Something She Can Feel

by Grace Octavia

Genres: African American; African American Women's Fiction; African American Romance

Synopsis

For a woman with her future all mapped out, life's about to go in a whole new direction. . . Tuscaloosa, Alabama, may not be glamorous, but for Journey Cash, the small Southern town has always been enough. She has a loving husband, a great family, and she brings the house down at church with her beautiful, thunderous singing voice. But Journey wonders if her years as an obedient preacher's daughter have kept her from living the life she is meant to live. . . When Dame, one of her former students, comes to visit after striking it big as a rap star, Journey gets a taste of the fast-lane life that has passed her by. Dame is exciting, unpredictable, and sexy, and Journey is ready to trade in her seemingly perfect existence to simply feel one thing that's real. Soon, she finds herself running from everything in her world into the arms of Dame—and the ride of her life. . . "This wonderful book holds your attention from beginning to end. There are surprises at every turn, and no detail is left unexplained. . .This book will inspire you to take charge of your own life." -- Romantic Times

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Dafina

Print pages: 480

Sample

I’d been nervous most of the morning before the wedding. Still wondering if I’d made the right decision. Evan was the only man I’d ever dated—we’d been together since the third grade. I loved him, and he loved me, and everybody loved us together. And coming from where I’m from, that was supposed to be enough to last a lifetime. Everyone, including Evan, expected us to get married right after college. But I wasn’t so certain. I thought that just maybe there was more to see and do and that, well, perhaps Evan wasn’t it for me. He was the perfect man. Good to me. And I loved him dearly. But something in my throat stopped me from saying, “yes.” So against everyone’s wishes, I made Evan wait ten years before I agreed to walk down the aisle, so I could be really sure. And I was for a while.

But when I woke up the morning of the wedding, something in my gut said that something else was missing. It was screaming and tossing inside of me like a banshee. But then my mother came to me wearing her pink bathrobe and rollers all over her head and told me this was normal. A case of the “cold feet” she’d had at her own wedding. We prayed together, both of our hands on her grandmother’s Bible, and she reminded me of everything I loved about the man who was waiting breathlessly to be my husband.

Evan had done a lot of growing since he was a pudgy-faced, yellow boy with acne and chicken legs chasing me around the town when we were kids. Once his face slimmed and testosterone thickened his muscles, every girl from our street to Birmingham was asking so-and-so for the who-and-what about Evan DeLong. By the time we began freshman year at the University of Alabama, even I had to admit that Evan was easily the most handsome boy on campus. His face had the kind of refined charm that made him the perfect escort to the cotillion, the man on whose arm you wanted to be seen. But he only wanted me—the girl who everyone said looked like his sister. My Alabamian roots drew back to the days when African slaves, Choctaw Indians, and poor white Irishmen often married, and I was a few shades lighter than Evan’s sandy-colored skin. I had brown hair that was streaked the color of corn during Alabama’s long, hot summers, and despite a voluptuous size 18 frame, Evan and I did look a lot alike with our perfectly nana-pinched noses and clear, light brown eyes. My mother said it was because, like her and Daddy, we were around each other too much as children.

With those memories of who Evan was and the honorable, distinguished leader he’d become, my mother assured and reassured me, laced me up in the corseted, princess-styled gown we’d shipped from Milan, patted me on the back and held my hand until I walked down the aisle, whispered “I do,” and Evan slid the shiny, platinum wedding band on my finger. Even then, I turned to look to her tearful, honey-colored eyes for certainty and waited for the thought of “something else” to fade.

And then it did.

The reception was at a refurbished twenties mansion at the end of a long, winding road on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. Evan and I’d found it one day during a “get lost” drive when we were just teenagers. After jumping out of his first car—a silver, hand-medown Mustang—and walking around a bit, we fell in love with the stately white columns and romantic, oilburning light fixtures that led to the front door. We dreamed of one day living in that house; however, when it went up for sale just before we got engaged, we knew we couldn’t afford it—I was a music teacher and Evan had just assumed a position as superintendent of the local school system. But Evan decided we should try to have a little piece of it and he got the real estate agent to let us use the five acres in the backyard to set up a tent for our wedding reception. With weeping willows and a still lake in the background, it was the ideal Southern setting for our new beginning together. The tent was draped in cream roses and silk ties; soft white lights and candles brightened every surface.

