The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart Read Online Free PDF

taken me for several weeks to the office of Dr. Hickerson, who casually prescribed Valium, and sent me numbly careening on my way. She did not care enough to suggest perhaps we were simply trying to do too much. That we were throwing our young lives against a system that had crushed lovers and idealists for centuries.
    I sigh, into the quiet room. I think, I say, that Mississippi, living interracially, attempting to raise a child, attempting to have a normal life, wore us out. I think we were exhausted. In our tiredness we turned away from each other. Next to me on the couch, I feel you relax. Perhaps you anticipated blame.
    But how can I blame you for being human? For wearing out. For running on empty eventually. Just as I did. Now you begin to talk. You mention how, in the final days in Mississippi, you became afraid to leave me alone in the house. That one day you locked the door behind you and I accused you of locking me in. That was the day, you say, you knew we had to leave. I don’t remember this particular day, but I certainly do recall the feeling of being incarcerated. Solitary confinement might be ideal for certain forms of mental creativity, but it is horrible for someone who craves a social world, whose spirit yearns for the refreshment of companionship. Between “projects,” my books, there were days that contained only a scream into the silence. I combated this by teaching at two of the local black colleges, for practically no money. I planted trees and flowers. I learned to shop in a way that took hours rather than minutes. I joined anexercise club, to which my slim, bored neighbor Phyllis and I went each week. I quilted, I began making a rug. I actually did needlepoint. I talked to my mother on the phone.
    Our Child does not remember any of the happiness that surrounded her arrival in our house. And yet, it is this happiness for which she yearns. It is the security of two doting parents, adoringly attentive, adoringly present, that is the quality of comfort she misses. She has become angry at us over the years because no matter what she has tried, this quality of being completely loved by both of us, together, has remained beyond her reach. I feel sad for her. I see the little girl running to the door at the sound of her father’s car, a huge brown and black Toronado that was always, because of its incongruous stylishness, comical for a civil rights lawyer. I see her father fly out from around the car, running to meet her wet and openhearted kisses, her widespread, chubby arms. I see him down on one knee, lifting her against his chest, his wide face transparent with love. I see myself standing, smiling, in the doorway. In his eagerness to embrace and kiss me as well, his thin lips are already stuck out. He is the only white person in the neighborhood at this hour of the day, but even if I think of this it is with amusement. The three of us collide in the doorway, laughing to think we have outwitted racism and racist laws one more time and lived to love another day.
    On such an upbeat day I would have worked well, whether at typewriter, quilting or flower planting. Our Child and I would have played. She would have napped. I would have shopped, driven out for a walk around the reservoir, taught. But most important, you would have come home in time for dinner, andwould perhaps spend the evening at home, not, as was often the case, in the office, where one or another case of a black family being terrorized by whites would have called you, immediately after dinner, and compelled you to work on it through the night.
    I have a question to ask you. I look at the therapist to see if it is okay. She nods. Why do you work so much? You look surprised by the question. I don’t know, you say. I’ve always done it. I know this is true. I remember how, when we met, you were still selling life insurance—a lucrative job finagled from a friend of the family, by your mother—which you’d done for years, even though you