Faye McCray's Blog, page 7

Water

They kept bringing us water.

I don't remember much about the services following the passing of my brother five years ago but I do remember that they kept bringing us water.  My cousins.  Small paper cups filled with ice cold water from the funeral director's office.  We sat on the hard pews of the small funeral home gazing ahead.  His casket was silver and it was covered in flowers. Fresh and silk.  I was lost in the empty spaces. Unsure if I was awake or awakening.  After about the third cup, the weight of the water caused the paper cup to bend with my finger tips.  The water skipped along the rim as I raised it to take a sip.  I turned to one of my cousins and smiled.  I hadn't seen her in years but we communicated in that familiar way only family can.  She smiled back.  Her eyes brightening briefly in that playful way it had when we were children.  It was funny. The constant gift of water.  My numb gratitude.  It was funny but neither us thought it appropriate to laugh. She knew we needed something.  Him.  She couldn't bring him back.  Water was all she had to give.  She gave me more.

I was on the stair machine the other day at the gym.  It's the hardest machine for me.  I lose my breath almost instantly and the sweat pours from me with a constant intensity.  I had just finished talking myself out of stopping.  20 minutes, I promised myself.  I had about 8 left.  I increased the level and brought my ice cold water bottle to my lips.  It felt good.  The water. Moistening my palate after the dryness of deep, deliberate "you can do this" breathes.  Cooling the warmth that blanketed my skin.

I thought of them then.  My cousins.
 
Bringing me those little cups.  How the water had felt traveling through me. Moistening my mind from the dryness of deliberate "you can do this" thoughts.  How the cold water had been the only thing real in that moment.  Reminding me that I was alive.  Reminding me that I still lived. 

I chuckled, grateful, and finished my time.

Love and Light,
 Faye

Oprah, SoulCycle, Weight Loss and Finding Faye

This fall, my best friend gave me four free tickets to Oprah's The Life You Want Tour in Washington, D.C.  Initially, I was a little wary of the invite.  I consider myself fairy driven and mostly happy.  I didn't know how much I would benefit from a weekend of self-help clichés and sponsored motivation (I mean, how intense is that photo?).  However, filled with gratitude that my friend would think of me (and trust in her assurances that it was "just what I needed"), I rounded up my girlfriends and went all in.



I had a great time.  The speakers and activities were great but the energy in that room was life-changing.  Over the two day event, men and women piled into a convention center with hopes of coming out better humans.  I met and had conversations with people who, on face, I should have had nothing in common with. However, I came out of each conversation feeling like a better person.  There was no judgment or pretense - just positivity and support, like a reboot for folks whose lives had left them close to empty.

During the second day of Oprah's weekend, there was a Soul Cycle demonstration called Soul15.  For those of you unfamiliar with it (as I was), Soul Cycle is this indoor cycling class that combines great music with positive affirmations to form this kind of insanely positive, high energy cycling party.  Anyway, this impossibly energetic, beautiful curly-haired woman, Angela Davis, came running out and got the whole audience of well-heeled ladies off their feet and dancing and squatting like maniacs on the floor of that convention center. She would yell positive words and phrases into the crowd, forcing us to declare who we were and how we saw ourselves.  I get chills remembering it.

Somewhere in the middle of cheering and sweating, I was overcome by the palpable energy of the crowd.  It felt good to be moving.  It felt good to be yelling.  It felt good to just be me.  Despite a relative degree of success with my lawyer life and writing career, I couldn't help but feel mocked by my failures.  I realized I had begun to reserve  mental space for things I couldn't control, allowing things that didn't go my way overshadow the things that did.  Dancing like a wild woman among strangers, I felt beautiful and alive.  I wanted to feel that way every day.  I knew the only person who could control that was me.  My first step becoming a better me was easy.  In October, I started following Carmen over at My Natural Sistas weight loss journey on Instagram.  From Carmen's first "after" picture, I decided I wasn't taking another step until I started working on the extra 25lbs that took residence on my body over the past year.  I joined a new gym, got an awesome trainer and committed to going to the gym every other day.



I'm two months in, ten pounds down and every muscle hurts but I'm happy.  I promise to smile in my next after picture (three months will be January 27). 

Be kind, this belly has had two babies. The second was to start writing for love again.  When I started writing my first novel, I was a new mom on maternity leave.  I would drive to the small beach by my house while my brand new baby boy took a nap and write furiously into an old journal.  At night, I'd read what I wrote to my husband, like a secret between us.  I didn't think about what anyone would think or how much money it would make me.  I just thought about how much I loved stringing the words together on the blank pages of that notebook.  How the life that was born there seemed almost as real as the little life in my arms.  I needed that again.  Just as simply as I needed water.

