Jamie's Dreams Deferred

Jamie's Dreams Deferred

Meredith F. Coleman-Tobias

I want a wedding where bluebirds sing in a lily garden. Juniper blossoms cast off love's aroma like the time before right now, in my mind, when falling in love was a must and its power would suspend mundane me for the rest of my life, unravel me, and re-make me, whole. I want an empire waist white dress. Well, I guess it would have to be off-white in remembrance of the "Negroes," here and there, that have, over time, rubbed its stark whiteness away. I want organ music, dammit! Or at least the instrumental for a midnight love jam. And a cluster of my favorite people sitting, on a diagonal, to my right, in hard-back chairs, uncomfortable enough to make them want to pay attention to something pleasant, like my pretty face, my direct gaze, my wide cheekbones, my subtle half smile, and my braids doing a rain dance despite the clear skies. I can hear the "Hey, Jamie!" excited, tactless murmuring of my little cousins amidst my grandmother's sobs. I want a warm breeze to kiss my temples. I want to see my King, plainly and beautifully. I want my stomach to drop like it did the third time I saw him because it was then that I was aware that I had been counting. I want him to remind me of the highest note brothers croon, falsetto, on a good day. Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes.

Jamie whispered to herself as she washed the last of the soap bar away. She lowered her head and let the steady stream pound her back. Today she had kept the wedding basic. Yesterday, it was a multi-million dollar event at a private club on Park Avenue where antsy little cousins would have been checked, with the coats, at the door. Yesterday, there were Godiva wedding favors instead of today's simple white matchboxes. Every day, vows were exchanged in various locales, yet her desire remained simple and constant: a wedding.

Every morning began with this daydream ritual and ended with back-to-reality sadness, warm painful tears on the occasional Thursday, and continued monotony. Khakis and a cotton knit shirt. The B46 to Sears. Time clock. The too-fluorescent lights. The escalators. The elevator jazz music, playing the same set, every day. Then overdressed semi-cute babies. Come on, Come on, let's see the booka-boo smile. That's it. That's Mommy's baby. Flash. Different background? Flash. Then first relationships at fourteen sauntered in, the girl almost always smiled, and the boy dragged, reluctantly. Shouldn't he stand behind me and put his arm over me? I know he's kind of short, but still...Flash. A different pose? Flash. Then giggly high school girls with matching Old Navy t-shirts and overdramatic hairstyles. You see, everybody wants the 24 set, but some with everybody together and then everybody one-by-one, but we only want the one-by-one pictures for ourselves....you get me? No. Flash. But the 24-set combo? Sure. Flash. Lunch at 12. Same situations in the afternoon, just different people. Bye y'all at 5.

But it was the newlywed pictures, the anniversary pictures, that made her fist ball up and her eyes water behind the camera lens. And if she could substitute herself as a bride in a particular groom's arms, she would suggest #34, the bell background, which she thought was delightful. On a day when she felt especially bitter, the black background would suffice. Each couple took her back to seven-thirty of a YesYesYesYesYes morning. And to keep her Sears service-satisfactory smile, she would remember the promise of her off-white empire waist dress. Sometimes she tried to escape her imagination's clutch. Her most recent attempt had been collecting soaps and buying books from the corner Nu-African used bookstore. Her habits kept her temporarily distracted. She inevitably came back to the soaps with names like Love's Kiss and Midnight Bliss, and novels where 0l' Boy in front of the bodega is transformed into Bed-Stuy's prince charming. She bought those things that reminded her of perpetual, committed love. The shower dreams continued, the water became Mr. Man, the soap smell became Marriage, and all worked a tango up and down her spine.

She knew she was twenty-nine and dreaming was not as cute as it used to be to Ma, who was not at all pleased with her Sears photo-specialist associate badge. "Baby, didn't you want to see the world with your camera? Didn't you want the negatives of the people who no one else thought worthy to photograph? What happened to dreams of your museum in SoHo and Harlem? I thought you had a dream! That's why I went along with Pratt and an art degree and too many damn pictures of me and glasses of water and more of me! I knew you should have gone to Brooklyn College! I knew it! I thought you had a dream, baby girl. You did. You do. Sears ain't it."

What Ma knew but never wanted to admit was the wedding was just as much a part of the vision as everything else. She had been encouraged to secure the dimepiece, Mr. Wonderful-type husband since days of five ponytails and pink corduroy jumpsuits. With all the womanpower boasted around her childhood house there was still the overwhelming, unmentioned feeling of "If only a man were here." There was no Daddy, Big Uncle, or Baby Brother. Just Ma, Granny, three moon-faced little girls, and Aunt Jess, who did not really belong to anyone, yet had the most to say. Jamie could hear her aunt's gruff voice now making its way through circles of cigarette smoke: "It's okay if he's not fine, baby. But can he support you?"

Her sixteen-year-old imagination had married the photography with the man on long train rides from school, and never broke the bond between the two. The wedding ceremony would send her off to a North Indian village and potential would send her on a rampage to find the pretty, the intelligent, and the old, sitting together talking about the brown, American girl who had nothing better to do with her time than flash a light in their face, for a small gift, of course. And she would laugh and flash. Laugh and flash. When she became tired or her Fuji film supply was exhausted (whatever happeued first), she would come home. Aud He would be smiling at the airport, as if He had been waiting there since her departure. More or less, this was her dream, with a few transition sentences, of course.

