Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi
Heavy drops of water hung from the ends of the resurrection ferns. The grotto was quiet. The seminary had closed in 1982, though the property remained in occasional use as a retreat center. Between the oaks, an aisle of palm trees lined the path to a Lourdes Grotto. A brook ran peacefully out of sight at the bottom of the grounds. I watched a mosquito slip by. St. Augustine Seminary, originally called Sacred Heart College, was founded by missionaries from the Society of the Divine Word in 1919 to be the first seminary for African American priests in the United States, and would become the alma mater of most of the nation's first African American Catholic clergy. I wondered why they had planted palm trees. In 1923, the missionaries renamed the school and settled in Bay St. Louis, close to New Orleans, somewhat sheltered from the Ku Klux Klan on Mississippi’s western coast. Spanish moss tangled with the ferns, which climbed every tree and burst from every crevice of the grotto. The camellias were beginning to fall in great pools of crimson beneath their dark and glossy leaves.
I clicked my tongue a few times, waited a moment, repeated the sound, crossed before the grotto, and sat down to wait some more. I leafed through my notes. At one point, the idea had been to write a letter—whether to him or to her was never clear—to explain, to resolve it. The tortoiseshell cat appeared from up the bank. I drew from my pocket a napkin full of cat food and spread it on the grass beside me. The campus still served as a base for IN A WORD, a bulletin on African American Catholic news that had begun in 1977 as the ministry responsible for making catechesis slides. The ministry had reshaped into a newsletter about a year after the seminary closed. Before moving exclusively online following the 2008 financial crisis, IN A WORD sent printed letters from African American SVD priests to over thirty thousand congregants.
I didn't know how many people accessed the website. I could reach out to the paper, but then I'd have to justify this unjustifiable project. The number didn't matter; I could peer along the line of it, one of a hundred papers that could be, about the history and politics of the seminary and IN A WORD, all the joints for expansion along down, the church's public acknowledgement of its limitations, the timing of certain articles against other unfolding events, a hundred obvious links to impressive references, it was finally topical, it was right there. I couldn't get alone with myself, with that last paper, and I wasn't myself anymore. I kept reading around the edges, with a sense of what I didn't know, but without focus or future, and it was a very angry season. At one point, about him specifically, there was a list of contentions in my notebook; all I remembered was that once he'd venially conflated personal and private property in Marx’s theory and I couldn't tell if he was kidding. The tortoiseshell cat pushed her face into my hand, dislodging my grip on the pen.
He had called attention to us, our, and we, and I was just then crashing into any awareness about you. The cat would stop eating unless I was running my hand over her back and down her tail. My cat, my older tabby cat, would do the same thing. Referring to either of the cats at home as mine still bothered me, at least while speaking to other people. Lots of things still bothered me while speaking to other people. I had been reading IN A WORD articles in their archive. They were very interesting, or at least, had that kind of toothsome feel of functionality in the context of a research project, but I felt voyeuristic as I read. I didn't have anything new to say. She began to purr, ferociously, like the tabby at home. I'd not given the cats names. I didn't like giving anything a name.
My bones began to ache against tree roots in the grass, but I didn’t move. The cat was nuzzling against my outstretched leg, kicking against my shin for a moment, flipping back to her feet and composing herself. My mother grew up here, among the ferns. The air was dense, so thick with humidity that it folded gently against my skin. She'd followed my father into the desert. I hadn't told her I was coming here, where the moss spilled over in the same blues and greens as her eyes and mine, and the earth was dark and soft like her hair and mine, where she'd left five sisters behind. From the corner of my eye, I saw three figures moving slowly across the grounds, between the red-brick bungalows on the far side of the brook. I shut them out of my view, instead examining the dense tangle of grass roots and clover and soil at the ends of my fingers. Some kind of prayer weekend was being held at the retreat center. On my way to the grotto that morning, I'd seen a foam board sign announcing the event with a single lotus and the name of the organization stuck into the lawn. I had always been skeptical of prayer. The cat was back at my hand. My mother flipped through her Bible before she decided to leave. She said that each time she stopped, and she had stopped three times, the first verse to catch her eye had been about marriage. So she went. It had been like that for her about children, too. She said that God had told my father that he’d have four children. So she gave him four children.
The dappled morning light began giving way to the fullness of noon. The far side of the bank was once again empty. The cat had collected herself against my knee for a nap. I was the youngest, the one most like her. She said the older children would try to run away, that I didn’t, that I was the one who made her feel that she was a good mother. The three older children still lived with her and my father. I wanted to be able to write about anything else. I’d been here once or twice as a child, but it had taken me nine years after leaving my father’s house to return to my mother’s hometown. I’d never been back to the desert. God had promised four children. I broke and fulfilled the prophecy at once, the fifth, the fourth, born after one who’d died, on a cold day, in the thin air, on Epiphany.
I wanted to pet the cat, her fur sun-warmed and dusty, but I let her be. I didn't like disturbing rest, and instantly hated anyone who carelessly touched an animal. I tapped my fingers into the grass, counting off the number of months it had been since last I’d had a migraine. Not quite long enough to comfortably contain them in the past tense. I had arrived in San Francisco at seventeen and gotten by on an array of jobs and school. Cheap black business casual became a uniform; social life and extracurriculars were beyond me. The degree was the difference between making do with one job instead of many, but I quickly lost any faith in the university, and was beginning to physically fail, and knew if I didn't graduate in four years, I wouldn't at all, but I had a cat, so suicide was out, so I had to graduate, but I'd lost any shell of brassy liberalism, and then there was the uprising, and then I left San Francisco, a creature of bare, androgynous functionality, more pain than person.
