Amina's Vision(Barry) Amina’s Vision
by
Barry Rachin



“Perhaps you don’t remember me.” A dark-skinned woman with a pinched expression was standing on the threshold of the apartment. The pudgy face was rather plain and nondescript, utterly lacking in feminine refinement.

Jason had been preparing breakfast when the doorbell chimed. “Amina Jackson… from the library. You spoke against the book banning last month.”

“Yes, well I’m not here about that,” she continued. “I’ve a doctor’s appointment over at the Glenville Clinic. My sister was driving but cancelled on short notice, and I was wondering if you could take me.” When there was no immediate response, she tapped the left side of her head with an index finger. “There’s retinal occlusion in my eye.”

“What’s that?”

“Blockage of a small blood vessel carrying blood away from the cornea.” She brushed a wayward strand of hair from her cheek. “The doctor scheduled an injection, a hypodermic needle, so I won’t be in any condition to drive home. It’s my third treatment.”

A hypodermic needle in the eye. Jason cringed, suddenly felt light headed. He swallowed hard. “I got no plans and can drive you over there. What time do we need to leave?”

“I’ll come by in about an hour.”

When Amina Jackson was gone, Jason returned to the meal in progress but had lost his appetite. Neither the omelet shot through with cheddar cheese, onions and diced honey ham nor the buttered croissant held any interest.

* * * *

The banned book meeting in late April dealt with the woke agenda – critical race theory, LGBQ, binary and transgender rights, social activism and a panoply of ecological concerns. As townspeople filtered in, there was clearly no love lost between opposing sides with naysayers outgunned by a cabal of liberals, NAACP officials plus a stony-faced representative from the ACLU.

“My eight year-old son doesn’t need to learn that it’s OK to wear a skirt to his third grade class or have his gonads reconfigured by middle school.” The woman who registered the original complaint spoke first, objecting to what she perceived as a mishmash of perverted values.

Her opening remarks were greeted with a rumble of jeers and malicious resentment.

Countering her argument, legal counsel from the NAACP noted that there was nothing obscene, pornographic, defamatory, false or threatening in the book and, as such, the hardcover edition could not be banned from either the elementary schools or library shelves. If the book was not returned to full circulation within the next week, a lawsuit, citing the First Amendment would be issued.

Bolstering the counsel’s remarks, the ACLU spokesman stepped to the podium. “Proponents of similar book bans insist they’re advocating a balanced, patriotic education, and yet these insidious bans do the exact opposite, denying the truth about our nation’s history. They punish those who speak out to counter a mountain of falsehoods.” Stroking a bristly goatee and adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose, the lawyer cracked an officious grin and placed his paperwork in a tan attaché case. Sensing the battle was lost before it had hardly begun, many of the town residents looked dispirited.

“What a freakin’ farce!” a voice as coarse as fifty-grit sandpaper muttered.

Glancing to his right Jason noticed a burly, barrel-chested man with a disheveled mop of red hair and flannel shirt sporting a torn pocket. “Hi, Chase,” he returned.

Chase Collingsworth, a long-distance trucker, had lived several streets over from Jason’s parents during high school. A congenial, hot-tempered, tobacco-chewing free spirit, he had a penchant for barroom brawls. Rumor had it the amiable powder keg routinely carried a 38-special, five-shot revolver strapped to his belt along with a pair of speed loaders. The speed loaders bumped his firepower up the fifteen bullets with hardly a few seconds pause to reload. A mutual friend had jokingly dubbed Chase the ‘Northern Redneck’.

“Off with their heads!” he growled tersely.

“Really?”

“Where’s a well-oiled guillotine when you need one?” Chase clearly didn’t appreciate what the ACLU lawyer was proposing.

“That’s a bit extreme?” Jason chided.

Chase stroked his scraggily beard with a thumb and index finger. “My Kinsman Major Molineux…”

“Excuse me?”

My Kinsman Major Molineux … it’s a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

As crude and unsavory as Chase Collingsworth appeared, the man was an avid reader. Chase claimed that he never drove his eighteen wheeler cross country without a handful of good books plus a collection of raunchy Hustler magazines. The erotica, he quipped with a supercilious grin, satisfied carnal needs while the literary fiction was more for personal edification.

