A World Turned-A Dream Imagined
Was this real? Did it happen?
I tried desperately to remember my dream. Snatching at the moments. It felt so magical. I was there but I wasn't. Nothing was certain and yet it all appeared in certainty.
I had fled to China. My parents had disapproved. But these weren’t my parents. These were people I couldn’t recognize. I’m struggling now to recall their faces. To conjure their images in my mind. They were from the 1950s. Disapproval eked out of every pore. The mother with clear-rimmed glasses and a scarlet bonnet for a hat.
And what of this China? A dustbowl of a road. A Wild West street. A wide avenue that stretched for miles into the distance. The air clogged with brown. A surface layer that settled over everything. A sepia dream saturated in mist.
Down this road was a carnival. The people are obscenely happy. Migrant workers selling fanciful goods. A market of antiquity. And in the center, he stood. A jazz player with the look of John Amos. A tall, strong, Black man in 1920s garb. Plain shirt held with braces and a bowler hat. Every shade of beige. The dust clotting and static covering his outfit.
