Ficre comes to my dreams and has never been more vivid.
He is excited: he has just been named the chef in the historical division of a great art museum. He is to invent dishes, and to match pigments in paintings to their proper historical sources. He tells me the history of ocher: ferric oxide, an impure clay, makes the color, explains why it is red in Eritrea and yellow in southern France. The things he knew! How to make paper with suminagashi paper technique. Where there was a foundry in the Hudson Valley to do lost wax casting in bronze. How to butcher an entire lamb, and clean a fresh chicken. How to marbleize paper and make tiny notebooks with covers the pink, gray, and greens of some remembered quarry.
He loved that I was an American girl: tall, sturdy, sunny, good teeth, optimistic, full of songs from the Negro canon and the great American songbook. He loved my blues, which saw the world but never laid me low. He knew more than I did that we were not meant to survive if not to profit for others but I came from survivors.
Later that morning, I ask my sons: how can we be so happy, when we have been through so much? The forest is not denuded. The trees are standing tall.
In the dream, he picks up my coffee cup and examines it; I have purchased it since he died; he finds the curve of the handle and pale pink, crackled glaze to be beautiful. Sit with me, darling, he says, and have a cup of coffee.
Eleven
I dream we are moving, my family of four: Lizzy, Ficre, Solomon, and Simon.
It is light and easy. We laugh with the boys as we sort through and throw things away. Ficre carries and moves large bags and objects, the African ox, sturdy and purposeful. The boys move as oxen as well. We are glad to be going wherever we are going.
Then the children evaporate from the dreamscape and it is just the two of us walking a long, gently curved road, holding hands. At a fork in the road, Ficre lets my hand go and waves me on. You have to keep walking, Lizzy, he says. I know it is the only truth, so I walk.
I look back. I look back. I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.
It was the two of us walking the road and now he has let my hand go.
I walk. I can always see him. His size does not change as I move forward: he is five foot nine and a half, exactly right. I can still feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk.
I wake and the room is flooded with pale yellow light.
Acknowledgments
Before this book could be written or even imagined, my sons and I had to be put back together again in the wake of Ficre’s loss. My parents, Clifford and Adele Alexander, took care of us in every way, putting our needs above and before their own and standing tall and steady by our sides. They teach me how to be mighty every day. My brother, Mark Alexander, and his family gave unwavering loving support. Ficre’s amazing extended family all over the world showed their love and regard for him in many ways. Father Peter Orfanakos of St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church kindly and patiently taught me many things I never knew I’d need to know, as did Mr. William Cameron at the Grove Street Cemetery. Monica Negrón, Lisa Gaither, Jomaire Crawford, Lisa Marcus, Ken Marcus, Lin Song, and Tyler McCauley helped me stay whole, each in their own way.
My colleagues at Yale University were compassionate and kind beyond measure. Rick and Jane Levin, Regina Starolis, Jonathan Holloway, Emilie Townes, Peter Salovey, and Marta Moret extended special courtesies from the university community. Glenda Gilmore immediately took over my chairship of the African American Studies Department in the first weeks when I could not work; Lisa Monroe, Janet Giarratano, and Jodie Stewart-Moore held down the departmental fort. Each of my faculty colleagues in my beloved community of the African American Studies Department showed me how fortunate it is to work with people you also love. Our dear graduate students in African American studies brought home-made food to our home every night at five thirty for weeks: Thank you, my dears. Other special friends outside of the department who were especially helpful in their steady kindness include Steve Pitti and Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Inderpal Grewel, Joseph Gordon, Chip Long, Jon Butler, Jock Reynolds, George Chauncey, and Ron Gregg.