A Natural Woman Read online

  “People get ready . . . there’s a train a comin’.” A full twenty-four hours had passed since Aliesha’s visit to the barbershop, but she still couldn’t get the song out of her head. The familiar lyrics and soft-spun melody conjured a flood of warm memories. Mixed in with her reoccurring thoughts of Dante flickered shadowy images of her long-dead father.

  William “Will” Eaton had been Aliesha’s rock. His presence in her life is what had kept her from believing that black and ugly were words that naturally complemented and enhanced one another in the manner of other well-known word combinations, like cake and ice cream or rhythm and blues. “You are a smart and extraordinarily beautiful child of God. Always know and recognize your worth in the world” is what he’d made a point of reminding her on a near daily basis and in direct defiance of the world’s insistence on telling her just the opposite. It was because of her father’s emphasis and influence that, unlike a lot of women who bore her same soft, ebony hue, Aliesha had never questioned her physical attractiveness, only the apparent blindness of others to it.

  The unexpected, loud click and rattle of her office door jerked Aliesha upright in her chair. She knew of only one person brazen enough to ignore, so blatantly, the large, red-lettered DO NOT DISTURB sign she’d hung at eye level outside her door.

  “Monica Wilbun!” she said without even bothering to turn her head. “How many times do I have to say this? Can’t you at least knock before you come barging in like that? Hell, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “And how many times must I remind you, my dearest Dr. Eaton? If you don’t want visitors—get rid of the crappy-ass sign and lock your damn door! Mark my words, one of these days it’s not gonna be me, it’s gonna be Rufus the janitor and you’re gonna be up in here changing your damn drawers.”

  Aliesha smiled as she swiveled toward her friend and colleague, the incredibly foul-mouthed but highly esteemed professor of history, Dr. Monica Wilbun. On first glance, the two women (one owning an obviously mixed racial heritage and the other whose African lineage visually dominated her DNA) appeared to be nothing alike, if not total opposites.

  Nevertheless, beneath the surface of their respective veneers swam a multitude of similarities. They were both smart, self-motivated, highly driven women who had grown accustomed to being looked upon as “exceptional” by their peers in the world of academia but who refrained from buying into the notion themselves.

  While Aliesha, the taller and darker of the two, owned her fair share of curves, voluptuous was a word that better suited her shorter and considerably lighter complexioned friend. And not voluptuous as a cloaked synonym for fat, either. Dr. Wilbun’s womanly attributes came packaged in a way that made most of the men on campus, who didn’t already know, stop, turn, and say to themselves, “Damn, who is that?”

  Monica dumped her backpack and fell into the chair in front of Aliesha’s desk. “Wow, I don’t know what dude did, but my God, your hair is fucking gorgeous!”

  Aliesha nodded. “Why, thank you for the overly generous, albeit incredibly vulgar compliment, Dr. Wilbun. I think the young man did an excellent job as well. So, what’s your ‘but’ or should I say your beef? ’Cause I know you’ve got one. So, go on, spit it out already.”

  Monica crossed her shapely legs and leaned back in her chair. “Ooh, mighty defensive now, aren’t we?” Her face split into a wide grin and for a few seconds her features became decidedly more Asian. “Uh-huh, just as I expected. Leave it to you to fall under the spell of some young slick who works in a damn barbershop. . . .”

  Monica knew all about Aliesha’s visit to Wally’s. In the hours prior to her Wednesday night rendezvous with Javiel, Aliesha had slipped in a call to her friend and dished her all the pertinent details.

  “Hey, all I’m saying is, you might want to try shaking your head a couple of times, ’cause it sounds to me like a wee bit of granny’s creek water has seeped into your ear canals and is pooling on the flat contours of your brain.”

  Aliesha laughed. “Come on, how many brothers do you know who listen to Curtis Mayfield, much less read Kafka? I’m telling you, there’s something special about this guy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure there is,” Monica said. “And in a good way, too. But why should you care? Last time I looked, you already had a man. So what’s up? You and Javiel have a serious falling out or something?”

