Short Story / Glory Moving Forward
I do not remember the face of my mother anymore than I remember the arid plateaus of Ethiopia. There are images of both, I’m sure, floating around somewhere in my mind, just waiting to be plucked down and examined. Mama Kline tells me not to be ridiculous, that of course I can’t remember, being just under six months old when God, in His infinite mercy and wisdom, decided to deliver me from a heathen’s death in Africa.
Mama Kline talks like this a lot. Not as much as Papa Kline, who, red-faced and panting, shakes his finger at parishioners every Sunday morning from the pulpit at Homestead Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska. Every sentence of Papa Kline’s is followed by either (1) Praise Jesus, (2) God is Good, or (3) Amen, and sometimes, he includes all three in one breath, but usually only when the Huskers win a game. I like when that happens because, in his joy, he will fish change out of his pocket and divide it equally between the five of us—me, Bubba, Simon, John and Ruth.
Bubba, whose real name is Ezekiel, wrestles the other boys for their money in the backyard after Papa Kline has fallen asleep in his armchair. I’m glad I’m a girl because he leaves Ruth and me alone, and now I have nearly ten dollars hidden in a sock underneath a loose step on the front porch. I sneak out sometimes in the middle of the night because I love how the moon makes those nickels shine in my palm, bright and full of promise.
This is how Aunt Marlene, Papa Kline’s sister, says I came to Nebraska: Mama Kline read about a woman in Walnut Grove who adopted a little Vietnamese baby her husband found while ministering to soldiers in Hanoi. Mama Kline, not to be outdone by a couple of Lutherans, decided to go all the way to ‘the dark continent’ for her orphan. Aunt Marlene is vague, and mostly drunk, but it’s more than I ever get from Mama Kline, who simply tells me that I am being ungrateful when I ask about the adoption.
Aunt Marlene, according to Mama Kline, is a hopeless sinner, who is everyday securing her ticket to hell by smoking and drinking in bars with strange men. She doesn’t dare say this in front of Papa Kline, and she still takes Ruth with her every Saturday morning to ‘Curl Up and Dye’, Aunt Marlene’s beauty parlor, but there is an unmistakable air of scorn about Mama Kline you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to notice.
Saturday mornings while Mama Kline and Ruth are getting their hair done, and Papa Kline and the boys are clearing the yard, I sit on my bed and look at myself in the small compact mirror Aunt Marlene gave to me one Christmas. There has never been a time I didn’t know I was different, and even if I forget for just a little while; there is always someone to remind me. I close my eyes and pray hard for the flat, plain features of my adopted siblings, for the long curtain of silky hair Ruth allows me to brush every morning, for the stocky build of my classmates. Always, the same me stares back when I open my eyes. High cheekbones, thick, springy—Ruth says kinky—hair, and hollow ribcage. Sometimes it’s enough to make me give up on God, though I mostly feel bad about it afterwards and promise to give Him another chance next week.
Summers in our house are easy and peaceful, and there is more kindness than usual in Mama Kline. She lets us walk all the way into town to buy ice cream and soda, and sometimes, she’ll give us extra money for magazines or something else equally foolish (Mama Kline’s words, not mine). There is a community pool in town, but we’d rather go to the swimming hole at the edge of our property line because it’s ours and we don’t have to share it with anyone.
There is a church barbeque every 4th of July, but during the day, most of us kids are lined along the street for the parade, elbowing each other for the candy thrown from the fire-trucks. This is also when the ‘Miss Independence’ pageant is held, but only Ruth and I stay to watch. One year, Ruth enters the pageant, and when she wins, she gets to ride in a red convertible in the parade, though she is too dignified to throw candy.
“I want to enter next year,” I say proudly across the table after grace has been said.
I’m ten, so I don’t know the silence that ensues is awkward, only that everyone at the long picnic table is suddenly gaping at me from behind their corn-on-the-cob. Bubba is the first to laugh, but soon everyone else has joined him.
“Don’t be silly, Candace,” Mama Kline says, smoothing the back of Ruth’s hair.
Grandpa Kline slaps his hand flat on the table and turns to Deacon Berg. “My God, man, can you picture the look on those judges faces when this little nigra gets on stage?”
“Daddy,” Papa Kline warns quietly.
“What’s your talent going to be?” He calls over to me. “Spear throwing? Tribal dancing?’
Bubba jumps up from the table and begins stomping his feet and moving in a circle, shouting gibberish and kicking up dust. The kids laugh, but their parents look suddenly uncomfortable and I feel the heat rise to my cheeks.
“Enough!” Papa Kline roars. “I will not have this kind of foolishness at my table.”
Bubba sits sullenly in his seat, and Grandpa Kline coughs into his napkin.
“Candace, you go on and enter that pageant if you want,” Papa Kline says.
