The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  “Really? Well, what happened, if I’m not overstepping?”

  “It just went as far as it was going to go, and we…or at least I, knew from the beginning that it would come to an end eventually.”

  “Did you love him, or were you guys just hanging out—you know, having fun?”

  Tawna took Aaron in with a face that seemed just shy of offended, but she continued, “Of course I loved him. I wouldn’t have been with him for four years if I didn’t. It’s just that there was an issue between us that was never going to change. He was white, and while that never, ever got in the way of our love, it certainly got in the way of our future. He wanted to get married, and I swear, I definitely think we would have had a wonderful marriage, but he also wanted children, and, well—”

  “You don’t have to tell me if it makes you uncomfortable to talk about something so personal,” Aaron said as he shifted nervously, thinking she was going to tell him that she couldn’t have children. And while that wouldn’t have mattered one wit to him, it just seemed to him to be too much to tell him on a first date.

  “No, it’s okay. The truth is, I have dated white men and black men, but when it comes to the idea of interracial children, I know that for that reason I couldn’t marry a white man. I think a child has enough pain and heartache to navigate from childhood through puberty and into adulthood, and to add the whole issue of dual races to it. I don’t know, it just seems like it’s unfair for two people to make that kind of decision, play God in that way with another life.”

  “So, how do you date someone without the idea that one day you two will get married?”

  Tawna looked at him with a Cheshire grin and asked, “How do you date someone without the idea that you two will get married?”

  Aaron only nodded and smiled with a thin smile of nonplussed awkwardness. Then he said quietly, as if he didn’t want her to hear, “I just thought it was different for women.”

  “Different how?”

  “Just different in the way women want to get married.”

  “Aaron, I mean this in all loving kindness, but when the glacier melted down, you just stepped right on out, didn’t you?” and then she laughed with complete abandon, and seeming comfort. “I’m not sure I’d feel right about saying all women want to get married, but this woman wants to get married. I’m not on such a mission to get there, though, that I can’t welcome and appreciate a sound and profound relationship with someone for whom I care deeply for however long it lasts, even if going into it I know it’s not going to end in marriage. Hopefully along the journey I’ve learned enough about myself and life to make me that much more prepared for when I do get married. But that’s just how I see it.”

  Aaron thought that what she was saying sounded quite progressive for a southern woman, but thought better of saying it out loud because then she’d truly think he was the missing link. So he said instead, “I guess I’ve just never thought it all through before about interracial children.”

  “It’s an issue, at least to me it is because this is a world that will love them or hate them for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Love them for the wrong reasons?” Aaron questioned, because it didn’t make much sense in any way he looked at it.

  “Now, you know there are some black people who’re going to love an interracial child just because of their exotically colored light skin. To those people, it’s not going to much matter what the child really looks like or how smart the child is, as long as one parent is white, those people will think that child is pure perfection in every way.”

  “That’s a pretty sad statement of things, if that’s how they really are.”

  “Yeah,” Tawna said pausing to let the waiter put her salad in front of her and Aaron’s salad in front of him. When he was gone, she continued, “It’s sad, and it’s cruel too, because it gives them a false sense of reality that’ll do nothing to prepare them for the hatred that’ll come from some whites and blacks alike just because they’re not one thing or another.”

  Aaron put a heavy-handed sprinkling of pepper on his salad, then looked at Tawna with a serious stare and said, “So you’ve given this quite a bit of thought, it seems.”

  “From the first time I was blown away by finding myself attracted to a white man,” she said before putting a forkful of lettuce into her mouth and chewing rigorously so that she could swallow. Then she quickly said, “Look, I’ve thought about it because when I do have children, I want to be able to give them the best of myself in order to make them the best they can be. I can’t do that if I can’t get a complete understanding of how to raise a child who has to find a way to bring two halves together in a way that society tells them they can’t and shouldn’t and still try to make them somehow whole. I mean, how do you introduce the concept of color the way it’s understood here in America to a child? I think even if that child were, through some miracle, to somehow make it all the way to adulthood before knowing that they’re two races, I think from the very moment they found out, it would change forever their concept of themselves, from who they knew they were to who they might be now.”