  Aliesha sighed and thought back on Wednesday night. “We’ll only stay an hour,” he’d promised. But like always, one hour had stretched into two and leapfrogged into almost three. Wanting to be a good sport, Aliesha had refrained from grumbling, pouting, or protesting while Javiel and the loud group of regulars seated on either side of them had piddled away the bulk of the evening arguing stats, discussing strategy, bad-mouthing the officiating and cheering all of the phenomenal plays and fancy moves being broadcast on the bar’s digitally enhanced wide-screen. She remembered picking over a plate of chicken tenders and fries and waving off Javiel’s repeated suggestions for her to order a drink or two. He’d meant well. But rather than cause her to loosen up and relax, she’d feared the alcohol would only aggravate her boredom and agitation and lead to a public unleashing of her private discontent.

  She tossed aside her pen and, with her eyes still averted from Monica, said, “A serious falling out? No, not really.”

  “Yeah, well, my womanly intuition tells me there’s a whole bunch of something lurking all up in the ‘not really’ load of crap you’re trying to sell.” Monica propped her hands beneath her chin and rested her elbows on the desk. “So, you wanna spill it now or would you really prefer that I drag it outta your ass later?”

  “I don’t know,” Aliesha said before forcing herself to meet Monica’s unyielding gaze. “It’s just that . . . well, Javiel and I . . . we don’t . . . talk as much as I’d like.”

  Monica shook her head. “See, that’s your problem,” she said in a much sterner tone. “Instead of being satisfied with the pretty-boy looks and A-1 stud services, like the rest of us, you want these fools to talk to your ass, too.”

  Aliesha’s smile resurfaced. In the two years she’d known Monica, she had yet to stay mad at her for more than a solid five minutes. She reached for her pen. “Oh, and I suppose you and Jesus don’t talk?”

  Jesus and Monica had been dating, off and on, for the past couple of years. He was an affable guy with an outgoing personality who worked as a sports trainer and an instructor in the university’s Athletic Department. He was also Javiel’s cousin. Had Jesus and Monica not pressured Aliesha into a blind date with Javiel, she was almost certain their paths would have never crossed.

  “Talk?!” Monica said. “Hell, no. Least ways, not if we can help it. All talking does is shine a big-ass spotlight on our differences and inevitably leads to discord. No, girl, with me and Jesus—it’s just like Chris Rock said—we eat, we screw, we go to the movies, we screw some more, we go out to eat again . . . And hell, we look cute together while we’re doing it. Why ruin a good thing by talking? For what? Believe me, I’ve got much better things to do than sit up and listen to Jesus cuss my ass out in Espanol.”

  As Monica rambled on, Aliesha couldn’t help but agree with some of what her friend was saying. In fact, somewhere deep down, she knew the dissatisfaction she was experiencing in her relationship with Javiel had little to do with the way they communicated. She couldn’t pinpoint it or give it a name, but she could feel it slowly eating away at her from the inside.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mr. Phillips reached for the showerhead Aliesha had purchased on her way home from work. Ordinarily, she handled simple tasks and improvements of that nature without any assistance. Not only had her father given her extensive hands-on training in the art of home maintenance, he’d left her an older brick-and-shingle, four-bedroom craftsman that in the brief time she’d lived in it had required only a couple of minor repairs. On arranging for her handyman, Mr. Phillips, to stop by and replace her leaky water heater, she’d decided to h
ave him replace the outdated and partially clogged showerhead, too.

  “All right, let me take a look at what you got,” Mr. Phillips said. “Something fancy, newfangled, and overpriced, I imagine.” Rather than break the package’s seal, Mr. Phillips squinted at her. “There’s something different about you. Did you lose weight since the last time I saw you or something?”

  Aliesha chuckled. The last time they had seen each other had been a mere four days ago. Archie Phillips and his wife, Barbara, had sat in the pew directly across the aisle from hers at Garden View Presbyterian where they were all active members.

  “Did Barbara tell you ’bout that boy of ours getting engaged?” Mr. Phillips asked. “The one that’s up in Cleveland studying to be a doctor? Yeah, let me show you.”

