The Stranger
- The Stranger
The one I like most is about her—a story with so few details it became mystery, with so few versions it remains myth. This much I can tell you. She was married, had a family. I know this because her granddaughter-in-law told the story to her daughter, who told it to me. What was she like? I picture her small and lean, brown as pines, with hair like bare branches in winter. Did she grow very old? How did she die? None of this I know, only that she was a dark woman from South Carolina. And she was unpredictable.
She’d come and go as the spirit moved her, disappearing for days without a word. It wasn’t a lover who lured her, or a craving for adventure—that was common as dirt yards in those parts. No, it was a calling, a witnessing she had to do. . . . Eventually, not even her husband dared question her. Like the others, he simply waited for her return, waited to see if she had changed. But she didn’t appear changed. Only something slight, dimly perceived, hovered about her, like the first glimmerings of new light after the passing of a storm.
Nothing more could be said about her—yes, she could heal them with her roots and leaves. And she could read their dreams. After a time, they grew used to her wanderings. But who wouldn’t be intrigued when she came home after a week in the woods, barefoot, with a bag of live snakes, a pale mark blooming on her forehead, and some strange landscape hinted at in her eyes?
That is the truth as it was passed on to me. Did it happen? Who can say. I ponder this sliver of a tale, and her ways, which seem to me those of a wisewoman or shaman. Then there is the real story, the one no one can tell me: what happened in those woods. Half-a-life and no-name, she has been given to me. I come back to her often, gazing in the mirror at a face with its own wild luminance, its own secrets.
Selected works by Sharan Strange:
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• First Sight
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• Hunger
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• Natural Occurrences
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• Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969
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• Dorothy
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• Mule
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• February 19,1994
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• Ash
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• The Unintended Life
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• The Factory
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• The Stranger
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• The Body
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• An Interview with Sharan Strange
Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina.
