The Color of Family Read online

  “Well, come on in,” she ordered them. “Don’t just stand out there. Come on in for Sunday dinner.”

  They walked into the front hall, each one with steps more halting than the other’s. But it was Aaron who guided the whole group into the living room. He took the three steps down and crossed the room to sit on the couch against the wall. But when he saw his mother and father just standing there at the top of the steps as if waiting for something more formal to bring them to sit, he prompted, “Well come on down and sit. Don’t just stand there.”

  “Yeah, don’t just stand there, Ma, Poppa,” Ellen said, descending the steps herself. “You don’t need to be invited to sit down.”

  Junior sat down next to Aaron, looking with expectancy at Antonia. And by his example, it seemed, Antonia slid past Aaron to sit next to her husband.

  Ellen crossed the room and sat in the chair on the side of the coffee table. She slid off her little ballet slipper house shoe and rubbed her foot intensely, back and forth, on the carpet for a good scratch. “What is it you say, Ma, about when your foot itches?”

  “It means you’re going on strange land,” Antonia answered.

  “I think it means you need to wash your feet,” Aaron said as he plucked and dipped a piece of broccoli from the platter Rick was placing in the middle of the coffee table.

  Rick laughed as he stood up.

  Reacting to the encouragement, Aaron said, “It is funny, isn’t it? And true, too.”

  And by now, the rest of the room was having itself a healthy chuckle at Aaron’s humor when Ellen, with her laughing tears welling in the corners of her eyes, said, “Aaron, you are so nuts. It does not mean my feet need washing.”

  “Well, that’s what it sounds like to me,” Aaron said, taking her in with eyes he’d forced to become sober, humorless, as a part of his gag.

  Ellen laughed her way down to a comforting simmer, then reached over and took her brother’s hand. “See, this is what I’m talking about. Us getting together every Sunday and doing just this.”

  “Just what?” Junior asked.

  “You know, having fun with the laughs and the jokes. This is fun!”

  “Ellie, we’ve laughed and had fun before. What is it you think we do, get together and discuss all the troubles of the world?” Aaron said, looking with a wrinkled forehead at his sister. “Besides, if we haven’t had fun before, we’d be one miserable group of people calling itself a family.”

  “I know we have, Aaron. We’ve just never done it on any traditional day like today. Like Sunday dinner.”

  “So, is that what this is about?” Antonia asked once she finished crunching a baby carrot. This is about starting a family tradition?”

  “Yes, Ma, it is. We’ve never had a family tradition.”

  “Sure we have,” Antonia replied. “What about Thanksgiving? What about Christmas?”

  “Only twice a year, Ma? Two days when we’re supposed to, almost by law, get together? They certainly don’t count. Anyway, I’m talking about a once a week where we can talk to each other about what happened in our lives the week before and what we hope will happen in the week to come.”

  “And that day can only be on Sunday?” Junior asked earnestly.

  “Yes, Poppa. Sunday is holy, and the most sincere day of the week.”

  “I see” was all Junior said sagely.

  “Well, Ellen, I’m hurt that you don’t think we have tradition in this family,” Antonia said with a certain mother’s sadness that seemed to come from someplace very deep and lined with guilt. “I mean, I’ve always tried to make Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners as nice as I could possibly make them.”

  “Thanksgiving always is, but Rick and I are in New York every Christmas with his family, so that doesn’t count for me. But then there’s New Year’s Eve. You and Poppa don’t even come over on New Year’s, but Aaron does.” Then she paused and remembered New Year’s just past and continued, “Except this past year when he took Maggie to Paris.”

  Aaron looked at his sister at first, then let his eyes drop to the floor saying, “Umh, yeah.”

  “What?” Ellen asked, wanting to understand the emotion behind his near-grunting response.

  “Nothing,” he said as his face seemed to have smoothed over the recollection of an unwanted memory.

  “Anyway, this is what this family needs. Some kind of tradition.”

