Chapter One

Sex was a way to stop the crying, the powerlessness of not feeling beautiful. She always felt beautiful under lustful hands. Lustful hands can't lie. The want, greed, and emptiness is real. That type of emptiness can't be imagined. And she trusted it because she understood it. The magic that disillusioned others about loving was what she liked most -- the emptiness always comes back. She could count on that. And as long as it did, she could keep believing that she didn't need promises of forever.

Selah knew that real love only cost twenty-five cents. That's what she charged the neighborhood boys in Waterman Gardens where she grew up. Waterman Gardens was more than a project; it was the entire world. Starting just below Bradley Elementary School and ending just before Kmart, between Baseline and Tippecanoe, everything she needed was within three blocks of its pink concrete walls. She and Tina Perkins used to sit on the great wall of their city, their ten-year-old Vaseline-slicked legs crossed and dangling as boys with little afros and grown-up appetites passed. Selah noticed way back then that boys weren't so different than men. She watched little boys play basketball; she watched grown men play basketball. They all liked dogs, remote control cars, and women.

Selah studied her neighborhood. She recognized that chase was an early form of sex and that the possibility of ending up with a man that visited late nights and never took out the trash was real. She was intimate with women she'd one day become. Not intimate in a sad way, but in the concrete way of staring at your mother and understanding what you'll look like at sixty-five. But Selah would not look like her mother; she decided that the day she took home her first training bra from JCPenney's with her grandmother. Selah would look like Mama Gene and all the other grandmas, aunties, and mothers in her neighborhood who had the courage not to leave.

Staying could be difficult between these walls. Waterman Gardens was a low-rent mecca for black women. The kind of place you agree to until you can find something better and end up collecting your social security in. The units were joined in twos with a slab of gray concrete on either side for parking. Behind the parking spaces were two parallel brick walls with clothesline cord strung between them. Every back door opened to a sprawling common area of green grass and trees used for shade, climbing, and switches. Front doors opened to wide streets with exotic names that intersected each other's curves. This wasn't a woman's paradise, it was more of a permanent holding tank. The kind of place you could move sideways in, but never up and out of. A mother was lucky to get a two-story apartment. Most families squeezed all its members into one or two rooms and hoped their name would rise to the top of the waiting list for a three or four bedroom vacancy. Selah didn't understand until she was older why her neighborhood was considered a ghetto. Ghetto was a term that showed the low expectation wider society had for her underprivileged world. And at the same moment this occurred to her, she also realized that her sprawling neighborhood would have been called condos if white yuppies lived within its walls.

At ten, Selah's world was already complicated by the responsibility of knowing. Pink birthday tights and silk ribboned ponytails were only symptoms of childhood. Red lipstick was already on the inside of her. Selah admired the five and seven year olds who still found completion in colored supermarket balls and swing sets. Despite their fifth-grade status, she and all of her girlfriends were women. Their teachers knew it, so did their older brothers' friends. It was their mothers who were the last to find out. The girls hid their womanhood from their mothers in school bathrooms and sleepovers, in missing underwear and booty-shaking playground cheers:

My name is Selah...Yeah,

and I am fine...Yeah,

if you don't like it...Yeah,

kiss my behind.

Roll Call Sha-boogie, check, check me out.

These girls hid their womanhood, but more than anywhere, they hid it in summer days on the "Gate," their legs dangling against pink concrete, their mouths sucking on orange Popsicle sticks, and their minds filled with loving.

Out of Tina, Tasha-Marie, and Carla, Selah was the least talkative of her crew. She thought it was because she was the biggest sinner of all of them. In Selah's mind, the biggest sinner needed to know when to keep her mouth shut. Maybe if she'd gone to church more, she'd have felt forgiven for her sins. Even the most heathen children had to go to church in summer. No weekend homework, no excuses. The church van never came for Selah. And she connected this absence with her uncontrollable urge to do things she wasn't supposed to. To Sunday summers of amazon grass and yellow short-shorts. To her missing mother and father. To a God that never answered when she asked. And to boys with quarters who would pay to touch budding breasts behind backyard trash cans.

Copyright © 2003 by Jenoyne Adams

Chapter Two

It was easier for Selah to find nakedness in men. That's why she photographed them. Even as a photojournalist for theSentineland mainstream newspapers, she always tried to find the man behind the story. She did this because women often came with their pretensions first. It wasn't Selah's bag to have to pick and rummage through their surfaces to find the truth -- this wasn't the case with most men. As soon as their clothing dropped, their bravado dropped as well. They wanted to be seen, particularly by a woman. They needed a space to be vulnerable; Selah was this space. That's why men opened to her, unpolished and pomegranate red before her camera.

