Rhythms of Grace Read online

  RHYTHMS

  of GRACE

  RHYTHMS

  of GRACE

  Marilynn

  Griffith

  © 2008 by Marilynn Griffith

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  E-book edition created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-1271-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, Janet Kobobel Grant, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-7953.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  For Dr. Joseph Smith of the Central State University Upward Bound program and Oral History department. Thank you for putting the drumbeat into my spirit. I hear it always.

  “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me . . . Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”

  Matthew 11:28–30 Message

  Contents

  Part 1: Chorus 1984

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part 2: Harmony 2005

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  Part 3: Rhythms

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  Acknowledgments

  Reader Note

  PART 1

  CHORUS

  1984

  1

  Diana

  No one would miss me. They never did. And that was okay because I’d made up my mind. I was never coming to ballet class again.

  Ever.

  And I was also going to tell my mother what size tights I really wore. These things were killing me. Mom believes in squeezing in wherever you can, but not Daddy. He says that life is too short to be uncomfortable. I wonder then why he married my mother. Who knows? People are strange that way, making sense and not making sense all at the same time. Like Mom, thinking that wearing this pink leotard will rid me of that other dancing, the kind I do by myself to the beat always in my head. She saw me once. We didn’t say anything about it but the next week I was here at Fairweather Dance Academy where girls are kept on their toes.

  Right.

  I didn’t tell Mom then, but there are two kinds of dancing: the kind people teach you and the kind you’re born knowing, like some kind of dream. That’s how I dance when nobody’s looking: pushing it back, throwing it over, paying it forward, dropping it down. None of that pointy floor-pecking that my ballet teacher screams about. I can do that too, the pointy thing, but it’s too polite sometimes, like the way Daddy’s lips brush Mom’s cheek when he pretends to kiss her. No, when I do my dance my feet smack against the floor, kissing it full in the mouth, flat-footed with no apologies. There’s a long smooch when I forget myself and slide across the floor. It drives my ballet teacher crazy. Like now.

  “Toes, Diana! Toes, dear.” My teacher sounds calm, but don’t be fooled. She’s crazy.

  I smile and assume the correct position, knowing better than to make a scene. There’ll be enough to fight over when Mom finds out I’m not coming back. The teacher could make me assume the correct position on the outside, but in my mind, I was bent low, head down, shimmying across the floor, knocking all the bony ballerinas out of the way, including Miss Fairweather, who, despite her name, was no friend at all.

  She started in on me again. “Lift the knee, Diana. The knee!”

  Yeah, yeah. I lifted my knee and flapped my arms. It was a silly piece that ended with us flapping our arms. Swan’s wings, the teacher said. I caught a glimpse of my body in the mirror and stumbled, almost laughing. So much for Swan Lake. More like the piggy in the puddle.

  “And . . . stop. Very nice.” The teacher’s expression glowed as she looked down the line. Once her eyes rested on me, the flowing stream of “niiice” curdled on the woman’s lips.

  I froze, knowing that look meant a speech was coming, one I didn’t want to hear.

  Miss Fairweather forced her eyes from me and turned to the other girls, who weren’t really girls any longer, but she kept calling us that anyway. “Thanks, everyone. Don’t forget to stop in the foyer and get fitted for your recital costumes.”

  Forget? How could anybody forget the joy of being measured at the end of a line of twiggy white girls and hearing their even skinnier mothers scream, “Turn around, hon. That can’t be right. Your hips are bigger than mine!”? Thank God I didn’t have to do it anymore.

  Trying not to think about how I never measured up, I started for the door. There was no rush to get into the hall because if I moved too fast, they’d try to whisk me off to be measured no matter what I said. I always went last anyway, giving myself time to recite “Phenomenal Woman.”

  “Hold on, Diana. I need to speak with you,” Miss Fairweather said.

  No good could come of this. “Yes?”

  The teacher approached, then stopped in the middle of the floor. I didn’t approach. After a few seconds of stalemate, she spoke. “There’s more to ballet than dance, Diana. A ballerina has to be suited for dance. And if she . . . isn’t suited, she must make herself suitable; do you understand what I mean?”

  I understood all too well. She’d been talking to my mother, for one thing. I dropped my bag to the floor. Even Maya Angelou wouldn’t get me through this one. This was going to require some Jesus.

  The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want . . .

  “I mean your behind, dear. The way it pokes out like that. It’s a distraction. We must be uniform, so as not to take attention away from the others . . . Speaking of that, your hair. Your mother is going to straighten it for the recital, right? It must be in a bun like the other girls. Total
ly flat.”

