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| Prologue 1983 | |||||
| The Seduction | 15 | (16) | |||
| PART ONE 1973--1983 | |||||
|
31 | (18) | |||
|
49 | (19) | |||
|
68 | (15) | |||
|
83 | (10) | |||
| PART TWO 1983--1985 | |||||
|
93 | (20) | |||
|
113 | (24) | |||
|
137 | (20) | |||
|
157 | (24) | |||
| PART THREE 1985--1986 | |||||
|
181 | (22) | |||
|
203 | (16) | |||
|
219 | (20) | |||
|
239 | (24) | |||
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| Rest | 263 |
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Chapter One
Part One
1973 - 1983
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds."
--Bob Marley
Rebel Dreams
K ORIE SLIPPED THE BLACK SCHOOL LOAFERS OFF HER feet and bent to remove her socks. Closing her eyes for a moment, she scrunched her toes through the wet new grass into the cool mud beneath it. Then barefoot, her shoes and socks in one hand, her book bag in the other, she picked her way through the trees to a spot beside the lake. She had come here often in the last year. In the fall, she had skipped stones along the water and scribbled poems and stories in her notebooks. When the frost came, she had used a twig or sharp stone to carve pictures into the soft ice crust that capped the lake. After the spring thaw, Korie often found herself lying in the grass with her head on her book bag, not writing or drawing at all, but daydreaming about what the next period of her life would be like.
It was Korie's last month at Kendall Girls, an old-line boarding school tucked into a green valley in rural Connecticut. Though of faded reputation, the school still attracted the promising girl children of wealthy New England families. Korie was from another world entirely. She had been bred against the hot, noisy, colorful Caribbean tapestry of Kingston, Jamaica, and found the hushed, damp atmosphere and tightlipped reserve of the Kendall girls a bit of a culture shock. She had nobody but herself to blame, though, because it was she who had lobbied her parents to send her to Kendall for her final year of high school, convincing them that there could be no better preparation for an American college than to attend an American school.
In September, she would be entering Barnard College in New York City. The long-dreamed-of brass ring was almost in her hand.
For as long as she could remember, Korie had had this yen for America--New York City in particular. She had decided, the summer she visited there with her parents when she was nine, that she would live in New York when she grew up. Even as a small child, that northern city had been the glittering metropolis she had dreamed of escaping to, the place where she might finally live free of the claustrophobia of other people's expectations.
Now that her year at Kendall was nearly over, Korie was almost sad that it had flown by so quickly. Her melancholy surprised her, because the year hadn't exactly been flush with friendships and good times. It had been, in fact, the loneliest year of her life, but she had found, for the first time, a degree of comfort in her loneliness, an opportunity to sink into this aspect of herself and claim it as an intrinsic part of her nature.
This small lake on the other side of the woods was where she had done most of her thinking. None of the other girls ever came here. There were deer and rodents and other animals in the woods, and sometimes boys from the surrounding hill towns came there to poach. Though she kept a keen eye out for the animals, and hid the only time she ever saw a poacher, Korie didn't worry much about the hill town boys. What would they want with a skinny black girl who had somehow wandered into their lily-white enclave? Most of the towheaded, pink-cheeked boys were day students at The St. Francis School nearby; Korie had seen them at Kendall's bimonthly socials, but not one of them had seemed to truly see her . She realized she was a mere shadow to them, standing with her back to the wall, gazing longingly towards the door, alternatively wishing to disappear through it and praying that someone, anyone, would save her from humiliation by asking her to dance.
Finally, at the pre-Thanksgiving party, someone had asked her to dance. Korie had been braced against the wall as usual, silently vowing that no matter how much her absence was frowned on, no matter what the house monitor said, she'd stay in her room the next time one of these ridiculous socials rolled around. Just then, a tall, cinnamon-colored girl had walked up to her and held out her hands. The Kendall girls often danced together at the socials while the St. Francis boys, swaggering to cover their shyness, circled the dance floor and ogled them. So it didn't matter to Korie that she'd been chosen by a girl. Relieved just to be noticed, she followed the tall girl onto the dance floor and faced her in the rose-colored light.
"Simona Jones," the girl had smiled in an apathetic sort of way. "I'm in Mr. Welch's homeroom. A senior like you. I've seen you walking over near the woods."
"Korie Morgan," Korie said.