Selah thought at times that this transparency was a sort of apology -- a way to show the women throughout their lives that they were sorry. Sometimes it was a mother being apologized to, sometimes the ex-girlfriend or the mother of their fifth child. Selah saw their collective need for forgiveness. It especially showed up in the penis. How it would coil itself into a pungent knot, hide behind a thick thigh, or sometimes, how it would betray its owner by hardening in front of the camera. Selah always felt sorry for a man when this happened. She understood how the penis could act in direct opposition to the eyes. Her body and emotions were often in this type of conflict -- the way her hurt would drive her to want men besides Parker. The aching would start in the lining of her vagina, like the warning signs of an approaching period. Selah obeyed the ache. She obeyed anytime her body responded viscerally to anything. She had stopped crying years ago. Nothing could hurt her to tears anymore -- not the death of her grandfather or Mama Gene's delusions because of the pills. Selah wanted something to jolt her. Maybe she would be whole again. Maybe she would feel somewhere other than between her legs.

"It's natural," she would tell the man. "I can see you feeling something real right now. It's in your eyes. Trust this, your penis will come around."

Eventually it would and Selah would gain such joy from the revelation. She rejoiced for anyone who could turn her words into action. She'd been trying to do that in her own life for a long time.

Selah worked out of two studios. One studio was primarily a gallery and the other was where she shot and housed her photography equipment. Umbra Gallery was located on Degnan Boulevard across the street from the World Stage Performance Gallery and three storefronts down. Because she often photographed neighborhood men nude or sparsely clothed, she never exhibited works on the main boulevard of small restaurants, jazz spots, and ethnic galleries. Her front display windows were smoked black with a small sign in the corner that read ENTRANCE IN REAR. Her clientele consisted mostly of women in their thirties and forties, repeat customers who added pieces to their repertoires with the unveiling of each new collection. One of her most popular collections was one on neighborhood drummers.

Because Selah had an affinity toward Afro-Cuban jazz and African rhythms, she had primarily asked drummers from these traditions to participate. The sittings took place over a period of four months and each shoot lasted two to three hours. It takes time to shoot quality photographs, Selah believed, especially nudes. This was because people are used to dressing up for photographs. Putting on our best suits and fullest makeup -- earrings, matching socks, clean underwear, perfume. Selah maintained that photography could be the grandest illusion of how we wished things were. A photograph can conceal last night's fights and familial resentments. We can be beautiful, thin, and seamlessly perfect on these waxed pages.

Selah's goal was to capture the opposite of this. She wanted the curved spine and freckles mid-chest. She wanted the wet eyes and uneven smile. And because she knew that the nude human body could be as plain as a block of unformed wood, she took painstaking care to treat her subjects with the utmost respect.

The drummers would come in one by one and Selah would shoot them against a black velvet backdrop, draped floor to ceiling. She would sit on the blond wood floor of the small studio with her camera hanging against her stomach from its black strap. Between sips of lavender tea, she'd ask the men questions about how they started playing, how they felt about their hands, and why their favorite drum was their favorite. Selah would ask them to undress slowly, as they felt compelled to. "Let what you know to be true about yourself guide you," she'd say.

Selah loved it whenever she saw sweat bead around a hairline. The natural perspiration increased the animal magnetism of her work and proved that her studio environment was working. She kept the windows shut with a small freestanding fan circulating slowly in the corner opposite the door. The only furniture in the room was a liquor cabinet and a wooden bar stool that clients often sat on until they relaxed into the vibe of the shoot. The shades were drawn and lavender mixed with frankincense burned sweet in the stairway that joined the lower studio to the upstairs room. Selah sweated a lot during these sessions and dressed in layers, so often she and her subjects peeled off clothing at the same time.

Sometimes the drummers would ask her questions as well.

"Do you ever get turned on photographing men this way?"

"Yes."

"Do you ever act on it?"

"Never during a shoot."

"Have you ever wanted to?"

"Yes."

"How do you control yourself?"

"It's the only time I control myself."

She was always honest with the men. A nude man not engaged in a sexual act had more radar than the most scantily clothed woman, any day. Selah needed a man to feel safe with her in order for the shoot to work so she held herself to the same pact of honesty she held them to: "Always be honest with me. If I ask you a question you don't want to answer or if there is a position you don't feel comfortable with, let me know."

"Are you attracted to me?"

"I think you're beautiful."

"Do you want me?"

"Yes, but I won't have you."She'd smile.

A man would laugh after asking her that, partly at her answer and partly at himself for asking. Selah would snap this shot, the camera's frame hiding the laughter in her eyes, a serious expression set on her lips and chin.