“In the Hawthorne story,” Chase continued, “a young boy tries to find a distant relative who has promised him work in colonial Boston. After a prolonged and fruitless search he finally locates Major Molineux tarred, feathered and being lead down the street by a frenzied mob.”

Jason felt his brain momentarily short circuit, misfire and go completely blank.

“The major worked for the British so his loyalty was with the king not the colonists,” Chase added by way of explanation. “Once the war ended they viewed him a Tory traitor.” Chase shook his head, a choppy, erratic gesture confirming the accuracy of his remarks.

“Tar and feather the worthless bastards!” the red head shouted just loud enough for all to hear.

Amina was the fourth speaker. She cited higher mortality rates, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and unusually high death rates of Black women in childbirth. “Critical Race Theory reveals the litany of abuses people of color have endured, abuses most white people can’t even begin fathom.”

Jason agreed with next to nothing she said but reluctantly conceded that the homely black woman with the childish features possessed a clever, if somewhat glib, way with words. She was passionate but misinformed.

“Bullshit!” a hoarse male voice hollered from the rear of the room near the fire exit.

“I rest my case,” Amina muttered in a derisive tone before cutting her closing remarks short.

In the end, it was clear that all five library board members situated to the left of the podium were intimidated, terrified half to death by the prospects of bad publicity coupled with a costly lawsuit. The controversial book would go back on the shelves immediately.

* * * * *

Amina Jackson arrived at eleven o’clock and they promptly set off to the Glenville Medical clinic. The woman sat with a stolid, self-contained expression and spoke hardly a word. Jason sensed that she was bracing herself for the medical ordeal. Unlike the defiant posturing at the library meeting, she looked vulnerable and defenseless. A mile from the clinic Jason asked, “When did you first notice a problem?”

“I was working on the computer and saw some smudgy gray lines resembling cobwebs.” Amina thought the screen might be dirty and wiped the glass down with a paper towel and cleaning solvent. When she sat down again, the diaphanous tangle of filaments had only worsened. Jason pulled up at a traffic light, the medical clinic just a few hundred feet beyond the intersection. He glanced at the woman a second time. Amina was staring wistfully out the side window.

“How many yellow lines do you see in the center of the road?” she asked.

Jason gazed at her curiously a second time. “Two… just two.”

“Before I started treatment last month there were four.”

It took him a moment to process the information. “How many yellow lines do you see now?”

“Two.” She cracked a gossamer thin, closed-lip smile. “Just two.”

The reception room was packed with existing and newly arriving patients. They found seats and settled in. Near the water cooler an elderly woman with swollen, arthritic fingers inadvertently crooked her head to one side as she stared unabashedly at what she assumed a mixed-race couple. The woman with the disfigured hands clearly did not approve the questionable arrangement. A sharp elbow inserted into his rib caged alerted Jason to the fact that Amina had noticed the undisguised hostility radiating from the woman by the water cooler.

A nurse dressed in white scrubs with a Nike logo on her mesh sneakers appeared at the swinging doors. “Amina… Amina Jackson.”

* * * *

Upon leaving the library after the banned book conference Jason was too emotionally frazzled to go directly home. He needed to think through the colossal farce that had just ensued.

The opposition was routed, vanquished, annihilated - discharged to an untimely, anonymous and unmarked grave. The threesome from the NAACP hadn’t come to promote racial equality, equity or inclusion. They showed no interest in the townsfolk’s unease. They made no case for moral or ethical consideration. Longstanding folkways, cultural traditions and religious mores never factored into the equation, figured for nothing, nil! The strategic game plan was twofold: to threaten and coerce the library board and town officials to do their autocratic bidding.

It was never a level playing field.

Trying to debate the issue was like trying to argue that the sun revolved around the earth; prior to the sixteenth century Copernicus, a well-intentioned soul would be burned at the stake for such heretical nonsense!

It was well past nine o’clock. At a coffee shop a block from the town library Jason ordered a French roast coffee and coconut macaroon. Sipping the coffee, he felt a tad bit better already. Disenfranchised minorities, transsexuals and binary types be damned! Who really cared about -

“Can I join you?” Amina Jackson stood hovering over his table with a triumphant expression. Sliding into the seat opposite, she placed her food on the table.

“Your book will be returned to the shelves,” Jason observed in a flat monotone.

“It’s not my book but, yes, the library staff will put it back… back where it properly belongs.”

“We live in the same apartment complex,” she diverted the conversation in a more neutral direction. “I often see you driving off to work in a blue pickup truck mornings around seven. Sometimes there’s a load of lumber hanging off the tailgate.” Amina ran a taut index finger around the rim of the cup, “I always wondered what you did for a living.”

“In college,” he sidestepped her question altogether, “I minored in philosophy. After graduation I opted to work with my hands rather than my head.” Raising an arm, Jason splayed the hand in a broad arc. Several fingers were scabbed over, a raggedy, well-worn bandage covering the thumb.

“My main interest was epistemology, the theory of how we understand things.” Jason leaned closer over the table. There was nothing particularly pleasant in either his tone or demeanor. “There were the linguistic philosophers - Wittgenstein, among others - and the Logical Positivists.” “To say that something is true is simply to assert it. To say it’s false is to assert a contradictory proposition.” “One man’s unassailable truth is another man’s falsehood.” His tone noticeably darkened. "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

“Yes,” Amina insisted, “but you conveniently overlooked a key distinction. Terrorists target the innocent while freedom fighters never do.”

“The perception of a person's actions,” Jason countered, “depends on one's perspective and the context in which they are viewed.”

Amina grinned good-naturedly. She pushed her coffee cup away and slumped back in the chair. “I understand what you’re saying but haven’t a clue where you’re going with all this grandiose logic.”

Abruptly reaching across the table, Jason grabbed the black woman by the forearm. “Every five days a white farmer is killed in rural South Africa and nobody does a goddamn thing about it. Worse yet, the police turn a blind eye to the violence.”

“I would appreciate your letting go of my arm,” Amina insisted in a hushed, unsettled tone. The jovial hubris had suddenly vanished, faded to fear.

Jason relaxed his grip and stared listlessly at the straw-colored crumbs littering his plate. “Activists claim South African authorities are tacitly approving attacks on the country's white farmers.” The neon lighting on the outside of the building was shut down, alerting the customers that the coffee shop would be closing shortly.

“Lawmakers passed a motion in their parliament which could allow land being seized from white farmers without compensation. One white farmer in his early twenties was shot dead by a gang of four thugs on a game reserve near Bloemfontein. A woman from Pretoria told the local newspaper that three armed men broke into her home, stole money and raped her.”

“I’ve heard more than enough,” Amina hissed in a raspy voice that was barely audible.

All pleasantries were ended. Amina glowered at him in utter disgust as she rose to her feet. “The restaurant’s closing. We ought to leave.”

Passing out into the street, the night was completely dark. “You think we’re heading toward another civil war in America?”

The last few stragglers left the coffee shop. The waitress locked the door and turned the deadbolt. “More like an amicable divorce, “ Jason qualified. “There would be no reason for violence unless the federal government was stupid enough to intervene.”

* * * * *

The clinic doors swung open again and Amina reemerged, clutching a thick wad of tissues in her right hand. She dabbed at her cheek, blotting away a teary mess that was dribbling haphazardly in the general direction of her upper lip. “We can go now.”

In the car she pressed the ball of tissues up against the side of her cheek and leaned her head far back.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, everything’s fine.” She blinked her eye spastically a half dozen times then cleared some moisture from around the nose. The eyelid flitted fitfully like a nervous tic. Finally she closed the left eyelid altogether and sighed deeply like a mortally injured animal.

When they reached the apartment parking lot, Jason said, “You should lie down… do nothing for the rest of the day.”

“That’s what I’ll do.”

He held the front door open. Whether it was pain or physical discomfort from the excess fluid which showed no let up, Amina’s face was crumpled like a boxer’s fist.

“I’m going to the market. Perhaps I could get a sandwich or soup so you wouldn’t have to cook.”

“That’s so kind of you, but I can cobble together some pasta or even a TV dinner from the freezer.” The dark-skinned girl’s left eye remained totally shut. “No, I’ll be perfectly fine.” She disappeared down the hallway in the direction of the elevator.

At the market Jason purchased vegetables, meat, parmesan cheese and a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce. Back in the apartment he waited until the sun began to fade. Positioning a hickory cutting board on the kitchen table, he diced an onion and began sautéing the pearly flesh in olive oil. Then he put the spatula on the kitchen counter, shut the stove and removed the pan from the heat.

