Just As I Am Read online

  Praise for Just As I Am

  “In Just As I Am, Harris—a truly gifted writer—has taken on a Herculean task. Aside from dealing with homosexuality and homophobia, he also tries to tackle a long list of complex problems: racism based on skin color among blacks; the church’s reaction to gays; conservative Southern values vs. modern urban life. Just As I Am is a powerful and poignant piece, like a passionate letter from a close friend who has seen the best and worst this world has to offer.”

  —Tallahassee Democrat

  “Just As I Am is a potpourri of political complexities related to sex: sexual confusion, bi-straight relationships, interracial relationships, interfaith marriages, etc. Harris has much to say about bisexual eroticism, and his honesty and apparent lack of any political agenda serve the novel well.”

  —Lambda Book Report

  “Just As I Am answers the essential question all black gay men must eventually ask themselves: how can I be black and homosexual and remain a part of my family and community? Harris has given us a book on survial and a glimpse at the wonderful possibilities that await us when we decide to love ourselves without compromise. This book is about courage and the necessary journey to examine and reexamine our lives. Every day.”

  —Southern Voice

  “This eagerly awaited follow-up to Harris’s first novel, Invisible Life, is a stirring plea to accept people as they are.”

  —shade magazine

  “Harris’s characters and their milieu are tellingly unexplored in much of contemporary fiction. His books therefore do double duty as mind-opening and heartwarming.”

  —Genre

  “Harris’s work exemplifies a command of the language and a skill at describing physical settings and mental states that elevate storytelling into the realm of literature.”

  —Austin American Statesman

  “Just As I Am is a worthy sequel and a fascinating read in its own right. Together, Invisible Life and Just As I Am form a major contribution to both African American and gay literature.”

  —The Gazette (Tampa, Florida)

  “Just As I Am is a romantic, old-school fairy tale. Harris’s triumph is that he allows the audience to grow, struggle, and learn with his hero and she-ro. Both Raymond and Nicole find the men of their dreams because they refuse to let anybody bullshit them into believing that they don’t deserve love and respect. When honesty rises and converges with love, how can there be anything but perfection?”

  —SBC

  “Harris confronts several important issues head-on in this novel of a black American’s coming out.… Superb character development and insight make this a powerful sequel to Invisible Life.”

  —Library Journal

  Also by E. Lynn Harris

  INVISIBLE LIFE

  AND THIS TOO SHALL PASS

  IF THIS WORLD WERE MINE

  ABIDE WITH ME

  NOT A DAY GOES BY

  ANY WAY THE WIND BLOWS

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1995

  Copyright © 1994 by E. Lynn Harris

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1994. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, as are those fictionalized events and incidents that involve real persons.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harris, E. Lynn.

  Just as I am : a novel / by E. Lynn Harris. — 1st Anchor Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Invisible life.

  I. Title.

  [PS3558.A64438J87 1994b]

  813′.54—dc20 94-24594

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83173-6

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  For

  Jules and those who fight the battle against AIDS

  each and every day

  and

  The Huntleys

  Tracey, David, and Calhoun

  for a friendship supreme

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost I thank my savior Jesus Christ for His blessings in my life daily. I am blessed to have the most wonderful group of family and friends, especially my mother Etta Harris and my aunt Jessie Phillips, who always give me their unconditional love. Much love and thanks to Tina and Jonee Ansa for their love and friendship, and for teaching me the true meaning of being an artist.

  Special thanks to Timothy Douglas and Ellis Smith for providing me with wonderful friendships and a home away from home. Steve B., Jerry Jackson, Ray and Darice Ellis for friendship and financial support. My sweet inspirations and sheroes, Valerie Boyd, Loretha Jones, Vanessa Gilmore, Lencola Sullivan, Linda Chatman, and Regina Brown. My friends and heroes, Carney Carroll, Keith Thomas, Troy Donato, and Carlton Brown. I must thank Sallye Leventhal for coming out of retirement to edit this book and helping me to become a much better writer. My test readers, Tracey Nash-Huntley, Kelvin Pillow, and Cindy Barnes for their time and valuable input. Thanks to Bill Britton for great lines. My agent John Hawkins for just being there to listen to me bitch and moan, and Warren Frazier for putting up with my calls. I am also grateful to Martha Levin, my friend and mentor, for her belief in my talents and welcoming me with open arms into the Doubleday family. Shout outs and thanks to her able assistants Deborah Ackerman and Delia Kurland for their help and understanding. Deborah, I will miss you much. Good luck with school.