So, that's where I am.  Days away from the new year.  365 days of joys, heartbreak and surprises but I feel better leaving than I did going in.  I will have a few writing related announcements at the top of the year that I hope you'll like! In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note or two about what the new year will bring for you.  We aren't jumping up and down in a convention center together but maybe we can join hands across the web and support one another.

Love and Light,
Faye

Beyond Distraction

He said he loved being black. 

His voice was barely a whisper above the soft sound of the tangerine comb gliding its way through his curls.  His brother, my littlest, was fiddling with my contact case, turning it upside down and spinning it against the ball of his fingertips.

For a moment, I forgot what I had been saying.  The rush of the morning slowed and the light from the rising sun suddenly filled our halls.  I had been feeling heavy. An early morning scroll of social media will do that to you. Everyone was outraged.  Everyone was frustrated.  We’d witnessed a man who looked like my husband take his last breathes on a street corner, and we’d learned no one would pay. 

I’d rose from bed with my alarm as I had done every morning, chucking my phone to the nightstand beside my bed. I watched my sons' bounce into our room.  I rested my hand in the warm spot my husband had left and listened to the sound of the shower beat down on him from our bathroom.  I rose, helping my boys, 4 and 7, make up their beds.  I guided them to the bathroom to wash their faces and brush their teeth.  I rubbed shea butter into my palms and then spread it onto my eldest son’s hair. I smiled as I ran my fingers through his deep dark curls, softer than mine but just tight enough to defy gravity in curves all over his head. 

“You have such beautiful curls,” I’d said, picking up the comb and gently releasing a few curls from the matts last night’s sleep had left. 

“You too, Peanut,” I said to my youngest.  He smiled and looked back down at my contact case, spinning it in whatever world he was inventing in his head.  “I love that we are a curly haired family.”  I said it consciously. Deliberately.  Making the choice I made every day to reaffirm our beauty.  I wanted them to grow up believing it; not to have to learn to, as I had.  I slid the comb down to the nape of his neck, mentally preparing the list of things the day would bring after they were safely in school.  Emails, phone calls, gym…

That’s when he said it.  He stared at our reflections in the bathroom mirror.  The glass slightly foggy from my husband’s shower.

“I love being black, Mommy,” he said. He said it matter of factly.  The way he said he loved oatmeal in the morning, honey on his fingertip when he returned from school, or the way he loved writing comic books with his best friend, Caleb. In that moment, he meant he loved his curls.  He meant he loved the scent of shea butter in his hair.  He meant he saw beauty shining back at him in his golden brown reflection.  In all of our reflections.  A big smile spread across his pink lips.  His missing teeth made his sweet smile even sweeter. 

I beamed.  Wordless for a moment.  In all my effort to prepare him for the worst, I hadn’t noticed how truly good it would feel to prepare him for the best.  For all the beauty.  For all it meant to be black that sprouts beyond the distraction of oppression.

I kissed his temple and squeezed his waist.  “Me too, baby,” I said softly in his ear.

Five

Five by Faye McCray I am in the dirt this Wednesday. My hair is sprouting leaves. My fingers are burrowed and moistening. Mud coats my knees.   I am digging to hear you plainly again I last heard you five years ago I know if I dig deep enough,   I will still hear your echo.   We’ve been five years sullied. Our roots in mounds of pain. As if joy is the exception To deaths dark shadow on your name.   I am in the dirt this Wednesday. My hair is sprouting leaves. To forget how you left us. To remember how you breathed.    © Faye McCray  
Love and Light,
Faye

Cookies and Heartbreak

My baby boy is in love.

Well, not quite.

My four year old has this deeply complicated relationship with another four year old.  She rubbed his back the first day of preschool when he cried in my arms about leaving me for the first time.  Then she gave him a lollipop (and “No’buddy else, Mommy”) just because she had fun playing with him that day. Then she wrapped her arms around him tight and told him she would miss him between a Thursday and Friday just because he was leaving school early.

He looked at me, amidst the embrace, with his eyes wide and mouth reluctantly spread in a wide grin, that wild smile you only get when you’re trying really hard not to, and I knew. 

This little brown girl, with big hazel eyes and sweeping auburn curls had stolen a piece of my young son’s heart.

