“Do I have a choice?”
“Of course you do.”
“Then, no. I’m not going.”
“Chloe,” her mother pleaded. “You might like it. Don’t condemn something you haven’t even tried.”
Chloe folded her arms against her chest. “You said I had a choice. If you didn’t mean it, just tell me I have to go.”
Libby wanted to strangle her. How could this lovely child with her silvery angel’s hair and bluer-than-blue eyes inspire such a rage in her? Libby’s voice was sharp-edged, cold. “All right. Suit yourself. Don’t go.”
“Thank you,” Chloe said, smiling sweetly.
“Don’t go far,” her mother called after her, “and take my cell phone.”
Chloe didn’t answer.
Libby sighed and sank back in her chair.
Nola Ruth sipped her coffee, offering no comment. That would have been unusual enough in itself to draw a question from Libby, but she was too preoccupied with thoughts of Chloe. “What do you do, Mama, when everything seems more than you can bear?”
“You have no idea what a woman can bear, Libba Jane,” her mother said dryly. “The idea that you think you’re at rock bottom amuses me.”
The verbal slap took Libby aback, but only for a moment. She wasn’t a child and she refused to be intimidated. Her mother had alluded to secrets and she wanted a part of them. “I’m not at rock bottom. That’s a relative judgment that no one can make for anyone else. I’m curious, Mama. What do you do when times are hard?”
Her mother’s dark eyes flickered. “I pray.”
“You aren’t even religious. I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“Being religious has nothing to do with it. When you need to pray, there’s always a god.”
“Isn’t that a bit too convenient?”
“That’s the beauty of it.”
“What matters, Mama? In the end, what really matters?”
Nola Ruth pulled back her lips in an attempted smile. “You matter, Libba Jane. You and Chloe. Our children matter. That’s all.”
Suddenly the urge to bare the truth became overwhelming. “I know you lied to me,” Libby began. “Your parents died well after I left Marshyhope Creek. When Eric and I drove through New Orleans, I was curious. I wanted to know about them. I found out they were living exactly where you said you’d grown up.”
Nola Ruth nodded but she didn’t seem bothered to have her deception uncovered. “Did you stop in to see them?”
Libby shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking of family just then. It wasn’t until later, after Chloe was born, that I contacted them. Your mother invited me to visit. I never did.” Her mother’s eyes were deliberately vacant, veiled against her. “Does Daddy know?”
“Shame on you, Libba Jane, to think I would keep anything from your father. Of course he knows. He knows everything. It’s time you did, as well.”
“I don’t understand.”
Nola Ruth leaned back in her chair, leaving the coffee to grow cold. “It isn’t a pretty story, but it’s mine. I want you to know because it’s your right. I handled things the way that was good for me. I don’t know whether or not the same way will be good for you and it certainly won’t be for Chloe. You’ll have to decide.”
“I’m listening.”
“Pour yourself a cup of coffee, Libba. It’s good New Orleans coffee. This story will take a while and it isn’t one I’m proud of. I won’t blame you if you hold it against me. I will blame you if you don’t do as I ask.”
Libby poured her coffee, recognizing the command for what it was, a moment needed for an old woman to regroup, to settle herself, to meet her dragons face-to-face. She prepared herself to work at paying attention, to force herself to appear interested, to endure the ramblings of a woman whose brain wasn’t what it had been. What, after all, could Nola Ruth Delacourte, the quintessential lady, the charming hostess, have done that was dreadful or memorable or even worth recalling? Libby could not have anticipated the nature of the story that came from her mother’s memories. The words, spilling from the older woman’s mouth, came quickly, sometimes unintelligibly—fascinating words, repelling words, in the soft, liquid tones of the Louisiana Delta, in third person, as if the series of events had happened to someone else.
