While working on Stumbling toward the Buddha, 10th Anniversary Edition, I listened to music while I wrote. This was a first for me. I usually demanded silence while I worked, even wearing noise-canceling headphones.

My audiologist and my sister brought music into my writing life.

Hearing aids turned me into a spy. I could hear conversations on airplanes flying above my house. I heard an eighteen-wheeler rumble past out house and then realized it was my stomach growling. I eavesdropped on treetop bird chatter until robins dive-bombed me to get some privacy.

When the audiologist told me I would become accustomed to hearing aids, and sounds would start to fade into the background, I was disappointed. I was a junkie for sound. She told me to introduce it in other ways, such as music.

My sister Michelle, a professional gospel star and longtime Bey, turned me on to Beyoncè and Beethoven.
Because you’re supposed to stop writing to refuel the brain with art, I introduced music into my routine. I scheduled afternoon listening sessions, lay on the couch to refuel creativity with acoustic art. Then late one afternoon, there was no time left for both writing and listening. So I tried them simultaneously.

I wrote better (you be the judge of that). I slept better, too.

While I composed the Author Notes for Stumbling, the following albums burrowed into my prose.

• Bach: Unaccompanied Cello Suites (Yo-yo Ma)

There were times, reflecting back from ten years later, that I uncovered aspects of myself I would preferred to have left covered. Dismay spilled over into embarrassment spilled over into confusion spilled over into guilt spilled over into anger spilled over into hatred spilled over into despair spilled over into hopelessness. I couldn’t hold it all. The cello enfolded me. Together, we wept.

• Breaths (Sweet Honey in the Rock)

Rage argued I should incinerate the white male patriarchy for a few pages, but I was supposed to be writing reflections. I was supposed to be vulnerable. I needed to chanel the rage, so I closed the laptop, staged my own protest march around the living room, and belted out “I’m Gon” Stand.”

• Cowboy Carter (Beyoncé)

Many of the author notes considered the subject of identity. When did my Blackness affect an incident? In which situations was it irrelvant? Cowboy Carter demonstrated that every creation from a Black artist is an expression of Blackness. Beyoncé inspired me to be my genuine self.

• Mozart: The Complete Piano Sonatas (Carmen Piaazzini)

My energy dragged midafternoon as usual, but I felt the urge to write. On a whim, instead of downing a Diet Coke, I streamed Mozart. When caffeinated, I was tense with obsession as in, I will finish this essay, dammit; no matter what. I shoved words onto the page. With the rippling piano runs of Mozart’s allegros, words paraded onto the page of their own free will.

• My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall (Various Black women artists)

I expected twang. But the vibration was kind of church-y. And then something more mournful than me on a bad writing day. And then the spoken word “XXXs And OOOs” made me bounce like I’d listened to hip hop all my life. Country written and sung by Black women. No twang nowhere. Alice Randall exploded my preconceptions. What better gift for a writer?

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

******************

“He smiled but it was all mouth and no eyes.”
———Kalynn Bayron
———The Poison Heart

I posed on a hillside that overlooked Beverly Hills, the summer sun in my eyes, while a photographer snapped my photos. It was creepy, alone out there with a man I didn’t know, but he and his wife had invited my parents for the weekend. The invitation included something about me modeling for the husband.

I was seventeen, doing what I was told to do. Shy to the point of comatose, I’d been sick with intimidation all morning. The two-hour drive down 101 in our beat-up car to visit their rich white friends, the canyon road that wound uphill to their house with a view, the wife hugging me like we we friends.

My hand trembled as I tried to drink the proffered Perrier without spilling on my new sundress, a lime green beauty speckled with white daisies. Princess lines. Empire waist. Built-in bra. Pretty and crisp, it was my Audrey Hepburn dress.

The photographer suggested outdoor shots, so drove the two of us to a clearing overlooking the city. After positioning me, he backed away, holding his camera in front of his face. Every few clicks of the shutter, he gave me instructions, his disembodied voice floating on the breeze.

“One foot forward. That’s nice”

Grass tickled my bare feet.

Click, click, click.

