“No, my lovely little January,” smiled Caprice as she pulled a small framed photograph. “That’s not what I’m here about. What I’m here about is this…”
Taking the black and white photo from the older woman’s hands, January was fascinated once more by the image of the mysterious black woman back in time; back in Italy.
“You’ve long wanted to know who Sicily was,” Caprice remarked bitterly. “I felt that now…a time when someone wants you dead for loving a man you obviously have no business loving...it’s the perfect time to tell you all about little miss Sicily.”
In the photo, the woman who looked exactly like Grace Jones was smiling radiantly, clutched in the arms of a handsome older Italian man. The sea was behind them and January could make out seagulls.
“This man in the photo with her, Caprice…who is he?”
“My father…”
~*~
Chen sat on the sofa as Daisy served up tea and dumplings made in the traditional holiday style their ancestors had made them in China—with silver dollars in them.
Between Daisy and Ling’s euphoric joy at seeing their mother freed from the room-curse, there was an unspoken conversation going on. The decision not to speak about the rape in front of Chen, but after two sips of tea and a few bites of Jiaozi, the mother brought it up.
“I felt stronger than I’ve ever felt that my daughters need me,” she said while staring at Ling Mae. “After all my life of being afraid, it kept coming to me that the two of you were inheriting my way of being enslaved by fear.”
“The last time we saw you—you told us to go away and not to believe in anything, mother.”
“That is true, Daisy, and that was meant. But what is it with you that you hide behind the face of a black girl; not letting your own beauty be shown with the wonderful voice nature gave you.”
Daisy’s mouth fell open. “How do you know that?”
“I know…because it was hearing your voice on the computer in my room that finally gave me the courage to break free. The song you were singing; your need to be heard. And, of course, I am the one who nicknamed you ‘Daisy.’ When I heard the song—I recognized your dilemma immediately.”
“No record company in America has ever gotten behind a Chinese singer, mother.”
“But don’t you see, my daughter—that is the dilemma of fear. People have convinced you that the world is just prejudiced and that is the way it is; they have convinced you that you can do nothing about it. But that is not true—your voice proves that you have some power. Your determination and your intelligence to write these songs; it proves that someday, someone Chinese will break down that door. But your fear comes from believing the things that this whole society has told you, my daughter…until that fear is the curse that keeps you locked away.”
“The songs are selling very well on the internet,” Daisy admitted. In fact, Tiger Holden had just helped her to get a contract with an indie label to release one of the songs as a mainstream single—provided her true image remain anonymous to the record company. Daisy told her mother, “I don’t see them being hits once people find out that I’m Chinese.”
Chen put down her tea in exasperation. Her daughter still wasn’t getting it. Chen said, “Stop believing that you will or won’t succeed, Dao Ming! Just have the courage to do what your spirit tells you…and do it! The day will cast sunlight where it may. But first, you must stop being afraid and stop believing in what everyone else believes…and just be.”
Honestly, Daisy tried to grasp her mother’s philosophy, but she just couldn’t dig it. Reality had shown her the world as it was—and that was her world.
Finally, Chen looked to Ling Mae. She said, “You aren’t the first woman to be violated in some way, Ling—and you won’t be the last. What is done is done, there’s no time for hating yourself or thinking that there is only one way to stand up in life. There are many ways to stand up in life. And that is what real women, strong women do—they stand themselves up.”
Tears filled Ling’s eyes as she realized that her mother leaving the confines of her father’s room was the greatest example of just that—a woman who had been down so long finally standing up. But Ling refused to make eye contact with Daisy, because she knew that her older sister was just being polite in front of their mother.
She knew that the rape had reawakened the bluesy angry part of Daisy that was Dao Ming. She knew that her sister was determined to find out who had raped her and that once Daisy knew who—he would pay.
“I would just like to see us all let go of the pain that has gone before,” Ling pleaded with a smile, changing the subject. “Daisy’s first single being released on an actual record label is like a new start for all of us. It doesn’t matter if America doesn’t know she’s Chinese. We know, and it’s like a good omen for our family—a chance at a new beginning.”
~*~
6 a.m.
House of Crowns, Georgia
As Adam Crown turned down the long hallway and through the doors of the cavernous media room in his family’s mansion, he found his parents seated before the giant screen television with a look of great sorrow as newscasters rehashed the family’s loss of Bliss Carrington Crown over and over again. They were sitting in the raised antique King and Queen chairs that he’d seen them hold court from all his life, their minds ticking away over how they would protect him, their son, Adam realized.
“Mom and dad…I’m so sorry,” he said. “I came as fast as I could. Bliss was a wonderful, wonderful person.”
“We’ve lost our grandbaby,” Queenie Crown broke out crying. “Somebody killed it!”
“I just spoke with the authorities,” Adam told them. “It was an accident; it wasn’t foul play. You both know about those treacherous twisting loops and overpasses at Spaghetti Junction. The autopsy…”
“You did it,” Queenie interrupted with her stare freezing on her son in mocked mortification.
She and Otis had rehearsed this scene for hours and now was the time to display their best acting. “You wanted a cavity so bad—you had Bliss murdered!”