We arrived hand in hand, sitting atop the backseat of a fire engine red, convertible, 500 Series Mercedes-Benz. My dream car. It was brand new and Evan had somehow talked Sam Meeks down at the local dealership into letting us borrow the car so we could make what he’d called our “grand entrance as husband and wife” at the reception. “A car under the tent?” I asked when Evan told me his plan.

“It’ll be fabulous. Don’t worry,” he said with his eyes sparkling. He loved attention.

So after the “I dos” and vows, and my daddy giving his blessing, we were riding into the reception, sitting at the back of that pretty red car, and waving at 350 seated guests like we were king and queen of the prom again. Evan clutched my hand and I looked to him to see him grinning and looking at me the way he always did.

“Do you remember what I told you when you said you would marry me?” Evan asked, his hand still holding mine as we rode slowly in the car on a path through the middle of a wide ring of tables. Everyone was waving and smiling at us as the DJ called our names and played a sweet Ray Charles song my mother selected for our arrival.

“What?” I asked.

“I told you,” he began as his cousin Lenny stopped the car in the middle of the circle. He turned to me and looked into my eyes softly. “—that I’d give you the world.”

Before I could say anything, the DJ stopped the song and began speaking to the guests.

“Now, I know everyone’s excited that our couple has joined us, but please remain seated, because the groom has something he wants to say to his new bride.”

Everyone began cheering and I looked at Evan, unsure of what was going on. We’d said our vows at the church. I certainly hadn’t been prepared to say anything else. The DJ rushed over and handed Evan the microphone and with his usual charisma during such happy occasions, Evan jumped up and helped me out of the car.

“Now,” he said into the microphone when we were standing beside each other next to the car, “I was just reminding my wife—”

When he said “wife,” all 350 of our guests began to cheer wildly and even I felt myself blushing.

“That’s right ... my wife,” he went on. “I was reminding my wife that when she agreed to marry me, I said I’d give her the world. If nothing, I’m a man of my word! And I intend to do just that. So, Mrs. Journey DeLong, I have something I want you to know.”

“Yes,” I said shyly. Evan wasn’t big on surprises. He was a planner and he seldom planned anything I didn’t know about.

“He’s pregnant!” my younger brother, Justin, hollered and everyone laughed.

“No, that’s coming though ...” Evan said playfully. “But seriously. Journey, you know that dream car you always wanted?”

“What?” I asked. “You mean—”

“Yeah, that car right there.” He pointed to the pretty red car. “Well, darling, you don’t need to dream about it anymore.”

“What?” I shrieked this time.

A steady mix of “wow” and “ohh” came rising from the tables around us. I turned around to see my parents looking on arm in arm. My dad gave me a quick thumbs-up.

“What?” I cried in disbelief this time. “What?”

“Yes, it’s yours.” Evan smiled, and we hugged tightly.

“I love you so much,” I whispered into his ear. “How did you—”

“Wait, y’all,” Evan said into the microphone as people continued to applaud. “There’s more ...”

“More?” my best friend and maid of honor, Billie, shouted. “I hope there’s a car for me!”

“Are you ready for this?” Evan asked me, holding the microphone behind his back with one hand and using the other to hold me. His eyes were now intent and serious.

“What is it?”

“There’s a house in front of this tent,” he whispered. “Eight bedrooms, ten bathrooms, a three-car garage—”

“No—” I broke loose from his embrace and looked at him, covering my mouth with my hands.

“And a master suite with a walk-in closet,” he went on, “that now has every item of your clothing inside.”

“Evan,” I said happily as I began to cry. “We can’t ... we can’t—” The indecisiveness I felt earlier was fading fast. I was Cinderella at the ball right there in that moment.

“No such thing.” He placed his finger over my mouth before I could finish and handed me the microphone. “You tell them this one.”

“He bought the house. He bought the house,” I said, keeping my eyes on Evan. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I was living a fairy tale. And if I’d been looking for something when I woke up that morning, now I had everything. The perfect husband. The perfect house. The perfect car. What else could I ask for? Right?