In the hallway he rode the elevator to the third floor.

“How’re you doing?”

Amina was clutching a fresh ball of tissues below the half-closed, rheumy eye. “Okay, I guess.”

“Do you like spaghetti?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m cooking up a pot… my own recipe.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t go without eating.”

Amina pressed her lips together so tightly that the skin blanched a purplish gray. Then she inadvertently raised the heel of her free hand to the side of her face but thought better of it and hastily lowered it. Something was wrong. The black woman looked frightened and demoralized.

“Yes, I’ll join you for dinner,” she finally blurted distractedly but with negligible enthusiasm. “Let me just grab the house keys.”

Back in his apartment Jason spread the vegetables on the kitchen table. He cored a red pepper, tossing the stem and white seeds in the trash. What few seeds remained he rinsed away in the sink under running water. Mixing the pepper with the diced onion, he turned the range back on again. When the vegetables were simmering on medium heat he fished a package of sliced mushrooms from the refrigerator and tossed them into the mix. Jason set a smaller pan on the stove. Placing a wedge of meat on a separate plate, he returned to the refrigerator.

“What’s that?” Amina asked.

“Maple syrup and cinnamon sausages.” He tossed the empty Styrofoam package into the trash. “I blend pork with the hamburger for added flavor.” Cutting away the outer casings, he mashed the meats together with a spatula and raised the heat to high. “How’s the eye?”

She was still blinking but not as forcefully. “It doesn’t hurt nearly as much.”

“That’s encouraging.” Jason saw no reason to press the issue. After a few minutes, a sweet, spicy aroma filled the room. He drained the pan, mixed in the caramelized onions and other vegetables then added a sprinkling of sweet basil, oregano and thyme.

“You cook everything from scratch but use store-bought sauce?” Amina said with a hint of humor, indicating the jar of Ragu.

“It’s a matter of picking your battles.” He filled a pot with water.

While the water was heating, he set the table and placed a loaf of ciabatta bread on the table. “Thought we’d do angel hair pasta rather than traditional spaghetti.”

There was no immediate reply. When he glanced over at her, Amina was doubled over at the waist, crying mutely. Her pudgy hands covered her face in a futile effort to stifle the sobs.

Jason lowered the heat on all the burners, leaned against the kitchen counter and waited.

“There’s a black speck,” she muttered so softly the words were barely audible.

“Where?”

“Here.” She jabbed her finger erratically in the air. “In my left eye… above and to the right and it won’t go away.”

“Is that where the doctor injected the medication?”

“Yes… no. I’m not sure.” She blew her nose unceremoniously making a loud snuffling sound. “The black spot… it won’t go away,” she repeated bitterly, “and I don’t know what to do.”

“Call the clinic,” Jason suggested.

“It’s too late. They’re closed and tomorrow’s Sunday, so that’s another day lost.”

“The black speck could be gone by the morning, and you would have made yourself sick for no good reason.”

As Amina explained it, there had been a glut, an unusual overload of patients at the eye clinic, more than the doctor could reasonably manage. The nurse prepped her eye with anesthesia, waited ten minutes and drenched the eye with another dose of droplets.”

“To kill the pain?”

“To lessen the discomfort,” Amina corrected. “There’s always a certain amount of soreness.” “The doctor rushed in distractedly,” she continued, “grabbed the hypodermic and completed the procedure before the anesthesia had sufficient time to settle in.”

Jason swallowed hard. “How long was the needle in your eye?”

“Five, ten seconds.”

One. Two. Three. Four… He tacitly counted the agonizing interval. No, Jason couldn’t imagine such a thing! Out in the street the dusky sky had finally given up the battle and faded to black. Retrieving a box of maiden hair pasta from the topmost shelf in the cabinet, he sifted a generous portion of paper-thin strands into the boiling water. “Let’s eat,” he suggested, “and worry about your predicament after dinner.”

* * * * *

“Are you seeing anyone?” They were almost finished eating.

Jason stabbed a glossy slice of mushroom, spearing it on the tip of his fork. “Haven’t had much luck in that department.”

“There’re always the dating bars.”

“Been there, done that!” He cracked a laconic grin. “Even spent a couple hours at the Chicken Shack a couple of weeks ago.”

