Missz’ Grace Lives Here - Excerpt from the Novella
My flesh is the colors of autumn leaves. Reflections of indian red, bone yellow, brown, indigo. Star lightened breast signal toward a ray of sun streaming above a gray cloud. She prepares for the stark white winter.
Miszz' Grace enters another bathroom. She is thinking about all the years she has spent looking at herself in the mirror. Yet really not knowing whom it is looking back at her. She notices a few strands of white hair, and sighs, each one stands for a lesson she has learned as a twenty first century black woman.
Each one is vitally important.
She decides to contemplate each lesson she has learned, while she walks away from the mirror, and prepares to take a spiritual bath, one of many, while living in her twenty first century slave master's house.
The Poet - Painting by Isa Ariel Ramat Gan, Israel
She leans over the tub, turns on the hot, then cold water and adjusts the temperature, so to get it just right, she looks into the water, she sees a shadow, almost like a mirrored reflection in the water. Outside the bathroom, she hears, the master, shouting over the running water, “ stop running all that water, if you had to pay for it, you wouldn’t be using so much.”
Miszz' Grace turns the cold water faucet on, to adjust the hot, to a trickle. She makes sure she moves very quietly inside the bathroom, wearing an all white robe, it is open, exposing her nakedness, breast, stomach, thighs, and legs, she takes a quick overview of her flesh, and doesn’t want the slave master to enter interrupting this sacred space, it is her only place of solitude in America. The bathroom, the bathroom is the only place in the world of bathrooms that she can be with her realized self.
My flesh is the colors of autumn leaves. Reflections of indian red, bone yellow, brown, indigo. Star lightened breast signal toward a ray of sun streaming above a gray cloud. She prepares for the stark white winter.
Miszz' Grace enters another bathroom. She is thinking about all the years she has spent looking at herself in the mirror. Yet really not knowing whom it is looking back at her. She notices a few strands of white hair, and sighs, each one stands for a lesson she has learned as a twenty first century black woman.
Each one is vitally important.
She decides to contemplate each lesson she has learned, while she walks away from the mirror, and prepares to take a spiritual bath, one of many, while living in her twenty first century slave master's house.
The Poet - Painting by Isa Ariel Ramat Gan, Israel
She leans over the tub, turns on the hot, then cold water and adjusts the temperature, so to get it just right, she looks into the water, she sees a shadow, almost like a mirrored reflection in the water. Outside the bathroom, she hears, the master, shouting over the running water, “ stop running all that water, if you had to pay for it, you wouldn’t be using so much.”
Miszz' Grace turns the cold water faucet on, to adjust the hot, to a trickle. She makes sure she moves very quietly inside the bathroom, wearing an all white robe, it is open, exposing her nakedness, breast, stomach, thighs, and legs, she takes a quick overview of her flesh, and doesn’t want the slave master to enter interrupting this sacred space, it is her only place of solitude in America. The bathroom, the bathroom is the only place in the world of bathrooms that she can be with her realized self.