  Mr. Phillips placed the unopened package on the toilet seat and fished his wallet from his back pocket. Sporting the quivering grin of a proud papa, he all but shoved the photo into Aliesha’s face. “Nice-looking girl, huh? She smart, too, just like Duke.”

  Aliesha gazed at the smiling, petite blonde and the stern-faced young man, who looked like a younger, more athletic version of his father.

  “You know that boy ain’t dated nothing but White girls since he been up there,” Mr. Phillips said.

  Feigning interest while willing herself to ignore the boast and brag imbedded in his words, Aliesha said, “Is that right?”

  “And you know what he told me one time when I asked him why?”

  Ah, no! Aliesha thought to herself . . . Nor do I really care.

  “He told me most of the young Black girls you see out here these days don’t know how to appreciate a young man like him—you know, somebody smart and ambitious, who believes in living conservatively and saving his money so that later on in life he’ll be free to travel, eat at fancy restaurants, buy nice things, and what have you.”

  Let it go, girlfriend. Just let it go, is what her wiser, calmer, internal censor advised. But the other voice, the reckless one who lived way down deep in her gut, egged her on with a defiant, Oh, no he didn’t!

  Aliesha massaged the back of her neck and between the clenched teeth of a forced smile managed a deceptively sweet, “And you mean to tell me in all the time your son has been away at school he has yet to encounter any smart, nice-looking, Black women who think like him?”

  “Hey, I’m just trying to tell you what the boy told me. Now my other boy, Orlando, he’s just the opposite. He don’t date nothing but these ole loose tail hoochies that come straight out the projects and already got two and three babies by just as many different daddies.”

  She glanced at her watch. “You know what, Mr. Phillips? I’ve got go fix myself something to eat before I run back up the school. Can I get you something?”

  “No, you go ’head on. Don’t mind me. I’ll be through in a minute.”

  Aliesha sucked in a head-clearing breath and hurried off to the kitchen. She felt as if someone had been holding her underwater and laughing at her efforts not to twist and flail.

  If young Mr. Phillips and his fiancée were happy with one another, she was happy for them. To feel otherwise would have made her a hypocrite. After all, she’d dated outside her race before. Indeed, her current beau, Javiel, was a self-described, odd blend of Puerto Rican and Louisiana Creole. Moreover, Aliesha might have been able to stomach the twisted sense of pride and pleasure the elder Phillips seemed to derive from his son’s interracial romance had he not seen fit to insult her and every other Black woman in the process. More and more, as of late, she wondered if what Monica had said to her once in jest wasn’t in fact the honest-to-goodness truth: “You’re looking at it all wrong, sweetie. Black men love themselves. It’s your Black ass they can’t stand.”

  Upon entering the kitchen, Aliesha grabbed a pair of protective mitts. She yanked open the oven and jerked out a sizzling pan of salmon and rice. She had a salad to fix, a dinner to eat, and a shower to take before she left for her department’s latest meet and greet where she, the lone Black female in attendance, would be expected to maintain her assigned role of the poised, charming, articulate, exceptional Negro.

  “See, I told you it wouldn’t take me but a minute,” Mr. Phillips called out from the hallway. “Mmm-mmm,” he said on poking his head inside the kitchen door. “Something sure does smell good.”

  “Alaskan salmon,” Aliesha said. “I seasoned it with some lemon juice, some butter and garlic, and a few other spices, then baked it over a bed of wild rice. I could fix you a take-home plate, if you’d like.”

  Mr. Phillips shook his head. “No, I prefer my salmon the old-fashioned way. You know, fried up in a cast-iron skillet with plenty of oil, a bit of onion, a little flour, and some cornmeal? And far as rice is concerned, if mine ain’t white, it ain’t right.” Mr. Phillips squinted at her, like he’d done earlier. “Now I know what it is . . . you did something to your hair, didn’t you?”

  Even though Aliesha couldn’t bring herself to grant Mr. Phillips a full pardon, she couldn’t resist the urge to smile.

  CHAPTER 6

  Prior to walking into Wally’s and lucking up on Dante, Aliesha’s last decent haircut had been approximately eight months ago. The event itself wasn’t one she would soon likely forget, even with it having taken place during those sad and uncertain days before Miss Margie’s premature death.

