Dreams of Our Black Mothers

We know what it means when our older Black mothers start dreaming about “fish.” Sometimes, the dreams we dream at night are bigger and more complex than just ourselves.

Maybe these dreams or mares are just an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” – Ebeneezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Maybe not.

The scenario went like this: I was invited to a hours-long run from Atlanta to North Carolina by a long time lifelong friend who I know would do no such thing of this kind, but when I agreed to go on this trip with them – only to watch her back because she ‘sort of’ asked me to, it turned into a real “trip.”

Once we got to the city limits of something I could only identify as the Wilmington area, I was dumped off by them (to my chagrin and surprise) in a certain dubious neighborhood near an inner-city subway line rail station.

On one side of the train station was a filthy cluttered smelly rat-tattered old neighborhood and “dumping ground” filled with nothing but poor Black people and wild animals of all sorts and variations, the likes of which none of us have seen on Earth. So far. On the other side of this glass encased and girded with metal train station was a clean bright city where I could see two buildings — the “Mayor’s Office” and the “Police Department.”

All I remember saying after my friend and her so-called “boyfriend” dropped me off out of their Cadillac-like luxury rolling motor home is “You’ll see! I have survived worse things than this. I will make it and I’ll be right here when you come back!” Only, I wasn’t so sure they were coming back. Ever.

I roamed through the station and checked out a few shops inside, then looked through the window trying to see if there was a way to get to the “clean” side of the station. It wasn’t the first dream I’d ever had about being lost in a Maze of some kind that I couldn’t get out of, but every time the location and scenario are very different.

Whatever the case … I decided to venture out on the “rough side” of town because, of course, what could possibly happen? Well … a lot can happen, and it did.

I was immediately chased by something that looked like a cross between a gopher and a rat, if that’s even possible; and it scraped at my ankle all while trying to bite me. All around were flying things, biting things, animals and creatures and people acting like animals and creatures, and even people who had horses rather than dogs, leashed in their back yards. Debris was flying everywhere and hand-laundered clothes were flapping around on poles in something that resembled typical inner-city projects or low-income housing.

 

I made my way back into the subway somehow after surviving all those attacks and running to find a RELATIVELY safe SOMEWHAT sane place. I looked for and finally found a rail security officer (a white female) whom I asked how to get the transit elevator to “the other side” where the mayor’s office was. I wanted to have a BIG talk with this mayor about this “ratty tattered” neighborhood with nothing BUT poor Blacks in it who looked to be diseased and zombie-like with hunger and insanity. They had even looked at me as if I was nothing more than sheer Ramen Noodles for the hungry and destitute. I wanted to know really, wtf was going on?! that these people should be treated this way.

She just gave me this funny look and said “You can’t get over there. Period. Besides, the mayor is gone for the day anyway and won’t be back.” I guess the obvious finish to that sentence was won’t be back “Ever.”

Anyhoo…

I decided my best bet, in that case, was to stay inside the train station and wait for my friend and her friend to come back and get me and drive me back to Atlanta where I belonged, but the next thing I know, I’m eating some lame dry tasteless lunch in a cafeteria in the train station and I get a TEXT MESSAGE from this so-called best friend.

She is telling me what a wonderful time she is having on her trip, what she had for lunch and described it in detail from appetizers to dessert. It was a very long text and it was all about her sage and lavender spa massage and her foot massage in cherry vanilla scented creme, and her beautiful new clothes her “boyfriend” had bought her (he had only picked her up and driven her to North Carolina because she couldn’t decide what to wear on their date). I went along to watch her back, she ditched me.

She says NOTHING in this text message about what time they are coming to pick me up to take me home, she doesn’t even ask how I’m doing, where I am, what I’m doing … nothing about me, all about her.

So, I start texting her back, like “I’m going to tell you what is going on with me whether you want to hear it or not!” manner, starting off with MY “wonderful” tasteless lunch and everything that had happened and how I was “stuck” where they left me with no way to get home, and I was about to get into it and THEN cuss her out. Then…

I woke up.

The end?

The “friend” was a person I know damned well would NEVER do that to me. Or do I?

The guy was someone she was “all in love with” that I had never met.

The place was beyond me because I know very little about North Carolina except for an uncle, some cousins, and the paternal cousins of my ex- who live there, and the relatives of a friend’s ex- who lives there. That’s it. The only place I’ve been to in North Carolina is their homes and up in the mountains at Harrah’s Casinos.

Sometimes, dreams are not all about me and mine.

I have a feeling that there is a bigger message here than what was currently affecting me in this dream state.

Thoughts?