She recognized the girl. She'd seen her a few times at supper and in study hall, and had made the mental note that there was another nonwhite student in the twelfth grade. Simona was athletically built. She wore a short black skirt and a tight black sweater and had long smooth muscles in her bare brown legs. On her feet she wore big-heeled platform sandals and no socks, even though there was snow on the grass outside. Her hair was cropped short like a boy's and parted to one side, its curls subdued by some shiny wet substance. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and bored, her lips full, cupidlike, sulky. On them, she was wearing fire-engine red lipstick--a grave infraction of Kendall's rules, even at socials. If any of the teachers or monitors who chaperoned the dance caught sight of those lips, Simona would be in detention for a week.
It was the lipstick that won Korie over. She was suddenly enthralled by Simona, thrilled by what the lipstick revealed about her--that she was a rebel, fundamentally and decisively, and that she didn't belong at Kendall any more than a skinny, brown-skinned Jamaican girl did. But if Korie survived her awkwardness, her sense of being perpetually a stranger, by shrinking into the background, Simona wore her outsider status proudly, defiantly. The night of the pre-Thanksgiving social, her long arms snaking through the air, her hips moving in sultry circles, Simona's "otherness" was as plain to Korie and everyone else as the fire-engine red lipstick on her full pouty lips.
They became fast friends. Simona's single (all seniors were granted singles) was in the residence cottage diagonally across the main quadrangle from Korie's, and they had no classes together, but they met often in study hall, ate all their meals together, and spent their recess and evening free periods together. Simona was from Brooklyn, New York, where she'd been raised by an elderly aunt in a tiny apartment on Flatbush Avenue. Her mother had deposited her there when she was six, then went off to drink herself into oblivion. Simona didn't have a clue where her mother might have gotten to in the intervening years. She might be dead in some nameless town for all she knew. Most of the time, Simona acted like she didn't give a damn, but sometimes late at night, after lights out when Simona and Korie would sneak out of their dorm rooms and meet for a smoke in the cobblestone alley beside the north wall, Simona would break down and cry. The school's groundskeeper kept Simona and a host of other Kendall girls well supplied with hand-rolled hashish joints, and Simona always brought a couple of them. Korie didn't really like the taste of the makeshift cigarettes, so she'd take a draw and let the joint burn down in her fingers while Simona drew deeply on her cigarette, and turned moody in the dark. Korie learned to sit silently by without touching her. Once when Korie had tried to hug her, Simona shook off her arm fiercely and snarled: "Don't you pity me!" So now, Korie just sat next to her while she cried, until at last, Simona's cigarette would be done and they'd make their secret handshake and scurry back to their rooms.
Korie's heart ached for Simona on those nights by the wall. It was impossible for her not to notice that while her parents had been busy inventing a rich and flourishing childhood for her--holiday house parties with a rainbow-hued army of relatives and friends; Sunday afternoon picnics with the flamingoes in Hope Gardens; weekends with her grandparents in the cool hills of Malvern; summers at her parents' north coast beach condo--while Korie had been experiencing all this, Simona had spent her childhood in a two-room walk-up with the bathtub in the kitchen, yearning for a mother who was never coming back.
And yet, in one sense, Simona's mother had blessed her by leaving her with the old aunt. It was the aunt who first noticed the child's native intelligence, and pushed for her to be tested. It was the aunt who had agitated and schemed for scholarships to Brooklyn's best private schools, then, as Simona approached puberty and the streets began to beckon, had arranged for her to attend Kendall Girls on a scholarship for disadvantaged inner-city kids. In those early days of affirmative action, Simona was a critical statistic at Kendall; the presence of girls like her secured a measure of federal funding for the school. And now Simona had been accepted on a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, and would be heading across the country to stir up the other coast's famed gold dust come fall.
A bell sounded in the distance--five minutes till afternoon study hall. Classes at Kendall were over for the year, and students were expected to spend the next week and a half studying and writing papers for finals. Korie rinsed her feet in the icy lake and pulled on her socks and shoes quickly. Then she slipped her book bag over one shoulder and retraced her steps through the woods to the wide green lawn on the other side of the trees. Girls in blue plaid skirts and crisp white blouses with Peter Pan collars were milling around outside, strolling in small groups or lounging on benches under the broad trees. A few were already walking towards the massive cut-stone school building, not willing to risk a demerit for being late. Korie hurried across the grass. She'd received her share of demerits for being late to study hall this year. One more would cost her a whole point on her grade point average. Not that it really mattered. She'd already been accepted early decision at Barnard. Still, Korie prided herself on being a good student, and so she wanted the 4.0 grade point average she was carrying to remain intact.
