Change

by Trace on April 19, 2003

I know in my heart there are hurt places that are dark and deep, and scary, like ocean depths, unplumbed by man. I don’t go there either. My strength, I tell myself is in laying aside those things as if they didn’t exist. I lie to myself that they don’t exist; that I am not doing the Scarlet O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow thing. And don’t accuse me of being like her and planning to think about that tomorrow.

The truth is she and I are more alike than I care to admit. And we don’t intend to think about those things at all. The problem with putting them away, though, is they can’t be quelled. They surface at the damnedest, most inopportune times and take me over.

And I sink to the depths, uncharted and scary and wish I knew how to truly forget. And at those times my death seems such a welcome relief.

But then I remember, to my horror, that as a reincarnationalist, I believe I have to learn all these lessons before God will keep me with him.

We made a deal God and me, that I’d work thru things on this plane, and I’m bound by it.

I’ve been reading Radical Forgiveness, which emphasizes the repetition of mistakes or wrong relationships and I’m reminded of the “there are no coincidences” theme of the Celestine Prophecies.

In each of these books, the recurrences or occurrences were/are systematic efforts on the part of the Universe to take us to enlightenment.

Send me a light bulb. Some of this stuff hurts too much.

The legend of 13 comes from Pythagoras, who believed it meant change and evolution. The end of a belief and the birth of a new consciousness. It was not endings, but beginnings, This year the 13th of October comes on Friday. A day we normally view as unlucky, because it is unusual.

I was raised in a small town in the South – “I was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at the foot of the Appalachia Trail.”

I grew up in the Sixties, I know – you didn’t know I was that old! I should have graduated high school in 1969. (What a good year, yeah?)

My mother had “help” when I was growing up. Not live-in help, but help one day a week who cleaned the bathrooms and mopped floors and ironed: Juanita and Marie

And there was Jesse.

They were soft, sweet-smelling black women. And they made my house smell fresh and clean. And they are as much responsible for who I am as anyone in my history.

We had to pick Juanita up from the bus station. My mother would send me into the ‘Colored’ section of the building to get her. It was dark (not as many bulbs in the ceiling) and Juanita would be sitting on what looked like an old church pew. She’d brighten when she saw me, stand and lumber out to the car. She’d smile and laugh and I can’t imagine her looking forward to cleaning my mother’s house then coming back to the bus station so she could ride in the back of the bus to her home, and her children.

Marie had her own car – a 1957 Chevrolet BelAir – which would become the car to own when I was in high school, a few years later. It was nearly ten years old and looked brand new.

Jesse lived not far away and she was mostly there to look after my two little brothers. They were 15 months apart and, I think, too much for my mother to handle. Being pregnant that much in two years, and having to take care of the babies she birthed put her into that Magnolia place that some Southern women enter . . . and she fell back on a big, fat, Black woman to tend her children.

Home movies from that period always include Jesse in the background, watching the little ones. My mother isn’t in these films, I guess she was making them.

I don’t know who’s influence introduced me to Dr. Martin Luther King. My mother’s absence of racism, the women who helped raise me . . . But in Atlanta, in the sixties, wealthy white people didn’t revere him, or admire him. I think they were afraid of him.

He represented change. Big change. Scarey thing, change.