In this beautifully poignant account, PORTIA BATES takes you on an intriguing journey through her life as a young girl in North Carolina, where her mother's family held reunions in nightclubs, and her father's people sang songs to Jesus, praying for blessings to rain down on them like pixie dust.
Yet, in that hallowed space lay a curled serpent, a deep betrayal by God's chosen one. The delicate words in Portia's narrative juxtapose sharply against the tangled web of deceit and complicity that created the space for the destruction of a woman-child.
And so, 20 years later, we meet the ghost of that child, the one who lost her adolescence to a long black robe and a stained white collar. And she asks herself:
"Why does this immovable, calcified rock sit so heavily on my chest? . . . He imbibed himself with a fertile garden he was never supposed to taste, a rose he was never meant to smell, satisfied his fingers with skin he was never supposed to stroke, and conquered a land he was never meant to possess. In that fading space between adolescence and adulthood where the mind, the body, and the soul are bubbling over with curiosity, he sat in the shadows watching me grow."
Portia writes these words as she continues to surpass the broken dreams of her childhood, as she reaches toward a future her story never intended for her to touch. The message of this haunting memoir is that sometimes to move forward, you must stare down your past, determine if its remnants will leave a trail of crumbs to your future. To determine if, in fact, there is any dream left in the soul.