Simona was already in study hall, a long, high-ceilinged room with towering windows that cast their misty light across highly polished, mahogany tables. She had saved the seat beside her for Korie and when her friend appeared at the door, she let out a sharp whistle to alert her. The hall monitor glared at Simona, who stared back at her with wide-eyed innocence. The monitor turned back to her books, apparently deciding to let Simona's violation of the silence rule pass--one more month and the tall black girl with her smartass attitude would be gone for good.
Korie slipped into the chair next to Simona, took out her books, and settled down to study. She was a fierce studier. Her habit was to cram furiously before exams, a studying style that had netted her top grades throughout her school career. The trick, Korie had learned, was to not know the material too thoroughly. Years earlier, she had discovered that if she studied a text too closely, she did less well in the exam, because she became consumed with trying to get down all she knew. But when there were gaps in her knowledge, Korie was forced to go more deeply into those points she had full grasp of, and to make creative extrapolations on the points of which she was less sure. The result was invariably more original, and seemed to please examiners far more than a faithful regurgitation of the facts. So Korie was always careful not to study a subject in depth too soon, which meant that come study week, she had to get serious.
Now, as she riffled through the pages of her physical geography book, looking for the chapter on water erosion, she reflected on the irony of her studying approach: How absurd that she should choose cursory knowledge of a subject over more solid learning for the sake of a higher grade. Growing up in Jamaica, she had always envied those classmates who didn't feel such pressure to achieve top marks. By virtue of who she was, the family she came from, Korie had never felt that she had that luxury. She had always felt the need to justify her blessings.
She was, after all, the cherished and freely indulged only child of Osgood Morgan, a respected surgeon, and his wife, the painter Alice Mathurin. People flew from all over the Caribbean to be operated on by her father at the University Hospital. People flew from all over to consult with her mother, too, though for more aesthetic reasons. Alice Mathurin had a way of drawing people to her; everyone seemed to want to bask in her reflected light. Indeed, she was a dazzling presence, a slender, half-Chinese woman partial to flowing caftans and hand-painted gowns, whose rich black hair, now threaded with silver, was worn tightly swept back from her temples, showing off her sculpted cheekbones and long, thick-lashed black eyes. Alice Mathurin was known throughout the region for her large, abstract canvasses, and for the fact that she had discovered and made the careers of many a struggling West Indian artist, simply by showing their work at her north coast art gallery, The Sugar Mill. She had located her gallery in the beach resort town of Ocho Rios, in the renovated ruins of a sugar plantation. And since she counted many Caribbean and North American collectors among her regular patrons, the works exhibited at The Sugar Mill had a very good chance of finding their way into highly reputable collections.
Alice drove from Kingston to Ocho Rios several times a month to supervise showings at her gallery, and Korie had often made the hour-long trip with her, sometimes even prevailing on Alice to let her skip school in favor of helping to hang paintings for a show. Korie adored her mother, but she had always been a little in awe of her, too. In Alice's presence, Korie felt singularly undistinguished. She was medium brown like her father, and appeared almost mousy against her mother's luminous black and gold coloring, her light brown eyes almost colorless next to Alice's laser black stare. To make matters worse, Korie had inherited her father's intense myopia, and so had spent the latter part of her childhood peering through thick lenses set in pearly white frames. Her father insisted the glasses looked just darling on her, but Korie, even at seven, knew better. Her appearance improved somewhat when wire-rims became trendy, and she was able to swap her pearly frames for less intrusive gold wire ovals. But her lenses were still very thick, and distorted the appearance of her eyes, making them seem weak and distant and sleepy. At fifteen, Korie had graduated to contact lenses, which freed her lovely almond-shaped eyes from their funhouse-glass prison and gave her the promise of beauty. But by then, Korie's vision of herself as a lackluster, bespectacled girl had become a personal fact, and she was never quite able to believe it when her mother took her face between her palms and told her softly that the duckling had become a swan.
In the shadow of her mother's poise, her near perfection, Korie had grown up shy. She'd always felt like something of an impostor in her parents' world, an urchin who had wandered into a very fine gathering, her presence so forgettable, her radiance so dim, that nobody had bothered to notice that she really didn't belong there. As she approached puberty, and bursts of contradictory emotion rocketed around inside her, her notebooks had become her refuge. In them, she drew idealized self-portraits and scribbled stories of young women who were the stars of their firmament, sirens of dramatic bearing who inspired undying passion in both women and men, confident, self-possessed creatures who could enter into any setting on earth and simply know that they belonged.