All that hope I held in my hand has slipped through my fingers like water, and though Papa Kline’s support means everything to me, I feel empty.
“Never mind.”
**
The airplane is packed with people who have skin as dark as mine. Most of the other passengers are young, serious men in cheap suits, all wearing the same round glasses. Students. They glance up occasionally from their newspapers to look out the windows, and sometimes, at me. Their eyes are admiring and not, as is the case in Nebraska, curious.
I clutch a letter in my hand, worn and creased from months of reading and even now, I unfold it and trace the letters with a fingertip. I am going home, not for the summer to Beatrice, but back to Addis Ababa, back to Ethiopia, back to my mother. The she who has proven elusive is suddenly as wonderfully solid as the old woman seated beside me, smiling and muttering to herself in a language I have lost.
We begin our descent and my stomach flips nervously, though not, I think, from the change in altitude. I close my eyes against the trembling dip of the plane, biting back a wave of nausea when the landing gear thuds against the asphalt runway in staccato bursts. The plane taxis, and people begin gathering their belongings; tacitly ignoring the lighted fasten seatbelt sign. Minutes pass and we are jerked forward when the plane stops suddenly. The hatch is opened, the stairs lowered, and a sea of bodies is urging me forward.
The heat hits me, oppressive and almost liquid, rising from the tarmac in steamy clouds. Already there is a thin sheen of sweat coating my forehead, and my crisp linen suit, the one Rosario lent me especially for this trip, has wilted in the humidity. I stop to catch my breath because nothing I’ve read has prepared me for this.
“Is someone meeting you here, little sister?”
He’s not handsome, exactly, but there is something kind in his face. He’s wearing a threadbare, albeit meticulously-kept, uniform, and it is only much later, drinking tea in my mother’s house, that I realize he is one of the pilots.
“Yes, er…should I—“
He points in the distance, past the retreating backs of the other passengers to a compact building. “The terminal,” he says simply.
“Thank you.”
“Minim aydel.”
Minim aydel…you’re welcome. I know the rudiments of Amharic, have ordered cassette tapes and study guides, holding conversations with disembodied voices in a clumsy tongue. I was full of romantic notions at first, imagined the words of my people coming back to me with an easy grace, was disappointed when instead I couldn’t grapple with the odd arrangement of consonants and vowels. My sentence construction was abysmal, and my pronunciation made even Claire, my yellow parakeet, cringe. I am embarrassed by my own ignorance, but language isn’t something imprinted in our DNA.
My limbs are impossibly heavy, leaden with the weight of heat, and possibly something else. She’s there, I know, just beyond the glass and concrete, waiting for me. I am propelled forward by something unnamable, akin to hope, and maybe even rapture. But there is also this: fear and doubt in equal measures, lodged in the bottom of my stomach, fixed and unchanging.
It is here, halfway to the terminal, that the sounds and smells of Ethiopia’s capital city finally permeates my senses. Raised voices, honking horns, and, is that cattle? collide in stereo. Exotic spices are carried by a grudging wind and I close my eyes, willing my body to remember this, any of it. In the end, it is as foreign and unfamiliar as the landscape. I resume my walking because, in the startling brightness, there isn’t anything else to do.
I open the door with trembling hands, realizing too late that there isn’t any time to compose myself. I look for her in the crowd of faces, knowing instinctively that she won’t be holding any sign. She is testing me, or maybe just herself, but anyway, she thinks we should know each other without the aid of identifiers. And she’s right. My insides prickle with recognition.
She’s tall, like me, and slender in a way I know Rosario would arch an eyebrow at. Those cheekbones, the slope of her nose, even the elegant lines of her neck, are familiar to me because they are mine. She doesn’t look like a refugee, though I know she fled to Kenya in the seventies to escape the socialist regime of the Derg, leaving me with an aging aunt until she settled. I know only a little of her story, the bits she chose to reveal in her carefully worded letter, but heartbreak colored every line. She’d returned to Ethiopia three years later under the cover of darkness to find her aunt dead and her only child swooped away by Americans.
Our eyes meet across the distance and both of us stop breathing for a fraction of a second. The crowd falls away until there is only us, and, I swear to God, time stops. I don’t remember going to her, but suddenly, her hands are on my face. I can’t hear what she’s saying above the din of the mob, but I can still read her lips.
“Konjo.”
Beautiful
And, suddenly, at the age of twenty-five, I realize that maybe I am.
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This 123 word review has not been unlocked.
Decently written, but I think I may’ve missed the point of the story. It seems like it’s just lacking content, and needs more leading up to the end.
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“Ruth enters the pageant” – entered
There are several more words after this that need to be in past tense.
“nigra” – negra?
This is a very well written story, and the only suggestion I have is that there are places where you switch between present and past tense. Other than this correction, very well done on a great story.
Interesting. Very well written.
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