“Waterfront, West Vancouver” Phone Photo DS
Mooney, Harrison. Invisible Boy A Memoir of Self-Discovery. 2022.
995 words
***The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children. Lorraine Hansberry *** recollections encrypted by trauma *** LITTLE. BLACK. WAIF. *** My white family wouldn’t believe me. *** I was adopted. *** birth father German, mother wayward black youth *** The families were Christian. *** Fraser Valley, mostly white suburb, bordering Washington State *** In a roundabout way, my family created me . . . *** Music time made me the happiest. *** Here was the love I was after. *** a woman saw an angel *** At church, and at school, I encountered no one like me. *** I saw myself in Moses, born to a slave girl *** Samson was highly relatable whose mother was barren, God gave her a special child *** Logic was on my side. *** I have questions about where I came from, my birth mother *** I had been to a circus once. *** The revival’s similarity is clear to me . . . *** The rapper lowered his head, showing subservience . . . *** There were women skipping, waving flags . . . *** When Sapphira comes to pull the same stunt she dies too . . . *** The anointing is all over you, brotha . . . I should have been encouraged by his words. *** My mother said I should stop squinting. But I couldn’t see the blackboard if I didn’t. *** My bully was the first to tell me. *** What did God say when he made you? Oops burned another one. *** He who spares his rod hates his son . . . *** Spankings were more than okay in the home. I was not being abused. *** Still she blamed me for the whole ordeal. *** Bur I never returned. *** homeschooled *** I tried to read a Canadian book on adoption. *** I developed a crush on a girl, bright-pink beret *** One night, I dreamt that I almost got back safely. *** I didn’t want to see a demon. *** Then she took me into her lap and began to pray . . . *** Other homes were tucked behind patches of forest surviving the upward expansion. *** Besides, she was always denying it. *** Why would God do that? I asked, interrupting the teacher. It’s mean. *** I was banished to the foyer. *** Some members of the congregation knew that Pastor Mark was a kid-toucher, but he had confessed and repented early. *** shoelace he used as a noose *** Does that mean sex? I asked. Several children snickered but the pastor’s wife was not amused.*** My mother heard it all through the Prayer Hotline, which doubled as a grapevine for gossip. *** The sting of silent rejection is the prevailing memory of my eleventh birthday. *** He was rapping in tongues. *** James Crock hit the chorus as hard as he could, and we screamed at the top of our lungs, and the madness outside was no match for the madness within. *** Shem and Japheth aren’t amused. They enter their father’s tent backwards out of respect . . . It was an act of homosexual rape, he declared. The curse was the skin of the Black man. I hadn’t been paying attention, but I definitely heard this and I felt it too, as every eye in the abandoned cadet academy armoury landed on the lonely Hamite sitting with my family. *** Staring up at what I did not know was stolen land, I got the sense that God himself had reached down like a shearer and shaved a strip in the earth . . . *** She asked me to do the dance, and I had so little self-respect that I agreed to before I even sat down. *** But I ran away from there, reminded of why I rarely left home. *** Mom, I said, did I ever see an angel . . . So don’t be your brother she said. Cut it out. You have a higher calling. *** We can’t have sex, Ashley said. There’s too much at stake. My mother gave up everything for me and I won’t throw it all away for you. *** I had no language for what my father could not see, and one cannot speak up without words. *** I knew the KKK mostly in abstraction . . . But on I-55, I stood corrected . . . and my mother shouted, Harry, get down. *** I raced upstairs. I gathered up the magazines and leafed through every one, in search of the young, handsome, happy BLACK man. *** A spirit of rebellion surged within me. *** You would, you racist, I responded in my mind. *** The highest GPA of anyone with this minor. *** I agree. You’re not a burden. Make yourself at home. *** She handed me a document, BIRTH FAMILY HISTORY . . . mother Trinika, was born in Ghana, Africa . . . Your birth father’s name is Cory Klein. He lives in Langley. *** Visiting Cory felt like being unfaithful, and I crept into the house with guilty eyes. *** My mother emerged as a voice in the shadows. Hello, she spoke over dead air. *** We did not speak again for several weeks. *** Mothers teach love and survival, said the warrior poet, Audre Lorde. But mine taught me to survive without love. *** I suppose you could say I was free. *** I thought you didn’t like me. Of course I liked her, she said she was my mother, so I loved her . . . *** If we do not define ourselves for ourselves, the warrior poet said, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment. *** Late one night, punch drunk on history, I dialled Trinika’s number. *** It’s Harrison, I said . . . She wept . . . ***
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ShellseekerReflections 