The Color of Family Read online

  “Ma, we’re here,” a man’s voice boomed from the front hall, snatching her from contemplation over the furniture.

  When she hurried with her arthritic shuffle into the hall and found her son Aaron standing there, she could see her daughter Ellen, a perfectly fine name that Ellen liked to shorten to Ellie, hovering behind him. Antonia noted in the deep-cut lines in Ellen’s forehead and her frowning lips, that she was none too pleased to be there, but Antonia went against every emotion that made her a mother and decided to ignore her daughter’s annoyance instead of asking what was wrong. She’d soon show Ellen that coming over would most likely be the most sensible thing she’d do all day. And as Ellen stepped out from behind Aaron, Antonia was stunned into a gape-mouthed stare by her daughter’s belly, which had grown fuller with Antonia’s first grandchild seemingly overnight.

  But Aaron, standing between them, held out the Thermos and his mother’s Tupperware. “The woman out there asked me to give this to you, Ma.” And after he put them in her hands, he gave her a questioning look and said, “Everybody else in this neighborhood is trying to get these women to go away, and you’re feeding them. Ma, why do you keep feeding them?”

  “Because somebody has to,” she said dismissively as she moved around him. “Besides, no matter what their sins are they have to eat, don’t they?” So when she finally made her way to where Ellen stood, she reached out to touch the miracle. “Oh my, Ellen!” she exclaimed. “Will you look at this? This baby sure has grown so nicely.”

  “Ma, what is this about?” Ellen said without acknowledging a grandmother’s pride. “I’m between patients and I don’t have long.” Her voice was saturated with impatience.

  “Momma, I’ve got a meeting with my producer that I can’t miss. But you made it sound so important.”

  “I know you’re both busy, and bless your hearts for coming right over. It’s good to have such attentive children in my old age. Why I called you here is important.” Antonia walked back into the living room, and she heard her children follow.

  But Ellen stopped before she could come fully into the room, being as preoccupied as she was with matters other than her mother’s reasons for calling them there. She looked over at the sofa where the piano once stood, and then over to the piano where the sofa, coffee table and two chairs once stood, and her jaw dropped on its own. She put both hands on her belly as if to keep her baby still while the laughter gurgled up from her depth. “Did you help her do this again?” she asked her brother.

  “You mean this furniture? Of course I did. You know I always do,” he said in a near whisper to his sister, as if Antonia couldn’t hear a word. “You know this is what she does when Poppa goes out of town.”

  “Ma, when is Poppa coming back from New Orleans?” Ellen asked.

  “Oh, some time on Sunday. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. All this furniture, even the stuff in the dining room and the bedroom and the breakfast room will be back to the way he likes it by the time he gets back. I just like to have my home set up the way I really like it for a time. This is the way I compromise, Ellen. It doesn’t hurt a soul, and it lets me feel like this is my home too.”

  “Yeah, well what are you going to do when Poppa retires from the board down at Tulane? He won’t be traveling back and forth so much. You have to face the fact, Ma, that one of these days you’re going to be stuck forever with the furniture the way Poppa likes it without any opportunity whatsoever to change it around,” Ellen said as if she were giving her mother a thought she’d never before had to ponder. “And besides, one of these days all your furniture moving is going to take its toll on Aaron’s back.”

  “Not to mention her own,” Aaron said. “You should have seen her. And she obviously did more moving after I left, because I didn’t put those two chairs over by that window.”

  Ellen pressed her lips together so that they curled up on each end. Then she blew out a sigh and said, “Anyway, I guess we didn’t come all the way over here to talk about the way you move furniture around behind Poppa’s back. What’s this all about, Ma?”

  “Just follow me,” Antonia said, stepping around an awkwardly placed magazine rack. When she opened the doors to the dining room, she first made certain they were right there behind her before stepping aside with a dramatic show-girl shuffle to let them see for themselves; the only thing missing was the ta-da. And she couldn’t understand for anything why Aaron and Ellen, wide-eyed, were gawking like two people caught totally by surprise with nothing intelligible to say. “So, what do you think?” she prompted. “They’re all here, pretty much.”

  The dining room table was spread from corner to corner, edge to edge with newspaper photographs and articles about Clayton Cannon, the concert pianist that Baltimore had claimed from New Orleans. Peeking through the yellowed, frayed edges was the rich cherrywood of the table Antonia Jackson brought from her childhood home in New Orleans to her married-woman home in Baltimore forty-two years before, when she was that much younger and still feeling like a new bride.

  What she had there, though, didn’t even begin to account for half of the clippings of the concert reviews Antonia had collected on Clayton Cannon over the years. She had friends all over the country sending them to her from wherever he’d played. It seemed that at least one newspaper from every state in the union was represented on that table. If Clayton Cannon was even as much as mentioned in passing in the last paragraph of an article, Antonia had it. And if his picture was in it, it was worth that much more, at least to her. She had them arranged chronologically, spanning his career from the very beginning as a ten-year-old Louisiana prodigy to his days at the Peabody Conservatory, right there in Baltimore, to the very first time he played Carnegie Hall, and every other music hall before and since. She even had the most recent one from the Sun papers, “A Day in the Life of the Piano Man,” written only three weeks before, after Clayton moved back to Baltimore from New York with his wife Susan, and his twin boys Noah and Luke. Twenty-three years it had been since he’d lived there. But Antonia made it the most important point in her life not to miss one second of his.

  Aaron finally spoke. “Ma, you’ve got these clippings spread clean across what you’ve always told us was the family’s most sacred heirloom. This is the only place in the house where we couldn’t even so much as rest a tissue when we were growing up.” Then he looked to Ellen as if she had the answers.

  “I’m about to do what I needed to do since the first day that boy moved here to Baltimore twenty-seven years ago,” Antonia responded, “that’s what this is about, and I want you two to take these, whichever ones you want, just in case something happens to me.”

  There were several seconds of meaningful silence in the room before Aaron spoke. He looked at one or two of the clips, then asked, “Ma, why are you still on this thing? I thought we had all this settled. I thought we had made it clear to you that Clayton Cannon is not your brother’s son.”

  “You didn’t make anything of the sort clear to me.” Antonia was immediately perturbed. “I know my blood, and that boy has my blood running all through him just as sure as you two do. That boy sitting down there in Harbor Court Towers, the prodigious musical genius brought up out of the great, albeit sometimes backward, yet always musical, state of Louisiana is your cousin. Emeril was my twin. I shared a womb with him and I would know more than anybody when a part of him is still living.”

  “Okay, Ma, that’s it. I don’t have time for this,” Ellen said. “You either stop this nonsense or, I swear to God, in the morning I will have you committed to Shepherd-Pratt. And I mean what I say.” And with that threat, Ellen stormed from the room and walked toward the hall with determined thumps to her measured steps.

  “Ellen, honey, please wait. Please just listen to me, sweetheart,” Antonia implored desperately. For as much as she knew how the mere mention of Clayton Cannon spiraled her daughter downward into her basest self, Antonia still couldn’t help herself. And she thought that without her self-imposed cont
rol, she’d be writing to Clayton Cannon constantly; maybe even sitting on the bench at the harbor every day waiting to catch a glimpse of him as he stepped from the front door of those elegant apartment towers. Of course, even now, it was difficult for her to admit to herself without the prickly heat of embarrassment that she’d actually done just that the day after reading that article on him in the Sun papers only three weeks ago. It was right there in plain print that he lived in Harbor Court Towers. It was as if fate had given her the go-ahead. Still, if Ellen only knew how hard she struggled against her temptations daily, maybe then she’d understand.

  She put the clips in her hand down on the table and followed her daughter into the hallway. She steeled herself against the pain of rejection and said, “Well, you go right on ahead and have me committed. But I’m doing this for you and that grandchild of mine you’re growing right there inside you. He or she has got a right to know their kin, don’t they? Knowing that that child’s great uncle is close to the finest pianists in the world should be that child’s birthright, and it will be as God is my witness!”

  Then, without waiting for Ellen’s response, Antonia took two more steps toward her daughter—but watched as she turned and walked out the door. “And I’ll tell you something else,” Antonia proclaimed, “I have the truth, and the Bible says ye who has the truth shall be free from the sins of the world!” Antonia’s love of quoting from the Bible had yet to leave her since the day it started when she was sixteen years old and carried with her the self-righteousness of having sat for one solid week to read it, book by book, gospel by gospel, chapter by chapter and psalm by psalm. But even though the quotes sounded nearly authentic, they were always her own skewed version of the real thing. She went back to Aaron in the dining room, who looked lost and somehow doubtful of something, and she smiled nonetheless eagerly. “There always comes a point where the children think they know more than the parent. At least you’ll listen to me.”

  “Ma, I’ll listen to you, but you have to listen to me, too. What you’re doing could affect all of us in a really bad way. We could all be investigated as deranged nuts. I could be taken completely off the air at the station and blackballed altogether in the news business. And Ellen, she’s just scared. You know, Ma, this whole thing could compromise her standing at the hospital. This kind of thing could get around all of Baltimore. You know this is a small town at its heart.” And in his voice was the crackling desperation one gets when trying to speak reason to the unreasonable.

  She wasn’t about to budge, though. She shoved two things at him. One was a newspaper photograph of Clayton Cannon standing in front of a sleek black piano and the other a snapshot of her brother. She said, “You can honestly tell me that you don’t see my brother through all that white? His white skin be damned, look at his eyes, and then look at Emeril’s and look at mine. Those are Emeril’s eyes. Those are my eyes.”

  Aaron obeyed his mother and without looking into the layers of her eyes, he only skimmed over them, saying, “Ma, I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again, I don’t. I want you to stop this now. You have no proof that he’s your brother’s son.”

  “The hell I don’t! His mother, that Agnes Cannon is a lying snake-in-the-grass. She’s made that boy believe all his life that his daddy is that part-Cajun-part-cracker Douglas Cannon. These pictures are all the proof I need.”

  “And I say you need more. Besides, that’s a pretty caustic accusation you’re making against Agnes Cannon, and Douglas Cannon, too, because you’re basically saying that he’s too stupid to know that a half-black child isn’t his.”

  Antonia looked sternly at Aaron through narrowed eyes, then said, “Let me tell you something that you’d better remember for the rest of your life. The dumbest woman can fool the smartest man any day of the week.”

  “Aw, Ma, come on,” Aaron said wearily.

  But Antonia was not about to argue this a second longer. She was not going to give up her effort to claim her nephew, and Aaron was never going to believe she was doing anything more than obsessing over her own delusion to keep a dead twin’s memory alive. “Are you going to take these things or not?”

  “Again, why do you want me to take them?”

  “Because I’m about to make my move and I want you to have the proof in case something happens to me. I don’t trust that Agnes Cannon. I believe she’d do anything to keep that boy from knowing he’s black.”

  As if he hadn’t even heard his mother’s paranoid ranting, Aaron asked, “What kind of move are you about to make, Ma?”

  “Why do you care? You think I’m crazy anyway,” she said, gathering the clips from the table.

  Aaron took the yellowing scraps from his mother and held her hand. He looked deeply into her eyes in a way that seemed filled with a sad farewell. “Momma, I’m really worried about you. Maybe you should see your doctor.”

  “Just take these and get on out of here. I don’t need a doctor, and you’ll see that when it turns out I’m telling the truth. Goodbye.” She pushed him into the living room and through it into the hallway. She pushed him all the way to the door.

  Aaron stopped and turned to face his mother. “Ma, I love you and I’ll do anything for you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I love you too. Good-bye,” she said, giving him the bum’s rush. Abruptly, her door was shut and bolted.

  She went immediately to her writing table that sat in front of her favorite chair in the entire house. She proceeded to write, writing faster than her mind could gather up the words. She stopped only to study, once more, a picture of her nephew whose eyes as round as marbles of green-speckled honey and head of curls that were just one gene away from kinky made him as much like her as his straight and pinched nose and wafer-thin lips made him a part of Agnes. Yet even though she and Agnes were displayed so prominently in him, he still looked like an all-American, full-blooded white man; just an ordinary white man who turned a deep shade of pink when he laughed too hard or had too much hard drink. Antonia and Emeril, in Clayton, had been completely subdued by Agnes. Damn that Agnes.

  Antonia’s pen moved across the page as if it were being guided by a much more powerful force than merely her will. It was anger. Anger in its purest. Antonia wasn’t going to sit by and abide by this betrayal of her brother a second longer. Over the years, Antonia had written letters to Agnes that varied in the levels of her wrath. They had gone unanswered year after year, after year, and Antonia had long grown tired of waiting. She wanted to know her nephew. She wanted to touch the only piece of her brother’s flesh left on earth. So she wrote:

  Agnes,

  I have written so many times I couldn’t tell you how many letters I’ve written if a gun were put to my head, and I often ask myself why I don’t just accept that you will never tell the truth, but I persist because Clayton and I are the only parts of my brother left here on earth. I have vacillated between offering you my kindness and offering you my red-hot rage in this matter, but now I am simply resolved. My brother has been dead for the same number of years Clayton has been alive, and before I die, we will settle this because…

  Then without warning, her pen just stopped moving, and her mind was forced to the very hour Emeril died. It happened only hours after the exact moment when Antonia knew for certain that Emeril, along with God and that Agnes Marquette, had created a life. It was a hot day in July, and she awoke with the pain of her monthly, but that was only second to the agony of the dream she’d forced herself to leave. Her sleep vision was of Agnes, skipping round and round the Dupreses’ willow carrying Antonia’s old yellow basket filled not with Tippy, but with fish. There were fish of all kinds, but mostly red snapper and one salmon with a big fishy smile. Agnes just skipped and skipped and smiled as big as that salmon with just as much guile. And Antonia remembered that, when she forced herself awake, she had the sprinting heart that could only be imposed by a nightmare, not a mere dream. This, she knew, had been a nightmare indeed, particularly since her mother’s old bayou wisdo
m believed, and thus made her believe, that a dream of fishes was the certain sign of a birth to come.

  So she jumped up and splashed herself with a bit of water, then dressed fast. She scooped Tippy up from where she lay curled lazily at the foot of Antonia’s bed and put her in the old yellow basket. As she scurried down the hall, past her brother’s empty room, headed for the back stairs that spilled into the kitchen, she heard her mother’s call.

  “Antonia,” her mother beckoned with distress. “Where’re you goin’? I’m gonna need you to go down and buy me some corn and tomatas. You done slept half the mornin’ away as it is, not to mention the day.”

  “All right, Momma,” she said without really heeding a word of her mother’s. “I’ll be right back, Momma. I gotta tell Emeril somethin’.”