  Aliesha had been going to Miss Margie ever since she could remember. As a pigtailed youngster, whenever she’d made the trek down South and visited for any extended time, she’d always ended up sitting in Miss Margie’s chair somewhere or else seated in front of her on Aliesha’s Big Mama’s porch. If she closed her eyes and squeezed them tight, she could see herself perched atop a couple of old telephone books and the back of her head bumping against Miss Margie’s ashen and slightly swollen knees.

  Miss Margie and Aliesha’s Big Mama had been best friends who’d belonged to the same church. But unlike Big Mama, Miss Margie had been anything but the scripture-quoting, hymn-singing, motherboard type. Most folks could tell in a glance that the tall, leggy, natural redhead (before it all turned gray) had not only spent some time in the fast lane, but she had also skidded and slammed up against more than a curb or two.

  Miss Margie had never tried to hide her past, nor had she seemed particularly ashamed of it. “Britney, Whitney, Lil’ Kim, and ’nem . . . Shoot, ain’t none of them wild-ass heifers got nothin’ on me. Yeah, chile, I been hooked on it all—dope, the bottle, and a whole bunch of no-good men. Done had all but one of my five children taken away from me. But I betcha one thang—you ain’t gone never catch me sitting up somewhere crying ’bout none of it. You know why? ’Cause through it all, I know the Good Lord’s been my comfort and my strength. Yeah, I might have forsook him a time or two. But He ain’t never give up on me.”

  On the birth of Miss Margie’s last child, Peaches, she’d cleaned up her life and turned it over to Jesus—or so she’d claimed. Given the perpetual slant of her half-closed eyes and her slightly slurred manner of speaking, there were those who occasionally wondered aloud if the ole sister wasn’t still getting her snort and sip on every now and then.

  Beyond dispute had been the fact that Miss Margie had known Aliesha’s hair better than anyone, including Aliesha herself. The skilled beautician’s long, tapered fingers had been the first to ease the sizzle of the curler and the hot comb through Aliesha’s thick, black mane; the first to straighten the proud, stubborn kinks with a chemical relaxer; the first to wrap it, wave it, make it bounce, and lend it sheen. Likewise, Miss Margie had been the first one Aliesha had sought when, upon her return South and subsequent acceptance of the teaching position at Wells U, she’d decided to wear her hair natural.

  When it came to Aliesha’s hair and a whole host of other things, Miss Margie’s death had left Aliesha alone to fend for herself. Before she’d passed, she’d made Aliesha promise not to let anyone at Sister Beulah’s Beauty Boutique, besides Peaches, work on her hair. “Don’t let none of these
silly-ass heifers up in here fool with your hair. I know ’em, see. First thing they gonna do is overprocess it. Yup, and after they get it good and limp, they gonna make it they business to talk you into putting some God-awful color in it. You do that and your head gone end up looking just like theirs—ruint! Yup, all dried out, full of split ends, broke off, if not coming out in great big ole patches.”

  Honoring her promise to Miss Margie hadn’t been a problem. But finding a new hairstylist had been a bigger headache than Aliesha could have ever imagined. Her search might not have been as difficult had she opted to go back to wearing twists or braided extensions. She wouldn’t have had a problem at all had she only wanted her hair relaxed or had been willing to suffer through the singe, cringe, and stench of an old-fashioned press and curl. But incredibly enough, finding someone to properly cut and style her medium-length natural had proved darn near impossible.

  After one particularly harrowing experience, Aliesha had shown up in Monica’s office, hoping to find a sympathetic ear and shoulder upon which to unfurl her tightly woven grievances and sorrows, only to have her friend take one look at her and start laughing. “I’m sorry, girl, but you need to run right back up to whoever just did your hair and ask for a refund. I swear if they don’t have you looking like some kinda wild-ass bush dog.”

  Thank goodness Dante had shown up in Aliesha’s life and quite literally “saved the day.” Beyond giving her drooping self-esteem a long-overdue boost of adrenaline, Dante’s expert hands had helped ease away some of the apprehensions Aliesha had been harboring over her upcoming introduction to Javiel’s parents.