Monday, 15 May 2006
“Its something about being on that bike that just frees me,” my dad told me before we took off.
And here I was. For years, my father and I never agreed on anything. We would let the stresses of the world pit us against each other. Even at one time, I told him I didn’t have a father. And here I was on the back of his motorcycle like his little boy again.
Through the plastic shield of my helmet I could still taste the wind. I saw the fields and fields of Alabama pasture with grass drunken cows. Above me was as blue as the oceans near Cape Town and if I could have inverted gravity, I would have dived into the sky.
But it wasn’t the beauty of the day. It wasn’t that my father and I finally agreed and I now wanted a motorcycle too. It was… It was… It was I was afraid I might not get this day again. Me and my dad riding his motorcycle.
At 14, Jasmin packed a small plastic bag with some clothes but she left the important things. She left her only baby picture. She left all the sports trophies she had won. Those were the only things that reminded her that she was meant to be alive. She had a purpose to being born.
She was leaving the only home she had ever known. But it wasn’t much of a home. She was not part of the family. She was not part of anything here. She was simply funding her surrogate’s family’s crack habit with the money they received from the government – because of her. So she was leaving. She was going to belong. But she only had one chance. One fifteen minute chance. And if she missed it or got caught, the beatings and abuse would be without end. It already was without mercy. She had the scars to prove it.
Jasmin quickly dropped the plastic bag out the hole in the wall that others called a window.
She purposely ran into her surrogate mother, “I am going next door. I will be right back.”
But her surrogate mother was still high and waved her away.
Jasmin pretended to go next door to the family shack beside hers. On the way, she scooped up her small plastic bag that contained all the things she would need for her new life. And she was gone.
I grabbed the television set that Ani and I had found in the trash (but remarkably still worked) and I stopped at the edge of the stairs. In slow motion, I saw it fall. In slow motion, I saw my fingers release it. It fell and this metal and plastic box bounced. Bounced on every stair and tore into the wall where the stairway curved away. And in our living room the television set spilled out. Its electrode guts were all over the wooden floor.
I felt like that television set.
When I met Ani and I saw the future woman President of the United States, I stood at the top of the stairs and jumped. “Fuck it!” I yelled. “Life will sort me out at the bottom.” I remember waking up the next morning after I had met her at our mutual friend’s birthday party and I had one purpose: get Ani’s phone number.
I wish I could have been hit by a car that day. Or I wish I could have broken my leg or my arm. I should have gotten an early flight back to North Carolina. Anything to change the course of my life. Anything to protect her from the pain she endured. But it was too late, I had set my direction. And it was that moment, I thought she would be the woman who would watch me die when I was old and gray.
So Ani and I walked down the aisle and at the top of the stairs, I jumped. We had our first date in Barcelona. We had six months of newlywed pork chops. I saw New York City for the first time while holding her hand. We went into debt over an empty three story house.
Then I bounced on my first stair and pieces started falling off. Too many hateful words said at the wrong time. Too many times sleeping on the couch. Too much family involvement. Too much pushing from my side that she should be President of the United States.
Bang! I discover that she does not want to be President of the United States. Smash!
Her purpose is to finish her father’s life. She is suppose to protect and provide for her mother and her sister. I say she is supposed to provide and protect us. The fights intensify. I tell her that the only way she can help her family is to help herself first. Not by going back but by going forward.
She tells me I am not a man. She says I have no guts. She says I do whatever the world tells me to do. I am a puppet. I tell her she is furtherest from the truth. I threaten to leave – “You don’t have the balls,.” she says. I feel ugly. I tell her she is fat. She feels ugly. And the poison is released and eats us.
Clank! The stairway curves and the TV moves in a different direction.
I propose to start over. We fell in love in Barcelona so why not move to Europe to become new in the Old World? She is against the idea. It means she will be too far away from her family. But I do it anyway and she has no choice. And maybe thats when we realized we would never see our house together again. Maybe down deep we knew that when we packed our things up to put in storage, they would never be retrieved. That this new start was actually the end.
I met him while I was pushing a washing machine through a German window. He reminded me of somebody I already knew. He was quiet until spoken to but when he did speak he was witty like she was. He smoked too. I didn’t. I had heard about him from conversations Ani had about her school friends. And there was a moment when all of us were trying to catch our breaths, when they were standing next to each other, there was something there. I had seen it before. I had seen it before in me when I met Ani.