“But that’s an eatery not a dating bar.”

“There’s a drinking section in the rear where singles hang out after the meal.”

A rainy Friday night in mid-June, as Jason explained it, he skipped the buffalo chicken wings and potato wedges in favor of the walnut bar in the tap room, but anticipatory fright got the better of him and left him paralyzed with anxiety. Who to ask and what to say? How to ease into light conversation without sounding predatory, like some libidinous Lothario?

Several women were gesticulating and laughing a bit too loudly. A chunky blonde squeezed into a black dress several sizes too small for her frame seemed too blinkered, walled up in her disgruntled personality. Damaged goods – Jason made a mental note and wandered away. An hour and two gin and tonics later, he was back in his Subaru sedan headed home.

“Romance was simpler in my parent’s day,” he observed. “My father had a best friend, Harvey Markowitz, from the neighborhood. He had his eye on Harvey’s kid sister from when they were in grade school ten years earlier.”

Amina sipped at a glass of peach Moscato then twirled the tilted glass adroitly between a thumb and index finger and watched as the translucent liquid sloshed from side to side. “Harvey fixed your father up on his first date.”

Jason began arranging the silverware and dirty dishes alongside the sink. “And the rest was history.” He turned the water on and added detergent. “What about your family?”

Inverting the wineglass at a sharp angle, Amina made short work of what remained of the Moscato. “My father’s an interesting character…a self-described pantheist.”

“Can’t say as I’ve know many self-described pantheists,” Jason mumbled tongue in cheek.

“He was a very quiet man, thoughtful in a spiritual sort of way. He saw God in all natural things… birds, trees, animals, whatever.” “In middle age he took up bee keeping and managed a dozen hives – top bar, not the traditional Langstroth.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference.”

“In early spring we sat in the back yard surrounded by daffodils and forsythia in full bloom and watched the honey bees return from foraging the marshy wetlands, their hind legs weighted down with the first batch of golden pollen.”

“My father observed,” Amina continued, “how all the insects worked in lockstep for the welfare of the brood. The workers slavishly pampered and nourished the queen, cleaned the hive, constructed and repaired damaged comb and fed the newborn, while the drones fulfilled their meager but essential role.” Amina’s father told his young daughter that humanity could learn many valuable lessons from the diminutive insects. Honeybees were hardworking, selfless; they were fearless when tested in battle against hornets, paper wasps and yellow jackets.

“And your mother…” Finishing up the last of the dishes, Jason lowered the soiled pot in the soapy water. “What’s she like?”

Amina shook her head disagreeably. “A horrid fishwife… belligerent, obstinate, pigheaded.”

“Your poor father!”

“The man never complained. He ministered to his bees. Then one day my mother discovered that in addition to beekeeping her husband had another avid hobby of sorts.”

“He was cheating on her?”

Amina grinned devilishly and wagged her head.

“So what did your mother do?”

“Told him he was a worthless, contemptible, philandering, two-timing son of a bitch then promptly returned the favor.”

“A promiscuous tit for tat.”

Amina teased a fleck of lint off the sleeve of her blouse. “My mother’s dalliance didn’t last a month but my father is still with the ‘other’ woman. His devotion and faithfulness has been unflagging.”

“Not unlike the honeybee’s.”

The conversation petered out. The clock on the wall beside the refrigerator inched past nine o’clock. Amina stared out the window but, between a damp fog and starless sky, there was nothing to see. The black woman closed her right eyelid. Five seconds passed and the lid gradually rose. She sat motionless with a glum expression before repeating the process.

“The black spot… is it gone?”

“Still there.” She blew the air out of her lungs with a sense of futility. “After such a nice dinner I was hoping…” She didn’t bother to finish the thought.

Jason draped the damp dishcloth on a rack by the sink. “Go back upstairs to your apartment,” he spoke resolutely in a subdued monotone, “and collect whatever you need – toothbrush, pajamas, cell phone – and come back here. I’ll sleep on the sofa. You can have my bed.”

“It’s not necessary.” She seemed flustered, out of her element.

“Under the circumstances, you shouldn’t be alone. I’ll be sleeping in the living room for moral support if you need anything.” Jason went to the closet and pulled a pile of spare sheets, blankets and pillows from a shelf above the coats.