  “All black families do this Sunday dinner thing, you know,” Rick said, as if it were a solid fact, as he dipped a piece of broccoli and ate it.

  Aaron took Rick in with narrowed eyes that clearly had far more behind them than their focused bafflement. “How do you figure all black families have Sunday dinner? I think we can deduce from just what’s been said here that at least one black family doesn’t, and we’re not alone.”

  “Well, most black families do it,” Rick said as he sat on the arm of Ellen’s chair. “I’m telling you that’s why I loved that movie Soul Food so much. Something as simple as taking the time to get together with all of your family at one place once a week can keep a family strong. That’s where family values are. Maybe the lack of Sunday dinner is the breakdown of the moral fiber of America.”

  Antonia’s face was set with the exactness of a woman about to defend her singed honor. “I think the moral fiber of this family has done just fine without dinner every Sunday,” she said. “You don’t turn out two children like Aaron and Ellen without a strong moral fiber.”

  “Oh, Ma, I wasn’t talking about this family at all when I said that,” Rick said, with more contrition than any man could offer up, finding himself having just insulted a mother. “I’m just saying that there are families out here that are weak and end up going astray, and maybe if they had some kind of tradition to cling to like Sunday dinner, then it could make them stronger. My family would certainly have been stronger with a tradition like that.” He reached over and took a handful of vegetables, munched a cauliflower floret, then continued, “I mean, my family’s done all right, and we’re strong enough, just like this family, but it could be better. That’s all Ellen’s trying to do with this new tradition of having dinner every Sunday. She’s trying to bring this baby into an even stronger family.”

  Antonia looked at Junior, who was staring at nothing, then she looked at Aaron whose raised eyebrows seemed to share her sentiment when she said, “I don’t know, Ellen, this is a sweet idea, and all, but how long will it last?”

  “What do you mean? It’ll last forever. We’ll do it forever. That’s what a tradition is all about, Ma.”

  “I know, but what I’m saying is that, it seems to me, you’re trying to turn this family into something it’s not. Something it’s never been. I’ve never been the kind of stand-all-day-in-the-kitchen-cooking-on-Sunday kind of mother, and I’m never going to be.” Then she looked with the impatience of a fed-up mother at Rick, let out a long breath, then continued, “Now, for all these years, we have been a strong family, in our way. That’s how every family exists, Ellie, in their way. And in our way we have had our traditions. They may not have happened every Sunday, but don’t you and Aaron remember how I taught both of you how to do the Second Line? And don’t you remember how we listened to my zydeco records and I taught the two of you all about it? That’s our tradition that we brought up from New Orleans, and I’ve given it to you two. So don’t sit over there and tell me that we don’t have tradition in this family, because we do, and we always have.”

  “Well, of course I remember that,” Aaron said. “I just don’t know why it stopped.”

  “It didn’t stop. You two just weren’t interested anymore,” Antonia replied. “There was just no time.”

  Faster than she thought a woman with a lap full of child could get to her feet, Ellen was standing, looking squarely at her mother and nearly yelling, not with anger but with definite passion, “Exactly! No time!” She reeled in her voice and softened her eyes on her mother when she continued, holding an imaginary umbrella over her hea
d, “I remember the Second Line.” Then she dipped and did a few steps to the perfection of her mother’s training. And when she came back from her second dip, she stood where she stopped and said, “But there was never any time. Sunday dinner would have given us that time.” She turned and shuffled from the room, uncertain of the future of her Sunday-dinner tradition. Wondering if tradition could indeed be found in its own way in every family. Mostly, though, she found a certain prickly discomfort in the conjecture of exactly what her son would one day think of his family.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Aaron walked into Ruth’s Chris Steak House, where his mother told him to meet her, and took off his sunglasses so that his eyes would adjust to the shock of the murky light in the room. As he looked around for her in the shadows of the restaurant, he wondered what she could possibly want now.