April 19, 2008

For the first few months of our marriage, I was above the clouds. Somewhere out in the cosmos, starring in a novel, living every day happily ever after. I was in love with being in love and sometimes I had to remind myself of how I felt just hours before I got married. I’d look at my ring and thank God my mother was there to prop me up. Our marriage was everything Evan had promised and as we decorated our house, hosted parties, went to church, and just settled into our life, I knew for sure I’d made the right decision. Other people were fighting and some were even breaking up, but Evan seemed to only want our lives to be perfect. And it was.

With Evan’s new position in the school district, our recent nuptials, the house, and the pretty red car that seemed to get attention wherever we went, Evan and I had grown into a kind of celebrity couple in Tuscaloosa. People smiled when we walked into the grocery store, sent us expensive gifts and cards during the holidays, and we were on the invite lists of every event in town. We didn’t even have to save spaces at the Alabama tailgates that season; other people held them for us.

Evan, brimming with pride at the kind of stature he’d sought since we were young, relished in the attention—committed himself to memorizing the names of all the important people we’d cross paths with each day, meticulously answered each holiday card and gift with a quick thank-you note boasting a picture of us sitting beside the fireplace in our mansion, and extended his arm to lead me into rooms filled with people as we continued to make our “grand entrances.” While he was often over the top, this was just Evan. He was a true Southern gentleman—strong and gallant; full of honor and always wanting to exceed expectations. At times, it seemed like to him our life was a sitcom where he played the doting husband and I was the overjoyed wife. He was never angry and seldom raised his voice. One day, I pointed out that we never talked about anything that was serious, upsetting, or confrontational. I wanted to discuss what was happening in the world, who we really were, where we were going. Big stuff that I hadn’t even thought of. To challenge and be challenged. To see outside of our little world into the big world in ways that would make us love where we were from that much more. Not planning my family’s annual “Roll Tide” homecoming tailgate where we’d do our screaming duet of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and what red was actually crimson and what crimson was actually red. To this, Evan grinned and, after kissing me on the forehead, said I should be happy we didn’t need to argue over stuff on the nightly news. He did that all day at work and didn’t want to come home to it. We were happy and safe from all of that. This was a good thing.

While I was just as excited by the idea of happiness and living a carefree life, sometimes it felt so unreal that I wanted to scream and just argue about something. Anything I could bring up. It felt childish, but I wanted to prove that we were alive and not just these perfect robots. But I always failed. I’d jab about the laundry piling up and Evan would smile and call for the housekeeper. I’d complain that we needed to spend more time together and he’d clear his calendar for the day. It was wonderful. Amazing. But as we neared our one-year anniversary, I started to feel like I was suffocating. Caught in a tumbling storm of happiness and contentment with my life that made me feel like I was more dead than alive. I felt the need for something again, and just as they had before, both my mother and Evan seemed to have their own ideas about what that something was ...

“When you gonna have a baby?” Opal Ivers, a student in my fourth-period chorus section asked abruptly one Friday as I waited to begin class. Opal was a petite, brown-skinned girl, who might have been pretty if she’d gotten braces when she was younger, but now her teeth were bucked and seemed to part comically with each passing week. The kids had a habit of teasing her, but that didn’t stop Opal. She loved being the center of attention and took their laughs as encouragement.

Sitting at my desk behind the shaky piano I dared not ever use, as not one key was in tune, I frowned and dismissed the bold girl’s question with my eyes, but she was reading my mind. In what had become a habit of late, Evan had hinted about a baby over breakfast just that morning. He’d pointed out that I was about to turn thirty-three that Sunday and that my own mother kept saying it was time. “My mama said a married woman got to have a baby,” Opal went on. “That’s why you get married in the first place. Your husband rich, too!”

“Opal,” I started as the room continued to fill up with faces, “not all women want to have children ... or can. And as far as my having a baby, that’s private.”

While I did want children, I just wasn’t sure if it was time for me to take that step in my life. Yes, like Opal and her mother had pointed out, I was married and had a wonderful husband and home, but I still had other things to figure out. That, and not to mention, there was a school full of other babies that needed my attention.

The bell rang and a few stragglers came rushing in without apologizing—as I would never have done when I was in high school. But a lot had changed since then.

