The Color of Family Read online

  The Color of Family

  A Novel

  Patricia Jones

  Contents

  Prologue

  Just inside the wrought-iron gate that wrung around the last…

  Chapter 1

  Antonia shrugged on her furry coat. That’s what she called…

  Chapter 2

  The waiting room was filled with the faded echoes of…

  Chapter 3

  It was nearly one in the afternoon by the time…

  Chapter 4

  The very next morning, dawn’s virginal light slid slyly through…

  Chapter 5

  After Agnes left, Antonia spent most of the evening and…

  Chapter 6

  Ellen chopped garlic with slow precision, and with the memory…

  Chapter 7

  Aaron walked into Ruth’s Chris Steak House, where his mother…

  Chapter 8

  Junior’s suits were flung formless across the bed as Antonia…

  Chapter 9

  Antonia took jerky, skittish steps, as she approached the bench…

  Chapter 10

  Ellen was stretched out on the sofa, staring at her…

  Chapter 11

  Aaron slid the chair from the table clutching its high…

  Chapter 12

  Clayton sat in the master’s throne at the dining room…

  Chapter 13

  This time, it was Clayton lying in wait for Antonia.

  Chapter 14

  Aaron was reading through pages of background information for the…

  Chapter 15

  Antonia had decided that she would wear her canary yellow…

  Chapter 16

  The restaurant seemed to be a living thing, Clayton thought,…

  Chapter 17

  A determined rain tapped at the window as if it…

  Chapter 18

  Aaron was at the computer in the newsroom writing his…

  Chapter 19

  “Give me a chance to get there,” Antonia snapped at…

  Chapter 20

  As Aaron went past a store inside the mall, he…

  Chapter 21

  Aaron could still feel the sense of Ellen’s baby in…

  Chapter 22

  That the boys were still asleep in this early morning…

  Chapter 23

  The first complication that Aaron found himself faced with after…

  Epilogue

  Antonia wondered if her first real memory of Agnes Cannon…

  Let’s Talk

  Tribute To Patricia, A Woman of Courage

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Patricia Jones

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Just inside the wrought-iron gate that wrung around the last house on the rue stood the only willow tree along the street. Its leaves dipped so low that they looked like the long slender fingers of a lady caressing the ground, making a canopy just right for hiding. It laid a dramatic drape in front of the Dupreses’ house, only one of the finest colored homes in New Orleans. Antonia sat beneath the tree’s canopy, where no one could see her but she could see all, sucking on crawfish and munching down pralines, both of which she shared with her old yellow cat that she carried everywhere in a yellow basket that was far older than she. And in the sleepiness of this New Orleans midsummer afternoon, she’d been passing the time eating and stroking and feeding Tippy, for the better half of an hour waiting to see what she’d suspected all along.

  She could hear her mother calling for her, from way down at the other end of the banquette, wanting to know where her crawfish had gone to. Antonia had cunningly stolen them from the sideboard next to the stove where they sat after her mother had boiled them for some étouffé, and then Antonia darted from the back door like a flash of lightning running for a rod. But she knew that the pilfered crawfish wasn’t the half of what had made her mother so cross. Antonia had wrapped those crawfish up in one of the family’s good linen napkins to get them out of the house surreptitiously in the pocket of her dress. Well, what was she to do, with the crawfish being just about her favorite food in the entire world, next to pralines? “Antonia Claire Racine, you get yourself back here with my crawfish, gal!” she had heard her mother yell. But Antonia had only taken a few—four or five or ten—just enough to beat back the craving that wouldn’t let her loose. Besides, there was no point in answering her mother’s angry calls, since she and Tippy were savoring the very last one.

  And anyway, she couldn’t get up now, even if she’d wanted her mother to find her. She was just about to find out the truth about her brother, once and for all, and in her green dress, just the right shade of green for blending into the boughs of a lazy willow, Antonia was not about to miss her opportunity; all she knew for sure, which was simply not enough, was that something was definitely askew. They say that twins have a connection when it comes to each other, that transcends the physical five senses, and that’s how Antonia knew that her twin, Emeril, was up to some kind of slyness. And his mischief was not just about some missing crawfish—of which she was certain he had taken a few before she’d snatched her stash and then gotten blamed for the whole missing lot. He was sneaking around town with that Agnes Marquette, and Antonia could only pray that he had not given his first time away to a woman who was most unworthy.

