Excerpt from The Book of Outrage (A Novel)

Chapter 1: Silence

When I was twelve, I considered silence an elusive gift, a seductive dream far out of my reach. Pure quiet was like a planet: distant, vague, theoretical. I lived with my grandmother, my nine-year-old sister, Zora, and an old dog of unknown age, Duke.

Our house was a well-kept craftsman cottage. My grandmother kept the lawn precisely mowed using an old manual mower with sharp rotating blades. She considered pushing this horticultural weapon her main exercise until I was old enough to take over mowing duties. The house was painted cerulean blue with bright white trim, and the door was painted dray gray. There was a porch just big enough to fit chairs for the three of us and to accommodate Duke’s lazy sprawl in front of us on spring and fall days when it wasn’t too hot to move.

Inside, there were only two bedrooms and two bathrooms, and my grandmother hated clutter, so everything had a proper place, and if it didn’t, it had to go. We weren’t allowed to wear shoes inside the house and Duke’s nails were never allowed to grow long, so the walnut floors shone. I loved our home. But the wooden floors creaked. We lived on a busy street and noise filtered in when the windows were closed; with no central air conditioning, the windows were often open to the sounds of Atlanta going about its business.

My grandmother, a high school English teacher with a creative bent, loved to sing gospel songs and anything by Aretha Franklin, which, in her estimation, were just about the same thing. When my grandmother sang, she didn’t follow, she led, and you couldn’t even tell there was another singer accompanying her in the background. Zora was a dancer, which meant that she needed to practice, and that meant that she played records over and over, trying to choreograph her own versions of Swan Lake and Revelations. Duke limped and seemed deaf, since he only responded to his name when we shouted near his right ear, but he barked randomly and often, no matter what we did to break him of the habit.

I craved silence.

Zora and I lived with our widowed grandmother for most of our lives. Our mother left us in her care when I was three years old and Zora was a baby to attend North Carolina Central University. She was what Grammy called “fast,” resulting in her pregnancy with me at age fourteen and then again with Zora three years later.

“But Diana Robertson was smart, too, now. Once I helped her with her application essay, she had no problem getting in NCCU,” Grammy liked to brag. She always referred to my mother by her full name.

Translation: My grandmother, who graduated with honors from Howard University, edited the essay until it was essentially rewritten to meet her heavenly standards.

At seventeen, Diana Robertson, teen mother of two, was smart enough to leave home for college in Durham, but she wasn’t quite smart enough to resist the lure of parties on Central’s campus. Or those at nearby Duke University. For that matter, my mother saw no reason to refuse a party twenty minutes away in Chapel Hill, or thirty minutes away in Raleigh.

She was smart enough not to come home to face my grandmother after that first semester’s report card arrived in the mail showing three “F’s” and a “D+.” I’m not sure if my mother ever returned to classes after the fall of 1977, but she never lived with us again.

Diana Robertson was a disappointing stranger whose visits grew farther apart; when she did come, she offered weak excuses no one had asked for about why she couldn’t stay. When she remembered to bring presents, they were things Grammy wouldn’t allow us to keep (Eddie Murphy cassettes, bikini bathing suits, utility knives). She never asked me about the book I was reading, although I always carried one with me. She never asked Zora about ballet...