Magnolia Ruth Delacourte had lived in Marshyhope Creek for forty-one years, but she was not a native. The Beauchamps hailed from farther south, from a city with older, richer, deeper traditions, a city whose ethnic roots were as established as the heavy wet air and spicy smells; the floating duckweed coating whiskey-colored bayou waters like melted chocolate; the wrought-iron balconies weeping Spanish moss; the yeasty smell of beignets and chicory; the filthy, colorful, authentic neighborhoods; the raw oysters, crawfish pie and gumbo; the étouffées and jambalayas; the ragtime, Cajun and jazz; the floods, the sweat, the soft, still wonder of bayou nights; the red beans and rice that could only reach consistency when cooked at the low altitudes of the French Quarter; and, beneath it all, Catholicism, entrenched and traditional, like a greedy parasite on the rim of a Baptist South.
Resting in its below-sea-level nest, shielded by levees, swept by rains in winter and summer, bearing the residue of silt from a thousand northern tributaries, New Orleans perched at the mouth of the Mississippi River, an aging voodoo priestess, familiar, covetous, mysterious, enticing, sweetly addicting in her sultry power.
This was Nola’s city. It had shaped her character as inevitably as the wind and rain, the cold winters and hot, heat-stunning summers of a deeper south had shaped Anton Devereaux’s. Two people with simmering passions. A girl on the verge of womanhood, molded by conflicting influences, a decadent city, an ancient religion and a heritage of aristocratic privilege and shameful self-indulgence. A young man, square-jawed, hot-blooded and hardheaded as the iron-rich Piedmont soil.
They met on a summer night in 1962. Nola, daughter of a scion of New Orleans society, had escaped the confines of the annual debutante ball. For months now, she’d sensed that the world was changing and she was restless. She wanted to change with it. The soft music, yellowed linen muted with age, gleaming silver, crystal chandeliers, young ladies dressed in white, and young men from the finest families in the city held no allure for her.
Nola was seventeen, a smoldering dark-eyed beauty with exquisite features and magnificent proportions. In that Creole city populated by French, Spanish, West Indians, French Huguenots and Native Americans, she could have been any or all of those ethnicities. Men of every race and color turned around for a second look at her and were entranced. Nola did not look seventeen. She had never looked seventeen. The night of her fourteenth birthday she went to bed a child and awoke looking like she would look for most of her life, beautiful, alluring, ageless.
Anton Devereaux was passing out leaflets for a civil rights rally. What he saw when he glanced up at the dark-haired, honey-skinned girl in the breathtaking white dress was something he hadn’t the ability to express in words. He knew only that he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything before. She was beautiful, her accent proclaimed her a Southerner, and the crucifix on the slender chain around her neck told him she was a Catholic. The last was the only problem he could foresee. She had skin the color of cream-drenched coffee, black hair and dark, dark eyes. He’d seen lighter-skinned black women. It never occurred to him that she could be white. By the time he found out, the damage had been done.
Disregarding the stammering protests of the New Orleans schoolmate who was his host, he followed her down the street with but one thing on his mind, to acquire Nola Ruth Beauchamp for his own. Anton was one of a new breed of black men on his way up in the world, men who refused to stand when there were available seats in the rows labeled Whites Only, men who made it their business to read and write, to speak their passions and vote, men whose political clout and bravado would bring forth a new kind of South, a new kind of Democratic Party. What he lacked in finesse and experience, he made up with strength and co
nviction. If he drank more than his share he was honest and direct. If he gambled, he never cheated. If he came home more often than not with a blackened eye and split lip, no man could say he ran from a fight. His family was an honorable one.
Two generations before, a Devereaux left the West Indies with five pounds in his pocket to sign on as a cabin boy on a boat fishing for cod out of Boston Harbor. Gradually, he earned enough to migrate down to the warmer waters of the Chesapeake and open up a dry goods store. Every generation since had kept the business strong.
Anton was a beneficiary of the Civil Rights movement, the first in his line to aspire to a college degree. At Yale University he found himself caught up in the fire of the day. Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Huey McBride were his heroes. He had no use for the peaceful Martin Luther King.
