The Warmest December Read online

  Critical Praise for Glorious by Bernice L. McFadden

  • Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Fiction

  • Winner of the BCALA Literary Award for Fiction

  • Debut selection of the One Book, One Harlem program

  “McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth … McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “She brings Harlem to astounding life … Easter’s hope for love to overthrow hate … cogently stands for America’s potential, and McFadden’s novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Bernice L. McFadden’s novel Glorious, which starts with a bang-up prologue, has a strong main character (based in part on Zora Neale Hurston), hard-driving prose, and historic sweep of several decades, including the years of the Harlem Renaissance, which has always fascinated me.”

  —Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle President

  “The book is sweeping in scope and brings to life the tenuous existence of an African American artist in the early twentieth century.”

  —Vogue

  “I hadn’t read a word of hers before [Glorious], but I will follow her from now on.”

  —Alan Cheuse, NPR

  “The novel is so intense and sweeping at the same time. Some of the scenes were terrifying, and some were very comic in the irony of what the narrator was experiencing and what she was actually thinking. The word for a journey like this is picaresque, but the ever-impending tragedy makes that word not quite right for this book.”

  —Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales

  “A wonderful, rich read full of passion, history, wonder, and women you will recognize: Glorious is just that.”

  —Jill Nelson, author of Volunteer Slavery and Let’s Get It On

  “The seeming inevitability of cruel fate juxtaposes the triumph of the spirit in this remarkably rich and powerful novel. Bernice L. McFadden’s fully realized characters are complicated, imperfect beings, but if ever a character were worthy of love and honor, it is her Easter Bartlett. This very American story is fascinating; it is also heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and beautifully written.”

  —Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

  “A vivid and historical look at the Jim Crow South.”

  —Everything Alabama

  “McFadden’s descriptions are sometimes wrenching, sometimes heartwarming, sometimes gritty, but always evoke emotion.”

  —Books, Personally

  “This is a book that is difficult to put down. Easter Bartlett is a character who reaches out to you from the first page and who you never want to let go of.”

  —Curled Up With a Good Book and a Cup of Tea

  “Bernice McFadden broke and healed my heart in 235 pages.”

  —BrownGirl Speaks

  “McFadden does an expert job weaving fact and fiction … Her prose is straight-forward and honest, sometimes brutally so, underscoring the hardships Easter and blacks in general endured due to racism.”

  —Diary of an Eccentric

  “Glorious is a novel that should be read, pondered, read again and discussed.”

  —Rundpinne

  “Glorious is great writing, a powerful story, and in the hands of Bernice McFadden, haunting.”

  —Chick with Books

  “With writing as rich and vivid as only she can do it, Ms. McFadden draws you into the life of Easter Bartlett and doesn’t release you easily.”

  —Reads4Pleasure

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  Originally published in hardcover by Dutton in 2001; followed by a

  trade paperback edition from Plume in 2002

  ©2001, 2012 Bernice L. McFadden

  Introduction ©2012 James Frey

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-111-0

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-035-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923102

  All rights reserved

  First Akashic Books printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  Also by Bernice L. McFadden

  Gathering of Waters

  Glorious

  Nowhere Is a Place

  Camilla’s Roses

  Loving Donovan

  This Bitter Earth

  Sugar

  For me,

  those daughters,

  and their fathers

  … And every time I see him put the bottle to his mouth

  he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him …

  —Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Introduction

  BY JAMES FREY

  I met Bernice L. McFadden at a spelling bee. It’s a charity spelling bee where a group of well-known writers sit on a stage and pretend we’re in sixth grade again, and a crowd of people laugh at how poorly most of us spell without our computers. Although I do it every year, I don’t really enjoy it. I’m not friends with any of the other writers, and I always get knocked out in the first round. I show up, say hello to the organizers, misspell a word I should know, I leave.

  This past year, though, it was a bit different. Shortly after I arrived, a beautiful African American woman walked up to me, a huge smile on her face, and said hello. She was smart, funny, warm, radiated kindness and serenity. We chatted for a few minutes and exchanged e-mail addresses. The bee started and I got knocked out in the third round. Bernice lasted longer.

  She and I stayed in touch. We became Facebook friends. I had not read any of her work, so I did, starting with Sugar, moving to its sequel This Bitter Earth, and finishing with her masterpiece The Warmest December. She’s an amazing writer. Her work can be brutal and heartbreaking, but is full of heart and emotion. Stories of family and love, violence and abuse, struggle and redemption. All of it is filled with a spirit of grace and forgiveness. In many ways it was easy to connect the work to the woman I had met and who became my friend. In other ways it led to questions.

