URS date: June 3, 2014
Noorunisa Kathleen Frederick passed this morning shortly after 6:00AM June 3, 2014. We invite you to make aspiration prayers for her Passage with YA SALAAM! She had a great depth, quiet beauty and elegance which she brought to this life and I am certain will bring with her on her onward Journey.
Much love, Shabda
Ya Salaam, my beautiful sister Noorunisa Kathleen Frederick.
May the clear light guide your way Home.
Thank you for being you and fully receiving my love.
It was the summer of 1985. I stepped off a yellow school bus and onto the grounds of the San Quentin State Prison.
I had just completed a weekend conjugal visit with my father, and as a last good-bye, the prison staff held a picnic for the families of convicts. Everything was normal, except for the massive barbwire fences that towered like petrified redwoods over concrete cages. A prison officer dressed in a green uniform stood watch from an iron guard tower like a Greek titan eagerly waiting to smite us down with an AK-47 at the first sight of forbidden sin: a prolonged kiss from a lonely wife, an elderly mother’s forgiving touch, a son’s knotted legs in his father’s tight embrace. These were all punishable, we were told, by a swift ‘shot to the head.’
Three days earlier, I walked in deference to the rules shouted at me by an angry Puerto Rican woman with a boy’s crew cut as she padded my butt for weapons. “No touching, no kissing, no hugging. No jeans, no tank tops! No lotions. Nothing with alcohol.” She cocked her head in my direction. “You think you can handle that, son?”
I nodded, and quickly averted my eyes to the tiny black lines outlining broken squares across a white tiled floor. I dared not speak. She rambled on, convincing me that any egregious error on my part would galvanize unremitting guards into firing bullets into my coifed black hair — a fate, I imagined, more terrible than ‘the puberty’ my brothers often joked about.
But stepping off the bus, I realized that those final moments with my dad would not be mine alone. I locked eyes with the white woman standing next to him in a floral chiffon dress which proudly danced in the invisible arms of the breeze that caressed the curves of her fit body.
“Aw, shit,” I mumbled. That was a word I heard my mother use often in moments of frustration, and it felt appropriate now.
I wanted this time. He was my dad.
I dragged my cheap shoes across the crunchy gravel, my head bowed, watching my feet make tracks in the sand. My father stepped forward to meet me, and he placed a firm hand between my shoulder blades. No hug. No greeting. Just a nudge that quickened my pace towards this… woman. I knew he meant business. I took a deep breath.
“Make eye contact,” he growled through a smile. “Be respectful. Don’t embarrass me, you understand?” I nodded my head and looked up to greet her. She had eyes the color of emeralds that fizzled at the slightest movement of light. A gentle wave of shoulder-length chestnut hair was the perfect frame for her inimitable face.
My father spoke first. “Gabriel…” he paused and inhaled. “This is…Kathleen.” He paused again. “My new wife.”
My mouth fell open. “Shit,” I thought, “shit…shit. This is her?”
Kathleen’s reputation preceded her. I recalled hearing about a beautiful white woman that had become the object of my father’s attention. My curious ears often found the company of thin wooden doors to receive the words protruding from incessant mouths that masticated in hushed whispers. Silence would follow my entry into any room where my father’s family pretended to converse about anything other than my parents’ divorce, or my father’s new “friend.” Everyone teased that I was the family parrot. I would pick up bits of conversations like broken shells under white sands and drop them on the lap of my mother who, in turn, would unleash the fury of a woman scorned. Nobody wanted to talk their chisme, their shit talk, when I was around.
But I would not share this particular information with my mother. I kept it to myself. For a year. I couldn’t stand to see her heartbreak at the news, so I resolved that I would just hate this woman from a distance.
Each night, before bed I prayed. “God, please let my father’s new girlfriend grow hairy black moles on her face. In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
Kathleen stepped towards me and placed a gentle hand on my stiff shoulder. “Hello Gabriel. It’s so nice to meet you. I have heard so much about you.”