But it was too late. Ani was moving in with friends. I was officially homeless in Germany. We had separated. And he had found her. Two weeks later as I had no place to live – wandering aimlessly from friend’s flat to friend’s flat to the Starbucks on the Hauptstrasse in Heidelberg – I boarded my plane to Cape Town.
The remains of the television set is motionless bleeding electronic intestines.
Amandla is a Xhosa word – that directly translated means “power”. Others say that amandla more directly translates to “freedom”. But it was the word that represented the fight against apartheid in South Africa. As a white man, I am not really permitted to say it aloud in public. It is an unspoken word – it is a word reserved for blacks.
But I say it on this page.
All of us have that illicit word that points to something deep in us. It is an epicenter of movement – that changes us. Breaks the surface of our earth and makes us ajar. We can pour dirt into the chasm that is left but the ground never looks the same. You never build on that same place of land again. It is deemed inhospitable.
Your life shifts to the left or right of the place. And the place fucking sucks. If you ever have to drive past it, it burns inside you. Or if you remember it, your brain aches. So you do something to push it away. You rebel. You create your own movement and your own battle cry. And the battle cry is not to remember the struggle. Its not to remember the carnage, the blood, and the destruction. It is to remember the moment, the thought that made you change. To remind yourself the purpose of why you are doing it.
It is not the war you want to remember. It is the reason why you did it. Because “why?” is the answer to life. Even if there is no answer to the “why”.
I was in a courthouse in Atlanta. I remember everything being so big, so antiseptic, clean, fluorescent bright. The strange adults around me speaking in words and terms that I didn’t understand. There was a policeman there and a police woman who smiled sweetly and held my hand. I was just wondering where had my parents had gone. Why was I alone?
I remember being led in front of that big wooden desk with the State Seal of Georgia on a silver plaque. I could not see the judge because I was too small. I remember I was trembling.
A discussion between the hidden judge and the people around me. And at the end, the nice police lady led me away. “You’re going home,” she said and gave me a grin. I don’t know if I was crying but if I wasn’t I felt like I should have been.
I don’t remember them being there to pick me up. But what I remember next is waking up in Roanoke, Alabama and stamping across the heater vent and the cold wooden floor of Geneva and Bo’s house. Geneva was cooking something for me in the kitchen. Bo was drinking coffee.
They turned and saw me. They rushed over, picked me up, and painted me with kisses and hugs. It was then they were born to me – instead of me being born to them. Suffocating me with love was my mommy and daddy not Uncle Bo and Aunt Geneva.
I had not been in a court house in Atlanta since I was three. And what I was seeing equaled my memories. Bright, too clean, QUIET COURT IN SESSION sign, and lot of clouded electricity in the air. My lawyer Vic swung through the doors and sat beside me. He gave me some paperwork to fill out and asked me the questions he would ask me later after I raised my right hand and said “I do” to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The questions were simple. I said yes I agreed to have my divorce proceedings in Cobb County. Yes, Ani lives in Gwinnett. And yes, I live in South Africa. “That is correct,” that all separation matters have been dealt with in the Separation Agreement. “Yes,” the marriage is irreparable.
The judge added that her maiden name would be returned to her but when he said it he horribly mis-pronounced it – and for a second it registered as a stranger because it wasn’t her name. It wasn’t Ani. He continued – “I find this proceeding legal and the marriage is hereby dissolved.”
When Vic and I made our way upstairs to complete the paperwork, I told him, “Amazing how marriages start with such an amazing ceremony of life and happiness. And when they die, it is done so quietly in one or two sentences.”
He gave a sad smile. “Its to make it less painful. Its so you can move on.”
Later, I get an SMS (text) from South Africa on my Blackberry while sitting in Emerson’s Coffee Shop on Roswell Road, Marietta writing this.
“Are you ok? I love you just remember that. I miss you like crazy.” Jasmin typed.
Suddenly, I feel strong. I feel like I have guts. And I can’t wait to get back to check on my mother and take another motorcycle ride with my father.
Amandla!
Soulparking 
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