  We live in a peculiar time in the publishing industry. Publishers are obsessed with categories, and being able to place things within them, usually for marketing reasons. The categories themselves—fiction, nonfiction, memoir, etc.— tend to pigeonhole books, many of which defy them, and impose rules on them which might not have been part of their creation. People read memoirs and nonfiction and ask questions about what in the books isn’t real. They read novels and short fiction and ask what in them is. Ultimately, none of it matters. Good writing is good writing, and a story well told isn’t beholden to issues of fact and fiction, and moves beyond wherever it is shelved in a bookstore. Any author, and
every author, regardless of how their book is categorized, draws from their own life and their own experience in shaping their narrative. Writing a book is an act of subjectivity, and this subjectivity is what separates literature from journalism or academic writing. It is also what makes readers love certain authors. They connect, for whatever reason, with the author’s perspective, believe in it, learn from it, grow and change because of it. It is why, in this age of digitalization, writing will survive. No other medium does this in the same way.

  In reading Bernice’s work, particularly The Warmest December, which, unlike her other two books that I’ve read, is set in contemporary times, I wondered how much of it came from her actual life. On her own website, there is banner across the top that says, I write to breathe life back into memory. The book tells the story of a woman named Kenzie sitting at her father’s bedside as he slowly dies. She relives, through memory, the horrific childhood she experienced at his hands, a childhood marred by alcoholism and extreme physical abuse. The narrative moves back forth between Kenzie’s memories and her present life, one in which she has survived, but is struggling with, her addiction to alcohol. It is a beautiful book, and my words about it don’t do it justice.

  What I can do, though, is think about how it was written, how it came to be, how Bernice L. McFadden was able to give her readers the gift of The Warmest December. There are certain emotions, deep, profound, often brutal and sometimes beautiful, that can only be written about if the writer has actually lived through them. This is what I suspect the case is with Bernice. She goes so deep, and it feels so real, that it just couldn’t have been done if she hadn’t lived some version of it. Names have probably been changed, maybe settings, certain details to either enhance the narrative or protect someone’s identity, but art can’t be created in a vacuum, and a book like hers can’t be written without the years required to build it, make it great, and bring it to life.

  I hope you love the book as much as I did, and I hope it moves you as much as it did me, changes you as it did me. I am fortunate to have access to the great woman who wrote it, which has only bolstered my belief that it comes from her direct experiences. Certain people glow. They glow because they have survived things most of us could never have imagined living through. They glow because hardship gives them the gift of wisdom, and kindness, and grace. They glow because they’ve figured out how to take those experiences, as horrific as they may have been, and turn them into something beautiful.

  James Frey is originally from Cleveland. He is the New York Times best-selling author of A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard, Bright Shiny Morning, and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. His work is published in thirty-nine languages.

  Chapter One

  Now and then I forget things, small things that would not otherwise alter my life. Things like milk in my coffee, setting my alarm clock, or Oprah at four. Tiny things.

  One day last week I forgot that I hated my father, forgot that I had even thought of him as a monster, forgot the blows he’d dealt my body over the years and the time he called me to him and demanded that I show him my hands. “Are they clean?” he asked as I slowly raised my arms. “Yes, sir,” I said and shook my head furiously up and down.

  They were clean, in fact still damp from my having washed them. “Come closer,” he said. “Come closer so I can see better,” he said. I moved closer and closer until my small hands were right beneath his chin. “I see a speck of dirt,” he said and stifled a laugh. I smelled the whiskey. It was whiskey then.

  “A speck of dirt … hmmm … right there,” he said and smashed the hot tip of his cigarette down into the soft middle of my eight-year-old palm. I’d forgotten that day, the broken ribs, and the feel of the hard leather belt that held his Levi’s up and left black bruises on my lower back and the underside of my thighs.

  I forgot how the sound of my mother crying ate holes inside of me and ripped a space open near my heart. But worst of all I forgot about Malcolm, and for some reason I woke up early one cold winter morning and boarded two buses, traveling over an hour to sit by his bedside in Kings County Hospital.

  By then he looked nothing like the beast I imagined from my childhood. The hands that had caused so much pain and left so many bruises were now shriveled and black, the fingers curled under like the ragged claws of a vulture. The fingernails were long gone, having decayed months earlier until finally flaking off and turning to dust as they hit the floor.

  I sat for a long time watching him, while the winter sun fought to be seen through the dirty, cracked glass windows of his hospital room.

  The room was heated but I did not remove my heavy jacket or the thick rust-colored wool hat that covered my head. Being this close to him made me shiver despite the warmth, and I dug my hands deep into my pockets, where my fingers were going numb at the tips.

