My friend John left town a couple of days ago; but before he headed north, he gave me a book and a pen.  He made the pen himself… well, most of the pen… everything about it except the metal that holds a pen together and the writing instrument which I can replace when I’ve written all the ink out of it. I won’t even try to describe the barrel of the pen.  It’s a wonder of lathe-turned wood. I will definitely write with it.

The book is Sue Monk Kidd’s Invention of Wings.  Kidd wrote The Secret Life of Bees.   I had read reviews of this new book by Kidd, but I was unprepared for the first few short paragraph of the first page:

“There was a time in Africa the people could fly.  Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old.  She said, “Handful, your granny-Mauma saw it for herself.  She say they flew over trees and clouds.  She say they flew like blackbirds.  When we came here, we left that magic behind.”

My Mauma was shrewd.  She didn’t  get any reading and writing like me.  Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.  She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, “You don’t believe me   Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?”

Those skinny bones stuck out from my back like nubs.  She patted them and said, “This all what left of your wings.  They nothing but these flat bones now, but one day you gone get ‘em back.:

I was shrewd like mauma.  Even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey.  We weren’t some special people who lost our magic.  We were slave people, and we weren’t going anywhere.  It was later I saw what she meant.  We could fly all right, but it wasn’t any magic in it.

Those first few sentences hooked me, but if they hadn’t the next sentence would have done it:

The day life turned into something the world could not fix, I was in the work yard...