  Finally I must thank all of you who buy my books and have taken the time to write and share your thoughts with me. It means so much to me and it’s the reason that I get up every day and think what can I write today?

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Part Two Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Part Three Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

>   About the Author

  There are always

  two sides to

  every story …

  Raymond Jr.

  I imagine the world was created beneath a canopy of silence. Perfect silence. While in my own personal silence I would create the world I dreamed of. A world fall of love and absent of life’s harsh realities. A world where all dreams would come true. A place called Perfect. But I’ve come to realize that some dreams you have to give up. I live in a world that promises to protect me but will not catch me when I fall. In this life I have fallen many times. From these falls I have learned many lessons. Lessons involving lust, loss, love, and life. Lessons that hit as hard as an unannounced summer thunderstorm, sudden and sometimes destructive.

  One of my life’s unexpected lessons occurred during my senior year in college. It was on the first Friday in October that my brain released a secret it had struggled to protect throughout my adolescence. I learned on that day that my sexual orientation was not a belief or choice, but a fact of my birth. And just like the color of my skin and eyes, these things could not be changed, at least not permanently.

  My name is Raymond Winston Tyler, Jr., and I am a thirty-two-soon-to-be-thirty-three-year-old, second-generation attorney. The son of attorney Raymond Winston Tyler and Marlee Allen Tyler, an elementary school teacher, and big brother to fourteen-year-old Kirby. I had a happy childhood, growing up deeply ensconced in the black middle class. A child of the integrated New South, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that in the past was known more for church bombing than being the bedrock of college football.

  I returned home after law school and several years of successful practice in a large New York firm. About a year ago I moved two hours south to Atlanta, after a two-year stint of running my pops’s law firm while he followed his lifelong dream and became a member of the Alabama State Senate.

  Atlanta struck me as a vibrant city. A cross between country and cosmopolitan, a city where popular eateries still took personal checks, that is with a valid driver’s license. A city consumed with sports and the dream of becoming the Motown of the nineties. Atlanta was a city on the move and even though it didn’t have the flash and energy of New York City, it was more conducive to my life than Birmingham. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my family and my birthplace, but I knew it was time to move on and continue my search for Perfect.

  I was living in a trendy Buckhead condo and working for Battle, Carroll & Myers, a black, female-owned law firm specializing in entertainment and sports law. I had originally moved to Atlanta with the understanding that I would go to work for the city government, but a few days before I was to start, I received word that a hiring freeze had been put into effect. I later found out from a friend of my father that the reason for the freeze was because someone in the mayor’s office wanted the position promised to me to go to an openly gay, black attorney. Now wasn’t that just the shit. My Columbia Law School education and major New York firm experience didn’t amount to anything. Just my sexual orientation and then only if I was willing to make it public, which I wasn’t. So with the help of my good friend Jared Stovall, I went to work for Battle, Carroll & Myers. My position created an ironic dilemma. I was hired in part because of my love and knowledge of college sports. The firm was actively seeking college athletes about to turn professional and it was my job to convince these young men, mostly black and from black colleges, that the firm would be looking out for their best interests. I had just entered a period in my life when I was practicing celibacy and trying very hard to put the male body out of my mind, but now I was constantly in steamy locker rooms with some of the most beautiful bodies in the world.

  Our firm also represented a number of rappers and singers, but Gilliam Battle, the founder and only remaining partner, handled the majority of them along with the recording executives. Though an extremely smart woman, Gilliam didn’t know jack about sports, other than the fact that pro athletes made a great deal of money and didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do with it. Gilliam not only assembled a top team of attorneys but also a staff of investment counselors, speech coaches, doctors, and whatever it took to make sure our clients represented us as well as we represented them.

  My social life in Atlanta was in a lot of respects similar to life in Birmingham, back in the closet. Atlanta did have a visible gay community but it was visibly white. I wasn’t forced into the closet, it was just a choice I’d made out of respect for my family, especially my pops. My parents knew about and tried to accept my sexuality, but the fact that they knew didn’t mean they wanted to discuss it around the dinner table or with my little brother. So like my parents, I too decided to ignore my sexuality and went back to my old straight act the minute I left New York. Talk about your safe sex. Besides, men were basically dogs—couldn’t tell the truth if their life depended on it. And now your life does depend on it. Trust me I know. In my past I too have been guilty of not being totally truthful, either with men or women. But men never expect honesty. Women, on the other hand, say that they want the truth, but then they act like they don’t hear you when you try to tell it like it is. Sometimes in the heat of passion men are not the only ones who let their sex do the thinking.

