Beulah Land by Lonnie Coleman

Author:Lonnie Coleman [Coleman, Lonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Classica Libris
Published: 2020-04-13T22:00:00+00:00

4

In April, Roman was sixteen, half the age of his father Leon, and only a little beyond the age Leon had been when he fathered Roman. Yet the two of them, in the sixteen years both had been on earth together, had exchanged no more than a hundred words, all of them impersonal. Leon had always avoided the boy, and often did not speak when they met by chance. He disapproved of and ignored as much as he could Sarah’s friendship with him. He admitted his paternity, but only as a physical fact, and privately. Roman was more a stranger to him than was any other human soul on the plantation. To Roman, Leon was a total mystery, and one that fascinated him.

He could not conceive of Leon’s ever having desired his mother Clovis. His mental discord at imagining their bodies linked together even in blind lust was such that he could not think straight. That was because he could not imagine his father and his mother ever having been the age he now was and feeling the things he now felt.

His mind was lively, and he enjoyed and employed its energy, but he was not ambitious. He had been supplied with books, and further books that those first books suggested; but he had never known a real teacher. Sarah had been friend, mother, sponsor, advocate, protector, playmate. She had pointed and encouraged, but she had not really been his teacher except at the very beginning. And at least one inspired, mad, total teacher is necessary to change a life, to charge a good mind with ambition and appetite for the world beyond.

Much is observed of the violent changes in the body of an adolescent boy, but the chaos of mind and heart is at least as extreme.

Knowing that he was the first boy who had ever felt this way, Roman experienced the things every boy does—celestial elation and suicidal depression, lust a thousand times more throbbing than the wildest beating of a heart, and asceticism cold enough to chill a Siberian saint.

His hands groped the flesh of his body everywhere they could reach, not only his genitals, but there too. He gripped his biceps, his calves, the rounds of his behind. He kissed his shoulders, smelled under his arms, licked the insides of his wrists and elbows, admired the curving of thigh and chest, fearfully explored with his fingers the hunched back, and finally decided that he was not altogether repulsive. Although he did not think of her—how could he, when touching his own body?—Sarah’s having told him that he was handsome made it possible for him to accept his body the way it was.

And when hands did not grope and explore, he lay on the bed of his room back of the kitchen and pantries, blessedly isolated from the whole world; and he lay there like a holy man, as unaware of his body as if he had been true disembodied spirit.

But he burned; more often than not he burned.

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