The next day, I picked him up from school and he was in tears.  Big fat, snotty tears that ran down his face and left giant raindrops falling from his chin.  I scooped him up and kissed his wet face.  His teachers assured me that there were no bumps, bruises or scrapes.  They assured me he wasn’t hurt.  Physically anyway.  That he was crying because a friend had chosen not to play with him.  It was only after minutes of wet kisses and soggy embraces that he confirmed what I thought. 

“She didn’t want to play with me, Mommy,” he said referring to the girl with the auburn curls.  He buried his small face into the crook of my neck. “She doesn't want to play with me for all da days.”

I held him tight and felt so terribly sorry. I know this heartache.  We all know this heartache.  I just naively believed I could shield him from it.  That somehow that part of being a human would skip him. That all his love would be reciprocated and no one would ever be careless with his heart.  

Like I said, it was naïve.

The first boy I “loved” didn’t love me back.  I wrote him a note, and he called me a name.  I cried hysterically in the coat closet with my favorite nun at my Catholic elementary school for a half an hour.  She stroked my hair and waited for me to stop, looking at me in a deeply knowing way.  Despite her circumstance. 

We all know it, right? I mean, we ALL know it.  I wanted to hold him by his chubby cheeks and tell him all the ways that adorable little girl sucked for not wanting to play with him but instead, I told him it was okay.   

"It’s okay,” I told him.  “It’s okay to be sad.  It’s okay to want to play with her but it’s also okay for her not to want to play with you.”

He looked at me with that quizzical look that only a child can give and I continued, “Not everyone is going to want to play with you, sweetie. Sometimes it’s okay to play by yourself or find other kids that like the kind of games you play.  There are so many other awesome kids in your class.” I concluded rattling off their names, including his buddies who stood by the fence while he cried as if they would cry themselves. 

He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed, pulling away with his pink bottom lip still poked out.  “Let’s go get a cookie, Mommy,” he murmured through his tears.

I smiled. 

When in doubt, that always works, too. 

Love and Light,

Faye

Dancing in September

I can't believe I have let a whole month pass since I've reached out! If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I'm alive.  So, that's good.  However, I've neglected this here writing space for the whole month of September.  I haven't been hibernating (though forced exile and sleep sounds reaaaally good right about now).   I've also been working away on a fast approaching deadline.  Earlier this summer, I was asked to participate in a horror anthology!



Aside from being loads of fun, it is also my first professional fiction gig with a real publisher.  After getting over the initial fears and doubts (Am I good enough? Can I really do this?), my fingers have been flying.  I channeled all my creative juices into this project so a few things were put on hold.  But have no fear, I am still planning on pursuing Dani's Belts as a graphic novel! The preliminary sketches are done and next  month I will resume preparing my story boards.  Also, I still plan on self publishing my novel, Boyfriend.  Realistically, however, it likely won't be out until sometime next year. 

The creative juices are flowing, folks.  I can't wait to share all my new characters and words with you - if you'll still have me :-).


Love and Light,
Faye

Jim

I didn't know him all that well but he was familiar.
Like the large, old oak tree that once grew in our front yard.
He was deeply present as if rooted in the ground.  Entwined in the branches that stretched out above our small block.
He lived there since the house was built in the 80s.
He'd tell you that.
His skin was a milky white.  The kind that probably never took to the sun very well.  His hair was a silky heather grey which he wore slick back.  His clothes, even the casual ones, were always freshly pressed.  His loafers always impeccably clean. 

Photo by DardaniMEvery morning, I'd spy him outside my window as I made my tea.  Stretching in the middle of the cul de sac and doing push-ups against the curb.  No matter the weather he wore a sweat band and tennis shorts, no doubt showing off his impressive skills for the other retired ladies living on our block.  When I left to go to work, I'd wave to him as he began his run.  He'd smile, wave back and begin his scurry.  His arms moving faster than his legs as he made his journey through the quiet of the morning.
He knew everyone's comings and goings, including ours.  Every afternoon, he'd perch at the top of his stairs and watch.  Knees bent, arms crossed.  His playful blue eyes bouncing from this to that.  The rabbits chomping on the grass in our yards.  The kids riding their bikes.  And the birds flying their quiet journey through the air.  He could have sat on his deck in the back of the house but I think he preferred being a witness.  Being a fixture in the life around him. Greeting the school children as they arrived home.  Slowing the inevitable rush that marks middle age by waiting for a wave or a comment on the weather. 
"Hi, Mr. Jim," My boys would say as they road their bikes and scooters fast by his house.  He'd smile and watch graciously as they showed off a new move or answer intently as they badgered him with questions.
"Do you have a wife?"
"No. Don't want one."
"Do you have a scooter?"
"No."
"Are you a Grandpa?"
"No."
He was amused by my overprotectiveness. Watching me as I rushed to nurse a sudden boo-boo, or break-up an inevitable dispute between the neighborhood kids about who won at tag or who lost a race. Teasing me about letting the boys "be boys" or siding with my three year old when I told him he was too little to play in the street.
"I'm just messing with ya'," he said waving his hand towards me when I tried to explain.
He was the kind of guy that scolded my mother for looking under the hood of her car when she thought something was wrong.  Me for contemplating fixing the weathered paneling on the side of my house. 
"That's his job," he would say, referencing my husband and gesturing towards my house whether my husband was home or not.  I chuckled because he reminded me of a my grandfather.  He's brand of throw back was a kind I didn't care to disturb.
He had a beautiful 1969 Corvette in his garage. 
"His baby." 
He'd back it out only on the most beautiful days and go for a ride.  He'd pull out of our cul de sac with a small smile on his face.  I imagined him slow riding on I-95, picking up septuagenarian babes and remembering the good old days.