“Mother…oh my god…mother, the autopsy shows that Bliss had severe cramping at the same time she was having a seizure—her water broke prematurely and she lost control of the car. You know how dangerous it can be driving where the 285 meets the 85.”
As flashbacks went through Otis’s mind of the men in white gloves injecting needles into Bliss’s arms and dumping buckets of birth fluid on the car’s front seat, he told his son, “Catherine is obviously traumatized right now—she doesn’t know what she’s saying—but one thing is clear. Some sick psycho is out there attacking any woman tries to get her hooks into you and the only way you can save these women’s lives is to let them go.”
“That poor girl, January,” Queenie cried aloud, dramatically. “What if they blow up her car the next time? They’ve already killed Bliss.”
“If they blow up January’s car, mother—then I’ll make sure that I’m sitting in it with her. I’m not about to give up on the best woman I’ve ever known.”
And that comment ruined Queenie’s acting. Her face turned sour and she had to look away.
“You both may as well know that I’ve asked January to become a Crown—and she’s accepted. We’re getting married just a few weeks after Mardi Gras.”
Become a Crown?
“Can’t you wait until Bliss has been dead at least a good year or two?”
“Mardi Gras is six months from now,” Adam told them. “By then, January will have her divorce from Buck Knuckle-Joy. I’m very sad that Bliss lost her life, but neither of you realizes what January means to me. She’s my second chance. I can’t let her slip away the way February did. I have to have her.”
“Don’t disgrace this family’s image by failing to bury your wife properly,” huffed Otis Crown.
“I’ll stay until the funeral, father. But after that, I’m back to California.”
Queenie took a deep breath, watching her son exit down the hallway. She asked her husband, “What are we going to do now?”
“Well,” sighed Otis. “The detectives in both Atlanta and Pismo Beach are getting really aggressive, so I don’t think there should be anymore attempts on January’s life. We need to let that die down—or better yet—get the gunman to squeal on Buck Knuckle-Joy. Frame him for being the one behind all this.”
“My word—you are so brilliant, Otis!”
But as he frowned in thought, Otis couldn’t agree. January Knuckle-Joy was about to become a Crown; a member of this family. Being such a smart businesswoman, Otis imagined that she’d do the Crowns just what she’d done to the Sinatras—take over.
Now that two assassination attempts had failed, he abandoned the idea of having her killed. But he still had to get rid of her; he still had to figure a way to remove her from his son’s life, because so much more was at stake than just the family’s image. The future direction and power over Crown Tires, BTV, Crown Magazine and the NACP—it was all at stake.
~*~
Three days later
For the irrepressible January Knuckle-Joy, it was all beginning now to make sense. The way Caprice Sinatra had uttered the word “power” back at the hospital the other night when revealing at last the mystery behind Papa Sinatra’s fixation with the image of Grace Jones. It lingered in January’s mind, because it was the first time that she understood what power meant to people like the Crowns and Sinatras and what families were willing to do to keep it.
“Sell their souls to the devil,” January whispered as in unison, she pushed open the double doors of her offices at Warm Leatherette. “But not me; not me.”
Not only was she back—she was more determined than ever to show the world just who she was and what she was made of.
“Unlike Grace Jones, the Jamaican superstar my brother never actually knew but idolized all his life—Sicily was a Nubian woman,” Caprice had explained the other night. “Not a pop culture Nubian as so many blacks fancy calling themselves, but a real one from the Nuba mountains in North Africa, January. She had been a maid working in Cairo, Egypt and studying Italian when my father, Salvatore, saw her in the market buying eggs there and became enthralled with her. He hired her to be the nanny for Papa Sinatra and I—but by the time we were no longer babies and got to be big kids; he’d fallen madly in love with her.”
Up upon the wall hung the portrait of singer Grace Jones from the cover of the CD “Island Life.” It featured the impossibly different-looking Jones balancing completely naked in a pose that had caused Papa Sinatra to declare many times in his life, “Nowhere, in any other photograph ever taken of any woman before is the image of womanhood better represented than in this classic Jean Paul-Goude photo of Grace Jones.”
The bone structure, the blackness, the sheer otherness that caused one to surmise the image was not a woman at all but rather some alien goddess—all of which Papa Sinatra had painstakingly reconfigured and strewn in every corner of this place that he’d named after one of her hit records—Warm Leatherette. It all carried a much stronger meaning for January now.
“Of course I hated Sicily,” Caprice had continued. “I was loyal to my mother, and all over the village in Italy, on the small roadside markets and in what we called Big Town—my mother had become a laughingstock. Because as you know in the 1940’s and 1950’s, it just wasn’t done—decent well to do white men didn’t publicly acknowledge black women…as women. No, the few who existed in Italy back then—they were either maids or prostitutes or both, because that’s all they were allowed to be. They were kept in the closet for men to wipe themselves off on. Bring one out in the light of day? It simply wasn’t done. And decent men certainly didn’t propose to marry them as my father had Sicily.”
“Your father wanted to marry Sicily?”
