Finding My Thunder Read Online Free Page A

like a wheel spinning, climbing. Seventeen thousand Americans…dead…like
Eugene…all the young men…and all the fathers broken…and all the mothers
carrying on with sad, sad eyes.
    And
one hundred cities with black folks protesting for civil rights…in the
street…cutting into Mama’s stories…and her own sins…whatever they
were…screaming in her soul.
    And
I set that tip aglow as I sucked down that smoke and blew it back and the
breeze took it, and I thought of all of it passing like grass in the oven so
quick…so quick…and leaving its mark upon the hearts…upon the lives of those who
waited for news.
    Then
I thought of Lonnie saying that to Danny, “…until the army gets you.” He’d been
in himself but he wasn’t going to help. He’d made it home after World War II. A
miracle, he said. They’d put him in the hospital for nearly a year, longer,
before they shipped him home. And she never went to see him, never did.
    But
what I knew now that I’d woken up, what I knew as I stood and put out that
smoke, as I gasped and put my hand over my mouth…it was coming together if I’d
listen…a story…all of them walking toward one another…in me.
    Mama…I
wasn’t crazy and I wouldn’t let crazy in. Naomi…hard to look in her eyes. Eugene…traveling
the gray between two houses. Lonnie…I’d stood up to him. Robert…waking up the
girl in me. Danny…blind to what was meant. And me…blind to myself…until now.
    This
was my Vietnam. They were the frontline for my civil rights. And I was
demanding. They just didn’t know it yet. They didn’t know me. I’d only met her
myself.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    Finding My Thunder 4

 
    After
my time smoking in the backyard I fixed Mama some tomato soup and a cheese
sandwich. Naomi hadn’t come home which meant she was at a sick bed somewhere in
Snyder Town where her flock resided.
    So
when Mama was quiet in her room I escaped to mine and played my records. I
could do this for hours. I listened to the beautiful voices of Richie Havens,
and Etta James, and Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. And I floated to the
ceiling and out the window and I soared in the summer night sky and reached my
hand to the lightening bugs and watched the stars spin psychedelic patterns all
over heaven. My drug was hope and it was the newest most powerful drug in the
world. That and Pall Malls.
    I
was suspended, lying in my room on my floor, my black light on, my poster of
the big neon peace sign lit in the dark, and I was mesmerized.
    I
almost didn’t hear the gravel on my window…if that’s what it was. But I was
soon there unhooking the screen, pushing it out and looking down and for the
second time that day…there he was. “Danny,” I said softly.
    He
was looking up at me, still the white T-shirt, the jeans, the boots. “Hey…cut
my hair,” he said.
    I
did not want him to wake Mama. I did not want that. But it was hard to think
with this big thing happening in me. “Stay there,” I said.
    I
made a circle on the carpet like Sooner would. Then I found my scissors and I
started to go downstairs, then I remembered me. I wore a yellow T-shirt with a
smiley face on it, and my cut off shorts. Dressed naked, Naomi would call it. But
I didn’t care now. I was small up top and my hair covered it, I didn’t need a
bra. Not so much and it was dark. My feet were bare, and I was quiet on the
stairs and I slipped out the door and he was there now, on the porch and he was
petting Sooner, but he stood straight when he saw me, and I felt like he did
see me, even in the dark he looked, and he was quiet, and his dark eyes ink,
and his face shaved clean like Lonnie said.
    “I…don’t
know what I’m doing,” I said.
    “That’s
makes two of us,” he said.
    “Oh.
Okay. Sit on the porch stairs I guess.”
    “Where’d
you get this old dog? She’s gonna have pups.”
    “No
she isn’t.”
    “Then
she ate a bag of rocks. And they’re moving.”
    Was
I blind? I bent over with