In a Moment of Tenderness the Future Seems Possible

The right couple exists in a state of peril. The future promised by the marriage plot will be derailed when the mother asks, “What that niggah got to marry on?” It is the question on which black marriage founders. The numbers doom love. The death table, the rate of unemployment, the skewed gender ratios, the murderous abstractions. The numbers secure the law and determine the dire outcome. What kind of anchor is love against all that? The happily-ever-after will elude them. The beautiful life that might have been is captured in a moment of tenderness that in no way betrays what is to come—the mother cloaking her daughter in a burial garment. All the maternal toil and sacrifice fail to assure any better prospects for her daughter or provide an escape from the unspeakable. For this too the black mother will shoulder the blame. She has given all she has, all that matters, but to no avail. A vague disquieting feeling hangs in the air. It will cost her and the daughter everything.

The narrative is disjunctive. The story is in fragments. The chain of cause and effect goes awry. It is impossible to be confident about what happens and what is imagined. The whole story is unbelievable, so it is hard to reconstruct the chain of events. Dream and flashback thwart the attempt to order time into tidy categories of past, present, and future. The story advances and stumbles in uncertainty. So the account of the romance is necessarily speculative.

The threat of ruin hangs over the head of the right couple. Is it all just a waking nightmare? Is there an alternative scenario, a parallel track where they live happily ever after? Where invention is capable of sustaining love?

A storm descends. It is not from paradise, but the kind of storm that reminds them hellhounds are on their trail. The weather causes them to lose their way. It threatens to devour them. Engulfed in the storm, they can’t find a path of escape, a route to safety; they keep going in circles. Will they make it? They search for shelter and find an old house, but the domestic offers no refuge. The closed doors hide the hurt, make the brutality a secret history. In another telling, the rape never happens and a perfect life awaits them. In another telling, the nightmare ends and love triumphs.