The Gift Giver

MY BLACK ANGEL: CHAPTER 1

Written by: Phyllis Unterschuetz

DiAnn clasps her hands and presses them against her mouth. Sparkles dance in her dark eyes. “Careful,” she reminds me for the third time. “It’s very fragile.”

Inside the purple-ribboned box, cradled in cushions of cottony fluff, I find a glass globe about four inches in diameter.  A gold pin pierces the glass; at its top is a loop, and a ceramic angel hangs from the other end inside the globe. She twists slowly when I lift my gift from its nest. Then I pull out a stand made of gold wire so thin I can’t imagine how it will hold the ornament. It forms a circle at its base and then spirals up, extending outward at the top to support a hook. I hang the glass sphere and watch it swing gently, ready to catch it when the stand  topples over. But it stays upright, even as the angel continues to sway inside her fragile orb.

She has white garments and wings, red lips in a mysterious smile, black hair pulled back in a bun, and black eyes that seem to follow my movements. Her face, hands, and bare feet are brown. Obviously some magic was required to get her inside this crystal ball. 

“For you,” says DiAnn. “Heaven.” We nod to each other, and nothing more is needed.

Photo by Ian Talmacs on Unsplash

Soft moments were rare with DiAnn. The word no-nonsense might have been invented just for her. She had no patience for foolishness nor tolerance for duplicity. Her convictions were shared frequently, with considerable force, and were often followed by “That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!”

The day we met her, my husband Gene and I had come to the San Diego Bahá’í Center for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. We had been living on the road in our RV for several years at that point, traveling around the country speaking about racial justice.  DiAnn was the director of an African-American  gospel choir that had been invited to sing at the event. 

The choir members, wearing white robes with royal purple scarves, stepped up onto a platform and waited for a signal from their director. DiAnn stood still for a moment, until the room was quiet, then she lifted one foot, brought it down purposefully, and planted it on the floor. Next she lifted and planted the other foot. She seemed connected with a network of roots that began spreading when the first stolen Africans were brought here. This network vibrated  with the songs they created to help them survive, communicate, work, escape, and grieve. It was as if DiAnn put down her own roots in the earth and tapped into that web, pulled up through her legs that history, that longing, resilience, and nobility. I could almost see it rise through her body, and when she lifted her hands and her gospel singers opened their mouths, what came out was a sound so powerful that it could not have been made by those few human beings standing on the platform. The force of it pushed me back in my chair and left me breathless.. 

Over the months that we stayed in San Diego, Gene and I grew close with DiAnn and her family. She took us along to church, where we were the only White people, in spite of the pastor’s efforts to attract an interracial congregation. We sang with her choir, attended family birthday parties, and had intense, intimate conversations that lasted far into the night. After describing one particularly frightening experience with racism, she told us, “I’ve never talked with White people before about race. I don’t know why I can talk about it with you. I just know that I can.”

Her home became a sacred space of truth-telling and healing.  

DiAnn loved doing crafts, and her shelves were lined with ceramic figurines she’d painted in her art class. During dinner one evening, she said, “So listen to this. We did angels in class today. I got out my paints and set to work, mixed just the right shade of brown. Then this White lady comes over to see what I’m doing. Pokin’ her nose in. Her face is all scowling. ‘Oh my!’ she says to me. ‘I’ve never seen a brown angel before!’ ‘Oh well,’ I say right back to her, ‘I guess you just haven’t been to heaven yet, have you?’ That’s what I told her alright.” She threw back her head and laughed her great big laugh. 

“I’ll bet you felt like sending her to heaven right then and there!” I said, and we laughed some more. I couldn’t hear a hint of pain in her laughter, but I saw it in her eyes.  

This story became our own private joke. Whenever we were together and Diane experienced racism—which of course happened constantly—one of us would say to the other, “I guess they just haven’t been to heaven yet.” And we would laugh. Sometimes the situation required more subtlety, and we would say only “heaven” and give each other a knowing look.  

I knew that close friendships between Black women and White women were rare and precious. I felt an enormous responsibility to live up to my friend’s trust. 

The Black angel was a parting gift. We were leaving San Diego the next day and didn’t know when we’d be back. There were long hugs, promises to keep in touch, and plans to shop at Ikea next time. I thanked her again for my gift, and her eyes were still full of sparkles. But they were also full of something else—a secret meaning or a message of some kind. She didn’t give it voice though, so I was left to interpret it for myself.

When my husband and I got back to the campground that night, I started to obsess about where to put my gift so it would be safe. Fragile things don’t do well in an RV, where everything has to be stowed away, cushioned, and battened down. 

I imagined that if the Black angel got broken, it would mean I had betrayed DiAnn’s trust and failed to protect our friendship. So I wrapped the box in layers of bubble wrap and a spare blanket, then put it in the storage compartment under our bed, snuggled into a small space between the board games we never played and a box of shells collected on the Oregon coast. 

For six months, the brown-skinned ceramic angel in a glass bubble rode the highways of this country under our bed. At last she came with us to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where she would bestow more blessings.

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Phyllis Unterschuetz is a writer, storyteller, and the co-author of Longing: Stories of Racial Healing. She writes about racial justice, self-discovery, and spirituality and is currently working on a memoir about healing from a traumatic, illegal abortion.

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