Something in her lit up when a man flirted with her like this. There was an innocence to the proposition in the question. The woman in her wanted to believe it was the power of her female magnetism and not the vulnerability of them trusting her. It was possible that after a man was clothed again he wouldn't even be attracted to her pliable thighs and brown breasts with darker brown nipples that he could get lost in for days. Selah knew this and for that and other reasons she kept her shoots absolutely professional. She didn't want to violate the men; she knew the difficulty of sharing nudity with a stranger. And while the man put back on his clothes, Selah would take the film out of her camera and place it in the upstairs safe inside her developing closet.

Any attempt at a secondary sexual advance was useless. Selah had never had sex with a client before at this point in her life. The one time she did, she fell in love. Not with him, but with the possibility his presence left behind. This was real love, the kind she had for Parker, but never allowed herself to feel. The kind she tried to sex away with strangers. This man was a traveling moment that made it possible for her to be still.

Aside from clients, Selah never had intercourse with married men either. Considering she was married, she was never fully sure why she held this conviction. She'd determined a married man couldn't possibly sex her right. He would always be split between her and, as Mama Gene would put it,"the poot nanhe should be tending to in the first place." Selah had enough conflict of her own already. She needed potency, a man who could pound into her and be free of subconsciousness.Subconsciousness,Selah maintained, was a disease that scars people worse than the most terrible of conscious thoughts. Subconsciousness could drive a person crazy if they suppressed themselves long enough. Selah had already done this to herself before and come back; she didn't want to scar anyone else.

Once he was nude, Selah would have the man play his drums. She'd squat low to the ground to photograph the way the drummer's thighs braced the drum's wooded frame and pulsed hard in response to rhythms created when his hands struck the cream colored animal skin. They would lose themselves: Selah in her photography, the man in his music. Her favorite piece in the series was a mixed medium collage where she combined the shots of five drummers with red and bronze tempera lines overlapping the jagged edges of the torn sepia-toned photographs. Each man had an intensity in his face all his own, which Selah recalled vividly every time she looked at the framed 20 x 25 original in the comfort of her upper room.

Copyright © 2003 by Jenoyne Adams

Chapter Three

Grandma Gene used to say things she meant, but really didn't. More to Papa Frank than to Selah. The kind of things that make you lean back in the couch and focus on the television buzz that no one else hears. The kind of things that would stop Papa Frank from taking out the trash or telling her he loved her. Some nights when Mama Gene had told Papa Frank way more than he needed to know that she thought about him in one sitting, it would be three o'clock in the afternoon on the next day before he would acknowledge her. He'd get out of bed at 4:00 a.m., and instead of going down to San Bernardino High School where he had been a janitor for the past fifteen years, he'd grab his pole from the four-inch space between the refrigerator and the wall, take his tackle box from under the sink, and head down to Fifth Street Park to catch bluegill and the occasional catfish with the raw chicken livers he stole from Mama Gene's icebox.

When Papa Frank returned home around twelve that afternoon with four or five fish on his chain, only then would Mama Gene know he had skipped work. Mama Gene would then need to call Mr. Michaels the head custodian to let him know that Frank Mathis was under the weather and might be out for another day or so. It was entirely up to Mama Gene how many days Papa would miss. Everything depended on Mama Gene's mouth and how well she was able to tack it shut and let him forget a little. Papa Frank never called in for himself when he missed work. He figured that was Mama Gene's job because it was always her fault when he missed and Papa Frank could miss a whole week if he damned well pleased and Mama Gene made him mad enough.

Papa would find himself a nice spot under the shade tree in the common area backyard, place Mama Gene's cutting board on two shunts of wood, and commence to scale and cut up the fish. Papa Frank could sit out there for hours under leaves that never swayed for lack of breeze. San Bernardino did this every year before the beginning of summer, sucked its breath back into the fault lines of its desert skin to let residents swelter in dry, sun-baked heat. But that didn't matter to Papa Frank. He was a native of Bullhead City, Arizona, and San Bernardino could never brand him the wayThe Bullhad. Besides, Papa knew how to imagine himself a breeze. A tricky one, that made him press his Stingy Brim down tight over his ears so his hat wouldn't fly away in the wind.

Mama Gene usually started dinner early on these days. Cut up potatoes and put mushroom and cheese grits on the stove, all the while complaining under her breath about how Papa Frank's funky fish was disturbing the quality of her own imaginary breeze.

"And you bett'r not bring them fish heads in the house when you're done neither," she'd scream from the stove, her voice traveling upstream through the screen door net, toward the backyard. "Put them heads in a bag before you put 'em in the trash tin."