Last to arrive as usual was Zenobia Hamilton, a mother and second-year sophomore whose child’s father—a second-year senior—was expecting another baby this summer with Patrice, another one of my students (luckily, she was in first period). Zenobia walked into the room with an air of marked carelessness; her feet were angled at a lazy ninety degrees and her lips were turned under into a nasty frown. Her short hair was undone and standing all over her head as if she’d just rolled out of the bed and onto the school bus.

“Ms. Hamilton,” I said, signaling for her to come to my desk. I unbuttoned my suit jacket and slid it onto the chair behind me.

“Ummm-hum?” She was trying her best to communicate attitude in her voice. She rolled her eyes and balanced her weight on one of her ducked feet. This kind of unnecessary and unwarranted anger so early in the day used to perplex me eight years ago when I started teaching at Black Warrior, but now I’d figured out that mistreating me and mistreating their education, which for most of the students in the poorest school in the county pretty much made up the only structure they had in their day, was simply how they dealt with the emotional minefields that had been titled their life. Zenobia knew she was wrong for most of the things she did, but being bad and stepping out of line was the only thing she thought she could control. If I was fifteen, poor, and had a child with a high school student who was now expecting another baby with my classmate, I might be duck-walking and rolling my eyes, too.

“First, it’s, ‘Yes, Mrs. DeLong—’ ”

“Yes, Mrs. DeLong,” she said under her breath, repeating my words with no trace of sincerity.

“And second, what’s wrong with your hair?”

“I ain’t felt like combing it today.”

“But you knew you had to come to school, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but my mama took my braids out last night and then my auntie ain’t come over to braid it.”

“Personal situation aside—what’s the rule about hair grooming at the school?” I asked. The classroom grew quieter with each exchange. I didn’t want to embarrass her, but the hair was really standing up high and now that she’d mentioned that she’d just taken out braids, I noticed that it hadn’t been combed out and drifts of dandruff cradled her balding edges.

“I know the rule. We can’t come to school without our hair combed.”

“You know I have to send you to the office.”

“It ain’t my fault,” she said. “I told my mama my auntie wasn’t coming. She took my mama’s money and went to smoke it.”

It seemed every student knew what she was talking about—some had drug addictions of their own—and it was no longer a hidden Southern secret, not something these children felt they should be ashamed of. Zenobia hadn’t lowered her voice.

“Ms. Hamilton,” I whispered, leading her to the door. “I can’t allow you to sit in my classroom with your hair like that.”

“I know.” She crossed her arms and shifted her weight again.

“Then, if you know, why would you—” I stopped myself. I could hear my voice becoming frustrated. “Just go to the bathroom and comb it. Put it in a ponytail or something and—”

“My hair don’t fit in no ponytail. I ain’t got no gel ... no weave.”

“Well, just comb it down and come back.”

She sucked her teeth and flicked a red, widetoothed comb out of her back pocket. One she could’ve used hours ago.

“Fine,” she snarled. “I’ll be back.” She turned and waddled through the doorway and as she exited, I saw the promise of a firm belly imprinting the edges of her oversized T-shirt. I closed my eyes for three short seconds to say a little prayer of “no” and “God, please, no” over the pudge before turning back to the students.

“Let’s do a quick warm up and then we’ll pick back up where we left off on Thursday with ‘Swing Low’—we have only five more weeks to get this perfect for graduation,” I said, looking up at the other students in front of me. Some were other Zenobias, others were coming close, and fewer, Opal included, were fighting their best to escape it. The rest simply hadn’t come to school.

On cue, they groaned and rolled their brown eyes as if they’d thought there was some chance I wouldn’t require them to sing—in chorus. Send them all home for not having combed their hair. Zippers unzipped and song sheets rustled as they were taken out to be held in front of the faces of the few kids who still had their copies or needed the words.

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” was the traditional spiritual the choir had sung at every graduation since Black Warrior was founded for Negro students in the early 1900s.

“Let’s go.” I walked to the organ I’d placed in front of the old piano.

Hum.

Hum.

Hum.

Hummmm.

I keyed and sang each note for all of the sections to warm them up and just as they did whenever I sang in class, the students relaxed in their seats and looked on like babies being soothed to sleep by a lullaby. They requested the notes again and again and finally, I laughed and said it was time for them to sing.

