Loving Donovan Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  INTRODUCTION by Terry McMillan

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  JANUARY 2003

  HER

  AGE EIGHT

  AGE TEN

  AGE THIRTEEN

  AGE FOURTEEN

  AGE FIFTEEN

  HER

  AGE SEVEN

  AGE NINE

  AGES THIRTEEN TO FIFTEEN

  AGES SIXTEEN TO EIGHTEEN

  AGES EIGHTEEN TO TWENTY-ONE

  THEM

  DECEMBER

  JANUARY

  FEBRUARY

  MARCH

  APRIL

  MAY

  JUNE

  JULY

  DECEMBER

  EPILOGUE

  E-Book Extras

  Excerpt from Gathering of Waters

  Also by Bernice L. McFadden

  About Bernice L. McFadden

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  For me, those women, and the men we’ve loved

  INTRODUCTION

  by Terry McMillan

  When you visit Bernice L. McFadden’s website, you are greeted with the line, “I write to breathe life back into memory,” and while this is true, what is also true is that Bernice is one of the best contemporary literary writers out there today. As cliché as it may sound, Bernice’s brilliance, her talent as a novelist, is the very life she breathes into all of her characters. They live so fully on the page that we know them intimately by the end of any of her novels . . . and we want to continue knowing them long after the final page is turned.

  What makes Bernice’s writing connect with so many readers is her love and belief in the importance of history—both personal and universal. In her commitment to exploring her own history—and in novels like Gathering of Waters and Glorious, the greater history of black people in America—she brings to us deeply relatable human stories. She peels back layers of history to get to the heart of what shapes us as individuals, as a neighborhood, as a city, as a country.

  In her 2006 novel Nowhere Is a Place (reissued by Akashic Books in 2013), she achieves this by mapping the crossroads of her young narrator Sherry’s heritage as Sherry embarks on a road trip of self- and ancestral discovery. Once the story is complete—and Sherry has healed the fractures in her immediate family by sewing together the pieces of their past—Bernice adds a poignant epilogue, addressed to the reader, entitled “Are We Related?” In it, she reveals that Nowhere Is a Place was inspired by her personal genealogical research, which she then details before asking readers to send in their own.

  In this epilogue, Bernice paints the truest portrait of her process: not only are her characters’ earnest and varied quests to connect with their history very much her own, but it is through their engagement with her readers that her own urge to connect can be satisfied.

  If Nowhere Is a Place provides Bernice a sort of topography upon which she and her readers might find common ground, Loving Donovan’s trajectory is straight through the heart. The book has been described as an unconventional love story, and in many ways it is. When I began rereading it to write this introduction, I was struck by how much Bernice tackles in this seemingly straightforward story of romance. And while she addresses difficult topics such as pedophilia, domestic abuse, homophobia, abortion, depression, suicide, she writes with such finesse that she doesn’t leave the reader in total despair. Saddened at times, yes, but throughout it all, Bernice gives her characters hope.

  The array of craft she utilizes to this effect are plenty: the lyrical beauty of her writing, her tremendous empathy for her characters (rendered by the grace with which they confront their hardships), her honest and improbably inviting depiction of life in the projects, the breadth with which she describes even the most minor of characters, and above all the humor woven throughout the work that helps us—Bernice, her characters, her readers, all of us together—thrive and survive.

  But what makes a person know they’re reading a McFadden novel when reading Loving Donovan is the manner in which her ever-present resuscitation of memory and drive to connect is mirrored in the book’s ingenious structure. Told in three parts—“Her,” “Him,” and “Them”—the novel separately introduces two yearning, living, loving, fractured characters in their adolescence and sends them on their own paths of self-discovery that we know from the structure of the work are destined to converge in their adulthood.

  Through the first two parts, we get to know her (Campbell’s) and his (Donovan’s) scars so intimately—and watch them strive to heal so McFaddenly—that at times we can feel them. And “Them.” We smile with Campbell as she finally wonders, somewhere in the middle of “Them,” Is this how it starts?

  This must be how it starts. The sudden loss of breath and the on and off again sound of your heart in your ears. Words caught in your throat and the sudden urge to lick your lips. Wanting to look away, but wanting more just to reach across the table and place your hand on some part of him.

  Our smiles widen as she admits to herself with certainty that, Yes, this is how it begins. And thanks to this reissue, so it now can begin for you.

  Terry McMillan is the best-selling author of many novels, including Waiting to Exhale, Disappearing Acts, and Who Asked You? She lives in Northern California.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this is a work of fiction, the emotions are real: pain, longing, love.

  I am grateful to God, family, and friends, who constantly lift me up. Their support has been tremendous, and their love overwhelming. Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you.

  To my daughter, R’yane Azsa, who knew the years would go by so quickly? You’ve grown into such a beautiful young lady . . . I regret not having a dozen more. I love you so very much.

  To my family at Dutton and the Vines agency, I am indebted and grateful.

  Terry McMillan, your words of wisdom and friendship have been a source of great comfort for me. Thank you.