Mama Gene didn't have to look through the kitchen window to know that Papa Frank wasn't paying her a damned bit of attention.

"You can ignore me all you want to, Mathis, but see what happens if your bony-shouldered behind brings those heads up in here."

Mama Gene wasn't a nagger, she was a positioner. A person who waited until the right moment to drop crystallized hurt on you. That's why Papa Frank would stop talking to her in the first place. Once she told Papa that his mother never really liked his kettle-black ass much no way and there wasn't any use in him crying over her death and carrying on like he was. The truth was that his motherdidn'tlike him and Mama Gene hated her for it, but she never revealed that part to Mathis.

By the time she was old enough to tie her own shoes, Selah worried that Mama Gene would say something like that to her about her own mother. It never happened; Selah realized over time that it wouldn't. Maybe the real truth was that though Papa Frank and his mother didn't get along, his momma really did love him. And maybe, somewhere inside her, Mama Gene wasn't sure that Selah's mother did.

Ruthie was Mama Gene's only daughter. Mama Gene had raised her by herself until she met Papa Frank when Ruthie was five. Frank's mother, Francis, rented Mama Gene the converted garage in exchange for day work around the big house and one-third of the electric bill.

The garage was cozy but small. Every time Mama Gene bought or was given a new piece of furniture, she threw an old piece away so not to feel cluttered. The only thing the garage didn't have was a running toilet and bath. Mama Gene kept an enamel pot under the sink for midnight emergencies and used the bathroom in the big house where Frank and his mother lived for bathing and number-two business.

Francis Mathis liked Ruthie Mae and didn't mind having a female child following her around while Mama Gene completed her day work of scrubbing pots and windows. Mrs. Mathis even volunteered to tend to Ruthie Mae at night when Mama Gene went to her real job. But widow Mathis didn't end up watching Ruthie half as much as Frank did. Since Mama Gene worked nights from 7:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. and Frank's mother was taken to going to bed early, Ruthie ended up entertaining Frank for the better portion of the evening in the small garage. Besides, Mama Gene and Frank had grown fond of each other over a period of months and had come to consider themselves a couple. Not the type that would marry, but the type that enjoyed each other's company for what it was and shared bills every so often.

When Frank baby-sat Ruthie, he would sit back in the shit brown loveseat, pull the coffee table to his knees, adjust the table's slant by tightening the front leg screw into the worn particle board, then center the table-top radio between his legs. Ruthie would immediately start in. As Papa Frank drank his after-work beer, Ruthie would Shuffle the Truck, sliding her feet across the green squares in the linoleum. Next she'd try jump rope tricks or sing "Jingle Bells" into the sticky summer heat of the small room. Frank would open his eyes every so often and smile, "That's nice Ruthie," then close his eyes again and throw his mind back into his radio show. Each of Papa Frank's halfhearted attempts to appease Ruthie's need for complete attention would draw her closer to him. She'd smile big, giggle fake laughter into his face, tickle him, ride his leg like a pony, and Monday night ofThe Fat Manradio show would fall to the wayside until her appetite for attention tuckered her to sleep.

When Mama Gene got back from the convalescent hospital twenty minutes after four to the wasted electricity of radio snow and Ruthie's long, five-year-old legs sprawled across a sleeping Papa Frank, Mama Gene would snatch the old leather belt from Papa Frank's pants hanging on the back of the bathroom door and beat Ruthie's fresh behind.

"What-have-I-told-your-little-ass-'bout-climbing-on-grown-men's-laps?" Each drop of the belt punctuated Mama Gene's words. She'd grab one of Ruthie's skinny, flailing arms and spank her over to the twin bed in the corner of the room. "Mat-his-is-not-your-dad-dy. Let-me-see-you-do-this-a-gain-and-see-what-hap-pens-to-your-string-bean-behind."

Papa Frank would sit still on the couch not saying a word until Mama Gene calmed down. She'd snatch the radio cord out of the wall socket and head toward the bathroom to place Papa Frank's belt back on his pants.

"Dry it up, Ruthelen Mae," she'd yell, taking her seat next to Papa Frank. "And Mathis, you know your momma charges me for every last bit of that electricity, so why are you wasting my money? The radio's been signed off for hours."

Papa Frank would nod, knowing there wasn't any usefulness in trying to talk her down. There wasn't any use in her spanking the daylights out of Ruthie Mae or telling Papa Frank about the radio staying on too long. Ruthie would always be attracted to the laps of men and the radio snow would be replaced by white television snow from a round-screen twelve-inch television set that would sit between Papa Frank's sleeping legs many a night before Mama Gene could afford herself an apartment in Waterman Gardens.