“Turn a little sideways. Good.”

My right arm felt the chill of a shadow.

Click, click, click.

“Look over your shoulder. Lovely.”

Click, click, click.

Sun warmed my face as I looked into the lens.

“Slip your top down.”

The fabric scratched when I squirmed out of Audrey Hepburn.

He moved the camera away from his face and smiled.

An ambulance shriek closes in. From which direction? Where? Where? I slam on the brakes midway through a left turn, and the ambulance screams past, dangerously close to my front bumper. After traffic nudges back to life, I’m frozen for a second, trying to remember how to drive.

I’ve just come from the art museum. I’d gone solo, so the visual images could sink into my cells, unobstructed by conversation. 30 Americans—an exhibit of American life, as interpreted by thirty contemporary black artists. It was a bad idea. Not the exhibit. My going to see the exhibit.

An engine revs; an SUV speeds by. Now I remember how to drive: Look both ways. Turn the steering wheel. Press the gas pedal. I cruise through the leafy neighborhood that surrounds the museum’s manicured gardens. Several blocks ahead, the ambulance is shrinking, its siren receding.

#

I felt out of place among the white onlookers touring 30 Americans, even though I was an onlooker, too, gawking at my own life. Four hundred years of color-infused emotions—mine, the artists’, our ancestors’—compressed into claustrophobic passageways and alcoves. I chuckled at a montage of our hair in its myriad configurations. Yup, I used to sport that stick-straight coif, thanks to a lye relaxer that—swear to god—I could still smell. And I fairly levitated with joy at a human-shaped sculpture made of flower blossoms. You couldn’t identify gender, race, or age. Yes, let me see cabbage roses when I look at my enemies. Let the fragrance of gardenias hang in the air between us. Apparently, I have a greater capacity for despondence than optimism. Despite the intermittent uplift, four hundred years beat me down.

#

I pull up for a red light at a crossroad where high-end white Kansas City smacks up against low-end black Kansas City. Fast food. Bus stop. Cell phone mart. An urban apparel store sits across the street from a health clinic. Anchoring the corner is Walgreens, the place I stock up on eye shadow in shades designed for women of color.

#

The exhibition flowed into a corner housing an installation called “Duck, Duck, Noose.” A circle of nine wooden stools. On each stool sat a KKK hood, empty eyeholes facing the center, where a rope dangled from the ceiling, the end pooled in tidy coils on the floor. I gasped. Run. Get the hell out of here. Stop looking. But “Duck, Duck, Noose” forced me to stare, like an assailant holding my head underwater. I stumbled past in a stupor.

#

The car in front of me sits a beat too long after the light turns green. Cell phone distraction? The driver creeps into the intersection. Stops again. What is he—?

In the fast food parking lot, the ambulance.

Two white policemen.

A black person flat on the ground. Face-up.

Bright flowered fabric across thighs. Skirt. A woman.

Still as a rock.

I clench the steering wheel. Hyperventilate. My vision blurs, and I realize I’m sobbing. Need to pull over, to park, to say oh my god, oh my god, but I can’t remember how to stop driving. Automatic pilot glides the car past the scene, but my heart stumbles past it in a stupor.

On the highway, as grief makes a slick mess of my face, a slide show plays the images my brain has photographed. She’s on her back, arms and legs spread. Her head is inches from the policemen’s polished shoes. Her legs span the sidewalk. The patrolmen stand beside their car, hands resting on their heavy-laden belts. They appear to watch traffic go by. If she were alive, they’d be kneeling at her side, wouldn’t they? They’d be making her comfortable, wouldn’t they? The EMTs would be rushing to her aid, wouldn’t they? There is an absence of urgency.

She’s alone. May she find peace. Her family’s going to get a bad phone call. May they find peace.

I grip the steering wheel hard, to squeeze life back into its proper shape. So I can buy makeup again at Walgreens.

Maybe she’s part of an art installation. I want her to be an art installation.

She’s lying in savasana—corpse pose. She’s anonymous. I name her Grace. Who lies at the intersection of life and art. Thirty-one Americans.