“But we want you to sing,” Opal whined, and I shook my head no. But I was used to this. I’d grown up being a soloist in the choir at my father’s church and my mother always bragged that I had the voice of an angel. I wasn’t that confident, but when I was just a little girl, I realized that my singing could do things. My father would push me to the microphone and I’d sing nervously, watching as people fell to their knees and got saved right in front of me. Grown men and women would crawl on the floor and sing along with me, crying and praying, some speaking in tongues.

Hum.

Hum.

Hum.

Hummmm.

The sopranos. The tenors. The baritones. The altos. They sent waves of vibrating sounds through the oval-shaped room as I keyed the notes through the short warm up. Suddenly, the room went from dull and tired to a soothing rainbow of sound. The echoes from each group bounced around the room in a tide of confidence and calm.

Zenobia had come back, and we went on, charging at “Swing Low” so hard that it seemed as if the spirits of our ancestors, who rested on the very plantation that the school was built upon, were singing along. The children could feel this energy. All of them. And it came through in their voices. They were forgetting the past with song and living just in the moment in the wonder that we could sound as one. Right now, who they were and where they were from really didn’t matter. When class ended, they would walk out and return to the world; but for now, singing and “Swing Low” held their spirits captive. In that moment, I was winning.

“Wow,” Billie exclaimed, her face appearing and reappearing in the waves of a sea of students rushing out of the room when the bell rang. My best friend since she stopped Angie Martin from beating me up on the school yard in second grade, Billie taught language arts at Black Warrior. “They sounded really good. I heard them all the way down the hall.”

“Thank you.” I sat down at my desk and sighed. “Let’s hope they sound that way at graduation.”

“Oh, they will. They always do. Anyway, let’s go get some lunch. I need to get out of here.”

“You know I can’t do that,” I said, reaching for the running sneakers beneath my desk.

“You’re working out today ... again? This is five days in a row. This is getting out of control.”

“Don’t be mad at me because I’m actually keeping my grown lady New Year’s resolution,” I said, and Billie rolled her eyes at my reminder of our New Year’s pact. At my parents’ annual New Year’s Day breakfast that year, Billie and I sat stuffed and sleepy in my parents’ den, talking about how fast time was flying by. It seemed that only days ago, we were twenty-one and just graduating from college—making plans neither of us would keep and feeling like the rest of our lives were in front of us. And then, just in a quick snap of time, we’d awoken and found ourselves grown up and feeling like the rest of our lives had already happened. The maps had been laid out and we were just biding our time at work and in the mall. We groaned and complained that we were too young to be so old. We weren’t in our forties, fifties, or sixties. We were in our thirties! And that was supposed to be the new twenties! So, why did we feel so ... over? Not young enough to hang out in the new nightclubs downtown, but not old enough to play bingo in the basement of the VFW either. Then Billie came up with an idea—we had to make “grown lady” resolutions. We had to set up three goals for ourselves for the new year and not let another year pass us by without moving on them. Billie’s grown lady resolutions came quick—letting go of her tumultuous relationship with Clyde and finally dating other men, going back to school to get her master’s, and getting a new car—she’d been driving the same red Eclipse since college. My resolutions took a little longer. I just didn’t know what I wanted. But finally, I decided that I wanted to start to travel—to see the world beyond the South, to start writing songs again, and to lose all of the extra weight I was carrying around.

“I’m just walking around the track outside for an hour.” I added, “You should come, too.”

“But it’s Friday!”

“And?”

“And ... it’s your birthday weekend. You’ll be thirty-three on Sunday.” She sat down in the chair next to my desk and whimpered helplessly. “We need to start celebrating now.”

“Celebrating what? It’s just another year.”

“You’re one year growner!”

“Growner?”

“More grown ... whatever.” She flipped her hand at me.

“Okay, English teacher.”

“Just ... why don’t you seem excited? Not even a little bit?”

“I’m excited,” I said, hearing the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

“Then come eat with me, pleeeeassee,” she begged.

“But I have to walk today. I promised myself. I have to do something with these bad boys by summer.” I pointed to the round hips that seemed to be stretching my size eighteen slacks into the next cut. “I’m not trying to be the Southern cliché of a black woman—in the church, singing ... and big.”

“Please, J. You know the brothers love those country curves.”

“Not Evan.”