Anton was obsessed with quality. In Nola Ruth, with her boarding school education, her love of French philosophers, her graceful diplomacy, her aspiring artistic talent, the fluent, musical way she had of switching from English to French to German, he believed he’d found his ideal mate. That her designer gown and diamond-studded shoes cost more than six months’ profit from his father’s business meant nothing to him at all.
At first it rankled that she refused to introduce him to her family. But his mind was on the movement and his body filled with fire for the beautiful girl who was his lover. “Later,” he told himself. “They’ll accept me later, with my Yale degree and my place in the world. After all, she has to marry somebody, and who better than a young educated black man on his way up?”
As for Nola Ruth, she watched the tall, rugged young man with the square jaw, wide shoulders, broad workman’s hands, coffee-colored skin and yellow eyes walk toward her, and something dark, elemental and forbidden slumbering deep within her leaped to life. She smiled and held out her hand, accepting the leaflet he handed her.
Forty-some years later, Nola Ruth still felt cold sweat gather between her breasts when she recalled the events of the weeks that followed. Anton’s courtship was swift, intense and forbidden. She told no one, but her mother suspected she was meeting someone. Of course, she had no idea who it was. Nola Ruth could still recall her mother’s thin, disapproving lips warning her to be careful, that a gently bred girl must be beware of her reputation.
But Nola Ruth, born in that city of sin, ignored her warnings. She was deliciously shocked the first time Anton’s hot tongue entered her mouth and his hand closed over her breast. More times than she could count in those first weeks, he took her to staggering climax, first in the roomy back seat of the Studebaker provided by his nervous New Orleans host, then in the Beauchamp summerhouse, on their veranda swing, in the sitting room always late at night after the servants had retired, and finally beneath the sweating, lavender-scented sheets of the bedroom Nola Ruth had occupied from her earliest memory, the bedroom backed up to the master suite where her parents slept in serene ignorance.
Anton lacked refinement, but he was intelligent. He understood the rules of the rising black upper middle class and he intended to abide by them. Marriage was his intent, but he wasn’t completely sure of Nola Ruth. She was acquiescent and generous when it came to lovemaking. He had never experienced so willing and sensitive a bed partner. But there was something removed about her, as if only her body participated while her mind looked on from somewhere else outside of herself. It was this otherworldly quality that attracted him, and at the same time kept him on edge, slightly insecure, never quite knowing where he stood. Only during sex, at the crest of her climax, with her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her breathing labored, was he completely confident that she belonged to him. He used her incredible physical appetite to his advantage. Withdrawing himself completely, he teased her with the tip of his erection. “Marry me, Nola,” he murmured. “Marry me, tonight.”
“Please, don’t stop,” she gasped, arching her back to bring him back inside of her.
He was twenty-one years old, at the peak of his sexual potency. Sweat poured down his chest. Deliberately, with great effort, he held himself away. “Come away with me, now,” he begged.
Nola Ruth bit her lip. Anything to end this torture. “Yes,” she moaned. “Yes, yes, yes.” With all her strength, she palmed his muscle-corded buttocks and pulled him deeply into her.
Pressing his face between her breasts, he groaned and drove and pumped until he was empty.
Nola Ruth never forgot the events that followed their trip across the Louisiana state line into Nicholson, Mississippi, nor would she forget the ride back home with her father the next afternoon. It was something the Beauchamp family never spoke of, but Nola recalled it more clearly than any family photograph lovingly detailed in the family album.
Anton and she spent what was left of that night driving the back roads, not connecting with the main highway until Pearl River, breakfasting with truck drivers at an all-night doughnut shop. Nola Ruth ate in the car, afraid to be seen. She refused to underestimate her father. Anton roused the justice of the peace at eight o’clock. Blood tests were unnecessary in Nicholson. Swallowing to control her panic, Nola stared at the Adam’s apple in the man’s throat as she mechanically responded to his questions. How had she come to this?