Caprice had nodded in pain. “I’ll never forget how he disgraced my mother—late summer of 1954. Not only did he request a divorce to marry his ridiculous looking little bald headed African mistress, but he disgraced the whole Sinatra family reputation by being excommunicated from the Catholic Church—our family church; one of the oldest in Italy—all so that he could have his stupid divorce!”
“Papa Sinatra wasn’t angry at your father?”
Caprice shook her head in anguish. “All the Sinatra children loved Sicily—she’d been the one to raise us, after all. And because of Papa Sinatra being born right in Sicily’s arms, he became her special one. She treated him like her own son and my mother had so many of us, she let Sicily him.”
“How did your father die, Caprice?”
“The family…papa’s own family, had him killed. My uncles tricked Papa into driving down to the Warf and bringing Sicily with him. They shot my father right away. Then they gang-raped Sicily and drowned her. I know, because I was my mother’s favorite and while the other kids stayed in bed, she mother took me down there to watch it all happen. ”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t feel sorry. I hated my father. I was very happy watching it all happen. But what I wasn’t happy about was how it affected my brother, Papa Sinatra. He grew up…and he did everything he could to hand over the one thing that our family had always fought to attain in this world—power.”
“Are you talking about his marriage to me?”
“Yes,” Caprice had admitted, belligerently. “You never worked for anything in this family, January. You were just some uneducated cute little stripper who waltzed right in here and started sleeping with one rich man after the other. Then you married in, took over the company. You’re the rebirth of Sicily.”
“But Sicily had no power, Caprice.”
“Yes she did—just being chosen by our men, January—and chosen out in the open where everybody could see. That’s power. That sends a message; it reshapes public thinking; it colors the society. And that had always been the threat of Sicily. I mean after all—why would dark, swarthy Southern Italians, some of whom could almost pass for black themselves want to have the power of Sicily’s blood reintroduced? Her blood was power and she was a threat. And you, January, you’re the continuation of that threat. That’s why my brother left his fortune to you—to take revenge on us, all of us who are named Sinatra. And that’s why he’s carved that Jamaican look-alike of Sicily into every crack and crevice of Warm Leatherette—to avenge the murders of our father and Sicily.”
“Why are you telling me all this Caprice?”
“I’m telling you all this—because my son is innocent. To the Crown family in Georgia, you’re a type of Sicily as well. And this time, it’s not the Sinatra family that’s trying to kill Sicily.”
At that moment, May Day had broken in, demanding, “What do you know lady? Tell us!”
“I know nothing but what I just told you. My son Noble is innocent! It’s the Crown family who wants Sicily dead this time—not us.”
Sweeping out in a huff, Caprice Sinatra had said with her eyes, mother to mother, all that May Day Foster needed to know.
“That woman knows the mafia in this town inside out,” May Day had told January. “It’s the Crowns who put a hit on you—I bet they killed February, too.”
Haunted by Caprice’s final comment, January now stood in her office staring up at the iconic Grace Jones portrait—her eyes fascinated by its larger than life narrative in ways she never had been before. As though she thought the spirit of Papa Sinatra could hear her through the portrait, she spoke to him saying, “The Crowns tried to kill me and I know in my gut that they murdered my sister. But now, following in your footsteps, Papa—it’s my turn to get revenge using honorable means. Because of what they did to February…I will not only become a Crown, but I will rule the entire Crown Empire.”
BOOK SIX
Corporate Cannibal
The Wedding
Six Months Later
Atlanta, Georgia
A hundred stories in the air, the
y knew nothing of the hidden camera that was watching them in Otis Crown’s corporate office like some menacing electronic eyeball. With their wedding only a week away, Adam and January couldn’t have honestly claimed to care.
“Not on top of your father’s desk,” January cooed, breathlessly. But as Adam Crown kissed her, pushing her into a reclining position across the giant expanse of the desk, January giggled at his impassioned response. “Yes, here, on my father’s desk—what better way to celebrate the finalization of your divorce from Buck Knuckle-Joy?”
Another part of it, they both knew, was a submerged disrespect for Otis Crown and all that the world at large didn’t know he stood for.
Pouting like a fish in his bed at home, an irate Otis Crown was watching every minute of it. Like a swimmer wading into a lake, his son’s body, clothed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, waded into January’s body, excitedly parting her sleek cocoa-pretty legs and raising her skirt as he kissed her with such a flourish of love that the pure joyfulness in it repulsed Otis.
“Dirty, black worthless gutter-snake,” Otis hissed with hatefulness. Even with their wedding just five days away, Otis believed that they had to do this and do it on his desk as part of January’s way of threatening his position and his power. She was the real smart and treacherous type who would definitely know that there were cameras planted in that tower’s executive suites, thought Otis Crown, angrily.
“Ooh, I love your chest Adam…you love me so good.”
Reclined on the desk with her legs in the air, Adam started banging her. Smack, smack; slosh, slosh.
What a disgrace! Otis Crown wanted to bust through the video monitor and strangle the bitch with his bare hands!
Two hours later at the Church of Tomorrow Cathedral, a television director was calling out, “Excuse me, Pastor Crown. Are you ready to begin?”
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