Alexis Domonique Mitchell
Freedom
Excerpt
You ever stare at a white picket fence so long till it blinds you? Kinda like staring at the sun, realizing that what you look up to could just as easily zap you out of existence if it wanted? Or make you feel like you’d want to zap yourself out of existence ’cause the way the world set up, you won’t ever have no fence? Or that it’s so big and you don’t know your purpose, or why God chose you? But then it makes you think what the heck is purpose and who makes that. Are we only worthy if we work hard enough to get a picket fence, or would we be more likely to enter the pearly gates of heaven if we lived this lifetime like Jesus did. Dying on the cross for the sins of His pale-faced children.
O
I don’t have children, at least not yet so that’s not my problem. And even if I did have children, they’d probably burn like all of the Jesuses in the streets that don’t get justice. Jesus had followers, churches risen up, hell even people enslaved to spread His name. The only memorial we’ll get is a hashtag and those raggedy old Dollar Tree teddy bears, hung around black poles under streetlights and stop signs. That’s no vigil. I don’t want balloons released in my honor. I want freedom for my people. Ecclesiastes talks all this nonsense about tilling land and reproducing fruit and that just being the way of life. We’ve been tilling land. It’s been our way of life but not by choice. God had nothing to do with that. Just plain evil.
O
I’m starting to think that people only have faith in the things that don’t box them out. I’ve seen firsthand someone love a God that wasn’t “supposed” to love them. People preach romantic love should be unconditional, but all other forms of love, especially religious ones, come with rules, regulations, and conditions. That never sat right with me. ’Cause if my momma gave birth to me, the first love and home I ever had, how is it that her love falls short to the love of some man. I was flesh of her flesh, same way we’re all supposed to be with God. But sometimes flesh falls short. I’ve seen it myself. You ever consider maybe we aren’t all God’s children? We could be akin but not cut from the same cord. If out of all God’s creations, one ended up like Lucifer, couldn’t some be flesh of his flesh and not God’s?
O
“It’s your turn to read, did you lose your spot?”
As she looked up, all of her classmates were smirking. She felt her hands clam up and her throat constrict as she struggled to find the last sentence. They were gathered around rickety old desks toppled together, forming an L in the center of the room. The sun shone through the six floor windows of the classroom. Whoever painted the white trim didn’t bother cleaning up the splatter on the faces of the panes, which was clear from the fossilized drops on the carpet that sat below it. It was a musty old plaid carpet, the color of dried blood. There were green tears in the middle and on the outskirts that ran like old church stockings up someone’s big-boneded thigh. The only color in the classroom was me, the rug, and green chalkboard that was cemented on the wall across from three of the windows. On one wall were the other three windows, and the last wall, closest to the door, held a bookcase. On it sat The African Genius by Basil Davidson, Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and a slew of poetry by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. Next to the bookcase there was a sixteen-by-twenty-four-inch blank space where they were testing out dry-erase board paint. The school had recently come into some money, so they were attempting to remedy the outdated look with some updated features. Even so, the chalkboard would remain, a staged head-nod to the “middle class” values of a liberal arts institution. Middle class, my ass.
For the cost of attendance rounding up to nearly sixty grand a year, you’d expect the furniture you see staged in the entrance of those gentrified condos or a coat of paint on the walls so fresh it’d make Ikea jealous. The school had been around since the late 1960s. Where it was first an academy for girls, it transitioned into a liberal arts safe-haven for all walks of life in the early 1990s. It was smack dab in the middle of the city, with no walls or borders to separate it from the real world. We sat in one of the older classrooms in the building. It towered over the corner of Charleston Street, adjacent to two crosswalks, two blocks over from all the high-end stores and chain of “posh” coffee shops, where people huddled around their Macs and iPhones like they were doing the most important work of all time. I was never one of those people, all uptight and self-righteous, but I did pay for a small seven-dollar coffee every now and then just to prove I could. Mama would kill me if she knew but I lived for the look on their faces when little old me, hair piled high on top my head, wearing nothing but a hoodie, shorts, and ripped tights in the dead of winter, strolled in with my espresso-white Converse asking for a roast they assumed I couldn’t pronounce. Seven dollars for a coffee and I still had to pour my own milk and add my own sugar, Mama would have a heart-attack.
Most of the English classes and AP comp lit courses were held here, but on random days like today, the elective Bible course took place in this room. Electives weren’t necessary, but the more you took on top of courses you actually needed to graduate, the better it was supposed to make you look on applications. This week’s discussion was about Ecclesiastes. The earlier weeks we covered the Book of Job and all the super dense stuff from the Old Testament. Class never fails to start the same way. Micah starts by making some snobbish comment about the truth behind the geographical voyage of the Israelites, Penelope picks apart the sources within the “book,” and Raph, who goes by “Aph,” makes some dumb joke about the classic tale of Adam and Eve. Always a debate with no conversation about soul.
About the Author
Alexis Domonique Mitchell is a fiction writer from Boston who is based in upstate New York. “Freedom” is part of her short story collection entitled Movin’ On Up, where she interrogates what this means both culturally and politically for POC and Black women.