She had never intended to marry Anton Devereaux, only to seduce him. He was a magnificent young animal, lean, hungry-eyed, predatory, forbidden, a perfect specimen for mating. She loved him, but he was completely unsuitable. Marriage was an institution to be entered into with deliberation and calm, a unity of compatible background, education, family, religion, wealth and race, a symbiotic understanding of one’s role in life. She hadn’t counted on the incredible skin-to-skin closeness, the mind-stealing wanting of him, the sensations of strength, slick hard steel and hair-roughened muscle, the magic of hot nights and movement and rising tension, the quivering, peaking desire and finally, the sheer joy of shattering climax. It was enough, almost. The sick, jealous rage at the thought of his hands on another woman’s body was her Rubicon. Nola Ruth knew it wasn’t the sort of love that would last forever, but she reached for it, taking whatever time she had.
In the end, she might have listened to her better judgment, but he caught her at a bad moment. She would have died to reach that climax. She’d read about women like her, addicts of the flesh, the nymphomaniacs of ancient Greece. For a long time after Anton, she stayed away from men until she met Coleson, warm, dear, wonderful Coleson, who comforted her, loved her, made her feel treasured and secure, helped her to realize it wasn’t sex she was addicted to, but the intoxicating heat and presence of Anton Devereaux and the exhilarating rush that came from indulging in the forbidden.
The elopement was absurd and doomed to fail, but the hours that followed were exercises in sensory hedonism, worth everything that came later. Reflecting back, Nola Ruth marveled at the marvelous stroke of fate that had brought Anton Devereaux to New Orleans that summer. Without him, she would never have known passion. Gauging her own marriage and those of her contemporaries, she realized that most women, unless they were willing to risk the shame of discovery, went to their graves never knowing the true meaning of the word.
Her father found them that very day. His influence was great, even in Mississippi. Anton was thrown in jail on charges of kidnapping, statutory rape and misogyny. He was twenty-one to Nola’s seventeen. He was black and she white. There was simply no response to the terrifying power, the icy coldness of the four men in blue police uniforms who read the charges. She would never forget the shocked horror on Anton’s face when they accused him of abducting and raping a white woman.
She waited for news of him for more than two months, but there was nothing. He’d simply disappeared.
If she had been braver, with the steady confidence of Coleson Delacourte or even the foolhardy, throat-closing courage of her daughter, it would have ended differently. She would not have been dispatched to her aunt Eugenie in Marshyhope Creek, where she’d lived behind closed curtains for six months. She would not have given bi
rth in a back bedroom with clenched teeth, cold metal between her legs and tears running down her cheeks. She would not have given up her child into the hands of a colored midwife, yellow-skinned, gold-toothed Drusilla Washington. She would not have risen from that bed believing, for half a lifetime, that nothing more than Anton Devereaux’s seed had been cut from her body.
But Nola Ruth was not brave and perhaps it was for the best. If the events had turned out differently, she would never have married Coleson. There would be no Libba and no Chloe. It was a strange thing to realize, this late in life, that her greatest joy lay in anticipation of the time with her daughter and granddaughter.
She never returned to New Orleans, never communicated with her parents and never saw Anton Devereaux again. Her penance was seeing the child, hers and Anton’s, nearly every day, although this part she kept from Libba. It tore at her heart and ate away at the pleasure she should have taken in her husband and the daughter they had together.
Libby stared at her mother, eyes wide with horrified comprehension. “My God, Mama. I don’t know what to say. Are you saying you have another child, a black child out in the world somewhere?” Her voice cracked. “How could you do that? You, of all people.”
“I told you how.”
“I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Nola Ruth sighed. “My darling, that’s irrelevant.”
Libby shook her head “I don’t want to hear this. It isn’t fair. Why are you telling me? Why now?”
“I had a very close call, Libba Jane. I won’t last forever. I want you to know how it was. I want to do the right thing.” She leaned forward and gripped her daughter’s hand. “When the time comes, I want both of my children to share in what I have to leave them. Promise me you’ll do this, Libba. Promise me now.”
“Of course I promise. If it makes you feel better, why don’t you leave a will?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
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