  The thought of Agnes making her brother a man wouldn’t have been so bad for Antonia if it were not for one thing: Agnes Marquette had more tracks on her than a field of freshly planted corn. And when a seventeen-year-old white girl in New Orleans in 1957 had a reputation so bad that it had snaked its way over to the colored side of town, well, it was about time that white girl started thinking about heading out of the city. Yes, old Agnes, with her hair as black as brand-new tar and her eyes as green as the money her family lacked was so well known by the boys, and not a few men, that she had been around the block and parked. This truth vexed Antonia far more than the fact that in the South of 1957, where a thick and intractable line separated Emeril from white women, Agnes’s whiteness put his life in a certain jeopardy.

  Antonia licked the remnant of praline she was munching from her fingers and looked at the wristwatch she’d just gotten last month for the seventeenth birthday she shared with Emeril. Still, though it was only a month old, it sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, even when it was wound to the end. Now, though, she believed it was keeping perfect time, since it was nearly three o’clock and she could hear Agnes’s heels tripping down the banquette, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Right on time. Every Tuesday and Thursday at three, Emeril would mysteriously slide away down the banquette headed for the Dupreses’ and then nearly an hour later, there was Agnes Marquette, her face as scarlet as a cut beet, her clothes loose, her hair flattened by wherever she’d lain, rushing by the Racine house as if a fire were nipping at her bottom to make the four o’five streetcar. And now here she comes, rushing to her swain for their afternoon of lust.

  Antonia’s heart quickened as Agnes pushed open the wrought-iron gate and clicked her way down the path leading to the front steps of the Dupreses’ house, her face bright with apparent expectation as she veered off and then disappeared behind the willow toward the back of the house. “Where’s she going?” Antonia whispered to Tippy. Just as she was about to get up from where she’d knelt to follow Agnes, she saw Emeril coming through the gate with a haste that said he just couldn’t wait. He followed Agnes’s trail around the side of the house to the back.

  What a puzzler this all was for Antonia. Yes, Emeril worked in the Dupreses’ house from time to time, fixing this and that, and old Mr. Dupres thought so highly of h
er twin brother that he gave him free run of the house with his own key when there wasn’t a soul at home. But would Emeril be so stupid as to risk the esteem of a colored man like Mr. Beau Dupres for a few moments of carnal pleasure with someone like Agnes Marquette? No, he just wouldn’t be that stupid. After all, everybody traipsed through everybody’s yard to get to one place or another. Maybe they went down to the cemetery, and this was the quickest path to where they would meet. That was it, she thought. They were most definitely doing it, and that thought would never be quiet in her mind, but at least they were doing it in the cemetery and not in the Dupreses’ house.

  So Antonia got old Tippy back in the basket and tucked the pralines in her pocket. Getting to her feet, she peeked from between the droopy boughs to make certain no one had spotted her and then followed the trail where Agnes and Emeril had gone. And when she reached the back of the house, she heard, but could not see, the ruckus of pure unadulterated covetousness that was bawdy and loud enough in its disgrace to make her keep her secrets forever from a man. But for now, she had to stop it. She had to throw cold water on these animals, and fear, the best cold water of all for this un-Godliness, would be a great big old ice bucketful for those two. Antonia ran around to the front of the house and up onto the Dupreses’ front porch and just as she was about to lean on the doorbell, someone called to her.

  “Fou-fou Antonia! Hey, what you doin’ there, cher? Don’t you know they ain’t home right now. Why it’s the middle of the day, fou-fou Antonia. What ya thinkin’? And what ya want with them anyways?” It was Jackson Junior Jackson, whom she always called Junior, since to think of him as Jackson Jackson was simply too much to take even in New Orleans. Junior was the bane and pain of her life, but he could stop her heart with just one look.

