It's All Love

My Own Happy Ending  (for Joe)  by Marita Golden          

I don’t tell the story often. Actually, I usually let it lay secreted away like a precious jewel. I’m content to reward myself with an occasional replay of it. It’s a story that is hard to believe, but when people hear it, they know instinctively, that it’s true.

A story more fantastic than any of the fictional narratives I’ve labored over. It’s the story of how I met my husband Joe. It’s such a befuddling mix, charming, whimsical, chilling, affirmative. The tale of how we met is like some talisman, or a reverse hex that lifted Joe and me from the very start, into a realm incandescent and thrilling.  We met at a party and when I saw him walking through the front door, I knew who he was, he was mine. Sounds like a scene from a movie doesn’t it? Well, it is. My own.

            I’ll start with the day we met. I woke that morning knowing that on that day anything was possible. It wasn’t a feeling that set me to trembling or that even filled me with curiosity. I just recall waking to see a slant of late August sun curving with a precise gleam, through the blinds and feeling that on this day, I was going to meet him. I was a forty year old divorced single mother whose twelve year old son lay tightly cocooned in sleep in his room down the hall.

            And as I turned my back to that slash of sunlight invading my room I smiled, yawned and then smiled again.  I was due a miracle after a long dry season without love.

            On that August morning I was confident that I would meet the man  I would marry, at a party I was attending that evening. But woven into the seams of my imaginative knowing were certain things I did not know. He didn’t have a name. He didn’t have a face. But all that was superfluous.  I had claimed him. I would know him when I saw him. He would be my psychic twin, the one, but most importantly, he would be the right one. Because now I was ready for him. He was ready for me. We were ready for each other. Maybe half a dozen other times in my life, I’d felt such absolute certainty. And here it was again. .

            The life I was living that August morning was one in which doubt was a word in a foreign tongue I could not imagine speaking. I felt completely grounded, sure of and quite frankly in love with myself.  Not only because I was going to meet  him in  fourteen hours, (as I calculated after looking at the clock beside my bed),  but I also felt this subtle rapture because of who I was, who I had become. What was to take place that night was logical, inevitable. A blessing with my name on it was on the way.

            I’d been a perpetual  victim of a host of mostly self inflicted love battle-scars. But two years earlier, as I contemplated the publication of my third book ( a book based on the life of my mother, a book that plays a crucial role in this story of how I met Joe), I knew that my life had to change.
The handsome but hapless live-in boyfriend had to go. Had I really lived with someone so utterly threatened by the books I wrote, my ambition and my hunger for life? Yes. And now I had decided that I had to find a male friend, a man bosom buddy to talk to (the way I could not talk to the boyfriend) about my dreams and fears, establishing a bond of emotional intimacy that I could create in the next love relationship I had with a man. I had to figure out why I kept attracting misery, , wallowing in it and calling it love.

            As I lay in bed that morning, bathed in a rare, giddy confidence, I recalled how my most recent novel, Long Distance Life had helped me decide that  everything in my love and life style had to change. That book, the writing and imagining of it, drove me into a frenzied but focused re-evaluation of my life. Long Distance Life was wasn’t just the saga of sixty years in the life of a Washington D.C. black family. It was my bible. My book of possibilities. And during the long process of its creation, spirits were telling me that I had to grow into the woman who could say I wrote that book.

            While writing that novel and questioning everything in my life,  I found a platonic male friend who introduced me to the joys of male female buddy bonding, an important prelude I learned,  to a satisfying love affair. In a way, it was like making love, a different kind of love with my buddy, a smart  in touch with his feelings, guy who was a computer consultant from New Orleans. I relished being listened to, knowing I was being heard. With my new male friend I was forming a bond of emotional trust and intimacy I was starved for but I had to admit to myself, I had not normally required of the men I chose. All this was a skill set I had ignored, hadn’t valued, preferring to be a high drama queen, specializing in the following equation, passion + pain = love.