Tuesday evening, we learned he was gone. 
In his bed, I heard.  Suddenly and alone. 
I stood outside with a few of my neighbors looking toward his house.  I  pictured him sitting there watching us.  Amused as we shared tears and stories.  Suddenly filled with gratitude for the bit part we play in each other's lives. 
We've had the most beautiful sunsets since. Filling our quiet streets in strawberry orange.  Making everything in the backdrop glow.  Somehow making his empty stoop look warm and full.
I'd like to think it was his way of remaining present.  Reminding us to be present, too. 
In life.  In all its glorious finite.  For all its quivers and falls. 
I'm glad I was a stop on his journey. 
I'm glad he was a stop on mine.

Love and Light,
Faye

Mornings

The walls in my bedroom are ivory.  A rather plain ivory but it ricochets sunlight from our window and captures shadows from the large oak trees behind our house.  In the morning, while my husband is still sleeping, I like to pull our fabric blinds all the way open, lie back down and be consumed by the light.  I watch the soft motion of the wind as it travels through the leaves to the rhythm of the chirping birds. The shadows two-step in the sunlight and sketch patterns on my body. 

  My youngest son holding his scooter and looking out on a lake.My hair, when loose, feels like spun cotton against my pillow.  I turn so it captures my face.  It's soft and it smells like coconut.  I like how it feels against my face.  It isn't long before I hear little bare feet smacking against the hardwood in the hallway.  Two sets. Opposite directions.  They swing open the door and jump into bed, my sons, snuggling against my husband and I, kicking blankets and talking about their dreams.  My little guy wants ice cream today.  My eldest wants to run through the sprinkler.  My husband opens one sleepy eye and asks if they're ready for breakfast.  They are.  They sprint from the bed making trips to the bathroom before bounding down the stairs to fill their bellies.  For a brief moment, I lie still.  Captured in the shadows. Content.  Nothing more than me.  Labeless. Loved. Warm. Full. Alive.  
 Love and Light,
Faye

Why I WILL March for Eric Garner

Response to Kimberly Foster’s Why I Will Not March for Eric Garner
Last week, shielded behind the numbness of my computer screen, I, too, watched Eric Garner take his last breath.  I watched a large, vibrant man’s resolve, self-worth and basic human right to stand up for himself squeezed out of his body in a matter of minutes.  I watched him struggle inside a police officer’s elbow and fall lifeless on a dirty, concrete street corner.  Like many, I shed tears but inside, I bled.  All I could see was my husband’s large build, my brothers’ dark skin, and my beautiful sons’ blind belief in their own freedom. 

At the time, my sons’ played in our playroom.  They chatted incessantly about what superheroes they would pretend to be and what advent
You see, almost seven years ago, when the doctor handed me my first beautiful, golden boy – in the midst of the overwhelming love I felt for the new soul placed in my arms, I saw an opportunity.  I saw an opportunity to raise the type of man, I had always hoped to encounter.  The type of man I had unexpectedly found in the man I chose to marry.  Men who didn’t throw bottles at women who spurned their advances. Men who didn’t expose themselves to high school girls on subway platforms.  Men who didn’t call women bitches and hoes.  Men who didn’t chalk up a women’s worth to her reputation or sexual appetite.  Men who valued the little girls they helped create.  

The arduous steps I had taken to that hospital bed had hardened me but holding that innocent life in my arms, I realized who he would be was yet to determined.   I could fight to make sure he was better than the type of man I had once endured.

