Grace Amazing

This is my contribution to our collective turn of mind and heart as we note the the significance of 9/11 twenty years later.  

In January 2001, I finally obeyed the call of my heart to re-order my priorities.  Among the new adventures to follow are today more than seventeen hundred drawings, dozens of stone sculptures dotting my Vermont homesteads, somewhere between two and three hundred essays, and, the very first thing to emerge, a novel titled: “Mirror Man: A Metaphysical Adventure in the Spirit of the Universe—playful, loving, deep.”

One of the primary characters in Mirror Man is a young woman we meet just prior to her senior year of college, and follow to the point, ten years later, when she is pregnant with triplets and happens to enjoy a level of spiritual awareness to know that each of her children on the way ended their most recent incarnation in the carnage of the Twin Towers.  In fact, one of her babies was one of the terrorists.  Another a New York City firefighter.  The third an 89-year-old African American woman.

This is that woman’s story:

She had traveled all the way from Harlem to lower Manhattan that morning to meet her great-granddaughter, who worked in an office pretty high up.  This was a first for the old woman.  In her entire life she had never left Harlem except once, when she was first married more than 70 years earlier, traveling by train to South Carolina with her husband to visit his family.  She knew no whites; didn’t want to; never had any reason to.  She didn’t hate them, but common sense said they were unpredictable.  That morning, before she left her apartment, the woman had remarked to her sister that what she was about to do took even more courage than marrying Mr. Waddington, her late husband.  She’d been 14, he’d been 25.  Mr. Waddington had been dead now nearly 40 years.  That morning, September 11th, 2001, for what would be the only time in her life, she traveled into the heart of white America, eight miles, a hundred-plus blocks, and an entire world away from the address she’d lived at since her wedding day.  

The visit was to be a gift to her great-granddaughter: to see with her own eyes the child’s beautiful office with the breathtaking view, to meet the child’s “associates,” as her great-granddaughter called them.  The old woman would do things for this child that she had never done for anyone else.  The child was bent on teaching her Great Na not to be afraid of a thing just because it was new or different.  Why didn’t Great Na come and see her in her office?  And since Great Na only went out mornings, why didn’t she come this Tuesday first thing, the child would clear her schedule, they would go to the top floor and have tea on a linen tablecloth and look out over the city and pretend they were the richest people in the world.  Her great-granddaughter had sent a car and driver to chauffeur her Great Na.  As the car pulled up in front of the World Trade Center, the driver handed Great Na the telephone and said that her great-granddaughter was on the line.  Her great-granddaughter said that she would be right down to meet Great Na and the two of them would ride up the elevator together.  Great Na said absolutely not, that she wouldn’t be treated like an invalid; she could very well find her great-granddaughter’s floor.  Her great-granddaughter had laughed and said that she would be there to meet Great Na when Great Na got off the elevator.  The plane, flown by terrorists, struck the building while the elevator was on its way up.  

It simply slowed and stopped.  The lights went out.  A battery powered emergency light went on.  A fire alarm began to ring somewhere outside the elevator.  

The only other passenger was a bicycle messenger, a white boy, a carrot-top with cornrows, face full of freckles, entire left arm from his wrist to up under his dark green t-shirt was covered in stars of many different sizes—blue tattoos.  

They had stood in the silence for many minutes before the messenger said, “They call me Starman.”  The boy had a gap between his two big front teeth.  Great Na was relieved when, just as she could no longer avoid giving her name, Mrs. Percy Waddington (she always used her husband’s name in unfamiliar settings), Starman said, “Ma’am, I spend a good bit of my life in elevators, and I’ve been stuck more than once, so I know we can’t necessarily count on someone rescuing us anytime soon.  Would it be okay with you if I open this door and see what’s what?”

Evidentially taking her silence as consent, from his backpack the boy pulled out a number of strange looking gadgets and gizmos along with what reminded Great Na of the crowbar her husband kept in the trunk of their one and only automobile, a Studebaker, long since turned to junk.  “The magic tool,” Starman winked at Great Na.  Then, his arms and head awhirl like Jazzy the short-order cook in her favorite diner who could whip up a dozen completely different orders at the same time, he somehow got the elevator door to open.  

“Ma’am,” he said, “you are good luck.”  

From the floor of the stopped elevator to the floor of the foyer it opened onto was a drop of about three feet.  

“Ma’am, I have a suggestion.  See how this feels to you.  While I hold the door, if you don’t mind getting your dress a little dirty, you could sit right here in the elevator doorway, dangle your feet and gently step down––that might be easiest.  You’ll be fine.  Take my hand if it helps.”

Even then it was difficult for Great Na; she was using muscles she hadn’t used in years.  Her blue flowered Sunday dress was going to be a mess.  She was very slow, she knew.  She expected the boy to get frustrated, that he had a lot of places to go.  She almost told him to go on without her, that she could make it on her own, but she knew that was ridiculous.  Without him the door might shut.  Without him she might have fallen, maybe broken her hip again.  But the young man acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a white boy to be tending to needs of an elderly black woman he had just met, even if that woman had yet to say a single word to him.  He didn’t mind.  He just went right on as though her silence were fascinating.  He seemed happy to keep up both sides of the conversation.  He wasn’t in a hurry.  He wasn’t afraid.  

