The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel
Joshilyn Jackson
DEDICATION
With gratitude for good teachers. Here are some of mine:
Ruth Ann Replogle
Dr. Yolanda Reed
Chuck Preston
Astrid Santana
Dr. David Gushee
EPIGRAPH
Heartily know,
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Give All to Love”
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
—WILLIAM STAFFORD, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
CHAPTER 1
I was born blue.
If my mother hadn’t pushed me out quick as a cat, I would have been born dead and even bluer; her cord was wrapped tight around my neck. She looked at my little blue lips, my blue toes and baby fingers, and she named me after Kali. Kali Jai.
My mother was in the middle of a six-month stint in juvie for shoplifting and possession when I was born. She had thirty-six hours with me in the hospital before the state took her to finish out her sentence. My grandparents—stiff, unhappy couple that they were—got temporary custody.
Kai told them my name, but my prune-mouthed gramma filled out the paperwork. Gramma would later claim to have misheard, saying, What I put on that birth certificate sounds like whatever that was you said, but in American. My mother didn’t know until she was released back into her parents’ custody. By then, everyone in town was calling me Paula Jane.
You were originally named for the mother goddess who brings hope and springtime, Kai told me often, when I was growing up. My lullabies were praise hymns—“Kali, Jai Kalika!”—sung in my mother’s smoky alto, and Kali starred in many of my bedtime tales. I’d fall asleep imagining a goddess made of sun and flowers, gold and green, and beautiful.
When I was five, I found a picture of Kali in one of my mother’s sketchbooks. Kai was drawing a series of gods in colored pencil. I recognized some of them as characters from her stories. Hard to miss Ganesha, a big-bellied fellow with an elephant’s head, dancing with his trunk curled high. And I knew Hanuman, the monkey god, leaping over the ocean with a bouquet of mountains in his hands. Then I saw my own name. Kali.
“Hope and springtime” was jet blue and savage, her skin a stark contrast to the burning city serving as her backdrop. She waved silver scimitars and torches in her many arms, standing barefoot on a dead man’s chest. Her skirt was made of human heads and hands, and her flame-red tongue was impossibly long, unfurled to swing between her naked breasts. My mother found me staring at this image, my fingers tracing the familiar letters of my own name beneath it.
Am I bad? I asked her.
No, baby, no. Of course not. She sat down on the floor beside me and pulled me into her lap, sketchbook and all. You can’t think of Kali in such a Western way. She spoke with all the authority vested in her by her flea-market prayer beads and her lotus-flower tramp stamp. She explained that in the Eastern Hemisphere—a half of the world that she had neither seen nor deeply studied—Kali meant “change.”
Kali destroys only to renew, to restore justice. Kali brings fresh starts, she said. She leaned her head down over me to whisper. Her hair was long and dark, and it fell around us in a tent, smelling like campfire smoke and orange peel. Your name literally means “Hail to the Mother,” over in India.
But I was born in Alabama. My mother invoked Kali on the black and bloody soil of the American South, and she didn’t get renewal, hope, or springtime. She got me.
And wouldn’t she be proud of me right now, if she were here? And if she were speaking to me. I was parked in front of Zach Birdwine’s house in the East Atlanta Village, stalking him, determined to force a fresh start of some kind or another. I was better at the burning part, quite frankly. I certainly wasn’t here to crawl up in his lap and ask him, sweetly, Am I bad?
It wasn’t the kind of question I asked anymore; I was a divorce lawyer, and as such, I knew to never ask the question if I didn’t want the answer. Granted, this answer was changeable, depending on who told my story. Most clients would protest that I was the epitome of goodness, thank you, while their exes wouldn’t answer with anything printable. My friends and business partners liked me fine, but my own mother had changed her answer long ago.