  So much for that memory verse. I did want. I wanted her to shut up. The big rock that I get in my throat when Mom talks to me like this started choking me. I fought to swallow it down.

  He leadeth me by still waters.

  The teacher gave a tight smile, taking my silence for agreement. “I’ve discussed this with your mother before, but perhaps I didn’t make it clear.”

  What was the next line of Psalm 23? Something about a table and some enemies? My friend Zeely and I had won a gold bookmark for memorizing the whole chapter last year when we graduated eighth grade, but now it wouldn’t come to mind. I closed my eyes. It helped sometimes, for remembering poems.

  “Look at me, Diana. This is important. Are you listening? I need you to lose twenty pounds by recital. Thirty would be optimal, but twenty is a good start.”

  He puts my enemies on the table, roasted with salt and pepper—

  And on she goes. “One thousand calories a day should do it. It’s a bit much still, but I realize this is all new to you. A sensible diet—”

  A door slammed at the back of the dance room. “Lady, your brain is on a diet.” A man’s voice.

  My head snapped up. My shoulders relaxed. He’d come to save me. Daddy.

  My father crossed the room in long, slow strides. When he reached us, he leaned down and took my bag with his left hand and took my hand with his right. “There’s nothing wrong with this girl. There’s something wrong with you.”

  Miss Fairweather’s face scrunched up the way Aunt Ina’s cat looked when it was hungry. “This is my school, Mr. Dixon. I like your wife, so I’ve tried to be patient, but you will not talk to me in that tone.”

  “I won’t talk to you in any tone, miss,” Daddy said before nodding toward the door. “We won’t be back.”

  At first I tried not to smile. I almost made it out the door with a straight face. Almost.

  When I was done laughing, I reached my sweaty arms around Daddy and hugged him hard—between coughs from the talcum powder he put on under his shirts. He’d done it, just like in my dreams, the ones only God knew about. Only better.

  The pink pig was free.

  I saw it first. A billboard at the corner of Kentucky Street and Main. It might have been up there awhile, but it was new to me because Mom never drove this way, not even to church. She preferred the highway to driving through “South Side,” as my mother called the place where she and Daddy grew up. Testimony really wasn’t big enough to have sides, but people need that type of thing to feel good about themselves. Mom especially. (I’d like to call her Mama like everyone else on my block, but she insists on Mom.)

  Sunday was the only time Mom came to this side of town since all her efforts to get Daddy to go to one of the fine churches in our mixed neighborhood had failed. No matter where we tried to go, within fifteen minutes Daddy was snoring like some kind of mule. He was a peaceful man most times, but he knew how to win a fight when he wanted to.

  Like today. Today brought us to the South Side, where Daddy came all the time. He ate here, worked here, shopped here, laughed here. He was a come-up man, people said, but he never forgot where he came from. Not like that wife of his—who knew she’d go off to college and come back stuck up like that? At least he still brought his girl around sometimes, but wasn’t she a little strange too? All those books. It couldn’t be normal. They said these things right in front of me, the South Side people did, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t Daddy or Mom, just stuck somewhere in between both of them, with a book in one hand and a drum beating in my head.

  And now, here I was with Daddy, who never skipped the rough parts in books or told you to cover your eyes when people acted crazy in the movies. He’d shake his head and tell you plain how things were and what God said about it. Sometimes, if you asked, he’d tell you what he had to say about it too. But most times not.

  Instead, he’d hide behind the newspaper making that laugh-coughing sound (probably from his talcum powder) or disappear under the hood of his truck and let Mom do the explaining. I couldn’t blame him either. There was no stopping Mom when she got started. She could talk faster than most people could think. Even me.

  But Mom wasn’t here now. Daddy was here, driving past Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, around Heavenly Pastures Cemetery, and right up to the rec center where a tall, brown girl with big hips and wide, oval eyes danced in the sky on the billboard above it. She was leaping, but not like in ballet class. It was a backyard-basement-secret-dance sort of leap. And that girl was no pink pig. She was a tree, uprooted and set to music. Music like the beat in my head. It had to be. Nothing else could explain her dancing like that up in the sky for everyone to see, even with her “behind poking out that way.” Was her teacher ashamed of her too? It didn’t look like it.

  I turned around backwards in the front seat of Daddy’s truck so I could read it better. Ngozi Dance troupe. African dancing for girls 12 through 18, 4:30 PM. 374-5343. I said the numbers over and over, three seven four, five three, four three. Three seven four . . . Those numbers were tumbling in my head so hard that I didn’t notice Daddy had turned his truck around and come to a stop right in front of the Charles Chesnutt Recreational Center. Right in front of that dancing girl.

