How Stella Got Her Groove Back by Terry McMillan Read Free Book Online

ponytail on top of my head which I discover gives me sort of an African-Asian look which I wasn’t exactly after but when I realize it also works as an instant face-lift I just grit my teeth and keep my mouth shut until they’re finished.
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    Vanessa is totally outdone when she sees me and tells me I look like a real hoochie and I give her the keys to my car. I am so glad that Quincy and Walter aren’t home when I call and I simply leave the number of the hotel and all the details. I have a driver pick me up at 8 A . M . and he puts all three pieces of luggage in the back of his Town Car and my eyes are burning because I didn’t sleep at all last night and my heart is pounding like crazy when I close my eyes and look out the window of the first-class cabin as we take off and I’m really wondering what might be out there for me. I pray that I’m not going to die up here, because I’m finally doing something for myself, but when I wake up to see that aqua water and an irregular-shaped stretch of green land a thousand feet below and the plane touches down on that runway in Montego Bay and the heat is already swimming up in silver slivers and I am the third person to step off this plane and the force of the sun is already draping itself all over my body and straight through this sundress and I look down and see at least twenty or thirty black men of different shades heights and ages standing at the entrance to Gate 6 and, as I approach them with my braids which seem to be tossing themselves over my shoulders, they all smile at me with those beautiful and chiseled African cheekbones those white white teeth and every size and shape of lips imaginable and one right after another and in unison they carol out to me, “Welcome to Jamaica,” and I think for sure that while I slept the plane probably did in fact crash and somehow I have simply landed in heaven.

 

    I T WILL TAKE almost two hours to drive the fifty-two miles from Montego Bay to Negril and it feels more like I’m on a bucking bronco than in a van. The road is two lanes of meandering pavement that runs parallel to the ocean for long stretches but as it grows darker—pitch black to be exact and it’s just seven-thirty—I can no longer see or hear the ocean at all, and folks are appearing out of nowhere on the sides of this road. At least ten times during the first hour I think for sure we are going to hit somebody. A slew of bicyclists taking their lives in their own hands appear to be having a hard time staying on the pavement. The driver is driving like a maniac and he seems to think everything is funny, like when he almost hits a goat that was standing in the middle of the road, or when he asks each of us if we’ve ever been to Jamaica, then chuckles as if he knows something we don’t know. When he honks his horn at folks he chortles, and I will find out later that just about everybody on this part of the island knows everyone else. I’ll find out that when you see kids women or men standing on the side of the road walking with an arm extended out like a flag during the daytime nighttime or whenever, they are trying to hitch a ride home and somebody will always stop and give them one until they get to their turnoff. And I will be shocked to learn that women can do this any time of night and still feel safe and nobody ever gets raped or shot or robbed and I’ll be thinking that this is how it used to be in America, this is how black people used to treat each other a long time ago when I was a kid, and before I leave I will envy them in more ways than just this.
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    I am the only black person in my van besides the driver and of the five white couples three are obviously newlyweds and the other two are old and fat and have southern accents and—I am not making this up—are wearing big straw hats. Right after we got on the van at the airport they interviewed me. “Darling, is your husband gonna be joining up with you?”