  Then he spotted what seemed to be the back of her head in a booth. He had started toward her when the hostess approached him, but before she could offer her assistance, he said, “Thanks, but I see who I’m here to meet.”

  The woman smiled coyly the way she might have blushed in the presence of a rock star, then said, “Okay, that’s fine.”

  When he got to his mother, she was pouring four packets of sugar, two in each hand, into a tall glass of iced tea. She looked up at him to find his disapproving face. “Don’t give me that look. In the summertime, you can drink this stuff with only a drop of sugar, because all you want it to do is cool yourself. In the wintertime, though, it’s a completely different thing. In the wintertime you know this stuff needs lots and lots of sugar.”

  “Whatever you say, Ma,” Aaron said as he slid into the booth to sit across from his mother. “I’m just amazed that all that sugar doesn’t lock your jaws shut.”

  Antonia only smiled as she crumpled the empty packets of sugar and set them aside. Then she took a sip of her tea, and said, “Well, ever since you were a little boy, you couldn’t stand sugar. You were the only child I ever knew who couldn’t even be bribed by a sweet treat.”

  “And nothing has changed. Sugar leaves a sour taste in my mouth,” Aaron said plainly as he picked up the menu and opened it. He let his eyes slide over it for a second or two, then looked at his mother and said, “You know I don’t have a lot of time. I’ve got to get to work. I told them that I’d be in late, but I can’t make it too late.”

  “Oh, I know. I’m not going to keep you. I just wanted to talk to you about what’s going to happen after I have lunch with Agnes.”

  Aaron looked at his mother questionably as he wondered what had happened between the night of the call from Agnes when he’d left her home and this day that made her think her lunch with Agnes would be more than lunch. So he took her in and smiled faintly, then said, “And what’s going to happen after you have lunch with Agnes?”

  “Well, Aaron, don’t be so naïve. The only reason this woman could possibly want to have lunch with me is to settle this whole thing. She’s ready to tell me that Clayton is Emeril’s son.”

  Or, Aaron thought behind his wry smile, Agnes is luring her to lunch for the purpose of having a restraining order placed against her, but instead he asked, “What makes you think so, Ma?”

  “Aaron, what else could it be?”

  The possibilities, as he thought of them, were endless, but the one his mind kept looping around to had to do with Agnes telling his mother to stop harassing her, or else. And the or else was too daunting to ponder, so he said, “I don’t know, Ma.”

  “Well, anyway, I wanted to talk to you to find out how you’re going to feel about our lives changing the way they’re going to. I mean with Ellen, there’s never any question for me with how she feels because she never misses an opportunity to tell me. But you,” she said as she stretched her hand across the table to touch his, “you have always been a quiet thinker. You don’t say much at all, but I know you think about so much, though you’ve never told me about it. But I know you must have been thinking something as far as all of this is concerned.”

  “Not really, Ma,” he said, fully aware that he was lying to his mother by virtue of never telling her for all these years how much he hated the very name of Clayton Cannon. He’d lied to her in the vaguest way possible—by omission.

  “Well, how are you going to feel about our family changing? I mean, it’s always just been me and Junior and you and Ellen. Now we’re going to be adding Clayton, his two boys and his wife. For the first time in our lives we’re going to have extended family right here in Baltimore, and on top of that, he’s famous. You mean to tell me that you’ve never thought about any of that?”

  “No, I haven’t, Ma” was all he said as he looked off to notice a group of four women who had come in and were smiling—actually, more like giggling—and whispering while pointing at him from their booth just across the room. So he smiled and nodded to acknowledge them and their adoration. And just as he’d always done in such a situation, he couldn’t help but let the thought trot across his mind to wonder if these white women would have even noticed him, much less bothered to speak in such an obsequious way, if he were just any old Aaron Jackson and not on television every day. He came to the same conclusion each time—of course they wouldn’t. He only remembered what he and his mother had been talking about when he heard her continuing with the matter at hand.

  “Well, I just thought you might be jealous, thinking that Clayton might come into my life and replace you, or something.”

  Aaron was suddenly completely present, those women be damned, as he took his mother in with eyes that were severely focused. It could not be possible, he thought, that she is only now thinking of the possibility of a jealousy he might have for Clayton. How did she think his ten-year-old self had regarded Clayton? How did she think the fifteen-year-old Aaron managed to maneuver through the cruelty of high school and the torture of a mother distracted by Clayton Cannon without a silent and internal rage exploding in him at the mere mention of the name Clayton, or even the simple word cannon in any context? And so now he didn’t know—could she really have been that checked-out for his entire life, or was that dark place where he’d always kept his torments really undetectable by the ordinary eye? But hers should have been a mother’s eye that could see what didn’t appear to be there.

  So he softened his eyes on her, smiled thinly and said, “Come on, Ma. Feeling replaced? That’s the feeling a little boy would have, not a grown man.”

  “Okay, well I was just making sure.” Antonia sipped her iced tea, then noticed the table of women who were still staring at Aaron. She looked back at Aaron and said, “You see those women over there making goo-goo eyes at you?”

  “Yeah, I saw them,” Aaron said quietly.

  “I’ll tell you, it’s just like having lunch with Billy Dee Williams the way women go wild over you.”

  “Ma, nobody’s going wild over anybody,” he said with a somewhat embarrassed chuckle. “You know, it happens. People recognize me.”

  “Yes, they do, and that’s because you’re such a good anchorman.”

  Just then, Aaron’s eyes came in contact with those of a man walking toward him, smiling with his hand stuck out, as if it were guiding him straight to Aaron.

  When he got to the table, he said, “Hey, man. You’re Aaron Jackson from the news. How you doin’, brother?”

  Aaron gave the man his hand for a shake, then replied, “I’m doing just fine, man. How’s it going?”

  “Yeah, it’s going real good, brother, real good. I watch you all the time, because you’re one of the few brothers on the news who’s not frontin’, you know, actin’ like you’re some black version of some white boy, or somethin’. You keep it real, brother, and that’s what we need out here—some positive brothers like yourself doing positive things, and still keepin’ it real.”

  Aaron smiled and said, “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

  “No problem, brother. Check it out, my name’s Roscoe, Roscoe Massey.”

  “It’
s nice to meet you, Roscoe. And this is my mother, Antonia Jackson,” Aaron said, pointing his hand at his mother.

  “Aw, man, this is sweet. This is real sweet,” Roscoe said as he beamed with some sort of pride and held his hand out for Antonia’s. “How you doin’, ma’am?”

  “I’m doing just fine, young man,” Antonia said as she shook Roscoe’s hand.

  “I know you must be proud, ’cause this is a good brother you’ve raised up here.”

  “Yes, he’s a good man. And it makes me even prouder to see people like you come up and treat him like royalty. I will never, ever get enough of that.”

  And Aaron knew she wouldn’t, so for as much as he wanted to get on with his day so that he could get in to work, he wanted Roscoe to stay there for just another minute and then another, to extend for as long as he could the star his mother saw in him through the sycophancy of strangers. Then, as if through telepathy, two of the four women made their way over to the table and stood behind Roscoe patiently. How did they know, he wondered, that I need the adulation to continue? How did they know that his mother should be made never to forget that her son was as outstanding, in his own way, as Clayton Cannon? So when Aaron craned his neck to look around Roscoe, he greeted the women.

  “Hi,” one of them giggled.

  “We were wondering if we could get your autograph,” the other one said.

  And that’s when he realized that they were young, really young, perhaps nineteen, maybe twenty. So he said, “Certainly.”

  They handed him a napkin that had the restaurant’s name emblazoned in the middle of it, and he took his pen from inside the pocket of his jacket and, with an illegible flourish, signed his name. He handed the napkin back to the first woman with a smile and took another napkin from the other woman and signed it. Handing it back to her, he said in a way in which he acknowledged that he owned the moment, “Thanks. You all have a good day, now.”