It was in Ocho Rios, helping Alice mount a one-man show of work by her newest discovery, a young Kingstonian named David Gilchrist, that Korie had first voiced her wish to go abroad. David Gilchrist had been working across the large stone-walled exhibition room, sorting his small, exquisitely painted collages into several groupings on the floor.
David was twenty-five, a wiry, dark-skinned man with a wispy goatee and dark, sunken eyes. He had the look of a man who had often chosen paints over food. Korie had liked him from the first, more because she liked the survivalist spirit of his work and the kindness in his eyes than because of any real knowledge of his character. And she admired his perseverance. Alice had told her how she'd found him in a two-room shanty in Western Kingston, where he had painted on any material available to him--pieces of cardboard, discarded wooden planks, zinc scraps scavenged from the dirt around his makeshift house. He'd used found materials like shells, tree bark, rusty springs, and bits of rubber to build up layers of collage on his paintings. Alice Mathurin had first encountered his creations in a craft market stall, and was immediately mesmerized. She found his approach entirely original and saw in his work the mark of an artist who created from sheer love of the medium, as if to live without his art would have been to relinquish his life.
So Alice had sought him out, even going into Western Kingston herself, a dangerous neighborhood for a woman who wore her sense of entitlement so plainly. But Alice also had about her a palpable sense of mission, and no one harmed her as she walked through the dusty streets to David's two-room shack. She went there three times before she finally found him at home. Bemused, he came out to greet her, shirtless, in paint-stained shorts, his feet bare. Alice told him right then that he'd soon be the toast of the art world, and peeled off several one hundred dollar bills to help him buy canvas and paint and food.
"Mom," Korie said now as she helped her mother assemble a wooden easel. "I don't want to go to university here. I want to study art in New York."
Alice looked at her daughter, her expression careful.
"You can study art here," she said. "We have a thriving program at the School of the Arts. Why not enrich your own culture?"
"I'll still be of this culture, Mom. I just want to go abroad, that's all. I got some brochures from Cooper Union. It's an art school in New York."
Alice didn't respond immediately. She turned back to the easel.
"Pass the screwdriver, Korie."
"Mom!" Korie voice was plaintive. She knew her mother's impassiveness was a form of opposition, and she knew she needed Alice's support if she was ever going to convince Osgood.
"Pass the screwdriver, Korie. We'll discuss it later with your father."
Across the room, David Gilchrist cleared his throat. Alice and Korie looked up and noticed he had stopped sorting his work. He stood perfectly still amid the stacks of his creations, looking at mother and daughter thoughtfully.
"Miss Mat'urin," he said at last, "let de chile go a foreign."
"She's only sixteen--" Alice began.
Korie started to protest, but David broke in.
"If to go to New York is what she want," he said, "mek de chile go. Don't stan' in her way." David paused for a moment, as if trying to find the best way to make Alice Mathurin understand. He stroked his straggly beam with two bony fingers as mother and daughter stared at him. Eventually he sighed, a resigned sound.
"Is like dis, Miss Mat'urin. You right here makin' all my dreams come true. So many years I hear about you, an' how you help so many Jamaican artists find a way. I never dream you would one day be here helping me, too. But now is your daughter's turn. Don't stan' in her way, Miss Mat'urin. Let her go. You just have to trus' she will find her way back."
Alice didn't answer right away. She studied David coolly, trying to decide whether to take his interjection as impertinence or care. They had developed an easy association over the last several months, with David advising Alice with absolute confidence on such things as which of his art pieces to include in the show, how they should be grouped for an observer walking through the gallery, what the lighting should be. Alice had to admit that for a man who had never shown his work in a gallery, much less been the author of a one-man show, he had infallible instincts. On the other hand, he woefully undervalued his collages, and Alice had had to argue with him for several weeks to get him to raise his prices. Overall, theirs had been one of the more satisfying artistic collaborations that Alice could remember, and her respect for David Gilchrist had only deepened as she'd got to know him better. Still, their relationship had never extended beyond discussions about his work and preparations for his show. Certainly Alice had never discussed her own family with him, even though he had met them several times.
