MIGRATIONS OF THE HEART(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　In her classic memoir, distinguished author, television
executive, and activist Marita Golden beautifully recounts an
astounding journey to Africa and back.
　　Marita Golden was raised in Washington, D.C., by a mother who was
a cleaning woman and a father who was taxi-driver. For all their
struggles, with life and each other, her parents instilled her with
spirit and aspirations. Swept up in the heady Black Power movement
of the sixties, Marita moved to New York to study journalism at
Columbia–and fell in love with Femi Ajayi, a Nigerian architecture
student..
　　Their passion led them to start a life together in Africa–a
place Marita was eager to understand. Exhilarated by a world free
of white racism, Marita quickly found work as a professor and
embraced motherhood. But Femi’s increasing expectations that she
snap into the role of the submissive Nigerian wife were shocking
and dispiriting. Her struggle to regain her footing and shape a
black identity that was true to her spirit is suspenseful and
inspiring, an uncommon tale of race, identity, and Africa.

　　Marita Golden has written both fiction and
nonfiction, including Migrations of the Heart, The Edge
of Heaven, A Miracle Every Day, and Saving Our
Sons. She is the editor of Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues:
Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex and the coeditor of
Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing and of
Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race. She
is the founder and CEO of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which
supports African American writers, and lives in Maryland. Please
visit Marita at www.maritagolden.com.

　　”It is a book all women will find useful and compelling and
all men who love women will find disturbing, painful, and
instructive.” –Alice Walker
　　”Golden’s book reads like a lyrical and well-balanced novel, but
it is all the more difficult to put down because the story is
true.” –Newsday
　　“The book is exquisitely written.”
—Los Angeles Times
　　”A marvelous journey . . .
powerful imagery. . . . Distinctly drawn characters come alive,
events pulsate with energy.”–The Washington Post Book
World

