FLANNERY ON STAGE
Her hair had thinned horribly during the illness, and she had been afraid it would fall out altogether. A petty vanity, she knew. When her mother had expressed her own worries she had laughed and reminded her that Jesus didn’t care if she were bald or black or bowlegged. Deep inside herself, though, where no one was allowed but God, she wanted her hair.
And now to stand in front of this mob, head shaved like a penitent monk. She can taste the cold metal of the microphone; the stage lights heat her scalp. She feels naked. It thrills her.
She strums her guitar and begins to sing. Softly at first, as always, making them lean forward in their seats to hear. The explosions, the ecstasy, will come later. The metal taste stays in her mouth as the strings vibrate beneath her fingertips.
The first time she had spoken into a microphone had been back at Yaddo, when she gave her first reading; it had been a huge thing, like a metal sausage. (Actually it had reminded her of something quite different, an observation she shared with Elizabeth back at the apartment, but only after Lowell had gone out for cigarettes. They had laughed and laughed.) But this thing is no bigger than a half-dollar, and attached to the headset clamped tightly to her bare scalp, so she can move as she wishes. She can move, period: gone the aluminum crutches, gone the pain. Yes, this is better than Yaddo, much better.
I do not apologize, she whispers. The bass comes in now, signaling the move from confession to declaration. She looks out into the black expanse of the audience, their faces washed out by the lights pouring over her. A bright flicker here, there; exit signs off to the side, a lighter held prematurely aloft. As a child in Savannah she had gone down to the riverfront and seen pinpoints of light, running lights on boats speeding by, the city’s illumination reflected in the water. There, too, the lights had not relieved the darkness so much as emphasized it; no more comfort than in Dublin, hiding on the rooftop from her mother’s blows, the points of light below her as grimy and hopeless as the buildings from which they emerged.
Mother had problems, did her Mum. Once Dad left she beat them all every day, with whatever she could get her hands on. Starved them, locked them in closets. But she got away from all that, finally, and years later, when Mum died in the wreck, she thought she understood maybe a little bit. No divorce, no contraception, no abortion, no rights at all. Say what you want about their gift of gab; most of the Irish were as mute and desperate as the rest of the world. Especially the women. Her mother never said a word about any of it. Irish to the bone, but stolid and violent as those Jesus-shouters out from Milledgeville, filled with the same rage.
That was why she wrote things down, why all the stories, all the songs. Mama never understood why she didn’t write things people liked, why she wasn’t Margaret Mitchell. It always left her shaking and speechless, but she went ahead anyway. She would not be silent like all those other women.
Into the groove now; the bass and drums churning. She feels the bass drum through her spine. That reggae man, the producer from Jamaica she met in London when she was cutting the first album, had said that the drum was the heart and the bass was the mind. Walking, talking, I and I to you. Sacrilege, she would have thought before, all that Ethiopian hoodoo babble. But now, after the time in London, after the first album, she recognized the Rastas more fully than she had ever recognized the blacks of central Georgia. She regretted not looking more closely back then, not trying to understand (although one of them, that one that had the movie from the man who did the space films, had said that such honesty was one of her strengths). But it was now and there was plenty of time. She feels herself start to skank across the stage, chopping her guitar like wood. She begins to shout: Go ahead and leave! You’ll never get away. The Rastas, they know. They know that faith is not some big electric blanket. Faith is not those prissy children back in Georgia; faith is not the old man in Rome. (She had learned; she would never rip that image up again—but she was who she was.) Faith is the cross.
The music swells and fills her up; she feels her lips pull back, her teeth bump against the microphone. Feral, some critic had called that look, when the song takes over. Predatory. Grotesque, like they said about the stories. But you had to be. You had to draw the pictures large and exaggerated, so that people would pay attention; you had to sing to make them listen. People are asleep, reading their books or listening to their music. You had to wake them up. And if they object, if they roll over and try to go back to sleep, you keep shaking them, you keep fighting. As she had in childhood, when she had practiced anti-angel aggression: she went in her room and whirled about in a circle, fists knotted, socking the angel the nuns assured her guarded each and every one of us. She didn’t want to be guarded, chained, watched.
But now here on stage everyone is watching, and that is how it should be. The detour was valuable, the holy orders cleansing, but she belongs here. Now comes the ecstasy.
The music throbs, roars; she can feel the crowd at her feet. She is at their feet: the blind, reluctant prophet shouting the news so all can hear. She dominates the crowd as she submits to the mad, stinking, bleeding shadow of Jesus, carrying them with her, home. She doesn’t need her hair. She is a slave; she is rapturously free. She does not know for certain how she came to this place, and the memories confuse her sometimes, drifting into her, merging, swelling, popping like a soap bubble. You’ll never, ever get away. She is bathed in light. Her mother is buried, buried; her father is calling her home. To Georgia, to Dublin: the music stops, the audience roars, and she bows her naked head down. Pierced by the light, she dances.