             Long Distance Life played a crucial role in turning me into the woman I was the day I met Joe. The story centers on  the life of  Naomi Johnson, who migrates from Spring Hope, North Carolina in the 1920’s to Washington, D.C. as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the south that so transformed this nation. It is the story of her daughter Esther, who four decades later goes back to the south to work in the Civil Rights movement, her grandsons,  Logan, who strides into the black middle class and Nathaniel, whose life choices are dangerous and tragic. The book covers much of the social history of the 20th century. But more than anything, Long Distance Life is a love story. In Naomi Johnson, I honored the tenacious, big hearted spirit of my mother, Beatrice Golden.

            I was writing the book during a time of tumult, yearning and confusion professionally and personally- bonding with my male buddy and still living with the boyfriend and trying to figure out how to get him out of my life; searching for a university teaching job and trying to figure out why with two books, I couldn’t find one; and my son Michael was fraught with emotional needs I wasn’t sure I was always meeting.

            So Long Distance Life became a life raft. A balm. A prayer. There were the hours spent at the Library of Congress researching the lives of African Americans in Washington, D.C. during that historical time span between the twenties to the sixties, reading black newspapers, poring over oral histories, talking to still living black migrants from places like Wilson, Asheville and Palmer, North Carolina, small sleepy towns where it seemed sometimes that one morning in the 1920’s 30’s and 40’s  all the black folks woke up one day and decided to head north.

            Because I felt my own life so bereft of the complete love of a good man, I blessed Naomi Johnson with the relationship I so deeply yearned for. Writing fiction is a form of sorcery and I was working on two tracks, creating the novel but harboring in my mind a place where a man as wonderful as the lover/friend and husband I gave Naomi Johnson could manifest for me.

            Rayford Johnson in the novel, is the love of Naomi Johnson’s life,  a proud “race man” who had worked with Marcus Garvey before coming to Washington, D.C. to teach at Dunbar High School, in the 1930’s one of only two high schools for black students in the rigidly segregated  city. He was devoted to Naomi and proud of her business acumen that had made her the owner of several boarding houses (as was my mother). Naomi, after having married and divorced a man too small to march with her into the realm of the big dreams she possessed, knows that in Rayford she has found her matching heart beat.
As I wrote, I kept thinking that if I could believe a Rayford Johnson into existence for a fictional narrative, since everything wonderful that had ever happened to me had its seeds in my imagination, perhaps I could conjure an actual good man of my own to fill the empty space in the real life I was living.

            Writing Long  Distance Life was as much spiritual quest as creative endeavor. But the most important thing I did during this time, this pre-Joe phase of my life, was to get help. From a therapist. I tackled my broken heart and the rebuilding of my spirit as if it were my own private Manhattan Project, figuring out how to build a Marita I had never before imagined, and the likes of which, the world had never seen before.

             I had cracked my hard shell of resistance partially open before I walked into her office. So we moved pretty quickly through the unfinished grief I was holding on to over parents who’d died  twenty years earlier, through the jungle of resulting abandonment issues, insecurities, the ocean of self doubt, the unease with the professional achievements I’d convinced myself deep down that I didn’t deserve.

          During one session I moaned “How can I  really master the habit of self love? Isn’t it too late?” And even if I healed decades old wounds, didn’t she know there weren’t any good men out there. Even if now I was armed with the tools to become the good woman I always secretly  thought I was, how would I avoid picking the wrong man again? I was so good at it.

            “The kind of lovers you’ve been attracting won’t even come anywhere near you anymore,” she assured me with an unnerving calm once we felt I was ready to leave her office for the last time. “What, did you do, work roots on me?” I asked.

            She just smiled. It was years before I understood how she could make such a guarantee, after only a few sessions, with so much ease. But during years of watching the earth shift beneath her clients as they sat across from her in that office, she’d heard the rumbles and whimpers of new birth, seen the blossoming of self discovery. And she had heard and seen in me,  what I could not see in myself-that I would be ok. In fact, I would be, in the end, just fine. By showing up in her office I had proven that I was ready not just to continue living my life, but eager to create a new one.  I could have the kind of  man I wanted.  I could love and accept myself.[Continued...]

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