In the early 1930s, young Ace Smart is eight years old when his father, a physician, is found hung in his office, and his mother, a writer in the Harlem Renaissnce, dies soon after. He grows up bitterly, marries, and raises two daughters. This is the story of the spiritual journey of one of his daughters. Evidence of the past and feelings of the famiy emerge as Mia is hospitlized in a mental hospital. Ace's secret affair with Vanav weaves suspense when Ace discovers that Vanav was his wife's best friend in childhood. Vanav has only known freedom and has kept the knowledge and science of her people from the island of Sokotra in the Indian Ocean. She is close to Mia and shared her knowledge with Mia's mother. Ace later finds that his father and grandparents were affiliated with people from that island who settled in Steelton, Pennsylvania, and worked with the underground railroad. Quakers, Muslims, and Jews were involved in the movement. Family ideas about the African American experience are an issue as is the remedy for Mia. The family has ties with the struggle for honor and with an ancient healing that comes from knowledge of the blood or red resin from the dragon tree of Sokotra. Unexpected events occur when Ace finally gets rid of his hostility and Mia fights for her mental and emotional freedom. This story is woven with poetry, in an out of time as its powerful messages leave an important imprint on the heart.

Cowards and Angels

By Aileen Muhammad

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Aileen Muhammad
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-5531-8

Contents

1 Birth.......................................12 A Million in One............................23 1880 Island of Sokotra......................34 Mali........................................65 Fjelland....................................86 Steelton, Pennsylvania......................97 1969 Philadelphia...........................198 Ace.........................................229 Vanav and Ace...............................2510 Vanav......................................3011 Family Talk................................3512 Inside Mia's Head..........................3913 Ache.......................................5014 Sokotra Serande............................5415 Younger Days...............................5616 Turning Tide...............................6117 Search.....................................6718 The Patient................................7619 Visitors...................................8220 Time Up....................................9521 The House Where I Live.....................9822 Health.....................................10023 Joined.....................................10824 Group......................................11225 Ace's Dilemma..............................11526 In Sync....................................11727 Ace Meets Solomon..........................12028 Socotra, 2014..............................12429 Time.......................................129

Chapter One

Birth


Out of the darkness
Passed through the light
The circle eternal
Forces the right
Bringing a word
The law of design
Carrying silence
The voice that's divine
Out of the shadow an eye that is time
Out of an organ a life and a sign


A Million in One

All in an instant the harmony of one million
crickets at seven pm on Thursday in the middle of
a hot summer day, knowing their parts, in a musical
symphony began to chat with me. Listening to the
chiming decree, I knew the missing consonance,
An order for my distant love of Peace, a broken word
A piece of shadowed dark corrupted scales
A rhapsody was needed all at once.
There was I listening to their symphony
without the sounding crater broken forth
when the universe announced itself. That
cracking easing melody might be a song.
But this was a cheering for a decision I made.
That trouble in the heavens came down here
after me. It is a transmission that is not known.
There are ones that dance beside me.
Alive without delusion.

1880 Island of Sokotra

This morning there was an announcement. It was more than wind that blew up on that shore. When something new was coming, waves rocked the fishing boats, heads looked out to sea. Children looked at their fathers and back again at the sea waiting for the horizon to give a sign as the grey and white seagulls agreed this was the place to merge.

Children ran from the sea through the village and up the hills. They ran up to the plains where the groves of dragon trees provided shade in their peculiar thicket. Children copied their parents and carefully withdrew the red resin from those precious trees.

Amadea sat a quarter of a mile from the opening of the holy cave that was high enough to see patterns of mountain tops below her. Sitting far from the entrance, she could see the ocean the sky and a massive arch where light exploded into darkness. This cave spread under an arch of mountainous terrain. She sat where she always sat and waited to see a sign of his coming.

She sat where he sat and watched all she could see. The view from that place was the purple sky meeting a turquoise shimmering sea with every ripple under light.

Have you learned yet, Amadea, the power of those clouds? Have you seen yet, Amadea, the healing of the dragon blood?

She watched the flood of birds land on the sea and hover together. Amadea rose from that sitting, wanting Shaheed to appear. She let each step meet that solid ground and walked through the tunnels past the inscriptions on the wall in Aramaic and Hebrew, in Socotri and Arabic. There were clay tablets set on large rocks and carved wooden tables with the Vedas engraved in Sanskrit. She passed through to the other end of the cave that led to an opening on the plateau with thousands of dragon trees standing like massive mushrooms and their giant trunks loaded with medicine. Held at the base of the sprouting of green were branches that formed sacred knots and twisted symmetrically. On the right side of the cave were the trees of laughter, their roots dug into stone. Their trunks were wide and oval like the belly of a woman's body with small slivers of branches opening up to pale pink delicate blossoms overhead.

Shaheed and Amadea loved each other there, as children. And when they became old enough they reached into each other's souls and flesh and loved in the solace of that place. Shaheed showed her how to cut the trunk, allowing the red blood to come out, his pouch always ready to collect the red resin as he taught her the healing of that sap. Then he'd find the blue aloe and take it to his grandmother to cook, and then he would find the frankincense trees. She watched the milky white sap flow out and harden with the air, when he opened the trunk. He travelled with his father on a ship to Europe along the great incense route. He often returned with news, books, and lapis lazuli.

The world found that place when Thomas walked with Jesus and then decided to travel. Thomas shipwrecked there and found people who loved to hear him teach. And that's when the world found out they were there, those men and women who still hide in those mountains, in elaborate structures designed with intricate carvings of pictures and symbols, built high within the stone shields. Amadea was the young girl listening, the young girl watching, and in later years, the one they turned to for translations, and for explanations of the healing arts of Sokotra. Amadea and Shaheed under the dragon trees brought Vanav into the world. They brought her forth at a time when the crumbling empires scrambled for power, wealth and labor and when the angels came to guide those who kept peace in their hearts and who hid to protect their way and their lives.

Mali

In 1825 the local members of the Twelve gathered in the heart of Mali and exchanged the results of their investigations. Their light and searchers informed them of the next move. They must meet their brethren in the land of the west. They must meet the ones that had already gone and establish a city there with the ancient ones that were expelled from the east who lived in peace there in the west. They must hurry because the land would soon be invaded and rebuilt. Their own would be stolen and altered. The kingdoms had their way and these men lived by the sign of peace. They saw no barriers in land and by tradition had hidden their treasures, their wealth and their loved ones.

Their hiding places were beneath the earth. Their hiding places were above the earth. And their hiding places were beneath the ocean through the elaborate under water mountain regions and into the center where they met twice a year and exposed those who would attempt to take over the earth.

After meeting they returned to their sources and passed the gift to the kings. This rising was the way of the ones that Live. They did not know the word death and they joined with their own. They...