That afternoon, as I watched Eric Garner’s life slip away from him, all I could think of was what kind of man his mother had dreamed he would become.  Had she watched him play in the house on a rainy day?  Had she loved him with all her might and worked tirelessly to make sure he was a “different” kind of man?  Like me with my husband, had his wife been challenged by his kindness… by his respect? Had his children felt the wholeness of a father who valued their lives? Had his daughter been one of the few brown girls I’ve ever known to call herself “Daddy’s girl”?


Fact is, I don’t know.  The NYPD didn’t stop to question what his mother’s dreams had been for him.  They didn’t stop to ask whether he mattered to his wife or his children.  They didn’t stop to ask whether he had ever objectified a woman or argued for her humanity.  They saw the same dark brown skin I wear every day and decided it didn’t matter.  They saw the same black life, I, as a black woman, have created and took it.  Yanked it away on a crowded city street.  

I do more than shed tears for Eric Garner, I bleed for him.  I bleed with him as I would for my sons.  My husband.  My brothers.  For all the beautiful life born to a black woman’s womb.   As long as black women create black boys and black men create black girls, I will bleed.  Our separateness is a divisive fiction.  A fiction no clearer than when I held my new baby boy in my arms.

Marching for him is the least I can do.
Love and Light, Faye

The Power of Contemplation

I was watching an interview recently where Pulitzer Prize winning author, Junot Diaz was asked if he had any advice for young writers.  True to Junot, he initially scoffed at the question, making no qualms about his disdain for such a clichéd question.  However, his disdain seemed to stem from his resentment of the professionalization of the writing craft... as if artist as a profession was like professionalizing one's humanity or thought or thirst.  He said, "There is nothing about our craft that needs to be pursued with such Talmudic concentration. But what does need to be pursued in our culture, which does everything to discourage us, is a passionate engagement with the world." He concluded, looking out into the audience and resting his eyes on the young question-asker, "The "you" that spends most of her life living not writing will be the "you" that writes the books I want to read."

I thought a great deal about those words in the days that followed.  Words, speech, or any communicative art form has a way of satisfying your thoughts in a way you didn't know they needed to be.  The quote soundtracked something I had been feeling for quite awhile.  I always felt my best writing followed a truly contemplative period.  Those periods where the world had smacked me around and I needed to make sense of it.  Or, maybe not so much make sense of it but figure out how I felt about it.  Those periods where I felt so deeply passionate about something or someone that I needed to give birth to something more than touch, or tears or anger... When my brother died, I needed to see it, in splashes of black ink beneath my fingertips or collections of letters against a white computer screen.  It made my feelings tangible... present... real. Even in fiction, I find escape.  I'm still there... just disguised, and pretty, and hiding in those in between spaces.  That need... to create... feels so intrinsically weaved into who I am, it is part of my human experience, like thought or thirst.

It's interesting that the young writer asked because I suppose the real question is how do we make "creating" our careers?  How can passionate engagement with the world and the product of that engagement sustain you? How do we become one of the lucky few that avoids the mind numbing ache of 9-5 realities, awkward elevator rides, and 30-year mortgages? I think the torture in being a writer, or any artist, is the urgency with which that desire consumes you.  It gnaws at you like a hunger pain or dirty sore.  There are days where my mind feels frantic.  Like my muse is pounding at the door, rattling my thoughts. Especially these days where my social, moral and cultural outrage seems fueled by my Facebook feed and i-Phone. This beautiful, flawed, unjust world is right at my fingertips, and I'm feeling some kind of way about it.  About it all. And I want to retreat with my words and some tea and the abundance of love I give and receive for every meal.  It's all I want.  Not the 9-5 or crummy elevator rides or 30-year mortgages.

But I wonder if the parts of my life that I'd rather not experience are a part of the contemplation.  If they are a part of that space before the art comes.  That place before its great.  What if "passionate engagement" comes not from getting everything that you want but getting a healthy dose of what you don't want.  How can I write about the beauty of feeling loved without knowing what it feels to be hated?  How can I fantasize about freedom without knowing what it feels to be caged?  How can I know the value of gratitude without loss? Maybe what Junot was saying... or what I'm going to decide Junot was saying (because let's face it, only Junot knows), is that we need to experience the ride.  Not just get through it.  But taste it.  In all its bitter and sweet.  In all its rotten and fresh.  The beauty in the breakdown.  I mean, whether you are able to professionalize your art or not, that kind of experience births wisdom.  And wisdom quenches the thirst of my art better than a dollar ever did.

Eh. Maybe Junot was just talking about reading. Young writers should always do more of that.

Love and Light,
Faye