A solitary tear, infinitesimal as a dewdrop, seeped from her good eye and dribbled down her chocolaty cheek. “I’ll just be a moment.”

A half hour later Jason killed the lights and they were settled down for the night, he on the lumpy sofa and Amina in flannel pajamas behind the closed bedroom door.

In the early morning Jason woke to the sound of bare feet pitter-pattering across the living room rug. “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s the matter.”

“What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.” She shuffled closer, lowering herself onto an ottoman. “The black spot… it’s finally gone.”

“Gone?” Jason was still trying to clear the cobwebs.

“I woke and had to use the bathroom,” she explained. “When I turned the light on, I noticed immediately that the dot had disappeared. I’ve been sitting on the toilet for the past five minutes looking for it.”

“The black dot?”

“You were right. It was just part of the healing process.”

The sense of relief was palpable. Jason blew his cheeks. “Thank God!”

Somewhere out in the street a car backfired, setting off a cacophony of barking dogs. “The sun will be up in a few short hours. Go back to sleep.”

“I’m taking you out for breakfast… my treat!”

“Much appreciated!” Jason yawned. He was drifting in the groggy nether world between slumber and fading wakefulness. “The morning will be here soon enough.”

“What will happen to the farmers?” Amina asked.

The weird question caught him off guard. “I don’t follow you.”

“The white farmers in South Africa… you said Africans were killing them, stealing their farms and cattle.”

“Nothing good will come of it,” Jason relied soberly. “Whites are badly outnumbered and isolated in the rural outskirts, and activists say South African authorities are tacitly approving attacks on them while the police turning a blind eye to the violence.” “Lawmakers and the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, passed a motion last month which could see land being seized from farmers without compensation; it sent a message that landowners could be attacked with impunity.”

“The president doesn't care about the murders?”

Jason chuckled sarcastically. “He ignored the district attorney’s formal request to establish a commission of inquiry into the farm attacks, rapes and murders.”

Again the room fell silent. Jason could feel the chasm between them widening. No matter the angel hair pasta, congenial conversation and routing of the evil black speck in Amina’s left eyeball. No matter that he was beginning to feel an affinity for the black woman with the not-so-grown-up face. Some immutable force kept them befuddled, mired in a tangle of emotional knots. “When is your next medical appointment?”

“Three weeks. My sister will take me.”

“Can she be trusted to do what she says?”

There was no immediate reply. Finally Amina said, “My sister’s going through a nasty divorce and her personal life’s in shambles.”

An unintelligible, guttural sound welled up in Jason’s throat. With the spatulated tips of his fingers, he massaged his eyes in an undulating motion. “Let me know the time and date. I’ll go with you.” He fluffed his pillow, stretched his legs and lay prone again. “And don’t plan anything for supper that night. I’ll cook.”

“That’s very kind of you! Your spaghetti was a real treat.”

“I was thinking,” he rushed on disregarding her previous remark, “meatloaf with a brown sugar, ketchup glaze or perhaps curried chicken with white wine and scallions. I layer it over a bed of Basmati rice with a garnish of pineapple chunks for added tang.”

“You’re treating me like royalty.” Amina returned to the bedroom, discretely closing the door behind her.

As he lay there on the lumpy sofa converted into a makeshift bed, Jason realized he was becoming alarmingly comfortable with the woman’s subtle expressiveness; the ingenuous if somewhat deadpan inflection in her voice when she expressed a heartfelt conviction – it snuck up on him and Jason had begun to anticipate these unsolicited nuances. Clever enough to understand that intellect was a liability in certain situations, better hidden away and downplayed, she could just as effortlessly wall herself up in an insular, unflappable silence. She grasped the restorative nature of stillness, the centering power of solitude.

* * * * *

They slept late, crawling out from beneath the warm covers slightly before ten o’clock, and breakfasted at a diner near the center of town. In the parking lot after finishing the meal Jason asked, “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

“Not particularly.”

“There’s something I would like to show you.”

She stared at him curiously. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” he countered evasively, slipping into the driver’s seat.

A mile down the road he pulled into the driveway of a clapboard building with moss green shutters. A sign in the yard read ‘Wilson Woodworking’.

