Introduction:
The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories
by Robin D. G. Kelley, Ph.D.

Thelma Reyna possesses a kind of second sight, a rare ability to penetrate the masks and facades we mere mortals use to protect our most intimate thoughts, fears, and anxieties, and unveil the truth. And she has this uncanny ability to find language to express those feelings and experiences that just seem too big or too painful or too beautiful for words. She is no mere wordsmith; rather, she is a sensitive listener who understands humanity in all of its dimensions. 

I recognized these qualities in Thelma long before I discovered her brilliance as a writer. Between 1978-1980, she was my English and creative writing teacher at Pasadena High School in Pasadena, California. It was a huge, inadequately funded school that served mostly low-income Black and Latino students. I was one of those students, an African-American son of a single mother who, like most kids in my cohort, was tracked for low-wage service work, prison, or, at best, a stint at Pasadena City College or Los Angeles Trade Tech. Thelma never accepted our presumed fate, because she could see capacity and possibility where others could not. She pulled from our narratives truths that had been suppressed for so long---a “thug’s” romantic streak, a young hustler’s love for mathematics or theater, a kid marked “remedial” capable of rendering her dismal neighborhood into a fantastic carnival. Thelma brought us back to life by helping us discover our inner resources and the force that animates us: Love. Although she never said it directly, she taught us that love was the path to self-recovery, since it enabled us to see and accept all the dimensions of who we were and who we could be. Her teaching was transformative.

Reading her beautiful collection of short stories three decades later, I recognize the same visionary, transformative qualities she brought to her teaching. The work is vivid, alive, soul-penetrating, and as powerful as anything by Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, J. California Cooper, or Philip Roth, for that matter. Reyna has this amazing ability to float into a life-in-progress and reveal the social, physical, and emotional landscapes with exacting precision. 

And the themes are universal—her stories are about the fleeting, transient nature of love and life. Relationships, even those with the strongest bonds, are always tenuous and vulnerable, and everything can change as a result of a chance encounter. There is no divine justice or plan, yet there is something divine and huge about how we find our unique paths to love, how we cope with loss, and how all of these travels help us find who we are. Nothing is inevitable, and, unlike the planets, there is nothing keeping human beings from drifting apart, drifting toward each other, being cruel or being kind.

I had this revelation reading stories like “Little Box” and “Comatose” and “White Van,” which remind us that we really are vulnerable, sort of like living on top of a building without a railing, or walking a tightrope without a net. We make choices, yet our compass is embedded in our emotions more so than in our rational intellect. 

I was struck by how “White Van” is entirely interior, an encounter that never actually takes place, yet it is paradoxically profound. I love how Diego in “Marry Me” becomes the vehicle for us to know Kika’s story and to discover the fleeting yet powerful nature of love. On the other hand, stories like “Faithless” and “Saving Up” reveal that, while love is tenuous and often fleeting, memories are not. We don’t forget, even if we wanted to, and our memories roll around gathering dust and detritus, or they may smooth over and lose their thorns over time. We carry them with us, and they can haunt us, or make us smile. I like the irony, too, of a comatose woman remembering.

Finally, “The Heavens Weep for Us” is pure poetry. As tragic as it is, in some ways it sums up some of the themes in Reyna’s stories. I read it as a meditation on domestic violence, which sometimes, ironically, is the darkest side of love’s tenuous nature. We are held together by so little, and yet emotionally it is all so big. There is no divine intervention here, and that is exactly the point. It is also a challenge to all of us to make different choices, and to cease being silent in the face of brutality.

I could go on. Thelma Reyna’s stories are excellent, and I enjoyed reading every word.  While they are often filled with pain, they speak to the human spirit—not as some larger-than-life powerful force (which is the common analogy), but as something vulnerable, precious, delicate, and yet persevering. The lesson is revelatory and yet eerily familiar, for if there was anything I took from Thelma Reyna’s Creative Writing class thirty years ago, it is that we are vulnerable, precious, delicate, and persevering. These are the qualities that make us human.

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*  Dr. Kelley is the author of several books, among them Race Rebels, Hammer and Hoe, and most recently Freedom Dreams.  His biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,  was published by Simon and Schuster in 2009.  Dr. Kelley has taught at the University of Michigan, Columbia University, New York University, and is currently a professor at the University of Southern California.

[This Introduction was published in slightly different form in The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories in 2009.]