“The only remnant of Big Mama’s past was a water-damaged, hand- tinted portrait of her and a man I didn’t recognize, both sugar-sharp, sitting on a bench in front of a painted backdrop. He was sitting up tall and strong. She was laughing, legs crossed, her head resting delicately on his shoulder. There was a power in his pose, but there was more in hers, a feminine power, the kind that lights a room and buckles a knee, the kind that makes men do things they know they shouldn’t — sneak in through open windows, lie to loved ones, give more than they have.

I often stared at that picture, trying to connect that woman — young, thin, radiant, dangerously alluring — with the woman I knew now as Big Mama. I couldn’t do it.

She was different now. Jed had made her different because he was more powerful than she was. He drew his power from a different source — not from hollowness but from wholeness. It was a grand, simple kind of power. It came from the knowing and accepting and loving of self that made the knowing and accepting and loving of everything else possible. It didn’t crush, but accommodated. He hadn’t taken away Big Mama’s power but given her a peaceful place to harness and trans- form it, to calm down and grow up, to move out of the woman she had been and into the woman she could be.

She was like a river — always running, never still, wanting to be somewhere other than where it was — that had finally reached the ocean — vast and deep and exactly where it was always meant to be.”

—CHARLES M. BLOW
Copyright © 2014, all rights reserved