  He had less than half of his liver left, and bad blood circulated through his body, turning his once warm cinnamoncolored skin an inky black. The veins in his arms and legs were weak and thin; the only good vein left was in his penis, so that’s where they attached most of the tubes. Delia thought that was funny and had smiled smugly when the doctor shared that piece of information with her.

  Dozens of tubes ran in, out, and through every part of his body, like translucent tentacles, and I half-expected them to stretch out and enwrap me in their plastic grip.

  Most of his teeth were gone and the ones that remained were the color of butter, buried in tobacco-brown gums. Never a big man, his small frame had withered so that his skin draped on his body.

  I watched him, and to my surprise my heart pulled in my chest as I remembered a Saturday a few years earlier when we still owned the house. The rain and wind were pounding at the windows, ripping away the petals of the tulips that filled the garden and tearing at the black phone lines hanging above the two-family homes that lined the neighborhood.

  It was Saturday and no matter the rain and the gray of the day, the sheets needed changing and the laundry needed to be done.

  Delia’s hands were hurting. The damp weather was aggravating her arthritis, her fingers refused to bend, and her knee swelled and bulged through her pants leg.

  I told her not to worry, I would change the linens on her bed and wash her clothes. “Leave my underwear alone,” she said as she half-walked, half-limped her way to the kitchen. “I’ll wash those tomorrow when I’m feeling better.” I just smiled and shook my head and then began stripping the sheets from the bed.

  I picked up Delia’s pillow first, removed its case, and then went for Hy-Lo’s, but I dropped it back down to the bed just as quickly as I had snatched it up. I stood staring at it for some time, trying to distinguish what I thought were tiny blooming roses camouflaged among the green-stemmed daffodils that sprinkled the mauve canvas of the pillowcase.

  I scratched my head in confusion and checked Delia’s pillowcase. No blooming roses there. I looked at the matching top sheet and bed ruffle. Again, no blooming roses.

  My heart began to race and I could feel panic taking hold of me like a vice grip. The air became thin, and all at once I knew that the crimson rose-shaped figures were not roses at all, but splatterings of blood.

  That dried sanguine fluid dragged me toward a knowledge I had been sidestepping for some time. Two, maybe three years at least. I had managed to ignore Hy-Lo’s bloated stomach and swollen face, disregarding the stench that seeped from his pores and hung thick in the air like smoke and settled deep into the upholstery. I chose instead to smile away the smell and his physical appearance rather than offer an explanation when a visitor raised his or her eyebrows in surprise.

  He was ill. More than ill at that point. My Grandma Mable said he was wiping his feet on Death’s doormat.

  I collected myself best I could and gathered the soiled linens and carried them down to the basement. He was there; he was always there, sitting in his recliner in front of the television surrounded by old lamps, boxes that held long-forgotten items, and dus
ty, rusting gym equipment that hadn’t helped a body in years.

  The washing machine was to his left and he rarely bothered to acknowledge anyone who came to use it; he would just lean forward, remote control in hand, and increase the already earsplitting volume of the television.

  But for some reason, on that windy, rainy Saturday, he turned and looked at me and I forgot I hated him and smiled. He did not return my happy face with his own, but gave me a queer sort of look before turning his attention back to the television.

  I looked at his balding head and the tiny sores that had begun to fester there, and I pitied him. A pity so deep and blue welled up within me like the sea, misting my eyes and blurring the image of the tiny blooming roses on the mauve pillowcase just before I dropped it into the soapy water of the washing machine.

  He moved a bit. His head turned left then right, and he squeezed his eyes so tightly that milky tears ran out and onto his hollowed cheeks. I looked away from him, past the other three beds and the sick men they held, toward the open door of the room. I wanted so much to get up and leave, escape back into the bright winter sunlight. I wanted so much to reach over and pluck a Kleenex from the box on the nightstand beside his bed and gently wipe the sick tears away from his face.

  Instead, I pulled my chair closer, hiding myself behind the green curtain that surrounded us.

  These were his last days and he would spend them on his back, tubes running in, out, and through his body. Orderlies would come in once a day to give him a sponge bath, maybe fluff his pillow, and make sure the sheet was tucked tight beneath his mattress. Visitors would look at him when their conversations waned, allowing their eyes to travel over his face, and maybe they would wonder who he was or who he had been. They might whisper, “Who’s that? What’s wrong with him?” but the people they confided in would not be able to give a response. Instead, they’d just shrug their shoulders, dismissing my father over their food tray.

  I blinked back the tears that I could not understand and focused on the beige wall behind his bed. There were bits of tape that still clung there, yellow and brittle reminders of a Get Well card or a banner from a relative of the patient who’d lain there before my father. Someone who got better, got up, and checked back into the world.