My eyes searched her face for black hairy moles. Nothing! What happened to my year of prayers? Where was God when I needed Him? My father must’ve sensed my confusion because I felt his middle finger press into my back, straightening my body. I searched my mind for something to say. I didn’t want to disappoint my father. I had overheard stories of the violent ways he castigated my family when he was displeased. It was rumored that he once held my eldest brother, Ronnie, by his ankles over the Vincent St. Thomas Bridge in Long Beach until he peed his pants. True or not, that was not going to happen to me.
“Hi,” I squeaked in my best prepubescent voice. She grinned and guided me into a firm embrace. My arms reciprocated, and my mouth rebelled against the frown on my face. Kathleen smelled like sweet vegetables and clean laundry. She had the essence of…heaven. She broke free from my hug and took my small brown hand into her cool white palm, leading me towards the wooden picnic tables. A slight breeze moved off the San Francisco Bay and frolicked across my hairless legs.
“Gabriel, I brought something just for you,” she said, and reached inside the green cloth bag laying by her side.
“For me?” My hands clapped in anticipation. She had only known me for a minute and was already giving me gifts?
Score!
She removed plastic wrap from a white clay bowl. The smell tickled at my nose, and I knew immediately that it was guacamole. My favorite! My hands flew for the open bag of black bean organic chips. I wanted to hate it out of respect for my mom, but my childhood voracity plunged tiny fistfuls of her green delicious goodness into my greedy mouth. Chip after piled chip prevented any discussion from taking place, and my father had to swat my hand away like busy mosquitoes. Kathleen was beaming!
“Leave him alone,” she scolded my father, “that’s what I made it for.”
And she stuck up for me? I loved this woman! LOVED her. As for my mom? Well, I would just have to deal with that later.
I don’t remember what we talked about in the short thirty minutes that followed, but I remembered that she made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe – until my stomach ached with cramps. As we stood up to say our goodbyes, she asked if she could write a letter to me. I felt my heart ricochet against my chest.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. My joy couldn’t be contained.
After we said our goodbyes and my father pried my knotted legs from around his firm torso, I stepped back onto that lonely school bus. The Puerto Rican guard from three days ago greeted me at the wheel, one eyebrow up.
“Were you a good boy like I asked?” she barked.
I shook my head yes.
“Did you break any of my rules?”
“No, ma’am,” I lied.
“Well, look at that. He speaks!” she said through laughter. I could feel a tear burning the edges of my eye. My bottom lip quivered. It must have reminded her of my current reality because she instantly stopped her laughter, leaned into my ear and whispered, “It gets better, sweetheart. I promise. One day, all of this will be over, and you’ll be happy. Just follow the rules.”
She patted me on the arm and winked. “Go have a seat.”
As I walked down the aisle of green plastic benches, I realized that the bus driver had misunderstood me. I was happy! Everything was better. These were not tears of sadness. They were tears of joy. My heart had opened to encompass this new woman in my father’s life.
Kathleen!
I ran to the last seat of the bus, and I searched for my father in a sea of blue prison denim. I spotted him at the picnic table where I had left him. There he was, next to Kathleen. My dad had his hand wrapped around her small waist. There was no more jealousy in my heart. She reciprocated his affection with a gentle hand around his.
The engine roared to life, and the bus began to regurgitate its way out of the mouth of the valley. I tracked their fading silhouettes across the winding road until they disappeared in a cloud of frenetic dust. I imagined that Kathleen never stopped smiling, never stopped waving. I imagined that they stood side by side, eyes on my bus, eyes towards my future.
I would receive a letter from Kathleen a week later in perfect penmanship, and then once a month for the next ten years. I would save them all in a plastic leather three-ringed binder that I hid under my grandmother’s bed. Her words would become the railroad tracks that would lead me through the dark tunnels of adolescence; they would be the lighthouse that guided me through the rough waters of early adulthood; they would become a symbol of hope.
In the Summer of 2014, thirty years after I stepped off of that San Quentin school bus, those same words would remind how lucky I was to have had this beautiful creature step into my life. And although I could not be by her side the instant she transitioned into the Great Eternal, I have often dreamed of that moment:
Kathleen sashaying across space and time to the rhythm of salsa music, her floral chiffon dress swaying in the invisible arms of the breeze across her new and healthy body, a smile painted across her inimitable face, her emerald eyes reflecting her eternal dance with God.