She and I hadn’t gotten along in a long while. Before the fire, she would appear just before day, rocking in an old chair that wasn’t there, and wait for me to say something. Later, we developed what might be called a way of conversing—I’d look toward her and listen, I’d whisper back; and no one, not even someone lying next to me, could say they ever heard a thing.

She had a lot to talk about: she was the woman I’d seen years before in a book on slavery, her naked back facing out, all kinds of scars where she’d been whipped, and, at the right hip, her hand. I’d seen the photograph not long after the Fisk Jubilee Singers had passed through town, giving a concert at our church. Most people in the congregation favored the gospel music, especially the faster tempo songs stirred along by a new electric organ capable of singing in chorus by itself, but I was haunted by the slave songs the college students had sung a cappella, by some uncomfortable past I heard in the amens of old folks who otherwise wanted no part of talk about the slavery days. I was respectful, but their silence intrigued me. When I saw the picture of that woman, I already knew what she sounded like singing; she seemed even more willing to speak.

It wasn’t until I’d left the South, though, that she began making her visits. To my own surprise and to the delight of my musically talented family, I’d joined a gospel choir in college—me who’d been always too shy to sing out loud, who’d been so eager to leave behind the family expectations that I would attend church each Sunday at least once. But I moved away only to find singing necessary that far away from home, and I enjoyed the Sunday morning and Wednesday evening times of song.

In my second year of college, I became so restless I wanted to leave my life and go wandering. I didn’t know where and I couldn’t say why, but I just became dissatisfied. My adolescent ambition to become a writer had become oppressive—it was harder and harder to finish anything, and I felt my new experiences outstripped the language I had to describe them. I also didn’t like the way I knew myself; I struggled toward and against a racial identity, my sexuality, and what I could see as my own peculiar history. I lost interest in classes, I stopped going to choir practice, and all I wanted was the courage to leave. She began her visits.

She warned me some folks wander away never to come back. She warned me of the failure my dropping out of college would represent to kin present and past. She warned me I’d still feel restless even when I arrived where I’d be going. And she began telling me of children she’d lost, the ones sold away from her, dispersed who knew where. I could help her find them if I stayed right where I was. I could help her find them if I waited.

But waiting got to be too much for me. I stopped writing altogether, and my restlessness grew painful. Finally, in some destructive act of creativity, I took all the pages of poems and half-poems, the not-completed dialogues of plays, all the stories I’d written and was writing, and I quickly burned them up. I decided then to abandon writing and find some other way of staying involved with subjective life while also being in the world. I decided to become a psychologist. For a while, a decade almost, this compromise worked. I went to graduate school. I left writing to other people. I would envy them, even as I sought those who wrote what I longed to read.

In the beginning, she would still come, but she was angry. As if I’d put her in that fire. As if I’d denied her. At times, I’d look to see her rocking in that chair and I wanted her to leave me alone. Her railing annoyed me, the hurt in the songs she sang seemed just too much. At other times, I’d think to ask her something else about the history she’d taught me. Maybe I could serve her as a generously educated man, or perhaps even as a psychologist. Maybe I could support others more qualified and gifted to write about her. Maybe they would be more loyal. But she said less and less, and, after a bit, she even stopped visiting. And I stopped looking for her.

Becoming a psychologist seemed mostly incompatible with creative writing, anyway. Graduate school was consuming. I was being trained to attempt some illusory objectivity about human motives and behavior, to develop and test hypotheses about them, all in the service of being helpful. And when I then began to train as a psychotherapist, I gave my working attention to people facing differing life problems, to being supervised myself, and to assuming an identity that is a culture all its own.

Except I wasn’t finishing my dissertation. Except I couldn’t sustain caring about a project I knew to be only another long paper, only an exercise. And when I finally—and slowly—confronted with the help of a good analyst the reasons behind this surprising lack of love, I was faced again with my self. I was faced with what I had so callously abandoned and left back East or down South. And, aside from the anxiety about going further educationally than anyone in my family had ever gone, about possibly losing my connection to the people I still loved most in the world, I was afraid I’d come to lack feeling connected to anyone at all. For it was a measure of solitude I feared most, the solitude most writers need and frankly love. The very solitude wherein real conversations with imaginary companions finally take place.

I became less afraid of solitude only gradually, and only with a lot of reassuring myself that I could maintain some sense of being the same. I became less engaged with some of the people in my life, as well as with many of the distractions I had so keenly cultivated. And I became more engaged with the academic writing that finally took only a few months to complete. During this era, I found myself thinking of a play I’d started just before I tried to burn everything up. It was set during a choir practice and the characters included voices I’d listened to as a child. I also thought about the woman I’d not thought much about for years. I promised myself I would try someday to write that play.

She had returned to my life, then. She was still angry, and she didn’t seem to trust me. She’d appear for a few minutes, be gone for weeks or months, come back for just as long. When she was with me, she railed more and she ranted. Her story had now become particular—a son who’d been sold away was someone I might know, if only I’d be loyal. And though she seemed to appreciate being made real again, she said she didn’t know that I wouldn’t become violent with myself again. She would stay as long as it took to finish the dissertation; afterwards, she’d just have to see. In turn, I took to arguing back, defensively angry at being portrayed as a coward, but wary of the scope of her requirements.

For a couple of years, I took on clinical work to provide more professional training, as well as to begin paying off my huge debts. On the weekends, sometimes in transit between places of work, I would try to make a place inside myself where writing might happen, where I could envision myself as a writer. The construction was slow going, because there were so many professional involvements that also interested me.

On my 33rd birthday, I became convinced I would not live through the year. The allusion to Christian history amused me, but I was also frightened. I kept the feeling secret. I didn’t acknowledge to my friends how my prospective death had elaborated itself and how I imagined it as sudden, violent, and pointless. I made contingency plans. I became less attached to the idea of a future. I even took comfort in the smallness of one life relative to the vastness of generations. But I was more and more restless, and by the end of that year, when I heard Peggy Lee sing, over and over, “Is that all there is,” I itched once again to get on.

The move I was faced with making was now more clearly internal. Moving back East, or moving overseas, even moving to live near my aging parents were possibilities I considered, but, as the woman had said to me some years ago: Some people wander away never to come back. During this time, I was more aware of her presence, much more aware of how I was able to call to her. I admitted that I had tried to kill her, and I accepted that awesome responsibility. In one memorable conversation, she asked me about my life: Did I want to live a contented life? A good life? Did I even want to live at all? If I decided to live, she implied, I could not do so without also deciding to write.

I decided to live. I decided I would wait with the ever-present threat of being mute, or being silenced by the reactions of others. I decided I would learn to sit still and write and write and write until I wrote myself away.

I also decided I would speak of and from what I might call my own life. I decided I would finally reveal myself to those who had come before me, among them the woman who’d come alive once more in my life. Maybe there could be some peace.

I've thought of her less and less. We trust each other more. Periodically, I have to make my decision all over again. Periodically, I decide once more to face the possibility of deciding to die. It happens in various ways—becoming depressed, losing interest in what matters most to me, becoming simply afraid. Usually, I recognize the chance to thrive. And, usually, I want to live.