Sometimes Selah wondered why Mama Gene never talked about Ruthie much. Anytime Ruthie chanced upon Selah's grandmother's home, Mama Gene lit up like a neon open-for-business sign and cooked like dignitaries were visiting. Ruthie would play daughter and loving mommy for a few days, but this wasn't her nature. She'd birthed Selah two days before she turned sixteen and abandoned her before her afterbirth menstrual cycle became regular again. Ruthie had talked a lot about giving Selah up during her first month of motherhood, but that was just crap because there wasn't any such thing as black baby adoption. The only people who wanted a black child were its parents. If the parents were nincompoops, that left relatives or the state until the streets were an option. Mama Gene treated Selah like her second daughter, even before Ruthie moved permanently out of the room that Selah would spend most of her childhood and young adulthood in.

Ruthie Mae removed herself from Mama Gene's house gradually. The last things to go were Jackie Wilson's smile and the 8 x 10 photograph of the Dells in powder blue duster jackets that hung above Selah's white bassinet. Mama Gene knew what Ruthie was doing, but didn't stop her. She noticed Ruthie Mae's lightening laundry load. Noticed that Ruthie never left the house without a bag under her arm or an extra sweater wrapped around her waist. She wanted to disappear piece by piece until Selah was the only proof she had ever been there.

Mama Gene could never find it in herself to be as hard on Ruthie Mae as she was on men. She understood women. She understood the sacrifices most women made every day just to comb their children's hair and clean their behinds. Every time a mother smiled at one of her children or rubbed Johnson's baby powder on a newborn chest, Mama Gene knew what this was worth. And whereas men began to grasp the universal moan most fully in times of death, most women inherited it with childbirth.

Ruthie Mae wanted to skirt this pain in her life. She would party herself straight to Beelzebub if she had to, but she would not waste her chocolate thighs bouncing a baby to bed every night in a small pea-colored room in her mother's two-bedroom ghetto apartment. She would not work for minimum wage and cheat the welfare department only to have to borrow back three of the five dollars she loaned a girlfriend earlier in the week. She would not sacrifice herself for Selah; she just wouldn't.

Mama Gene did not blame Ruthie Mae; she was familiar with the exchanges a woman made to consider herself a good mother. Ruthie Mae had gotten out while she could, before guilt and responsibility had swallowed the resistance in her spine. Ruthie Mae had done what Eugenia Wells, a tall, brown skinned, seventeen-year-old curve of a girl with no husband, didn't have the courage to do. Eugenia didn't have someone to make sacrifices for her child that she wasn't willing to make herself. So when Ruthie Mae handed Selah to Mama Gene when Selah cried, or when she was hungry, or when her diaper needed changing, Mama Gene took Selah from Ruthie Mae knowing that everything that needed to be said, had been said in the changing of arms.

Ruthie wanted all the accoutrements that long legs, a big booty, and tight hips could give a young woman. The not-so-young man Ruthie got knocked up by was what Mama Gene called a "jive ass momma's nigga." The kind that would suck his momma's teat dry until he found another titty to latch on to.

Mama Gene had always told Ruthie Mae that it was better to share her bed with a one-legged dog than with a sorry piece of man with good looks and a high sperm count. She didn't listen; she was in love. And he loved her back...Ruthie Mae and both of his other sixteen-year-old girlfriends who lay on their backs to establish him as a real pimp.

When Ruthie did visit, Selah knew who she was. Selah called Grandma Gene, Momma, and Ruthie Mae, sister. This would piss Ruthie off and she'd pick fights with Mama Gene and tell her she was going to pack Selah up and take her with her when she left.

"Well hurry up," Mama Gene would say. "That way I don't have to pay Frieda Perkins's oldest daughter five dollars to watch her tonight."

That would always be the end of Ruthie's visit and the end of Selah being played with like a baby doll and tossed aside until Ruthie felt like playing house again in a few months or longer than that. But even then, Selah enjoyed the one-day potty training sessions and putting lotion in Ruthie's hair to smooth it out with the wrong side of the brush. Ruthie would huff out of the house and tell Mama Gene she'd be back for Selah in a few hours, then she'd slip off again like music on the radio. Your favorite song never lasts forever. And had Selah been old enough to have a favorite song, she may have understood her relationship with her mother. She was just a baby. All Selah wanted was to pull her small fingers through her mother's Jergens scented hair and have Ruthie Mae be there when she woke up.

Copyright © 2003 by Jenoyne Adams

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Excerpted from Selah's Bed by Jenoyne Adams
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.