That was the biggest thing.  He was not afraid.  

And so, miraculously, she wasn’t afraid.  If he said they’d be okay, they’d be okay.  This was his world, the white world.  She was the stranger.  She trusted him, she didn’t know why.  

Once they were out, she headed straight for the ladies’ room.  After she had washed her hands and straightened her dress and hair, and found the boy looking out a window in a big unoccupied office with pillowy leather chairs facing a windowsill on which rested a large pair of binoculars, she noticed they hadn’t seen another living soul.  

The boy said they were on the 13th floor and that the only way out was to walk down the stairwell but that she was not to worry he would help her; heck, he’d carry her if he had to; in case she hadn’t noticed, he was very strong, he laughed: opening all those elevator doors, you know.  They heard occasional shouts in the distance for anyone still on the floor to immediately get out, but still they saw no one else.  With the exception of the fire alarm, the floor was all but silent.  

It wasn’t that Great Na knew that she was going to die.  She was simply prepared to accept whatever fate God had in store for her because she knew for certain that she could never walk down 13 flights of stairs.  And being carried was out of the question.  It was undignified.  She wouldn’t tolerate it.  And if her back ever went out, the brace she was supposed to wear whenever that happened was at home.  It was time to give her life to her Lord.  If He wanted her to come home to Him, that was fine with her.  And if He wanted her to live another day, He could certainly see to that.  She was just going to get herself a drink of water, sit in one of these comfortable chairs by the window, spruce up her lipstick, enjoy the view…and wait.  She would thank the kind white boy and send him on his way.  He could run down those stairs in two shakes.  But when she told the boy of her intentions, he said, “OK, whatever you like,” and plopped down in the plush leather chair next to her.  They were facing north side by side.  

What was it about white people? 

“Young man,” she said, “I’m sorry if I didn’t make myself clear.  You must go.  I want you to leave.  Now.  Please.”

He was smiling at her.  

“You have been very kind to me,” she said.  “Thank you.  But you must leave now.”  And then it just came out of her.  “I don’t know what I would do if you got hurt because of me.”  Suddenly the fire alarm stopped.  They both looked around.  There was nothing but silence.  

“Why are you here?” the boy asked.  

“I came to visit my great-granddaughter.”  

“Have you ever been here before?”

“No.”

“What does your great-granddaughter call you?” 

“Great Na.”  

“The way you say that, she must love you very much.”  

The statement was a little impertinent, but Great Na nodded.  

“OK, Great Na, here’s what we’re going to do,” Starman said.  “I’m sure your great-granddaughter is worried to death about you.  So it will be my honor to stand in for her.  Whatever she would do for you, I shall do.”  

“Why would you do this, you’re white?”  

The boy laughed as though she had told a good joke.  

“Yes I am, but only for the past 24 years, so far as I know.  I’m sure we’ve both been every color under the sun many times over in all our lives before this one, and maybe in our next life I’ll be the Black woman and you’ll be Starman.”  

Great Na couldn’t keep herself from chuckling at this strange boy.  Her church didn’t hold with reincarnation.  But there was something about this boy: he didn’t look at her as though she were invisible as most white folk did.  Quite the opposite.  When he looked at her, she felt the same way she did around her sister—they’d known each other so long that secrets were impossible.  She knew that arguing with him was futile.  For the first time in her life she knew someone who wasn’t Black.  For the first time in her life, she wasn’t Black, though exactly who she was she wasn’t quite sure.  

Neither of them spoke again.  

He took a fresh bottle of water from his backpack, loosened the top and handed the bottle to her.  After sipping, she handed the bottle back with a nod, then got out her lipstick.  They sat watching the view.  Her great-granddaughter was a lucky girl to have this to look at every day.  Great Na had never known silence like this in Harlem.  Eventually, the boy put out his hand.  Great Na took it, the hand that led to the stars, and held it until the building, and the two of them, disintegrated. 

Great Na left her body a very different being than she had been for all but those last few moments of her 89 years.  She had known joy before, but not quite like this.  This was the joy of surrendering to the Light.  And then it was something even beyond that: it was a joy that came from sitting with the boy, freeing the fear that had kept her in Harlem.  

It was funny, too.  I’d have lived in Harlem anyway, she thought.  But before I met the boy, I felt I had no choice.  Fear had been the boundary, not Central Park, Morningside Heights and the Harlem River.  

Great Na felt the meaning of the words “amazing grace.”  How many times had she sung that hymn?  And now, for the first time, she felt what could only be grace amazing: the truth that you can change yourself in a flash.  All you had to do was let go of fear.  She also felt the pain from years of choosing to see herself as different, separate, other than, less than….  From this grace, from this pain, her heart’s passion to love—to free itself of all fear—began to lead her, in harmony with universal law, to experience in her own way the unconditional love and splendid synchronicity of life: she had drawn to herself, and would always draw to herself, precisely what she needed on her journey Home to her Beloved Lord, her journey to Oneness, including, of course, the circumstances of her next birth somewhere down the road.

 

P.S.  The publishing of Mirror Man is imminent.