As we head toward 2025 at breakneck speed, I log in many hours in my studio working on book #2: Headrag. I enjoy research for the surprising places that it can lead; especially when a trail takes me deep into my own archives of deleted scenes.
Since book #1, The Peach Seed, launched in August 2023, one of my minor characters, Olga Delzina Dukes, has emerged as a favorite among readers and listeners. Someone actually asked at a book event if I was sure Olga’s not a point-of-view (POV) character because she lives so vividly on the page. Trust me! I’m sure. Although, in earlier drafts, Olga was a POV character, I agreed with Retha Powers, my editor at Henry Holt, who quickly and clearly saw that I had too many POVs, and made the wise note to cut back to the four male protagonists who carry the story.
After an arduous editing pass to eliminate POVs—including Olga’s cohort character, Altovise Benson—I archived all those scenes for safe keeping. And now I’m excited to share a few of them and will be posting one a week thorough the month of December.
November 11, 2014
Olga and the Darkness
From her fictional house on the very real Whitney Avenue in Albany, Georgia, as Olga Dukes slowly lost her sight, her world became a concave force pressing against her on all sides. She put up a heroic front for those outside her house—family at large, friends and colleagues, and you, dear readers. The family did what families do; they rallied, but at a distance, as she would only have it that way. Fletcher and Florida and the Mindy-Cindy twins became her right hand, the only ones she allowed around her as darkness closed in inch-by-inch, day-by-day, until it consumed all light.
Darkness. She choked on it.
Olga gave in to reliance on others, sentences distilled to one word: tissue, tea, bathroom. She asked Fletcher for the peach seed monkey that had belonged to their father. As she quietly sat for hours, she worried the precious charm like a single-bead rosary.
Inside her encroaching darkness, she saw fear like none she had known in her 88 years. Different from the fear provoked by red-faced, billy-clubbed police of her youth; different from that she felt as a girl of six on the street in downtown Albany, GA. She gripped her mother’s hand when she refused to step down into the gutter to let pass a white woman with her daughter, both dressed in soiled, thread-bare dresses with unkempt hair. The woman guided the child in spitting onto Olga’s and her mother’s shoes. This new fear was different even from the fear she felt when the raging white bull, reeking of gin, mounted her 16-year-old body, while his son pinned her arms to the ground.
This fear was greater for its power to lock down all the fears of her life for her remaining days and nights. Was she destined to replay them in vivid technicolor against a pitch black screen of eternal darkness? Surely, this torment should be reserved only for those who instigate evil.
Olga was afraid. Afraid to move. Afraid to be still. Afraid to speak and horrified by silence. She feared disappearing. Silent ears rolled onto Otis’ head resting in her lap. It would be weeks before she found even seeds of solace in her other senses. But in time she would return to Otis’ warm, pulsing body stretched out on the sofa beside her. She would again relish his heart beats and dog sighs. She would revel again in small things. Steam from mint tea enveloping her face; soft wrinkles of linen pants, the crisp and flaky aroma of Florida’s biscuits.
As she changed, he baby brother, Fletcher changed. He would sit and talk for hours, trying to pull stories from her. He used more words than anyone knew he had in him. Trying to make her laugh. All in vain. He turned on her Zenith Cube radio, a sound that had always grounded their bond. She insisted he turn it off.
Gripping Fear & Overcoming
At last, one day she imagined her world expanding. Its black edges trembled and morphed like one cell into another under a microscope. Moving not through light, but through darkness, its edges creeping like a living thing, darkness moving through itself. This gripped her tighter and tighter around her heart. Her lungs solidified fear. She knew the edges were finite, they had borders, and if her world could not expand beyond, then what? What would be left of life? She was unaccustomed to borders. Not even the city limits of Albany could hold her once she made up her mind to break away.
With no marker for night and day the line between awake and sleep dissolved. Her bodily sounds became musical landmarks pointing to a possible life: burps, growls, gas passing. Was that loud current gushing in her ears the sound of blood rushing through her veins?
Her world slowly grew larger via kitchen smells, savory and sweet, as Florida cooked and cooked. Her house helped by repeating its own familiar bodily sounds. But still, she shunned technicolor pictures, and memories—good or bad— and held only to necessary movement. Still, she sat on the couch and was waited on, not aware that family and her living house were coaxing her back into life.
After some time, she became satisfied that she now understood her new dark-world boundaries. She slowly allowed family back inside. Fletcher told another joke and she smiled, then told him to turn on the Zenith for a baseball game. She summoned Altovise, and gave me permission to tell you all of this, precious reader.