  Being at the Charles C—I’d only been there once, before we moved across town—would have been enough to knock me off my feet, but now there was that girl in the air on top of the building. Zeely, our preacher’s daughter, was always telling me about the Charles C and how I needed to pray that my mother would let me go some time. “Prayer changes things,” she’d said, sounding like the old ladies in the choir that she spent so much time with. I didn’t doubt her words or God’s power, just my mother’s stubbornness. Besides, until now it really hadn’t been worth fighting over.

  “Parks and Recreation facilities are for common people,” my mother said every time I asked, while Daddy whispered into his coffee that we were common people. At that point, I usually thought to myself that my mother was uncommonly stupid, but since hearing that sermon about the ravens plucking out the eyes of disobedient children, I’d blocked out thoughts like that. Without my eyes, I couldn’t read and that’d be worse than not being able to dance.

  Almost.

  I followed Daddy toward the infamous Charles C, named by the town founders for Charles Chesnutt, the wonderful writer of “Dave’s Neckliss,” my favorite short story. Well, not exactly. James Joyce’s “Araby” was my all-time favorite, not only for the writing but for the sheer curiousness of the words. I wrung my hands, realizing how nervous I was. I was rambling, even in my head. I paused to touch the dedication plaque on the wall as we passed, remembering the story behind it that my father recounted every Sunday when we drove by.

  The town founder, so moved by one of Chesnutt’s “funny Negro stories,” had named the original recreation center after him, only to be horrified later to learn that he had shaken the hand of a very light-skinned Negro, not a white man, and even named a building for him. The first rec burned down soon after, but the name stuck and in the end they named the new one the same thing. Charles C it began, Charles C it would always be. And I, Diana Dixon, was going in.

  I squeezed Daddy’s palm as he opened the door. Nobody truly understood me, but at least Daddy tried. He worried I’d go blind reading so much, but he never made me turn off the lights. I’d hear his slippers on the carpet in front of my door and I’d click the light off, waiting for his calloused fingers on my face, his prayer so faint I held my breath to hear it. In the morning, when my mother rushed into the room and found the light out and my glasses in the case on the stand, she would smack her lips and say, “I know you were up reading. I just know it. I’ll catch you one day.” But she wouldn’t. Not as long as Daddy was around. And he’d always be around. Well, maybe not always, since Mom swore pork chops would be the death of him, but he was here today. Here at the Charles C.

  Either I let go of Daddy’s hand or he let go of mine, but next I marched
up the steps, wondering if the dance class was held today. No days had been mentioned on the sign. Was Zeely here somewhere? I hoped so. If I tried to tell Zeely I’d been to rec, she never would believe it. I hardly believed it myself.

  “Hold up, girl.” Daddy ran behind me and I saw how far ahead of him I’d gotten. I also realized that I’d run up into the rec in a pink leotard and tights so tight that my thighs were rubbed raw in the middle. So much for looking cool. Not that I could anyway. The glasses and the braces sort of killed any chances of that. Daddy holding my hand was total overkill. I didn’t care though. This was it. Whatever I was going to do, I had to do it. And fast. Daddy was going to pay big-time as it was.

  I stood in the main hall, taking in the big brown front desk, the flyer-pasted bulletin board shouting DANCING, COOKING, and MEETING, PRINCE HALL LODGE #409. Basketballs bounced in time with the squeaks of shoes beyond the gymnasium door. There was another sound too, a thump down the hall. I moved closer, trying not to run when the thump became a beat and the beat became music. My music, the kind that pumped in my fingertips and strummed through my veins. Butt-naked music with no fluff on top. Music that made me move toward it, like so many times before.

  Daddy, who was still doing some kind of cowboy gallop to keep up, ran into my back when I pulled up short in the doorway of the classroom. The dance classroom. We’d found it. I stood there with both dread and happiness sloshing in my belly, feeling like I did when we ate real mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, knowing that the goodness would soon be over. The dancers weren’t bothered by our stares, they went right on, leaving me with nothing to do but watch them. Feel them.

  There were twelve girls in all. Zeely was there, right in the front, but she didn’t smile at me. She didn’t even act like she saw me. She was too busy being the blackest, prettiest tree in the foot-forest. They were all different, some with thick trunks and others willowy and long-limbed, but they moved the same, growing roots inside the song. My song.

  If there’d been time, I would have changed out of the leotard, ripped off my tights, or asked Daddy if he had some talcum powder in the truck to soothe the rash between my thighs. There wasn’t time for that. There was only now. And now was time for dancing.