Now Alice looked over at her daughter, whose hungry, questioning eyes were fixed on her face like searchlights. Oh, the fierce ardor of youth, Alice thought wearily. She gave Korie a small smile and turned back to David. She nodded her head. "Okay, David," she said quietly. "I'll bear that in mind."
"I've always loved this part of Jamaica, Mom."
Korie was leaning out the car window, her chin resting on her crossed arms as she gazed up at the softly hump:backed hills of Walkers' Wood, where thick carpets of razor grass rippled over the hillsides like waves in the breeze. Low stone walls and barbed-wire fences meandered through the undulating landscape, carving out pastures where cows browsed and seagulls, circling inland from the coast, alighted for a few moments in the cool trees. Here and there, white farmhouses with wrap-around porches and intricately carved wooden gables graced the very tops of hills. Elsewhere, abandoned sugar mills were falling into picturesque ruin, grass sprouting from between their stones, twisted trees poking through their crumbling window spaces.
Alice and Korie were headed back to Kingston from Ocho Rios, Alice at the steering wheel, Korie across from her in the front seat of the silver-gray Volvo. They had just left David Gilchrist in Ocho Rios, where he was now living, and were driving over the winding roads that led to Fern Gully--Alice's favorite part of the trip--where tall bamboo stands laced with thick ferns arched overhead, forming a dark green canopy over the rock-walled road. Fern Gully had always made Alice feel cozy, sheltered. She had never known that it was the broad, temperate, soft-bellied hills of Walker's Wood that had beckoned her daughter. Alice noticed that Korie's voice had sounded almost wistful, as if, in her mind, she was already saying good-bye to these hills.
"I've always wondered who lives in those farmhouses," Korie said now. "When I was little, Mom, I wanted to live in one of those houses."
"I never knew that," Alice said, smiling. There was so much about her daughter that she didn't know.
"Isn't it funny how we never seem to see anybody walking through here?" Korie mused. "Everything is so serene. Even the trees sway in slow motion, like the whole place is a mirage from another time."
To Alice, this dreaminess, at least, was familiar. Korie had always been a dreamy child, content in her own world, the loner in the schoolyard, twirling in solitary circles, her face to the sky. Yet despite her solitary habit, other children had always seemed to like Korie. They surrounded her, pawed at her, trying to include her in their playground formations. Korie would smile back at them sweetly and then simply drift away, so that the children were left staring after her, confused, bewildered, wondering in some not-quite-verbal way why she always seemed so approachable yet couldn't be grasped at all.
Alice had known, watching her wander off from other children, that Korie was a child who would grow into a woman destined to make her way alone. Some women birthed children who cleaved to them, became extensions of them, and Alice had occasionally wished that her only daughter had been that kind of child. Instead, Korie had been an inscrutable little girl, unfailingly pleasant and obedient, scrupulous in her attention to other people's needs, and yet, Alice had always had the sense that a part of her was not quite present, that she was holding herself in reserve. Alice didn't know where she had learned it, but Korie had always been selfish with her joy. She hoarded it; she was not spontaneous with it at all, as if to express it--to let it gush out of her the way other children's enjoyment gushed out of them--was a guilty thing.
Then in the summer of 1963, when Korie was nine, the family had visited New York City, and out of curiosity Alice and Korie, returning from a morning museum tour, had stopped by a rally that was being held in the ballroom of their downtown hotel. The room was packed with people: solemn gray-suited professionals, fur-hatted church ladies, grease-stained workers from nearby construction crews, intense young students, both black and white, and, over in one corner, a cluster of quiet black women in maid service uniforms who were obviously part of the hotel's cleaning staff. The speaker, a slender black man in a preacher's black suit, was exhorting people to support a march on Washington planned for the following week. He thundered words like duty and justice and equal rights . He told the people gathered that the Right Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would meet them in the nation's capital if they just came out to support him. He told of buses which would line the streets of Harlem at six o'clock sharp the following Wednesday morning, ready to transport anyone who needed free passage to the day-long march.
"Yes, indeed!" the speaker had shouted. "You have an appointment with truth , brothers and sisters! You have an appointment with God ! It is your responsibility to serve God by giving your footsteps to the cause!"
"Hallelujah!" somebody had called out. Around the room, Alice heard low murmurs of "Praise the Lord!" She remembered thinking that this North American ballroom felt like nothing so much as a Jamaican tent revival.