　　1
　　　My father was the first man I ever loved. He was as assured as a
panther. His ebony skin was soft as the surface of coal. The
vigorous scent of El Producto cigars was a perfume that clung to
him. The worn leather seat of his taxi, a stubborn aroma, had
seeped into his pores, and like a baptism the smells rubbed onto me
from the palms of his hands.
　　　In school he went as far as the sixth grade, then learned the
rest on his own. Part of the rest he bequeathed to me–gold nuggets
of fact, myth, legend dropped in the lap of my mind, shiny new
pennies meant to be saved. By his own definition he was “a black
man and proud of it.” Arming me with a measure of this conviction,
he unfolded a richly colored tapestry, savored its silken texture
and warned me never to forget its worth.
　　　Africa:”It wasn’t dark until the white man got there.”
　　　Cleopatra: “I don’t care WHAT they tell you in school, she was a
black woman.”
　　　Hannibal: “He crossed the Alps with an army of five hundred
elephants.”
　　　The Sphinx (pointing with a tobacco-stained index finger to a
page in the encyclopedia): “Look at the nose, see how broad it is?
That’s your nose. That’s my nose too.”
　　　Bitter, frightening tales of slavery dredged by his
great-grandparents from memories that refused to be mute. Passed to
him. Passed to me. And when he recounted the exploits of Toussaint
L’Ouverture, pausing to remind me that L’Ouverture meant “The
Opener,” inside his eyes I saw fire and smoke float over the hills
of Haiti, and his voice stalked the room amid the clanging of
swords, the stomp of heavy boots.
　　　Our most comfortable stage was his taxicab. On frigid winter
Saturday afternoons and warm summer evenings, I rode in the front
seat with him. Always, it was an adventure. As much as anything
else in his life, my father cherished the look of surprise and
unease that invaded the faces of white passengers as he regaled
them with quotes from Jefferson, Tolstoy or Frederick Douglass.
Pouncing on them unawares with the sharpness of his intellect, he
brought their blanched faces from behind The Wall Street Journal or
the New York Times. Their baffled respect, blooming in the form of
a generous tip or an awed, “Mister, you’re pretty smart,” sealed
his victory.
　　　Together we visited the homes of women, who plied me with
Kool-Aid and cookies and spoke to him in a language of double
meanings and invisible but obvious desire. Women adored my father.
He took them seriously enough to strip his fantasies before them.
He listened as intensely as he spoke, and his reactions confirmed
the legitimacy of their dreams. All of his women were like my
mother, women who had turned daydream desire into tangible reality
through houses, cars, money. All theirs. And, like my mother, these
women, who had flexed their muscles in the face of fate and
circumstance, looked at him with eyes that said, “I will give this
all to you.” My father never refused anything. He accepted their
allegiance or a loan of money with equal ease as his due. He was a
hard, nearly impossible man to love when love meant exclusive
rights to his soul. Yet he relied on their steadfastness to enhance
the improvisational nature of his life. Hearing their screen doors
slam behind us as we walked to my father’s cab, I trembled as
though implicated in a crime. For, returning home, I met my
mother’s worried interrogation and watched her large hands tie
themselves in knots after I helplessly nodded in assent when she
asked if we’d visited Dorothy or Mamie that day.
　　　My father’s friends were men with names like Lucky and Sweets,
men whose eyes rendered other verdicts on their lives. I watched
them develop potbellies and saw gray sprout at their hairlines as
they stood, year after year, before the fire-engine-red Coke
machine in Sam’s Sunoco gas station, waiting for the number to come
out. In a shifting, eternal circle, they parried and joked, voices
edgy, cloaked in gruff humor as they stood wondering if 301 or 513
would come out that day and “make them a man.” Because of his luck
with women and money, they called my father Goldie.
　　　They were not his real friends–they feared him too much.
Shuddered in the wake of his determination, which cast
consideration aside. And they trembled, windswept and lost, in the
face of his poorly hidden belief that he was and always would be
better than the rest. Much like the characters who peopled the
Africa he created for me, and for whom he felt an unbridled
affinity, my father viewed his life as a stage. Those around him
were an audience from whom he demanded total loyalty but to whom he
gave mere lightning flashes of his soul. And I loved him with blind
faith. Could never imagine having to forgive him anything. So when
I had to, I could not.
　　　My father grabbed life by the arm and wrestled it into squealing
submission. My mother cleared the same terrain with a faith and
self-possession that both fueled and ruined some of her
dreams.
　　　Greensboro, North Carolina, must have fit her like a coat too
small, buttons missing, hem unraveling and torn. The town, steeped
and cured in humility and patience, could never have imagined her
hopes. So at nineteen she fled. One summer night, while her parents
and younger brothers slept, she crept out of bed. Crouching on the
floor, she retrieved a cardboard suitcase wrapped in string that
had been hidden beneath her bed for three days. After pinning a
note to her pillow, she walked out into the full-moon night.
Standing on the porch, she felt her heart hacking a path out of her
chest. Placing the suitcase on the porch, she rubbed her sweating
palms on the side of her dress. Crickets echoed in the night air
and fireflies illuminated the web of knee-high front-yard grass.
And, as on every evening of what had been her life up to then, the
pure, heartfelt country silence reached out for her. Struggling out
of its grasp, she picked up the suitcase. Licked her lips for
courage. And, imagining her mother’s face the next morning
discovering the empty bed and her wizened hands reaching for the
letter, she scurried down the steps. It was 1928 and she was headed
north.
　　　Washington, D.C., was as far north as she got. There she settled
with a cousin who’d arrived the year before. Her first job was
cleaning government office buildings. But soon she discovered more
gratifying outlets for her industry. Driven by caution, she
scrupulously saved her earnings yet daringly, shrewdly bet small
amounts on the numbers. She hit them regularly and plowed the
winnings into property. Soon she owned four boarding houses and
leased two others, a material affluence which at that time equaled
a virtual empire for a black woman. Indeed, my mother was blessed,
for she had her own. Each month, when she wrote her parents, she
slipped a money order between the pages of the folded letter. And
seven years after her arrival in the city dotted with historical
monuments and scarred by Jim Crow laws, my mother drove, prosperous
and proud, back to Greensboro in her own 1935 Ford.
　　　Her mother sat on the porch in a rocking chair, stringing beans
that afternoon. Her feet touched the splintered boards and she set
the bowl of beans on the table beside her, stood up and clutched
the banister. “Be-A-trice, whose car that you drivin?” she called
out with only modest interest.
　　　”It’s mine, mama,” her daughter called back, parking the car
before the house with considerable skill.
　　　”Yours?”
　　　”Yes, mama, mine.”
　　　My mother was now walking dramatically up the steps to the
porch. She wore a dark-purple suit and a hat that resembled a box
was perched on her head. Her hands held white gloves and a small
brown leather clutch bag.
　　　”You want to go for a ride?” she asked, delighted to be offering
such a treat.
　　　Her mother, who had witnessed greater miracles than this every
Sunday in church, merely folded her arms and shook her head in
disgruntled amazement. “Be-A-trice, can’t you write your own folks
no more? It’s been three months since we last heard from
you.”
　　　If she’d had her way, my mother would have been an actress. Like
the best of them, her presence was irresistible. My father used
words to control and keep others at bay. For my mother language was
a way to reassure and reward. My father demanded loyalty. My mother
inspired it in the host of friends whom she cared for and melded
into her life. She was a large, buxom woman, with caramel-colored
skin and a serene face that gave little indication of the passion
with which she imbued every wish, every commitment. Her hands were
large, long-fingered. Serious hands that rendered punishment
swiftly and breathlessly, folded sheets and dusted tables in a
succession of white folks’ homes long after she was mistress of
several of her own. Hands that offered unconditional shelter and
love. In every picture of her there is freeze-framed a look of
sadness rippling across her glance, as though there is still just
one more thing she wants to own, to do, to know. She wore perfume,
fox fur throws casually slung over her shoulders and lamb coats, as
though born to wear nothing less. My father confided to me
offhandedly once, “When I met your mother I thought she was the
most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
　　　She had been married once before. That husband had loved her
with a precision and concern my father could never imagine. But
after ten years she divorced him, his spirit routed, mauled by
years of drinking into a shape she could barely recognize.
　　　My father was her Armageddon. The thirteen years of their
marriage, a music box wound too tight, played an off-key song of
separation and reunion. The arguments and fights were nearly always
murderous. Sculpted like hot wax around the dry bones of their
unyielding wills was a love that joined and informed them of each
other in ways that were unbearable and soothing. They fought over
my father’s women. But mostly, with a special viciousness, over
power, symbolized by my mother’s property. Her will shimmered with
so much eloquence and strength that my fat…