That’s an apt description of the story I’m finally ready to tell.
Please enjoy your experience.
??one
Poised a breath apart on the middle finger and thumb, the zills hold infinite possibilities, an unlimited range of nuanced sounds and varied patterns. Only one thing is certain: they will come together, move apart, and come together again. I don’t remember the first time I heard the irresistible cling of the finger cymbals, if it was the single pierced sagat or the slotted zills, but I’m certain that it was long before I was born. If it’s true that our souls travel in an endless spiral of incarnations—and I believe it is—then it makes sense to me that certain threads continue with us from life to life, from birth to birth. The zills ring with that inexplicably deep familiarity for me. Some part of me remembers the sound, and it moves me. I move without questioning it.
if u ever get the chance 2 travel back 2 ancient dance
I feel that same certainty about my husband, my soul’s mate. I believe—and so did he—that he was my lover in one lifetime, my brother in another; maybe we were sisters, mother and child, or even mortal enemies. At the moment of each birth, we were poised, a breath apart, destined to come together in some capacity and fated to part, knowing we would inevitably come together again. We might not immediately know each other’s name each time we met, or recognize the face, but we each knew that names and faces were the least relevant aspects of the other. I recognized my beloved, though not right away, and he treasured me, though he didn’t know how to keep me.
Prince Rogers Nelson was born June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His mother, Mattie, was a jazz singer. His father, John, was a musician who went by the stage name Prince Rogers. Prince spoke very little about his early childhood. He did tell me he remembered being locked in a closet sometimes. John and Mattie split up when Prince was ten, and he was like a kite without a string, sometimes living with his mom and stepfather, sometimes with his dad, sometimes crashing with friends. Prince was a skinny little kid, who topped out at five feet two, but he was still an excellent basketball player at Bryant Junior High, where he became friends with Andre Simon Anderson, who later went by André Cymone when he toured with Prince. Two things Prince would take with him from an adolescence that was as difficult as you might imagine adolescence could be for a short, skinny, black dude were his love of basketball and his friendship with André.
On November 12, 1973, while they were somewhere shooting hoops, I was born on a military base in Enterprise, Alabama, where my dad was in army flight school. My mother, Nelly, and my father, also named John, are both Puerto Rican born and raised. She was—and is—a stunner: a voluptuous, headstrong beauty. Her strict Catholic parents tried hard to keep a lid on her, but my mother was—and is, for better or worse—a bold free spirit who never did well in the role of caged nightingale. Really, it’s the laws of physics; her strict upbringing made her want to rebel and get off the island. She wanted to leave Puerto Rico, so she only dated men in the ROTC, hoping for a ticket out.
Dad was a great date, handsome and kind, a former body-builder who’d won the title of Mr. University of Puerto Rico. He’d followed his father into the military and rose through the ranks to become an officer, something his own father never did. After they’d been dating for a while, Mama realized she was pregnant. And not just a little. She was six months along. Both families swooped in and basically forced them to get married immediately.
Mama still mourns the fact that she never got to have a proper wedding, which made her all the more thrilled to see me marry Prince with all the trimmings. My dour Catholic grandmother (whose own father was black), wasn’t at my wedding, but she told me on the phone, “Well, at least he’s light-skinned. And he is who he is. So I’m okay with it.” And that tells you everything you need to know about my grandmother.