"Lenora"

           Lenora loved mysteries and detective novels! She couldn't wait until the Book Woman Club voted to again read her favorite genre!  Her best loved writers and characters were James Patterson and his delicious milk chocolate character -  Alex Cross, and Jeffery Deaver and his damaged, but brillant, Lincoln Rhyme.  Whenever she read a Lincoln Rhyme novel, dispite Deaver's description of him as a white man, Lenora always saw Denzel Washington!  (Denzel had played Lincoln Rhyme in the movie "The Bone Collector", based on Deaver's novel with the same name).  Lenora just loved those dark chocolate crime fighters!           The Book Woman Club was now reading "I am the Darker Brother", a collection of poems from the Harlem Renissance Period.  Karen was hosting this weeks meeting and had made a pinapple upside-down cake for dessert.  Lenora's mouth watered as she sniffed the delicious scent wafting in from the kitchen.  The girl could cook!  Lenora patted her flat stomach.  Good thing she burned calories as she ate them!  Some of the sistahs were getting down right fat from all of Karen's fantastic baking!  Karen was writing a recipe book filled with family stories and her family's secret recipies.  Those family secrets were reeking havoc on diets, and hips were expanding in the club!  "Secrets can be so destructive!" thought Lenora.
          Lenora was an expert concerning secrets.  Her life was one big secret!  "Not one of these women in the Book Woman Club really know me!",  Lenora thought.   "Ask any one of them a question about me, and they would have to pause and think hard!"  Lenora looked around the room.  "None of them know me!  Not one of you know who I really am!"  All they really knew about Lenora was that she loved detective novels and that she loved mysteries.  None of them knew that she was the biggest mystery of all!  And they will never find out the mystery that I am!", Lenora mused.  Her eyes narrowed.  "They better not!"  Lenora took a deep cleansing breath and let it out slowly.  "This is not the time for an anxiety attack!", Lenora thought.  Besides...she knew how to handle her business if any one of them ever found out and tried to expose her!
           Dr. Pamela Sue was Lenora's Psychologist.  Dr. Sue said that Lenora's love of detective novels and mysteries was a manisfestation of her own need to be caught.  Lenora sometimes thought that Dr. Sue was the one that was crazy, not her! She had no intentions of "getting caught".  None!  Lenora liked her freedom, and knew Dr. Sue would never tell her secret to anyone.  Not because she trusted Dr. Sue.  Lenora didn't trust anyone.  But she knew the law; client attorney privelege and all.  Besides, the story that Dr. Sue knew was not exactly the truth!  Lenora was not a fool!
          Dr. Pamela Sue was treating Lenora for anxiety attacks.   Sometimes Lenora would be sitting in a room, having a good time, and then suddenly she couldn't breath!  Her heart would race and the room would feel like it was closing in on her!  Dr. Sue was teaching Lenora how to control her attacks.  Bio-rhythms!  Active Imagining!  Deep breathing!  Lenora took a second breath.  She could feel her heart rate slowing, her breaths quieting.  Lenora took a third and final slow, deep breath!  Everything was under control.  She sighed.
          In 1978 Lenora and four other students from Texas Northern University, a traditional black college down the road from the prodominantly white Cullen University, bombed the library on the Cullen University campus in Houston, Texas.  They were protesting Cullen University's racist policies. The Texas Five, as they became known as, took seige of the library, ordered everyone inside to evacuate, and demanded the immediate admission of an equal number of Black Students to White Students attending Cullen University, along with the immediate hireing of 20 Black Proffessors.  The University refused to comply and the govenor of Texas ordered in the Texas National Guard.  After a three day stalemate, feeling like the Govenor of Texas would order his troupes to storm the building, the Texas Five snuck out of the library and then blew it up!  They set off the dynomite that they had wired throughout the building, dynomite they had used to keep the Texas National Guard at bey!  What they did not know, was that one librarian had not left the building when the group had laid seige to it!  The librarian, fearing for her life and virginity, (according to a tearful T.V. interview by the librarian's mother, who had received a call from her daughter during the seige), hid in a closet behind boxes of new philosophy books, with a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread and a thermos jug of chicken broth.  Kathy Evian's, (Lenora could not forget the librarian's name), body was found in the aftermath of the explosion, crushed under flying concrete and covered with peanut butter and bread!
          Lenora had not meant to kill anybody!  Still, she knew that every revolution came with a price....came with collatoral damage.  Innocents got killed!  Freedom had a high price.  But, she felt extreme remorse for the librarian's death.  She lived with constant guilt....and with the fear of being caught!  Four of the Texas Five were caught within a year of the bombing, and each were serving life sentences.  "Wasted lifes!", thought Lenora.  "Such brilliant minds should have been put to better use by the unjust American legal system!"  Lenora felt strongly that penance should be service, not imprisonment!  Afterall, they did not kill Kathy Evian on purpose!  Abdulla's mind should have been put to use for the greater good; teaching revolutionary philosophies to this young politically apathetic generation!  Jamal and Kwesi should have been allowed to become civil rights attorneys, serving the American justice system, not behind bars being screwed by the injustice of America's corrupt legal system!  And Niahla!  Niahla.....tears began to build up in Lenora's eyes!  Anger began to fill her clinched fists! Niahla's gifted creativity should not be locked in a cell, but should be celebrated for the revolutionary messages that her art expoused.
          Lenora was the only one who had somehow managed to evade capture.  For over twenty-five years she had been on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List!  She had changed her identity.  (She barely remembered her birth name - Vi...)  Over the years she had shifted her appearance, like a camillion; hair color, her weight, numerous plastic surgeries.  She had eventually moved to Syracuse, New York, got a degree from Syracuse University and became a librarian.  No one looking at Lenora could tell she was a murderer!  And hiding this brought on anxiety attacks;  anxiety attacks that she fought back every - single - day!  Lenora felt that by becoming a librarian, she was living out the life of the librarian that she had killed during that fateful bombing.  And she was a good librarian!  She loved books; treated them with great reverence.  Lenora loved children and promoted family literacy in whatever way that she could.  She anonymously donated books to fledging school libraries.  Needy families found new books underneath their Christmas trees, lovingly and  anonymously wrapped by Lenora.  Lenora had turned her life into a living shrine to Kathy Evian.  Wasn't that justice enough?
          Lenora felt panic again rising in the pit of her stomack.  She closed her eyes, began her deep breathing again, and actively imagined being in a green field, the wind rustling through knee-high blades of waving grass.  When she opened her eyes, she quietly contemplated the women discussing Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem Juke Box".  The smell of pineapple upside-down cake again tickeled her nose.    She looked at herself in the mirror that covered the wall that was opposite of  her, there in Karen's tastefully decorated livingroom.  And she knew, dispite her buttoned up cardigan, her tightly knotted but grey streaked hair, her Syracuse University degree and job with the Onondaga County Library System, dispite the book donations and dedication to family literacy, dispite all that she used to mask her past transgression....Lenora was a murderer!