New Yorker Maddie is a forty-three-year-old African American who seems to have it together- she had the best education that only money can buy; she is able to make a living out of her own passions of singing and playing the piano at an old hotel lobby in New York City; and she has been married for over ten years to her Los Angeles native husband Rolando, who is a photographer.
But the one thing she’d love to have is never fully in her grasp – a baby. The couple spent thousands of dollars on IVF and manage to get pregnant twice – each pregnancy ending in miscarriages. The second miscarriage produced a 15-week-old baby Nina that she held in the palm of her hand. This miscarriage and Nina’s demise sends Maddie spinning into a dark place she can’t seem to get out of. She then remembers being in the exact same deep dark place years before: when she was just a girl being molested by her babysitter.
For the next few days, she experiences heavy bleeding, heavy cramping, engorged breasts, and restless sleeping, the whole time suffering the loss of her Nina. Her loss takes another spiral turn when her husband Rolando informs her that he is leaving for good and that he never wanted the baby to begin with.
It is only then that Maddie reflects on her entire life and only sees pain and lack of value. She thinks of the childhood friends she has who bullied her relentlessly when she was a child. She craves for these now-adult friends to acknowledge what they did.
She blames her mother for her being the only African American student in the school she attended. Her mother Velma insists it was for the best education given to her possible. All Maddie sees is that she was isolated from her own people, and placed in a lion’s den of schoolmates who bullied her which included calling her the N-word, throwing rocks at her, and chasing her away. This results in Maddie a sense of abandonment, isolation, and victimization. It also results in a deep craving for those responsible to acknowledge what they did to her. She tries to talk to her mother about what she endured during her school years but her mother is materialistic, self-absorbed, and more concerned about the perception of her neighbors than she is her own daughter’s pain.
It is Thanksgiving and Maddie’s mother Velma decides to pay her daughter a visit at her apartment, giving her criticism of how her apartment should be furnished. Maddie notices her mother walking to her bureau and seeing the ultrasound photo of Nina for the first time. She thinks her mother will ask about Nina, but instead, she talks about baked macaroni and how she needs to cover her walls with photos, even if they are of Rolando.
Maddie met her eyes and glared a moment before she said, “You have nothing to say about the ultrasound?”
Velma leaned back in her chair and floated her palms open. “What’s there to say? I was almost a grandmother. And now I’m not. I’m not gonna feel sorry for myself. You don’t get everything you want in life. But you make the best of it.”
Maddie rested her fork. “You think this is your loss?” She laughed not because it was funny, but because it was so very Velma.
“It’s funny that I’ll probably never have grandchildren?” She crossed her arms across her chest. “No on to visit me for the holidays like all my friends have?” Thanks.”
“Mom, you don’t even like kids. And thanks for coming to check on me only to remind me how disappointing I am.”
Page 21
Her father Phil is a bit more understanding to Maddie than her mother is, but not by much. He is still the over-friendly, drinking womanizer and that is a higher priority for him than being a nurturing father to his daughter; but he seems to give her good advice, even though he is scouting a woman in the bar to sleep with.
“Yes, your marriage ended. And there’s no baby. Of course those losses are painful, and you’ll grieve. But you can make new connections and new experiences and you can focus on things that are good. Think forward, not back. Imagine happy times in your future. Create them in your mind. Pursue them. That’s your constructive drive, cosntrudo. With construdo you build your life up, instead of breaking it down.”
Page 33
There are many similarities between Johnson’s novella THE Homegoing and her novel Remedy For a Broken Angel – both involve African American strong women and both involve the gift of playing the piano – both a sense of escape, a sense of identity that in some ways preserves whatever is left over to these women, after they’d been abused in some way, usually discriminated based on the color of their skin.
Though Maddie’s pain is deep and scared into her DNA, one of her intense struggles is that of valuing and loving herself.
Her other struggle is trying to figure out how to forgive someone while at the same time holding them accountable? And what if the guilty party refuses to be held accountable? Should you still forgive? And if she does forgive will she be free from the past in order to take the next step into a bright future?
Toni Ann Johnson’s second book Homegoing was published by Accents Publishing on June 1, 2021.
https://www.accents-publishing.com/homegoing.html
Click on the belong link to listen to Homegoing on audible narrated by Toni Ann Johnson.
Toni Ann Johnson’s novel Remedy For a Broken Angel was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She won the 2015 International Latino Book Award for Most Inspirational Fiction. Her stage plays have been produced by The Negro Ensemble Company (co-author “Here in My Father’s House”), The New York Stage and Film Company (“Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public”), and in Los Angeles by The Fountainhead Theatre Company. Johnson is the recipient of two Humanitas Prizes and a Christopher Award for her screenplays Ruby Bridges, for Disney/ABC and Crown Heights, for Showtime Television. She wrote the Fox Television pilot Save The Last Dance and she co-wrote the feature film Step Up 2: The Streets. Johnson’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Emerson Review, Hunger Mountain, Xavier Review, Callaloo Journal, and elsewhere. She’s been a Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab Fellow, as well as a Callaloo Fellow in fiction at Brown University. Johnson has received additional support for her writing from The Prague Summer Program for Writers and the One-Story Summer Conference in Brooklyn. She teaches screenwriting at The University of Southern California.
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