Angelic Pathways (11 page)

“Wow, everyone got quiet,” the homeless man across from me chortled as he looked about.

“That’s because we’re all too tired to even talk,” a woman a few seats down replied dryly.

I’m not sure how long Raphael held the space with his peaceful aura, but I was so grateful to him just then. I wanted to get up and hug him, but I knew that doing so would have landed me in the psychiatric ward at the nearest hospital. After all, no one but me could see the luminous angel. Or so I assumed.

After waiting an eternity to see a counselor, my name was finally called. Using a cane, I shuffled slowly to the door, greeted the woman, and followed her to her cubicle. As I sat at her desk while she typed on her keyboard, shame and anger washed over me.

This is so demeaning! Humiliating! I don’t belong here! I did everything I was supposed to. I listened to my parents. I went to college. I chose career over relationships and starting a family. Damn it, I did all the right things. Why, God, why am I sitting here at this desk begging for a handout?

The thoughts came at me like a thousand arrows. I tried to shut out the images of my parents looking down upon me from Heaven with shame in their eyes. With disdain, or perhaps even disgust, knowing my father. He was never one to hide his contempt for the system and the people who used it.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I whispered to myself.

“Pardon?” The counselor swiveled in her seat and looked at me.

“Nothing,” I said, offering a weak smile.

“Well, you are one lucky woman,” she said as she flipped through my application. “Had you submitted this a few days earlier or a few days later, we wouldn’t be able to help you.”

Luck had nothing to do with it. I knew it was all part of God’s plan.

“We can assist you with your prescriptions and get you some food. Do you have any children?”

“No,” I said indignantly. My skin was very thin when it came to such a topic, and I knew it shouldn’t have been.
Yes, a black woman can be in her thirties with a college degree and no kids!
I knew it was something I had to let go of.

“That’s too bad,” she sighed as she wrote notes on my application. “We could have gotten you some cash if you did.”

I had been sitting on the edge of my chair, but after those words, I found myself slumping and slipping backwards. At that moment, my thirty short years passed before my eyes. Thirty years of hard work, of an undying dedication to education and earning every dollar I made. Thirty years of thinking so highly of myself … all thrown back in my face. Because I chose to go to school, because I chose to work, because I chose to do what my parents had deemed to be right and proper, I was worth no more than a few pence.

And like the dreg of society that I felt I was, I took it. It was better than nothing.

Once back in my prison of a bedroom, I gazed at the altar I had set up on my bookshelf. I gazed at the many statues I had collected over the years: Buddha, Kwan Yin, Ganesh, Hotai, Fu Lu Shou. In the center of them all was a small placard depicting Merciful Jesus.

A sigh of hopeless resignation escaped me. Maudlin tears fell. Sure, he had kept his promise. My father in spirit had promised me the previous November that I would not go without my medical needs being met. At first, I scoffed at his words. There was no way I could afford the many medications, and unless there was some hidden inheritance somewhere, I knew I never would. But he came through. Just as the last of my medications ran out, there was help.

However, the now cynical and empirically bitter side of me wondered how long such a luxury would last. Time would tell.

And there, as I sat in darkness and peered at the placard, the persistent thorn in my side made its presence known—Archangel Gabriel.

“What?” I asked, without taking my eyes from the altar. To gaze at the angel would have no doubt caused me to somehow find the energy and strength to lunge at his throat.

Stoic as ever, he stood there, his hands folded in front of him. His robes were gleaming white, and his head was crowned in golden ringlets. He was flawlessly beautiful. But that harsh gaze he always seemed to wear lately evoked in me even more contempt for the militant angel. Damn, I hated him, and there were no words in the English language—short of a long string of utterly foul curses—that could convey just how deep that hate ran.

The angel said nothing—odd for him. Instead, a rush of heat came over me, and bright, vivid visions appeared before my intuitive eye. They were visions of me in the past. They began with one I remembered all too well. It was Christmas Day of 1997.

My father had just passed away a little over a month prior, and to say it was a solemn holiday season would be an understatement. As always, Mother was up early and in the kitchen, but I was feeling unglued. I didn’t want to be home. It had felt claustrophobic for weeks, and the death of my father had driven a frigid but temporary wedge between my mother and me. She had grown clingy in ways she had
never
been before, and unfortunately I had no emotional capacity to tolerate it. Though she was a good mother, a hard-working mom who cleaned, cooked, and worked upwards of sixty hours a week, she wasn’t very affectionate or attentive. Instead, my father had always been the source of hugs, kisses, and unwanted curiosity about my teenage and then later adult life. Now that he was gone, the woman, who on many days chose work to get away from a family life everyone knew she didn’t want, was now turning to me for something I couldn’t give—closeness. Sure, it was selfish, and I regret it now, but I can’t change what was.

I was desperate to find an excuse to get out of the house. Any excuse would have worked. Well, not any excuse. I could have chosen to go to a friend’s house for Christmas dinner, but I wasn’t that cruel. Besides, I knew Mom’s wrath, and to forgo her dinner for someone else’s would most likely have gotten me disowned. So instead, I wedged myself into the kitchen beside her and made small talk while I made sandwiches. A lot of sandwiches. Upwards of about three or four dozen. Maybe more. I had lost count. I made them with whatever I could find—whatever looked and tasted good—and bagged them up along with a few pounds of fruit.