She knew about her fire. The fire that the li'l-bit in the orauge head wrap at the Poetry cafe screamed about: "Where is your FIRE?" Aud she knew the li'l-bit was talking to her. It used to make her leap inside and leave warm remnants to fuel the boring day-to-day. It was the idea of making time stand still. Of making the past different by how long you left the enlarger light on or if you chose to use a cyan filter. It was the almost spiritual quietude of the darkroom that re-birthed her, again and again and again. To attach it to a man was a naive journey to a dead-end. Yet, it was exactly what she had done. Because He was not always a dream.

Sweet Baby was a regular at Ma Rainey's Black Coffee, the local "to be young, black, and retro" meeting point. He would walk into the shop, trying out a new suite of music, despite the arched eyebrows of other customers reading newspapers. It was a ritual. There would be someone there who always said, "Sing it, sweet. Sing it, baby," and transformed the coffee shop into a stage where he sang until he felt the muse tiring. Whenever Jamie was there, he had the song just right for how she was feeling. Even if he did not at first, by the time he finished the last note and she finished her latte, she was feeling him. And she let him know. Together they were light and carefree--she snapped pictures, he sang songs. Sweet Baby sang her life's soundtrack. Sang her happy melodies and her blue blues. Seemed to sing her panties off, on, and off again. So she captured his face with melancholy colors and things, like berry clusters, that reminded her of musical notes. Yet, he would not talklong enough to engage ideas of marriage. He would just start singing. As naturally as the two connected, they drifted apart....

And Bamboo. He burned incense, smoked a Black & Mild, insisted that she lock her hair (to lock in the knowledge he was imparting), and wear a particular combination of red, black, and green on certain days. He called her his Queen, which meant that some days she was royalty and others she was part of the system oppressing the masses. He had bought a plot of land upstate and talked about working the land because land was the foundation of revolution. She knew he was
growing something less than legal there. She loved his passion but not the "nine" he carried, insisting that he had to stay armed. He loved her too, when he did not suspect she was part of the conspiracy to kill The Black Man. Marriage, of course, was part of the scheme--an institutionalized consttuct of assimilation--as were jobs, HMOs, and higher education. She shot Bamboo when he was not looking, to capture the scared little boy that knew his theories about America were truer than he wanted them to be.

There was finally Curtis who had moved from Mississippi to New York, running away from a controlling Aunt Bessie. From the first day she had met him at Sears, absorbed in an anthropology book during the hour-long lunch workers on Cycle One shared, he had been familiar. Too familiar. Familiar as fried fish on Friday. They talked on the phone until the other snored. They did the two-step to early-nineties love hits. They held hands while sleeping. They shot each other "Are you serious?" looks at community activism forums that guilt and lingering love for Bamboo made her attend. But memories of Aunt Bessie seeped their way into Curtis and Jamie's relationship. He would make collard greens, cornbread, and pot liquor. They sat on the floor Friday nights, re-twisting locks while sopping up the flavorful mush with their hands. He dragged her to church on Sunday morning when she insisted Jesus would love her while she slept in her bed--Jesus wanted her to sleep.

Pictures and Curtis were pointless. She never cared for them too much, because it meant she would have to stop arguing with him, laughing with him, laying on him in order to get up, change her f-stop, and adjust her focus on a man whose pictures would never do justice to the experience lines on his face, the intense stare, the genuine spirit, the wonderfulness. Besides, they never got past the enlarger in the darkroom.

Seventeen months later his robust aunt, Bessie, took a Greyhound to New York and cried on her knees to Curtis. Begged him to come home. Bubba misses you I need ya. Dis flat-hipped heifer can't cook You can go on to school back home. Don't you miss us? We're yo' fam'ly. I'll pay for it. I pray for you. It's too dangerous up here. You'll get kilt. Please. Of course he loved his aunt and missed Mississippi. Of course he wanted to go home. And as hard as she had begged for Curtis to leave, his molasses drawl begged Jamie four times harder to follow him. But leaving Brooklyn for a man was not how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to reject his aunt because of his love for Jamie. She did not know anyone in the 'Sip.' And her photography museums? Curtis left her in an 8:45 Greyhound on a Thursday morning.

She held tear vigils for a good two months after he left. She would have moved to a new apartment to escape his smell on everything, but a Sears' paycheck and a lease would allow her to do no such thing. Her heart split in several different places and really did not want to heal. In time, she bandaged it, but deep scars were left. They never had the wedding that they had planned again and again and again.

Presently, she let out a sigh, turned off the water, and stepped over the porcelain ledge. Perhaps she would take her camera to the shop and have it fixed. Quit her job and start snapping around the city, state, country, globe. Today did not look that promising. Tomorrow did not, either. She inhaled and looked up into the long mirror. She exhaled to find she was stilI Jamie, a paradoxical relief and disappointment. Jamie: disappointed potential personified, standing stagnant. Still brown and sometimes lovely. She felt too tired to dust off her camera, her dreams, or herself, and try again. For now. She resolved herself to being twenty-nine and "incomplete."

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