  Currently there is not a female in my life besides my mother and Gilliam, but there was a man, a good man. I’d met Jared Taylor Stovall in Birmingham when he’d come to run my pops’s political campaign. Jared was a political consultant who had been highly recommended when Pops’s victory was in doubt. Jared became a member of our family, practically moving into my parents’ home during the race. Jared actually convinced me to move to Atlanta by offering me a place to stay and remarking with a devilish smile, “I want my niggah around me all the time.”

  Jared was quite handsome in a rugged sort of way. His looks inspired confidence—tall and strapping, six foot three and two hundred and ten pounds of slightly bowlegged, biscuit-brown masculinity. Large bittersweet brown eyes, and a smile that would have lit up the Atlanta skyline. He was as smart as he was good-looking, finishing at the top of his class at Morris Brown College and later getting an MBA at Clark-Atlanta University. He was the oldest child and the only son of a devoted mother who had raised him and his two sisters alone in southwest Atlanta. Jared never mentioned his father.

  I hadn’t shared my sexuality with Jared mainly because it had never come up. I hadn’t determined if Jared himself was gay or straight, just as I couldn’t tell if his closely cropped hair was naturally curly or mildly relaxed. Only when I felt lonely did Jared’s sexuality cross my mind. Sleeping alone with just my pillows for comfort created an insatiable void in my life. Our relationship wavered between brotherly love and romantic love, though it was a romance without sex. A romance in my mind only, at least as far as I knew.

  I’m what you would call a romantic, a severe romantic, yet lasting romance has eluded me. I grew up believing that you really fell in love only once and that that love would last forever, like in the movies. I now know that most people consider themselves lucky if they fall in love once and have that love returned. But I wasn’t even that lucky; the truth of my present situation was a love life that consisted only of daydreams about Jared and listening to R&B songs about love dreamed but never attained. I longed for a love that would make me feel like the soothing love songs that caused an involuntary smile to linger not only on my face but in my heart. A love life that was an eternal “quiet storm.”

  My love life had included a quartet of lovers—two men, Kelvin and Quinn, sandwiched between my first love, Sela, and Nicole, the woman who had broken my heart because I hadn’t told the truth. A lie that sent me packing back to Birmingham, back into the closet, and into my present celibate state.

  Now even though I hate labels, I still consider myself bisexual. A sexual mulatto. I mean how else could I explain how members of the singing group En Vogue and certain members of the Atlanta Braves aroused my sexual desires with equal measure?

  I didn’t feel comf
ortable in a totally gay environment or in a totally straight environment. I often wondered where the term gay came from. Lonely would better describe the life for me. There was absolutely nothing gay about being a black man and living life attracted to members of your own sex in this imperfect world I called home. For now a place called Perfect remained a dream.

  Nicole

  When I was in the fourth grade, the boy who sat behind me would always pull my hair any time he thought no one was looking. He would really get on my nerves. One day instead of pulling my braids he slipped a note in my hand. It read, “Will you go with me? Yes … No … Maybe. Please circle one.”

  Since I didn’t know where he wanted me to go, I placed the note in my knee socks and took it home to my daddy, asking him what I should do. He gave me some advice I’ve always tried to live by. “Listen to your heart,” he said.

  From my daddy’s words of wisdom I realized that my heart has a voice. It speaks to me with each beat. My heart protects me, shielding me from the things I can’t see or lack the courage to face. My heart knows who I am and who I’ll turn out to be.

  My name is Nicole Marie Springer, former beauty queen, Broadway actress, and sometime word processor. Thirty years of age, but that’s twenty-five in show biz years. Born and raised in Sweet Home, Arkansas, right outside of Little Rock, population five hundred and eighty-five, and one stoplight. Daughter of cotton farmers James and Idella Springer, older sister of Michael. A small-town girl with big-city goals.

  They say in every life some rain must fall, but I’ve just come through a couple of years dominated by thunderstorms. Right now my life is cloudy and overcast, anxiously awaiting the sun.

  In the last three years I lost my beloved father to a sudden heart attack, my best friend Candance to AIDS, and Raymond, the brief love of my life, to another man.