“Hey man, your daughter, she’s a spiritual seer, Holmes. You don’t know this, but she’s a powerful woman.”
There are several responses to this statement that would be appropriate, and I go through them in my head, I do. I take a good three seconds to consider each one, carefully, and Sunita Habersham, bless her, she sees me do it. Her face goes from annoyed to cautious to seriously worried about how I’ll react to the stimuli given. I know this because she removes One Drop’s hands off her shoulders and starts to come for me. Our eyes lock, and that actually helps — she won’t realize it, but it does, in some quiet part of me, the part not about to start roaring.
“Get your hippie half-breed asses the fuck out my father’s house and away from my daughter before I kick the Uncle Tom out the lot of you!”
Roslyn doesn’t bother to frown. Everyone else is still as well. They just stare at me. Even Sun freezes, for a moment. But only a moment. When the air stops vibrating, when the biggest sound is the weight of my breathing, then she gets up and walks by.
“Don’t,” she says. No extra verb. Don’t talk to me. Don’t look at me. Don’t screw me. Don’t kiss me. Don’t bother explaining yourself. It’s all in there. And then Sun’s past me. Into the hall. Out the door. Down the steps. We all hear her feet go, boom, da boom, boom. Still, it’s motionless inside. Tal looks like she is about to cry, but other than that, frozen. Roslyn has dropped most of her smile, but the sides of her lips still tilt the edges of her mouth.
“Get out of here!” I follow with. Still that doesn’t work. Nobody moves. I close my eyes, to listen for it. To listen for movement.
What I finally hear is, “It’s okay. My father needs alone time.”
I stand there. I don’t open my eyes again. I don’t want to see them. I don’t open my eyes till the last footfall moving past me has grown silent.
I can breathe normally now. I am myself once more. The rage has escaped me. I have returned to normal. The house has returned to normal. Almost normal. When I do open my eyes, the overhead lights are back on. The candles are blown out. The music has been silenced.
Tal is gone.
Roslyn is not. She sits right where she did before. Staring at me. Smiling.
“You didn’t see anything,” I tell her. I know this. I know this even though I’ve seen things.
Roslyn keeps smiling, but doesn’t bother looking at me. Slowly she rises.
“They might believe you, but I can see what you’re doing, that’s what I see,” I say into her silence. Roslyn reaches for her purse at the couch’s end, brushes something off of it, then puts it on her shoulder. When she doesn’t respond I say, “You’re turning this into a cult.”
“It’s not a cult. It’s a karass. A people linked by a higher purpose,” she says lightly as she walks by me to the door.
“That’s the kind of shit people in a cult say,” I get out, but Roslyn doesn’t look back, my sound just another creak in the room.
20
SUNITA HABERSHAM IS NOT taking my calls. Her line rings, I see her face on my phone, and then the only voice I get is the one recorded for the entire world. Tosha won’t talk to me either, but this I barely notice, because Sunita Habersham is not taking my calls or responding to my texts and I feel the loss like one leg is gone and I have to struggle every moment not to fall over. I don’t leave my father’s house. I don’t go out. I don’t go to see her. I know she’s there. I know Tal is with her. Tal contacts me, after The Explosion, with a text that says, I’m staying with Sun now. Followed immediately with another text that says, Cuz UR an asshole. Tal, I miss, but she’s my teenage daughter and teenagers are supposed go through a period where they hate their parents and so basically this puts us right on schedule. As long as the cult doesn’t steal her, that door will reopen. The door to the life of Tosha Evans, that will reopen as well, we’ve been friends too long to not be now just because of mulattoes. There’s another door I keep thinking about. The one to Sun’s trailer. It’s a little aluminum door, with white metal siding on the outside. If I don’t get that door open again, eventually it will rust shut on me forever.
Everyone else in Mulattopia, they’re cordial. Very tolerant. Polite. The guy who still owns the land to this place? He should be tolerated. No one stands before the house and denounces me. I am never cursed back out. No one will look directly at me as I walk around my own property either, but they don’t make faces or other visible displays of disapproval.
I’m not mad at them, for this genteel shunning. I can feel my own shame, at the way I chose to express myself. My anger, having been given full vent, is largely exhausted. This primal emotion has been replaced with another: loneliness. The major cause of this is Tal and Sun not speaking to me, but I’m surprised to find that this is not the entire cause.
Yes, I believe this has become a cult. But it was a cult in which I was a member. Part of the allure of all of this, even as I’ve struggled against it, has been the seductive feeling of my own group inclusion. I still move through these people, but I feel disconnected from them now. I feel the absence of a kinship I took for granted. The only thing worse than a cult is a cult that won’t have you as a member.
It does get better, slowly. A week later, I do garner a few uncommitted head nods when I make direct eye contact. One of One Drop’s crew even follows with, “You feeling better since The Explosion?” I don’t go out as much, but when I do, when I leave for the store or interact with the parents and others as I teach the remainder of my class, several others make a point to discuss the night with me as well. They use the term The Explosion in a way that conveys that the events have been discussed in detail and a title for this historical moment has been formally approved. The Explosion. Very dramatic. According to them, The Explosion was perfectly normal. Something many at the camp have gone through. A part of the process. A necessary phase in the creation of a new worldview.
My favorite of these discussions comes at the gate. As I struggle to keep the bike upright in first gear, freshly bought groceries filling my saddlebags, One Drop steps right out in front of me.
“Yo man, I just want to say, it ain’t nothing to be ashamed of. We all been through it, it’s part of the awakening, you know?”
“Thanks, One Drop.” I like saying his name to him. It’s so goddamn ridiculous and the joke seems to hover a yard in front of his face, just out of his reach. He hangs that way before my face now, my front wheel between his legs. The bike stalls; he doesn’t notice. I flip up the visor on my helmet to add to the message that I want to get by him, but he doesn’t read social cues. It’s another language in which he’s illiterate.
“For real, Holmes. It’s a struggle, this mixed identity thing. I fought it too. Just like you, yo. Even more, bro, even more. Because my blackness, right, it’s my essence? It’s in me. You know what I’m saying?” One Drop tells me as he bangs his chest. So that’s where it is. Because it certainly isn’t outside him. “I didn’t mean nothing, the other night. It’s just, I saw the First Couple, and my mind was kinda blown. I’m just glad you’re down with the cause, bro. You ever want to talk about it, sunflower to sunflower, I’m here, yo.”