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Show Go Love/186 thing with Jimmy. These new pews are cushioned Family Row is dead in front of the casket where my mother lay-unimaginably-on crushed velvet. I shake the image from my head and scoot to the far end, as much distance as I can put between us and where Brother Dell stands in his Baptist preacher version of O.W.'s Jim Ed Brown Men'sware suit. People fan out in all directions-some I recognize from Mama's office in Little Rock, and relatives whose faces are strangely familiar, Mama's oldest friends from school days, people from the campaign circle, stray men who could be anybody at all, and a whole pewful of black folk in colorful suits and dresses. Sad-sad organ music rolls over us. I wish for light. I'm not a prayer-not really-but maybe I'm thinking that if grace exists, let a truckful of it rain down on me and my wife and daughter and Traceleen and O.W. and Mama there where she lay. In the breast pocket of O.W.'s coat, Mama's eulogy I've confided in no one that, for some days now, I've mixed the funeral up with a wedding. Since the moment Renee shook me awake, five days ago now, I've held myself together and tried my goddamndest to do right. My lifetime has revisited me; some dots connect and some don't- maybe some are connected that aren't supposed to be, I don't know The bloody history and the history of my blood I don't know. I know. One day soon, the events that have led up to this moment in my history will coalesce. And it will be no consolation. My mother is dead. My mother is dead. Her body is in that casket this second, dressed in the dress she picked out with her own eyes and imagined on her own dead body-she's pictured the dress on her dead body and that's a place I'll never go Brother Dell stands there with his hand splayed on her cold casket like he owns it, looking me, |