Lorene Cary

I learned to write on time and to space, as journalists say, for my school paper and then for TIME magazine, taking into account editors' and reporters' and fact-checkers' comments, learning that every word is political and that each story we tell bears a complex relationship to public policy, history and individual lives. At night I wrote for myself, everything, all the time; novels - romance, detective, autobiographical - poetry, essays, scripts. I needed to write; I still do.

The intense writing in my twenties showed me my emerging ambition: to create works of literature that come from the well of my own soul and even deeper, from the ancient, underground pools of our collective unconscious; to create works that matter - to individual readers and to our culture. I write as practice to free my mind from the craving, clinging ego, and to make beautiful works of art from stories, images, ideas, facts, and the way this language "sounds" to the eye. I keep writing to learn to be more honest, and as an answer to mortality.

Lorene Cary is the author of two novels, The Price of A Child, Philadelphia's and Buffalo, New York's One Book, One City choice for 2003, and Pride, and a best-selling memoir, Black Ice. In 1998 Lorene Cary founded Art Sanctuary, a series that brings excellent black artists to speak, perform and give workshops at the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building in North Philadelphia. Currently a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a 1998 recipient of the Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching, Cary has received The Philadelphia Award for civic service, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts Fellowship and honorary doctorates from Colby College in Maine, Keene State College in New Hampshire, and Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the Rev. Robert C. Smith, and daughters Laura and Zoë.
 

Rita Mae Raines called "Goodbye, Sweetie" through the glass. Her son, Jack B., had insisted on inspecting the engine, waving to the engineer, and sitting on the first car on the train to Philadelphia. Rita had charmed a grandmotherly colored lady on the car into minding him on the trip. The lady patted his wild hair and motioned to him, as you would a deaf-mute, to wave good-bye to Rita. He stared at her with his lips pressed together. She could not read his expression.

Rita caught the woman's lead and rendered from the shame of this moment a secret smile, smallish, fresh, a touch sad. The muscles around her eyes strained to keep it hanging in place as the train pulled away from the platform. Just for you, she thought. It was a picture of herself for him to keep, one that would trump the other images he must have stored in his head and square with what his relatives would tell him: She did the best she could for you, honey. She knew you'd be better off.

She had a lot of faces, which she directed from a control room deep inside herself, like the generals in the war. She'd cobbled her mommy faces from vague memories of her own mother - at a picnic, a child's baptism, sick in bed at the end. In each her mother wore a small, secret closed-lipped, smile.

"Goodbye, Sweetie."

- from Blackface, a novel in progress