  “It’s none of your business why I’m here, Junior Jackson. I’m mindin’ my business and leavin’ yours alone,” she said with a flirty flit of her head. Then she leaned on that doorbell anyway and took off down the steps and through the gate. She looped her arm inside Junior’s and walked in a haste that forced him to pick up his pace.

  “Hey, what’s the rush, there, cher?”

  “Never mind, Junior. Like I said, it ain’t none of your business.”

  Tippy let out a roar of a meow meant only for Junior, which prompted him to say, “Well, you better tell that old yella cat of yours to stop lookin’ at me like he’s gonna scratch out my eyes.”

  And just then, Antonia heard her brother yelling up the street, “Antonia? Antonia what do you want?”

  “Isn’t that your brother down there on the Dupreses’ porch, Antonia? He’s calling you,” Junior said, trying to slow down.

  But she quickened her pace nearly to a trot now, and said, as if she hadn’t heard Junior, “Never you mind about Tippy, and she’s a she, not a he.”

  “Don’t you hear your brother?”

  “I don’t hear nothin’ Junior. I think you must be hearin’ things,” she said as her name rang down the rue once again. She clutched tighter to Junior’s arm and pulled him into a yard and made him hide with her behind a bush. Then she whispered, “Junior, I’m tryin’ to keep my brother from makin’ the worst mistake and ruinin’ his life forever. Besides, I’m in the right, because the Bible says, Keep thy brother from sin and danger.” Antonia stared Junior down with the firmness of what she believed with everything in her will to be divine words.

  Junior squinted his eyes to ponder the supposed quote, then said, “Antonia, the Bible don’t say nothin’ like that. What’re you talkin’ about?”

  Antonia didn’t hear her name anymore, so she got to her feet, then tugged Junior to his feet. She threaded her arm inside his again and pulled him along with an urgent gait, saying, “Just keep walkin’, Junior. Just keep on walkin’.”

  CHAPTER

  1

  Antonia shrugged on her furry coat. That’s what she called it, not a fur coat, but a furry coat, because to her that made it sound truer to its vanity. But she wore it because it was warm and just right for a day like this when the wind and cold seemed to be an entity with heart, mind, and spirit. She hooked the coat closed all the way down to her knees, gathered up the Thermos of hot chocolate with one hand, and then wrapped that arm around the Tupperware container of fresh muffins she’d just gotten from her weekly food shopping at the Giant. Those girls out there on the boulevard need to eat something on a day like today, she thought as she positioned the container more comfortably in the crook of her arm. Antonia just knew they couldn’t possibly be eating right and keeping themselves up, given their sleep-around life. They had been run off of Baltimore Street and somehow found their way to Garrison Boulevard, landing practically on her doorstep. She’d fed them every now and then, ever since the day she saw the first of these wayward strollers two years past shivering on the corner nearly in her bare bottom.

  With her free hand, she opened the front door, fixed the latch so as not to lock herself out, then stepped across the threshold, closing it behind her. She hurried down the porch steps and along the pathway to the street with a quick short gait that made her teeter from side to side.

  When she got to the end of the walk, she looked one way, then the other. “They were just out here,” she mumbled to herself. Then she looked across the street as the number nineteen bus passed by, and there was Jackie. So she waved her hand in the air and yelled, “Jackie, honey.” And when the woman looked over to where she stood waving, Antonia descended the three steps to the curb and said, “Come on over here, honey. I’ve got something for y’all.”

  Jackie darted across the street as fast as she could in four-inch-high stilettos and a stretched-on swath of fabric that was actually a skirt. When she got to the sidewalk, she trotted over to Antonia with an innocence that, in that moment, seemed to peek out from behind the naughty-girl business of fulfilling the carnal pleasures of men. And almost like a giddy girl who’d just seen her mother, she asked, “How’re you, Miss Antonia?”

  “I’m fine, honey. Now listen, I brought you some muffins here and a Thermos of hot chocolate.” She gave them to Jackie, noticing the girl had no gloves covering her shivering hands. So she scolded, “Where are your gloves, child? You need to have some gloves on your hands or something.”

