessary act. She was mad, mad in every sense. Lincoln flashed through her brain, and the American Giants and Illinois and her Uncle and the fact that this was all her. She was all her.
The chains...they were not real.
The ball, though. It was the most real thing she'd ever felt.
She threw the ball. As hard as she could…
The world shattered.
[] Acanthus: In she went, and they saw her..or perhaps they always saw her, and merely chose sometimes not to act. They'd approached her, and she'd seen it, the world spooling. They'd done something, something bad. Or maybe they hadn't. She'd wound up home, terrified, and for a moment it was as if she'd seen something. She'd seen that she might have died, that her father might have as well. Two thieves on crosses, one lived a life eternal hereafter, one suffered, and based on a single moment. History had seemed to spool out, and that was a thought that didn't make sense. But it was as if the world suddenly didn't make sense.
As if she was starting to see the effect before the cause, as if suddenly she'd know what people weren't going to say and why they weren't. History was one of her best subjects, and yet she felt unmoored, and uncertain why.
As if she were dancing, as if she were shouting, as it was called, in the aisles. Something wrong, something strange, something different than the future she'd imagined and dreamed of and considered before. And yet if she knew what it was, it wouldn't have felt as it did. One night, two weeks later, she woke up and stumbled out into the night, because there was somewhere she had to be. There was something she had to write. Nobody knew where their place in history was, did they? They didn't write themselves into the story, and yet her hand itched as she journeyed forth, aimless and aware of how insane it was, what she was doing. What she was feeling. She was fifteen, and yet her path took her to a factory. Before the war ended, she remembered, people had said…
In there, in there was a book. A history book, and yet also a book of stories and songs, and yet also a book of lies. And promises. What ifs and just so stories. And so she began to read...
[] Moros: In she had gone, and she had been seen. And after that day, Uncle Jack was no longer allowed in the house. For two weeks, she watched her father get more haggard and tired, more exhausted. And yet, it wasn't him, it wasn't…
She. Mother.
It was sudden, it was...she couldn't have known. She couldn't have known. It is swift, a Spring funeral, a spring loss, and with it she loses something she didn't understand. Surely she...had to have known that people could die. It was insane. The night after the funeral, she goes into the kitchen. Utensils are there. Flour. Sugar. Objects. That's what's left of mother. Objects.
She did not write any great memoirs. She just traced the line of her height as it had shot up, as she had grown older. She had just been there, soft and yet firm, to keep things in order. What were they going to eat now?
Miriam would have to feed them. Have to...take care around the house. She was the...woman of the house, or something like it. She picked up the utensils, feeling almost profane to do so, as if they should be buried with her mother, as if she were some viking. And she began to cook, and prepare a meal. And the more she worked, the more she felt as if the world was falling away, and the more she felt as if there was a hand guiding her. A hand holding hers, and some time later she looks up, and something has been made.
But...it isn't food. She isn't sure what it is. And there is someone standing in front of her. Mother.
Or...not her. But it seems like her. And isn't that close enough? She's gone, so surely, surely…
Suddenly, somehow, she knows what she has made. Knows exactly what she has made.
And knows she could make it again.
******
[1] This involves dancing, actually, primarily. Look of Shouting, it's actually pretty important.
[2] The Stand was what the main area was called, and it did include 'legitimate' businesses, like theatres and the like, but it also included Black-and-tan Cabarets and policy game dens, and so on and so forth.
[3] I really did try to choose something less cliched than the most well known high school that catered primarily to African-Americans in Chicago in this era, but it's legitimately the only school that makes sense based on her location, class, and other features.
*****
A/N: Alright, so here we go. I hope that the described scenarios (which will be expanded after they are voted on) all sound alright and to the specifications of Mage. Also, this post itself is vital. If i lose you here, showing off Miriam, I lose you forever. So I hope this all made sense, hung together, and had its own voice.
I'm... really very nervous about all of this.
Okay, as far as the votes go, you can use the first two sentences of each vote as your vote, or you can vote for the Path that it most obviously is. Just...whatever works? Note, I will be writing out the Awakening, these are just 'short' versions of it. Relatively speaking, obviously.