  Aaron only stared blankly into the flickering candle at the center of the table while he finished his salad. What if, he wondered, someone managed to make it all the way to adulthood without knowing—like Clayton. So Aaron fought with everything in him to keep quiet a sliver of sentimentality that wanted to creep up for Clayton, if it all was true. But it wasn’t, so the pity wasn’t needed, and he would put it away for some other man who’d grow up to find out that the one true thing, in which he would always know himself, was painted, half of it, another color. When his salad was done, he looked up at Tawna, who was still eating hers in small bites and said with a fresh, sideways smile, “Well, at least I can take comfort in knowing that you wouldn’t turn down a marriage proposal from me because of my color.”

  Tawna laughed heartily, filling their little space in the room, then replied, “You never know, Aaron. The one thing we know about this world is that nothing is as it seems, and no one is as they seem.” Then she did laugh, staring at him through her squinty, amused eyes as if to make it clear that she knew there was far more to him than what he seemed right there in front of her.

  And though he laughed, laughed with every ounce of true mirth he could find in himself in that moment, it wasn’t funny to him. It wasn’t funny at all.

  When the laughter faded, Tawna was left with a faint smile that would not leave when she said, “You think far more than you speak, don’t you?”

  Aaron looked into the flickering candle again, then up into Tawna’s eyes. There was no telling why he should let her in, he only knew he had to. So he said, “Yeah, Tawna. I think a lot more than I speak. But the circumstances of my life have made that necessary.”

  “To protect yourself, or something? Or is it not quite that simple?”

  “It’s not quite that simple.”

  Tawna sipped her water, then put it down quickly when the waiter arrived with their meals. She leaned back to make way for the waiter’s arm, then smiled graciously at him. Once Aaron’s plate was placed in front of him and the waiter was on his way, she picked up her fork and speared a portion, then said, “So, do you ever speak of what torments you?”

  Aaron stared blankly at her as he chewed for several long seconds. He shifted where he sat. Then he shifted again the other way. He took out his glasses and slid them onto his face. Then he took them off, folded them up and placed them on the table next to his plate. How dare she reveal him. “How do you know something torments me?”

  “It’s in every part of your way, Aaron. But mostly I know because the only reason anyone thinks more than they speak is because they’re afraid of what would happen if they give voice to their torments.”

  “And you think I’m afraid.”

  Tawna chewed a bite of potato, then looked plainly at Aaron and said, “I think you’re afraid.” She ate a few more bites of food in the quiet that had slid between them, a
nd then she snapped toward him and said, as if with a desperation to explain, “But that’s not to say that you have to tell me what torments you.”

  Aaron laughed with a low chuckle, aware of and quite sobered by her truth. Then he looked at her and let his laughter fade to a smile for her that was churning with everything in him that not even he understood, and said, “I will, though. One day soon, I will tell you.”

  Aaron had just gotten back into his car after leaving Tawna at her doorstep. He did what any man raised by a woman whose sensibility was screaming in his ear don’t you dare go in there. As badly as he wanted to go in, and with the way she invited him out of her southern politeness, he knew it was no place for him to be. Not on their first date. So as he turned the ignition, put his car into gear, and pulled away from her apartment, he was struck smack in the face with the memory of his first date with Maggie. It had left him warm, he remembered. Warm with a comfort that made him feel as if he had just slipped into an old and familiar sweater. And he remembered how they’d laughed and talked as they danced on the surface of everything that didn’t have the least bit of a chance to chafe.

  So as he drove toward home, he found the juxtaposition between that long-ago first date with Maggie and the still-present first date with Tawna far too troubling. Tawna had made him itchy in a way that left him not knowing what to do with himself.

  He drove along mindlessly with Tawna in full focus. And as he did, he missed by mere inches the puffy coattail of a jaywalker who stared him down with the impudence of a streetwise toreador.