  Pat Houser, thank you for your friendship and immense support.

  To my readers, thank you for your continued support. Please keep the e-mails and letters coming; they are a constant source of joy for me.

  All we need is love . . .

  des-ti-ny (des-ti-nee) n. (pl. –nies) 1. Fate considered as a power. 2. That which happens to a person or thing, thought of as determined in advance by fate.

  —Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 1980

  The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

  —W. Somerset Maugham, recalled on his death, December 16, 1965

  PROLOGUE

  JANUARY 2003

  When she recalls that period in her life, she likens it to a piece of the hard candy she’d often enjoyed as a child. Round, colorful, tangy, sweet on the outside, and bitter at the center.

  Three years had come and gone, and since then Campbell had married a wonderful man from Kentucky, given birth to a son, moved to another part of the state, taken up pottery and yoga, leased a Mercedes, and purchased a beach house in Anguilla; her daughter, Macon, had made her a grandmother, and even with all of those life changes, her heart remained the same. Her heart remained with him.

  She wished she could say that she thought of Donovan only when she heard Etta James belt out “At Last,” or in the dead of night, midsummer, when it rained or snowed, or when the sun shone so brightly, it made the day too beautiful to behold.

  He had been beautiful.

  She wished she could say that her mind reached back to those times only when life was unbalanced and sad, but that would be an outright lie because she thought about that man even when she was happy and wrapped up ti
ght in her husband’s arms.

  She thought about him when she held her newborn son to her breast, pulled her fingers through her hair, when she sighed, sneezed, breathed.

  She thought about him.

  She found him on her mind when she was surrounded by silence, engulfed by noise, when she sat, walked, stood in line at the grocery store.

  Nikki Giovanni must have known someone similar, because she wrote about him in “Cancers (not necessarily a love poem).”

  Damn! She thought about him.

  And she asked herself, would she leave? Would she leave everything she’d ever wanted and had finally gotten? Would she put all she had behind her if she opened her door one day and found him standing there, empty-handed but with a full heart?

  Would she leave everything and everyone she had if he opened his mouth and simply said, “Hello. I’m sorry. I love you.”

  Would she go?

  Shit, she believed she would.

  Her

  1973–1980

  AGE EIGHT

  She can hear her mama in the kitchen talking loud to the walls, beating the pots, slapping her forehead with the palm of her hand, and wailing, Lord, why this man do the things he do to me!

  Millie cries a little, small tears that cling to her cheeks like the tiny diamond earrings she swoons over in the JCPenney catalog. The same diamond earrings her husband Fred always promises to buy her, but never does.

  When Campbell sees those tears, those wet diamonds, she thinks that they are pieces of her mama’s fragile heart her daddy went and broke again.

  Millie don’t know why he act the way he do, say the things he say, and he don’t seem to know either, ’cause when she ask him, he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Baby, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I spent the rent money, stayed out till dawn, had my hand on Viola Sampson’s knee . . . Millie, baby, I just don’t know.”

  He don’t ever know, and he’s always sorry.

  Sorry is what he says all the time, and whenever Millie hears those words, she behaves as if it’s the first time Fred’s been ignorant and sorry, and she spit and cuss, slap at his head and punch at his chest, holler out how much she hates him, screams she wishes he was dead, and still climbs into bed with him at night.

  Luscious says Millie married Fred because Millie felt she was getting old and was afraid she would end up a spinster, sitting out on the porch ’longside Luscious, shooing flies and cuddling cats in her lap instead of babies.

  “That’s why your mama married your daddy. I don’t think it was love, not the real kind that makes you walk with your back straight and your head high,” she tells Campbell.

  I think I walk with my back straight, and I ain’t in love, Campbell thinks to herself.

  “Your mother ain’t never been known to step in any dogshit or get the sole of her shoe messed up with gum. You know why?” Luscious asks, and cocks her head to one side.

  Campbell shakes her head and waits.

  “’Cause your mama always walks slumped over with her head down.”

  Campbell rolls her eyes up and to the left and thinks about what Luscious says, and in her mind’s eye she sees her mama walking to the supermarket, the laundromat, and the butcher shop, head down, her eyes searching the sidewalk for something she won’t talk about.

  “Uh-huh,” Campbell says, agreeing with Luscious.

  Campbell asks Millie about what Luscious says; she asks, Is it true?

  Millie tries to straighten the hump loving Fred done put on her back, and she twists her mouth up like she do on the day before the rent is due and it’s long past seven and Fred still ain’t home with his paycheck, and then she says, “Campbell,” and her daughter’s name is a long wind—and Millie takes another moment to fold her hands across her stomach before she continues.

  “Campbell, your aunt Rita is old and feeble-minded and speak on things she don’t know nothing about.”

  Millie doesn’t refer to Luscious as Luscious; she calls her by her given name. Rita.

  “I don’t know where that Luscious nonsense came from!” Millie screams in frustration. “Her name is Rita Josephine Smith. That’s what’s on her birth certificate, baptismal record, and welfare check, and that’s all I’ll ever refer to her as!”

