Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

Author:Toni Cade Bambara [Bambara, Toni Cade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77800-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

The Survivor

JEWEL AWOKE half expecting to find herself in the recovery room, overwhelmed with sorrow and weeping over an irretrievable loss, till she remembered it was only her tonsils after all, and the sobbing was more a result of the Sodium Pentothal than her state of mind. But that was years ago. Today she was waking up on a speeding bus, and a bus ride is a dangerous thing. The mind off guard, an easy mark for all the one-part dreams three-fourths forgot that sprocket themselves and urge the cameras to run amok. Brother Billy on a dare leaping blindfold from a cliff in Morningside Park. The aged super, her friend over the checkerboard, being removed from the cellar on a dingy stretcher, starved to death, left to wait on the curb while the attendants grabbed a smoke and she shrieked, impotent. Carl Berry, who early, tenderly, gave her to herself, walking off the roof—the final high. Greatgranddaddy Spencer with emptied eyes strapped down under the rubber sheets as they turned him on like Frankenstein and she had signed and he had begged but she had signed …

Her feet in the stirrups, drifting away from herself, but another her in attendance as the coal miner with the cyclops eye dumped hunks of her, the best of her, ruby quartz and reeking, down the drain, as if digging out a diseased portion of a dangerous vein, and for so long she felt herself coming back to herself to meet the pain too soon—snipping my wings, no, freeing me from disease—so long as if very huge portions were malign—seems so much of me is malign—then drifting somewhere else where it was flannel-warm and quiet. But that was years ago.

the vans coming in the night to haul away everything in liquor boxes marked “this side up” when everything else was upside down now that the man with the rolled-up sleeves was the man conducting the orchestra of cameras was the man bent over the editing bin was the man leaning over her breasts and rolling away to become just a very dead mister

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