  “I’ve got pockets, Miss Antonia. I’ll be all right.” She opened a corner of the container that held the muffins, took in their aroma, and smiled. “Aw, man, Miss Antonia. Blueberry muffins. This is so nice of you.”

  “Well, you take them and eat them. Share them with the other girls if they’re around. And keep yourself warm with the hot chocolate.” Antonia regarded Jackie for a few seconds with the heartbroken eyes of a mother. She put her own gloveless hands in her pockets, then said, “Now, you know I don’t like what you girls are doing out here. You know that. The Bible says that your body is where the Lord lives, you know. But I brought you those muffins and hot chocolate because you’ve got to keep yourselves up, and keep yourselves warm. And try to stay safe.”

  “I know, Miss Antonia. You tell us that all the time.” Jackie pinched off a piece of muffin and popped it into her mouth, then said, “But you know, Monique went on back downtown. She said it was just too weird being up here near you, since you was her fifth-grade teacher, and all. So it’s just me and Gina, but we’ll be all right, Miss Antonia. And you know I’m gonna be okay long as I have this,” Jackie said as she patted the pocket of her short, some-sort-of-fur, jacket.

  Antonia’s mind left Jackie as she stood there thinking about Monique and how it was such a futile exercise, the business of wondering what a child might grow to be. When she thought about the bright-eyed, interested child she taught and the woman that child grew to be, it was anybody’s guess what happened between those two points that brought her life to prostitution along Garrison Boulevard. And so as Jackie stared into her distracted eyes with puzzlement, Antonia merely hoped that the lost woman would one day find her way back to the promise of her girlhood; and she offered up an in
stant prayer in thanks for her daughter, Ellen.

  “Yeah, well,” Antonia said, “that switchblade isn’t always going to protect you. You just be careful.” And she turned to go back to the warmth of her home. A home, she thought, the like of which these poor lost girls may never know. Bless their hearts. Over her shoulder, she added, “I’ll see you later. If you’re still out here, I’ll bring you some pork chops from dinner. When you’re finished with the container and the Thermos just bring them back up to the house.”

  “Okay, Miss Antonia. And thank you again. You’re our guardian angel, that’s what you are.”

  “Well, just remember that this old guardian angel can only do but so much,” she said as she climbed the three steps to the pathway.

  “Oh, and Miss Antonia? By the way, what the Bible says is: ‘Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?’ It’s from Corinthians one, chapter three,” Jackie said, grinning with a certain pride.

  “It’s the same thing,” Antonia said with a thin smile of relief, believing that if Jackie had such an intimacy with the Scriptures, then just maybe that’s what she held on to to save her life in the abysmal world in which she lived. “And you need to remember that.” Then Antonia went on her way at a clip down the grand path stretched out before her.

  When she got back into the front hallway, she took off her furry and slung it across the settee. She went straight to the living room to finish the work she’d left when she went out food shopping. Taking the chair by both of its arms, she pushed it in a slow tango across the room, struggling as its feet caught against the carpet. It didn’t take her as long as she thought it might to get it the last few inches to the corner by the window so that it could be with its twin, which she had inched there just before she went off to the Giant. It saves money, she reasoned to herself each and every time she rearranged the furniture while her husband, Junior, was away, since reading the paper in either of those chairs by that window in the middle of the day wouldn’t require even a speck of lamplight. She huffed and puffed, tripping over her own legs and the chair’s, until she and the chair reached the corner. Then she took two steps back and studied her choice. Smiling with pride, she looked over her shoulder to the place from where it had come. At any other time of the year, when Junior wasn’t away, the chairs sat together with a lamp table between them just in front of the couch on the other side of the coffee table, pretentiously waiting for someone to sit for tea or parlor talk. Not very useful by her estimation. She and Junior never drank tea, never even bought it. And they certainly didn’t entertain enough, she thought, to justify having two chairs and a couch waiting just for small-talk parties. But that’s where Junior wanted the seats and lamp table—so that’s the way it stayed. Most of the time.