“Where in the hell are you taking all of that?” she asked, eyeing me over a bowl of sweet potato pie filling.

“To the streets,” I said dryly. “Be back by dinner.” And I was gone. I drove downtown to one of the darkest, most godforsaken places in Detroit: Cass Corridor. It was here that most of the homeless people in the city gathered. I went to school not too far from the area, so I had become a bit desensitized to the hellish visions that lurked there. The usual cardboard boxes that served as people’s homes were empty that day. It seemed that most of the people had moved into one of the many abandoned buildings to avoid the blistering cold. Still, I found a few souls brave enough to walk the desolate streets. With the holiday, the city was truly a ghost town.

I spent the afternoon handing out food and talking to total strangers, strangers who were now ghosts in my mind. I knew I would never see these people again. I also knew that such a deed would also go unrewarded by Heaven. I wasn’t there to be benevolent or charitable. I wasn’t there to do God’s work. I was there because I felt there was nowhere else to go. It was something my mother couldn’t argue against.

After a couple hours of enduring the icy winds, I returned to my car and drove to my university’s campus. I walked around for a while, enjoying the haunting feeling of being the only person on the planet. The winds howled down the main corridor, and dried leaves scurried across my feet. There wasn’t a soul to be found. Bundled up, I sat in the empty student square. And as I gazed at the damp leaves and wisps of ice crystals blowing across the concrete path, I broke the silence with two short sentences.

“God, why can’t those people just get jobs? I have a job.” Heck, before my current job that I had just gotten that past August, I had held down two part-time jobs and gone to school. It didn’t seem all that difficult of a thing to do.

The vision ended there and faded into yet another of me standing in a grocery checkout line with my mother when I was a little girl. There was a woman ahead of us with a baby on her hip and one in the front seat of the cart. She was fumbling trying to tear food stamps out of her coupon book while holding the baby.

My mother snorted in derision, “There goes my tax dollars.” I looked up at her in confusion. At the time, I had no idea what she meant by that, but the angry, heated glare the woman gave my mother and the nervous look on the cashier’s face always stuck with me. When the woman left, my mother started on a little tirade about my father’s sister and her kids. “Shiftless, never worked a day in their lives. Never will. The entire clan is useless.”

“I got a sister like that,” the cashier said with a chuckle. “Got pregnant, figured out it was free money. She hasn’t worked in years and here I am working and can’t afford a pack of pig’s feet, much less the steaks she’s always eatin’. ”

“Well, God blesses the child that has his own.” Then my mother looked at me and said, “You remember that.”

The vision wavered in front of me, and this time I was a few years older and with my father. It was a nearly identical scenario, only my father had cross words for my mother’s children from her previous marriage. “Stay away from those people, girl. They’re all criminals, and they will only take advantage of you.”

Those words didn’t faze me much. I was used to him and his contempt for “those people,” as he called them … on his better days. (When he was really in a foul mood, the names he reserved for them would make the Devil cringe.) It was when we got into the car that I met his wrath. And for what? I hadn’t done anything wrong. But whenever my father saw a woman carting around a brood of unkempt and unruly kids, I would become the target of his ire since he couldn’t really say anything to the woman’s face. No, that just wasn’t gentlemanlike.

“I swear,” he said as he started up the car, “if you ever come home pregnant … If I even so much as see you looking at a boy, I will skin you alive, girl, and then put you on the streets. I will not have it in my house!”

“Yessir,” I responded meekly.

“Welfare is for the weak and for the do-no-gooders. Your sister ain’t worked a single day in her life and look at her. Worthless!” And it was that hatred of my mother’s now very distant family that drove a wedge between my parents. I could never really understand why, because she didn’t have much to do with them, anyway. She had left them for another life and never looked back.

Her doing that, along with my father’s contempt and derision, would cost me everything years later, including the family home and everything I owned.

I didn’t have time to linger on the thought, as Gabriel ushered in another vision of me once again in the checkout line. Only now, I had my own groceries and my checkbook out and ready while staring at another woman with food stamps. Years of conditioning had worked. My parents would have been proud.

“Good grief,” I scoffed at the cashier as the woman walked away. “Is it so difficult to ask people to get off their asses and work?” The cashier chuckled as she rang me up.

The vision faded, and here I was back in the darkness of my bedroom. I glanced to the copy of the application that had been approved only hours prior. In that one moment, I had become everything my parents hated.

I had become the very thing I hated.

I had no words for Gabriel, and he had none for me. After a moment, he faded into the darkness. I didn’t move from my spot for hours, stuck in a vicious cycle of contempt, self-pity, and dread. Now, I would be the one to be mocked and humiliated at the checkout counter. The notion brought to me the painful realization that karma, as it were, was a rabid female Rottweiler cornering me, a pampered Persian pussycat that had pooped herself out of fear.

Here, I must be cautious. When I mention karma, I don’t mean it in terms of good versus bad karma or even in the sense of retribution. Here, karma simply goes back to what I covered earlier about causality. My parents had created conditions—indoctrinating me against public assistance to the point of callous cruelty—that invariably led to my feeling too arrogant to file an application. I had been told about assistance months prior, but pride had kept me from filing for it until an empty stomach, in addition to a broken body, pushed me into action. So if, due to my upbringing, I had not been so prideful, I would have immediately submitted the paperwork. Doing so, however, would have caused me to miss the window of opportunity that allowed me to obtain services and medications I needed at the time.