The roots finally dug in too harshly and I gingerly shifted to tuck under one leg, relieving the pressure without disturbing the sleeping cat. The sun had moved to fall on my face and I leaned back on my elbows, turning my head toward the light and closing my eyes. The migraines began when I was six. Other pains, other symptoms kept accumulating. Conveniently, collapse coincided with gaining access to comprehensive healthcare. All the imaging backed up the leading theory of most of the pain below my neck. They were very sure; they'd seen very clearly what there was to remove. The five scars on my stomach had all but faded. The surgeon hadn't found anything. A golf cart whirred up the path and disappeared around the bend, the plastic buzz fading as quickly as it had broken over the yard. It was like the retreat center, like the two new casinos at either end of the beach road, like the lower half of the walls in my mother’s childhood bedroom, composite boards nailed against the old wood less than twenty years ago. Everybody knew what they meant.
The cat had lifted her head at the sound of the cart. She looked at me, and blinked slowly, and I blinked slowly back, and offered my fingertips to her, and she inclined her head and scratched her ears against them. My reading and writing were inhuman after college, mechanical and far from me. I guarded an abyss behind my eyes. At first gradually, and then as compulsion, I stopped saying I. Psychotherapy was helpful in the way that institutional failures can sometimes be helpful, that is, it stranded me with myself, and all I could do was write. One therapist fired me after a year because—he said—I seduced him—which I had, though I hadn't intended to succeed. One therapist told me she loved me. Another therapist said that, because I didn't believe enough in EMDR for it to be effective, I ought to try an ayahuasca retreat to Peru. Another therapist told me she loved me. But it spooled out when I was alone, with the cats, walking, on the train, onto paper. The long and the short of it was that my mental landscape had drastically changed and belief became a distinct, embodied mode of being. And the surgeon didn't find anything. And the pain began receding into memory.
The prayer group was back, a leader holding another foam board sign with a lotus, walking a few steps ahead of the throng. They were heading toward the road, south-east, toward the water. The sign I’d seen on the lawn hadn’t indicated to whom the prayers were directed. I was increasingly wary about using some other's gaze to interpret anything. That ethic became the scaffolding of it all—be mindful of the use of you, though I didn’t understand when I first heard it, or at least, I was too young. It was probably better that I barely wrote or spoke for a while. I kept moving until I'd gone far enough to turn and see. And that had been the pain, that you in my head, like God, like a horizon, unnoticed. But I didn't understand then, and I couldn't be in the same room anymore, that windowless office in the annex, where she was just outside, and she had been so kind to me, but she didn't know I'd known of her since the fifth or sixth night of that intersession class, from the moment he very Catholically waxed poetic about birds mating for life, and I'd already been too childish and strange.
A fly hovered over the grass, catching the cat's attention. She lashed her tail. The wind tossed hair into my eyes. I stayed very still. I thought perhaps she did not know me well enough to chitter while sitting so close, but she might as easily have had her own reasons. I'd killed my hair with chemicals in college, chopped it off entirely after graduation, and kept it shaved for a long time. It was coming back, shapeless, governed more by the weather than by me. Language continuously felt like a shackle. On the far side of the cat, deep in the grass, my fingers inexorably counted off the months. When pulled taut, the strands at my crown brushed my jaw. Revelations beget the temptation to overreach. It'd keep at least until my hair was at my shoulders. She and I had both said too much and not enough about all of this, asymmetrically gesturing toward a world I could not yet navigate. But I felt, from very early I felt—there couldn’t be any writing to her, could be no use of her in that way, when she'd arrived to me before she knew, alongside the injunction to try, to hope, to be enough of a romantic to hope, for a love made practicable as tact.
The wind picked up the sign on the lawn and tossed it. The cat was on her feet at the noise, then quickly sat on her hindquarters, watching. So I'd be in the Tenderloin again soon. The question of a career was never very important beyond assessing how much damage I was willing to do; the market pays a premium for all-purpose feminine competence; I only cared about keeping my personality as far from the transaction as I could. I'd steadied on my own feet enough that I could refuse to pay or accept pay to be touched, and I looked askance at anyone who was enthusiastic about buying an experience. I generally tried to steer clear of institutions, was distrustful of leaders, and had learned better than to let anyone follow me. I was mainly involved with the cats. The tabby one and I had gotten along well together for around a year on our own. My reasons for adopting her were ethically ambiguous, which I knew, which I tried to make up to her. And then she seemed like she needed something, or I needed something, and he needed very much, and was very small, and I took great pains to introduce them very slowly, and then she had a spry and affectionate kitten with whom to chase and nap and play-fight, and I hoped I wasn't far off in my estimation of their regard for one another. And he grew! They hadn't told me he was mostly a Maine Coon.
She'd stood, and crept a few feet off, close to the ground, swaying along the line of whatever she saw in the grass. I dreaded the cruelty of moving the cats. There didn't seem to be a way around it, so I tried to be very quick. I peered over my shoulder toward the chapel, then looked at the places where I'd worn through the grass. She pounced on the thing outside my sight, she seemed to catch it, and she was darting off, back down the bank. I'd have to be cruel. I tucked the napkin that'd carried the cat food back into my pocket and gathered my things. I wanted to be gone before the prayer group was back. I rose from the grass, waited a moment to test the stillness, and returned to the grotto for a farewell. Thoughts of Our Lady resisted inscription. The shade of the stone, the lee of her veil, it was cooler here, and I stepped further into privacy from God.