  After Millie say what she got to say to Campbell, she sucks her teeth and waves her off with one hand while she reaches for the phone with the other and dials those seven digits that have belonged to Luscious for what seems to Campbell like forever.

  She waits a few seconds, and Campbell don’t hear her say hello or how ya doing or nothing; Millie just jumps right on Luscious and tells her to stop spreading lies and confusing her child’s mind with foolishness.

  There’s no hiding her pain from her daughter, and Campbell stays close by while her mother weeps and wrings her hands in frustration until she can’t take it anymore and settles herself down in her recliner. “Get me a beer, baby,” she says to Campbell. “And my headache pills from the medicine cabinet.”

  Campbell is too young to know that aspirin don’t come in prescription bottles and are not small yellow pills with the letter V stamped out of their center.

  “Thank you, baby,” Millie says, and gives Campbell a sad smile before she pops the pill on her tongue and takes a long swig of the beer.

  Campbell will stay with Millie until her mother’s eyes close and her head lolls on her neck. She’ll spend those moments at the window, humming “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. It is a soothing tonic for her and Millie during tense times, and there are many of those.

  Campbell finds herself at the window, her hands stroking the long emerald drapes, her eyes moving between her mother’s sad face and the street below.

  There is a lemon-colored sun resting peacefully in the pale summer sky. It’s quiet except for the chirping of birds and the now and again blast of a car horn.

  Not many people roam the streets on that sultry Sunday afternoon, and Campbell’s eyes are growing heavy with boredom when the click-click sounds of a woman’s heels against the pavement—faint at first, and then swelling—pique her interest.

  Campbell leans a bit over the windowsill, and her eyes fall on auburn hair and the mocha-colored shoulders of a woman who has a small pink suitcase clutched in one hand while her free hand, balled into a tight fist, punches at the air with every fourth step she takes.

  She’s wearing open-toed, strapless baby-blue clogs that whack at her heels as she speeds along. Campbell winces at the sound but notes the fresh pedicure and wonders why Millie doesn’t take that sort of time with herself.

  Before the woman reaches the corner, Campbell has the urge to call out to her. For some reason she needs to see her face, needs to see the lines in her forehead and maybe the set of her mouth and color of her eyes.

  But she’s only eight years old, and that would be out of place, and Millie would call her mannish and grown and probably twist her ear or pop her upside her head.

  So she bites her lip against the urge, and the woman disappears around the corner taking the punching hand and the clicking whacking sounds with her.

  Millie begins to snore, and Campbell turns to look at her. She observes the mussed hair and the salty tracks her tears have abandoned on her cheeks. Campbell thinks it’s a shame, a downright shame. But those are Luscious’s words, not hers.

  Campbell retires to her bedroom and pulls her journal from its hiding place beneath her bed, opens it to a clean page, marking her name, age, and date at the top, and beginning with:

  Ain’t no man ever going to make me cry, make me talk to the walls and wail out to the Lord.

  Ain’t no man ever going to break my heart.

  AGE TEN

  As far back as Campbell could remember, there were no flowers in the courtyards of the Brookline housing projects. No flowers, but plenty of beer bottles, candy wrappers, and other pieces of debris that people saw fit to toss over the chain-link fences.

  Each spring, Housing came throug
h to repaint and repair the benches that had been vandalized during the year, sloshing green paint over the nicknames, gang tags, and declarations of love that had been scrawled there with spray paint and black marker.

  The halls of Brookline Projects smelled like piss, reefer, and—according to Luscious—Maria Santos’s nasty ass.

  She said this because she had heard Maria screwing in the stairwell a number of times, had heard her scream, “Ay, Papi!” over and over again, and had seen the discarded condoms on the steps, and Luscious said the scent Maria left behind was ungodly.

  The intercom system in the Brookline Projects was always broken, that and the locks on the doors. Housing gave up on repairing those things, leaving its residents vulnerable to whoever wanted in. They concentrated instead on installing wire encasements over the light fixtures to keep vandals from breaking the bulbs only, making the residents easy targets in the darkness.

  They just became easy targets in the light.

  Most apartments were mice- and roach-infested, and hot water was something you prayed for before you turned on the shower.

  When people moved, Brookline residents ran to their windows, gathered on the benches, or balanced their behinds on the chain-link fences to watch the tattered sofas, mismatched kitchen chairs, color television, bookshelves, wall units, and various other pieces of furniture the family had accumulated over the years loaded into the borrowed van, rented U-Haul, or box-shaped delivery truck Juan Miguel had bought from a junkman on Euclid Avenue for five hundred dollars two years earlier. The red letters on the left side of the truck still screamed, WONDER BREAD, glowing through the cheap white paint he’d smeared across it last spring.

  Luscious would watch from the bench that sat closest to the doorway. The one she’d claimed as her own so many years ago. It was her throne, and in warm weather she could be found there most of the day and well into the night.