“Well, the Mr. Evan Deeee-Long is a different breed. Everybody has to be picture perfect around him—since he wants to be the first black president of the universe—”

“Well, Obama’s already on the way!” I said and we both laughed.

“Exactly. But I say, bump perfection ... when there’s a tasty sandwich shop waiting to feed us. Come on, girl!” She grinned and waved her hands rhythmically in front of my face to entice me.

“That’s easy for you to say; you’re a size 6,” I said, laughing as I slid off my shoes and began putting on the sneakers. One of the smartest, boldest people I’d ever known, Billie was the kind of pretty girl other pretty girls hated to walk into a party with. For her, beauty was something she didn’t have to work at. Billie’s chestnut skin, doe eyes, and slender cheeks made her an eyeful even when she was asleep—and I lived with her for four years in college at Alabama, so I knew.

“Size doesn’t matter when no one’s there to look at it,” she said, her voice sinking. “Sometimes, I feel like I could be a size 2 or 202 and that fool still wouldn’t notice.”

In high school, Billie was voted “Best Looking,” and we expected some Prince Charming from New York or Atlanta to come swooping down to see her beauty and take her far away from Tuscaloosa. But she had other plans. The love of her heart, Clyde Pierce, wasn’t from New York or Atlanta and he’d sworn long ago that he wasn’t ever leaving his father’s land. He graduated from Stillman College the year before we left the University of Alabama and took a job teaching gym and coaching the varsity football team at Black Warrior. No one was surprised when Billie signed up for a teaching job the following year—even though she was a finance major.

“Oh, Billie, don’t bring up Clyde. I thought you were finally moving on ... remember?” I said.

“I know, but it’s hard to have his shit just all up in my face like this, you know?” She leaned her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in the palm of her hand.

As coach of the football team, Clyde had been enjoying his own form of celebrity in Tuscaloosa. And for years, he’d had a long line of fans linked up behind Billie. The biggest problem he had was crowd control—especially with the other female teachers at the school. But Billie loved even the sweat that bubbled on Clyde’s brow, and while she usually wrote off his philandering and slipping in and out of janitorial closets as rumors, the last chitchat hit her like a bucket of his sweat in her face. Nearly a ringer for a younger Billie, the new physics teacher, Ms. Lindsey, was twenty-one, petite, and so cute the senior class voted to have her put on the list for their “Best Looking.” Last year, when word spread around the “grown people senior class”—that’s what we called the faculty—that Roscoe the janitor caught Clyde and Ms. Lindsey in his storage closet, giggling like teenagers ... and naked, Billie broke it off and she’d dedicated herself to finding a good man ever since. I was happy that she’d had the strength to move on, but also thrown off by the fact that unlike every time before, it seemed that this time the breakup was final. And not from Billie’s position either. Unlike the others, Clyde seemed serious about Ms. Lindsey. He paraded her around town, and sometimes I caught him looking at her the same way he’d looked at Billie when she was twenty-one and vibrant, her mind not caught up in the desires of a grown woman looking for a husband and family. This, of course, I never told Billie.

“How’s the Internet dating thing going?” I asked, trying to change the subject from Clyde.

“It’s great.” She perked up suddenly. “In fact, do you remember the guy I’ve been writing? Mustafa?”

“Mustafa?”

“Yeah, the hot Nigerian man? We’ve been chatting for like a month. Anyway, he’s coming to visit me this weekend.”

“Visit you? Did you check him out? Are you sure he’s not a part of some credit card scam or trying to marry you so he can get a green card? Did he ask you to transfer money into an account? I saw an e-mail about that.”

While I’d accepted the fact that the chances of Billie meeting a single man above the age of twenty-five in Tuscaloosa was nil, and that next to driving to Birmingham every weekend, the Internet provided the next best way for her to fulfill her grown lady resolution, I was still a bit nervous about the men she’d been meeting online.

“Don’t be so closed-minded, J. You know better. Mustafa is a good man. He has his own business and money. He’s single. No kids. Lives alone,” she rattled off but something in her voice was so rehearsed. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. “He has it going on. And with the shortage of good men over here in the States, a sister had to expand her options to the Motherland.” She started doing a ridiculous African dance and we both laughed.

“I’m just saying—he’s coming here to see you? All the way from Africa? Does he know anything about Tuscaloosa? This i