“It’s my father’s business. I’ve been working here since high school.” Cracking the front door, they were met with a hodgepodge of aromatic scents – knotty pine, Danish oil, shellac and mineral spirits. Stacks of lumber lay everywhere – deeply figured cherry shot through with coffee-colored and orangey highlights, dark walnut, quarter-sawn oak, silver birch and ash.

“What’s that?” Amina was pointing at a wide slab of grayish green wood leaning precariously against the far wall.

“Tulip poplar,” Jason replied. “Very easy to work with and relatively inexpensive when compared to the other woods you see here.” “The coloring leaves something to be desired but we use a dark walnut stain with a catalytic lacquer to improve the appearance.” “My father contracts with a regional craft and hobby outlet, supplying them with picture frames, unfinished bird houses, coat racks and other ornamental products.”

On a workbench at the rear of the room was a pile of rectangular wooden blocks.

“Poplar,” Amina blurted with a confident grin.

“Good eye!” Grabbing an assortment of blocks along with a smallish piece of plywood, he handed them to the black girl. “Everything fits together like a puzzle.”

On a nearby, uncluttered table Amina laid the wood flat. “I’m assuming the longer pieces are front and back.” Jason nodded in the affirmative.

Each piece had a quarter-inch groove along the bottom, the longer pieces a stubby tab that ran the length of either side. She quick slid the tab into a groove on one of the narrower pieces. The wood slid in snuggly with minimal tension, a perfect fit. She slipped the plywood base into the lower grooves where there was a bit more play but still a perfect fit. Snapping the opposite sides in place the carcass was complete.

“Now for the finishing touch!” Jason revealed an ornate lid fitted with decorative, antique brass hinges, which he had been concealing until she finished, and positioned it on top.

Pulling the pieces apart he handed her two, while still retaining a solitary piece. “The joint is called a mortice and tenon. The mortice is the shallow groove, while the stubby tongue is called a tenon.”

Walking her toward a window near the far wall, Jason indicated a small table with a tiny hole in the center. A cylindrical, carbide straight bit protruded through the hole. “We use an electric router screwed upside down in the table to cut all the mortice grooves. That’s simple enough. No big deal.”

“When I originally designed this box, I couldn’t figure out how to shape the stubs.” Jason brought her over to a commercial-grade table saw sitting in the center of the room. “The odd-looking cutter… it’s called a stacked dado. We use it to trim the tenons.”

“There are two blades,” Amina observed, indicating a set of widely-spaced, razor-sharp teeth.

Jason took a poplar block, laid a piece of quarter-inch plywood against the topmost edge and scribed a line with a pencil. He laid the poplar alongside the imposing blade then gestured at a small lever on the front panel of the table saw. “We turn the machine on and raise the blade in tiny increments, a half-turn at a time clearing away the waste, until the blade kisses the graphite line.”

“And then the joint is complete.”

“Doesn’t matter if you cut just one or a hundred-and-one tenons, as long as you don’t turn the machine off, they’re all a perfect fit.”

Amina fitted the two pieces of poplar he had given her together. They held without support in proper alignment when gripped with one hand and yet separated effortlessly with a gentle tug. “Why are you telling me this?”

Jason gazed pensively out the far window. Where the murky fog had lifted moments earlier, the sun etched the cloudless sky a dappled blend of azure and cerulean. “Would you go out with me?”

“A date?” The black woman crooked her head to one side in disbelief. “And what of the banned book we fought over and white farmers murdered in South Africa -”

“That’s other people’s unfinished business,” he brought her up short.

“We are other people,” Amina bristled. “None of us avoids the responsibility.”

At a momentary loss for words, Jason glanced over his shoulder at the table saw, where the burgeoning daylight made the dado set sparkle like a precious gem. “It’s always a matter of trial and error. You raise the blade in tiny increments… higher, higher, higher, until the razor-sharp metal kisses the underside of the pencil mark.”

Amina’s lower lip jutted out reflexively in an amused, if slightly muddled expression. She stared at the two pieces of poplar she clutched like a talisman.

“You raise the blade in tiny increments… higher, higher, higher until the razor-sharp metal kisses the underside of the pencil mark,” she repeated his words verbatim, Lifting up on the soles of her feet, she gently arched her neck and let her eyes drift shut. “Was that just a flowery metaphor… an ill-chosen allegory or are you going to kiss me.”

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