  Then his thoughts went back to the comfort and acuity he had gained from the years with Maggie, knowing how to balance so elegantly on one heel atop a bed of eggshells. And though at first the stance was discomfiting in every way, it became part of everything he knew. But now there came another comfort. The comfort of serenity. And even though he had never seen it, never thought about it, never knew it existed, when he watched serenity approach him in Tawna, Aaron knew he could finally put his feet down—those shells be damned and crushed to crumbs.

  So definitely, he thought, Tawna was the gift of serenity he’d give to his life, but mostly, she’d be the gift he’d bring to his family. And just as serenity approaches, hers will come and cover so softly and so gradually that nothing will ever be the same and only he will know why.

  And this made him wonder what his mother would think if she were to understand, as gradually as a sunrise, that nothing ever comes down to this or that, right or wrong. And what his sister would think if the palette of life’s logic had more colors than black and white. Neither would know the sieve of reasoning through which their sensibilities had gently been squeezed and shaped and made lithe. But he would know. And so he smiled as he pulled into his driveway with the thought of Tawna. Then he couldn’t help himself when an out-loud laugh just jumped from him as he got out of the car and made his way toward his front door, because the funny thing was that he’d never heard of such a thing and most likely neither had anyone else—one woman’s salvation for one man’s life.

  Antonia was in the kitchen peeling potatoes when she heard Junior step into the front hall from the cold and close it out behind him. There was a time, she thought, when only the sound of him could send her to a placid place inside herself. Just knowing he had come in from the cold to her had always given her a belief in the constancy that her love was safe with him and his with her. When Junior came home in days past, it was because there was no other place he wanted to be, no other place he could be. Now, there was another place, and perhaps he’d never go, or perhaps it was only a question of time. No matter what his decision might be, there was no more peace she could find in his opening the door to close out every element of the world.

  When he reached the kitchen, he went to her and offered her a kiss on the cheek that became awkward due to her stiffness.

  Antonia glared at him with everything she knew. Then, after several long seconds, when it was clear to her that he was not aware that she was staring him down, she went back to peeling her potato. While she peeled, she couldn’t imagine how he’d come to believe that he lets her do anything, as if he ruled her and everything in her. And with his mistress down in New Orleans, she thought, he ought to know that he no longer had the same intensity of power in their home. Then again, she thought, even days after finding that locket and shooting the venom of her hatred at him with her eyes, Junior still had no idea she knew about Cora. If, she had to remind herself, there was even anything to know. But there had to be, because that locket and its inscription made it quite something to know.

  And when Junior made no attempt at conversation, Antonia noticed there was something about the way he sat in the comfort of one of his worlds. Did he sit like that at Cora’s, she wondered. So that’s why that unknowable demon in her compelled her to disturb his peace. “When is your next board business down in Tulane?”

  “I have to go down next month to discuss hiring this doctor from out of Atlanta. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, just because I thought I might come along,” and without lifting her head, she looked over at Junior to see his immediate reaction. There was no measuring her silent ire when she saw that it was nothing. He didn’t even seem to as much as blink, from what she could see from where she stood. So she pressed, “Is that okay?”

  “I guess, Antonia,” Junior replied with a slight edge. “Although, I don’t know why you want to go back down there after all these years. You haven’t been down to New Orleans in nearly twenty-five years, and then we didn’t even stay in New Orleans that long since we were on our way to Plaquemine to visit Momma. You don’t know anybody down there anymore, anyway.”

  She gave him a sly smile, then said, “That’s not true. My cousin Vera Sue lives there, and her three children. Well, two of them live in Baton Rouge, but that’s close enough. And then there’s Cora Calliup.” She waited to see what he would do, how his face just might change. But nothing. He was even in every way. Then she continued, “I haven’t seen her nearly since I left New Orleans to come live here. I know she has all those children named after herbs. Do you ever run into her down there, Junior?”

  He didn’t answer her. He just slid the newspaper that sat on the other side of the table toward him and proceeded to read it.

  But she knew he was only pretending that he either hadn’t heard her or wasn’t paying attention. So this time, she said it quite loud enough for the deaf to hear. “I said, do you ever run into Cora Calliup when you’re down there?”

  Junior looked at her firmly for several tense seconds. Seconds that seemed as if at the end of them, Junior just might unburden his soul. