The Color of Family Read online

  Before Agnes knew it, they were at a crossroads, it seemed. She looked up at the street sign to see that it read NORTH AVENUE. It must have been the same street they were on just miles back, but out of the window the cityscape had changed to reveal somewhat better houses, even a lovely church with steeple and a funeral home right across from it that was white and bright enough to make death seem like nothing to be feared. “Driver, are we here?”

  “Well, this is West Baltimore, the part of town where she lives. We’re gonna be there in a few minutes; her house is on this road up here that we’re gonna turn onto,” he said as he sat waiting for the light to change.

  As they moved forward, Agnes suddenly felt forty-five years younger, cowering with the same insecurities that put her in the arms of Emeril, the only boy, besides Douglas Cannon, who ever bothered to look beyond the base words that had swirled around New Orleans about her. And what would she say to Antonia who, she knew, was certain to still see her as the Agnes of un-Godly ways? When she looked up at the passing street sign, it said Garrison Boulevard, and underneath the sign was the bawdiest prostitute she’d ever seen outside of Bourbon Street. Agnes’s heart quickened as the woman sized up the limousine. She could just see the headlines: DRIVER OF PIANIST’S MOM PROPOSITIONED BY STREETWALKER. Holy cow, she thought, this is all I need. But she breathed lighter again when the woman was distracted by a more likely payoff, and she walked to a car stopped at the traffic light, then opened her coat to display her bare nakedness. This is the street? she thought. This couldn’t be the street, and she wrung her hands. And when the limousine pulled to a stop beside the curb, she couldn’t move.

  “This is it, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” she said as she waited for him to come around and open her door. As she stepped from the car, she said, “I may be a little while. I’m not sure.”

  “That’s fine, ma’am. I’ll be here.”

  Agnes climbed the three stairs that led her to a long path that emptied at the foot of a wide set of porch steps. So she walked the path like a woman in no hurry. This place, this walk, these trees standing tall on each side of the walk to announce this grand house took her back to New Orleans; and it was like New Orleans in every way, with this splendor of a home tucked away from a boulevard where bare-butt prostitutes, covered up with just a coat, romped up and down. She couldn’t be away from New Orleans for a day without something reminding her of it. She was a daughter of the Big Easy with every drop of blood in her body, and the smells, sounds, the laissez les bon temps rouler spirit of the city brought about a melancholic fear-of-distance-from-it that wouldn’t be shaken until she was back there. Who knew Baltimore was this colorful, she thought, as she recalled that even in the days when Clayton lived here when he was in school at the Peabody Conservatory, she’d never traveled outside of the general downtown area when she came for visits. And she knew that it must have been this taste of back home that had brought Antonia to this place.

  She rang the doorbell twice before she heard Antonia shuffling through the hall to answer it. And when the door opened, Agnes stood with her fur slung dramatically around her shoulders saying, “Antonia, do you remember me? I’m—”

  “I know who you are. Why did it take you so long?”

  “I’ve been a little busy.”

  Antonia took Agnes in with every sense she had, then said, her tone laden with bitter sarcasm, “Well, I’m glad that whatever it took you to finish is finally done after forty years.”

  “May I come in, cher?” Agnes inquired, holding herself so uncomfortably she felt positively tortured.

  “Yes, I think you should. And don’t give me that cher nonsense. This is not New Orleans.”

  Agnes stepped into the front hall and looked around at its grandeur. And Antonia had it fixed up so nice, she thought, with a Louis XIV knock-off fainting couch in just the right place underneath the staircase. “This is lovely,” she said as Antonia guided her into the living room where she went over and sat on the sofa. Antonia, though, sat in the chair on the other side of the coffee table, facing Agnes.

  “So Antonia Racine…well, Jackson now,” Agnes said, as if their relationship had ever been such that this type of small-talk was appropriate. “So you went and married Jackson, huh?”

  “Yes I did, Agnes, in spite of the fact that his mother was actually simple-minded enough to name him Jackson Jackson,” Antonia said without warmth.

  “She gave him some kind of funny middle name, too, didn’t she?”

  “Jackson Junior Jackson.”

  “Yeah,” Agnes said, laughing. “That mother-in-law of yours sure was eccentric, and that’s puttin’ it mighty kindly.”

  Antonia looked at her and slid her mouth sideways before saying, “Agnes, she’s only considered eccentric in New Orleans. Any other part of the world they’d call her what she was—touched. But then again, who’s to say. After all, nearly everybody down there called me fou-fou Antonia since I can remember just because I carried my cat around in a basket all the time. And there are some who still think I’m fou-fou. Well, we’ll just see how fou-fou I really am.” Antonia was deadpan in a way that made it difficult to tell if this were a part of some sort of latent dry humor, or if it were simply some mean-spirited statement of fact-according-to-Antonia.

  “So how is Jackson, Antonia?”

  “Not as alive as he once was, but not as dead as he could be.” There was nothing that could be heard in her flatness that would indicate whether her sarcasm was meant to shock in jest or wound with a jab.

  “I see,” Agnes said nervously.

  “Listen, Agnes, I know you didn’t come here to talk about my husband’s ridiculous name or about what a character his mother was. What do you want? Have you finally decided to respond to my letters?”

  “Antonia, I want to ask you what you think you know.”

  Before she answered, she got up and said, “I’ll be right back, Agnes,” and she left the room, seemingly for some urgent matter. When she came back in less than a half minute, there was a lump in her pocket that wasn’t there when she left. She entered talking. “I don’t think I know anything!” she said defensively. “I know that your son is my brother’s boy and I told you in the letters why I know it’s so. And for the first time since the day you brought him into this world, I’m going to make you accountable for the decisions you’ve made since that day to cover up his race and deny my brother. I have told you in my letters over all these years that I know that the timing was never right.

  “That baby was born a full month and a half earlier than it would have been if he had been Douglas’s. I told you, I was watching you and I know the exact day you and Douglas had sex for the first time. You brought him to the same place where you lay with my brother down in the Garden District when you were babysitting for that little boy and girl, and I know ’cause I saw you take him in there and then I stood underneath the window while you two went at it.” Antonia hung her head as if embarrassed by such voyeurism, then said, “Anyway, I saw you. And I’m telling you, it does not add up. And the only thing more amazing than you thinking you could get away with it, Agnes Cannon, was Douglas actually believing that that baby was his, which could easily make him the stupidest man ever to be born in the state of Louisiana—and that takes some doing.”

  Antonia shifted where she sat to reposition the lump in her pocket. “Agnes, I’m not stupid. I knew about you and Emeril when you two thought you were being so careful. I tried to stop my brother. You’re just not the kind of woman who’s worth a man risking his life for. Do you remember that day when you met Emeril at the Dupreses’ house for a romp and somebody rang on the doorbell like crazy?” Antonia paused as if she was going to give Agnes a chance to answer, but she didn’t as she continued, “Well, I was hiding underneath the willow tree when you came up, and that was me who rang the bell that day, but you know that.” Antonia stood up to pace. It wasn’t working, because it was clear as she held herself in a clench that went from her
jaw on down that her annoyance was beginning to peak into anger when she said, “But when I saw that child once he started making a name for himself as a concert pianist, I paid real close attention because he started looking more and more like his father. And I’ll tell you, he looks as white as any white man I’ve ever seen, but I still know he’s black. I still know he’s kin.”

  Agnes was left with nothing to say, and as she looked off to the side, she wasn’t sure if she was gathering thoughts or tears, or both. And then her mind wandered back to New Orleans, and the oppressively hot summer days when the air was as thick as Louisiana swamp water. She thought of the front porch of Antonia’s and Emeril’s house where Antonia would sit in the summer afternoons, drinking lemonade and patching clothes with one eye and watching her suspiciously with the other, as she passed by from any one of her rendezvous with Emeril. The most bizarre and out-of-the-blue thought she had, though, was of the little half-wit from next door to the Dupreses’ who, on his daily journeys from yard to yard to eat spoonfuls of dirt, almost caught her many times sneaking behind the house.

  “But he’s not your kin, Antonia,” Agnes finally said, nervously, but strongly, as if her lapse into silence hadn’t happened. And even though she was just barely able to look Antonia in the eye as she said it, she had to look away when she continued, “I would have loved to have been left with a part of Emeril when he died and I would love nothing more than for Clayton to be Emeril’s boy, but he’s not, Antonia.”

  “Agnes,” Antonia replied while she wrung her hands furiously, “don’t you think I know that you have every reason in the world to lie to me. Look, Agnes, I don’t want to make trouble. I just want you two to do right by my brother’s name and memory. Now, something drew Clayton back here to Baltimore. I never did anything in the way of trying to contact him when he was in school down at Peabody, mostly because he would have considered my words to be the ranting of a lunatic after everything you’ve filled his mind with. He wouldn’t have believed me, and honestly, I just might have made him more resistant to the truth when it did come. But let me tell you, hardly a day went by when I didn’t want to just get in my car and go down there and tell him straight out what I thought. So now, if you don’t do something to set this right, Agnes, I’ll have to, because right is right, and blood is blood. Now, I guess you figured you lucked out when my brother died. You were able to have your little walk on the wild side, then settle into a well-to-do life with your own kind who was none the wiser that you had laid with a black man. Well, that’s fine, but your lies have caught up to you, Agnes. You’ve got to come clean.”

  Agnes sputtered incredulously. “Don’t you dare make it seem like that, Antonia Racine! I loved your brother. Still do. I went to our special place behind the Dupreses’ house for days, just waitin’ for him to come, but he never came. When I found out he was dead, it was like to kill me. And you could have told me, Antonia. You saw me the day after he died and you never said a word. The worst part of it all is that I couldn’t even grieve right for the only man I ever loved.”

  “You got over him fast enough. A month and a half later you were marrying Douglas Cannon.”

  “A man I didn’t love, but the times were what they were, Antonia, and livin’ the way I was livin’ a girl like me wouldn’t have stood a chance to get married. I thought Douglas was gonna be the best I could ever hope to do after Emeril died. And you know, I never remarried after Douglas died. Antonia, why are you doin’ this? And what if what you’re saying is right, that Clayton is Emeril’s son and therefore a black man? Can’t you see that he has done more than Emeril could have ever hoped for himself? So what if the world was unaware that he was black? He would know it. I would know it. You would know it. Even Emeril himself would tell you that bein’ a black man never got him anywhere. Bein’ a black man is why the ambulance took so long and why he died. I only came here to ask that you stop this and stop doing more harm to your brother’s name by saying these things about Clayton being his son, because it’s just not true.”

  “I’m sorry, but I won’t leave this alone until you admit the truth. Emeril was the only brother I had. For God’s sake, he was my twin! We shared a womb together and a life together until the rules of bigotry took him from me. It was just the two of us and now he’s gone. I want the world to know the kind of man that Emeril Racine produced.”

  Agnes sat for a moment before saying, “Antonia.” Hesitating for a few seconds, she wrestled with the decision whether or not to speak her thoughts, then she continued. “Antonia, is it money you want? Because if it is, I can try to help you out.”

  Antonia’s face fell so far in what seemed to be a concoction of disbelief and pure fury that she looked as if she could have exhaled fire. Slowly and regally, as was her way, she leaned forward in her chair in a gesture that was so menacing and unpredictable that it made Agnes draw in what could have been her last breath. Shaking with angry tremors, Antonia said, “If I were less than the lady my mother raised me to be, I would drop-kick your wrinkled white-cracker butt back to New Orleans this very instant. This is not about money. Never has been. I have money, probably more than you. This is about love and pride for my brother, something it seems you never had. Now, I would like you to leave my home.”

  “Antonia, please. I didn’t mean to insult you, cher. I’m so truly sorry. It’s just that this is very hard for me, these accusations you’ve been writing me with. I just don’t know how else to handle this.”

  Antonia said not one word. She went to the door, opened it, and stood. Stiffly she stood, not blinking, not moving.

  With a humiliated shuffle, her head lowered, Agnes submitted to Antonia’s demand and left. And when Antonia closed the door determinedly, Agnes was left with nothing else to do but descend the porch steps and walk the long path made longer in her mind with the heartbreaking feeling that she was losing Emeril all over again.

  CHAPTER

  5

  After Agnes left, Antonia spent most of the evening and the better balance of the next day dissecting every word, facial expression, and eye movement of Agnes’s visit. Antonia was more convinced than ever that she finally had proof to take to Aaron that would convince him. And as she took her sink-bath in the middle of the afternoon preparing to take him the evidence of things he could not see and therefore not believe, she remembered that he had always been a doubter. Aaron was the child who always needed proof that anything was real. Even his belief in Santa Claus, Antonia recalled with a faint smile as she lifted her arm and smeared on deodorant, lasted only until he was six. Yet for three years after he’d let Santa go for lack of proof, Aaron let her hang on to the miracle that he still believed. It amazed her that he could even believe in God, she thought as she slipped on her trousers and zipped herself into them. Or was he biding his time, she wondered, before telling her that the missing physical proof could not stretch his belief to a place like heaven? And that was fine, she thought, because she remembered those months after Emeril died when heaven, that place where life is lived after death, was an abstraction that was no soothing balm for her heartache; and so she couldn’t believe. She couldn’t believe until Emeril’s son was born, and so she could again look beyond the physical world to the place that would always ease her sick soul. The birth of one man’s son had fanned that which had been diminished by death to a mere flicker of faith, into a burning bush. So now she was dressed and going out the door, hell-bound for the television station, ready to save her son from his cynicism.

  Antonia was walking through the doors of Channel Eleven by 4:15. She went to the young lady behind the desk and smiled until the woman ended her call. Ordinarily, Antonia knew her name well enough, but with everything swirling in her head the way it was, she simply said, “Hello, young lady, do you remember me?”

  “I certainly do, Mrs. Jackson. How’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been just wonderful, and getting better by the minute,” Antonia said with the slyest grin. “But right now I’m here
to see my son. Is he around?”

  “He sure is. Does he know you’re coming? Because he usually tells me when he’s expecting someone, and he didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “Oh no, he doesn’t. This is a surprise.”

  “Well, how nice. Just have a seat and I’ll get him. He’s around the newsroom somewhere, I’m sure.”

  Antonia went to the comfortable-looking chair that had been deceptive in its appearance, which she discovered once she sat. Firm and bouncy. No comfort in that. She shifted this way and that, slouchy then straight-backed, trying to settle into some semblance of ease, but it was not to be, not in this chair. So she sat upright and crossed her right leg over her left, then dangled her board-flat shoe on her toes. She glanced over at the receptionist, for no particular reason, unintentionally prompting the woman to give Antonia an update.

  “He’ll be right out, Mrs. Jackson.”

  “Oh, thank you. It’s really no rush at all.” And just as Antonia said that, her attention was snatched away from the woman by the opening of a door.

  Aaron let the door drift closed behind him as he moved toward Antonia with all the verve of a doomed man. When he got to where she sat, all he could do was stare blankly at her, seemingly unable to breathe or blink or move hurriedly. Quietly, with his rightful perturbation and a barely perceptible low-grade fear amazingly under control, he said, “Ma, why are you here?”