Then, as the speaker left the podium, he lifted his open palms to the audience. "We shall overcome!" he yelled, and all around Alice and Korie, answering calls filled the air. A roar rolled through the room. Even the quiet women in maid service uniforms erupted into cheers. Alice sensed that she was watching something historic, that she was witnessing the prelude to a momentous divide in modern history. She looked down at her daughter, expecting to find her usual good-natured composure. What she saw startled her; she was so unused to that expression of frank joy on Korie's face, in her furiously clapping hands, in the way she turned to her mother again and again, her eyes gleaming as she grasped her arm: Did you see, Mommy? Did you hear ?
"Can we go, Mom? Can we go to Washington?" she had urged that night in their hotel room. Alice had been tempted by the excitement bubbling out of her daughter. She was hungry for more of it. She wanted to feed this new urgency in Korie, draw it out. But Osgood insisted they had to get home. He had patients waiting, and Alice herself had to supervise the installation of a new show. Besides, Korie's new school year would begin the following Monday. She would be entering grade five, and it made no sense for her to start by falling behind.
Now as Alice steered their car through the halflight of Fern Gully, the sunlight every now and then piercing the foliage and collecting on the roadway in sudden pools, Alice couldn't help wondering whether attending that march in Washington so long ago might have quenched the thirst in Korie. It had been only a little thirst then, but over the years it had quietly grown, and Alice saw how, inexorably, it would draw Korie back to the place where she had first dared to express her need for a higher purpose, indeed, for joy.
The good doctor had been harder to convince. It wasn't that he was so opposed to the idea of his daughter studying abroad, but Osgood Morgan wouldn't hear of Korie going to America to attend an institution called Cooper Union.
"It's quite a good art school," Alice told him, but Osgood was adamant.
"She's not going to study anywhere abroad that won't equip her to make a living," he declared. "What is Cooper Union, anyway? It doesn't even have `university' in its name. It doesn't even have `school'!"
"Daddy!" Korie almost screamed in her desperation to reach him, "those are just words! And this is my life!"
"You are my daughter," Osgood countered. "And you're asking to go to America on my dollar. You can sit on a street corner and paint for the rest of your life for all I care, but by God, you'll have a choice! The day you decide you're tired of that street corner, you are going to have a legitimate piece of paper that will get you a job !" He was silent for a moment, breathing hard. Finally he said, "Find a reputable school and we'll consider it."
So Korie had found Barnard College, one of the prestigious Seven Sister schools--her father couldn't argue with that. Barnard, like Cooper Union, was in New York City, it had a program in the arts that included studio painting, and it encouraged young women to apply under its early decision plan. That meant she didn't have to wait till next year to apply, even though she was two years away from finishing high school. Better yet, Barnard's program in the arts included a creative writing section. That was Korie's true quarry. Writing was what she really wanted to do; it was just that she hadn't been able to imagine how she might sustain herself with it. Art, on the other hand, had been so much a part of the Mathurin-Morgan household it was like breathing to her. Art seemed a sure thing. She wrote in her application that she wanted to be an art critic.
The following April, a letter came welcoming her to Barnard as a member of the class of 1978. She'd been accepted! No one but Korie was really surprised, though. She was a straight-A student, after all, and her teachers fell over themselves to write her glowing recommendations, thrilled at the idea of one of their own attending an Ivy League school. But Korie didn't want to wait a whole year and a half to matriculate. She wanted to go to America this year . And so she had found herself back in front of the Educational Opportunities Abroad shelf of the Kingston Public Library, poring through boarding school catalogs. The closest school she could find to New York City had been Kendall Girls.
Now, sitting next to Simona in study hall, Korie understood at least a part of why she had wanted to come here. She realized that, in her year at Kendall, despite the loneliness, she'd begun to embrace her independence in a way that was impossible in a close-knit place like Jamaica. It was as if her life was finally her own. Not that she wasn't grateful for all that had been given her. She thought of David Gilchrist and his years spent painting inspired collages amid the squalor of the shantytown where he'd lived. He had toiled so faithfully, with little hope of ever finding an audience that might support his work. Alice had facilitated a different ending to his story than the one that was more typical. Still, when Korie compared her own life to David's hardscrabble existence--and to Simona's, for that matter--she knew she had no right to feel so burdened by her privileges. And yet, she had wanted nothing more than to leave it all behind her, to go to a place where she might become more than Osgood and Alice's well-mannered daughter, a place where she might finally discover who exactly Korie Morgan aspired to be.
Copyright © 1998 Rosemarie Robotham. All rights reserved.
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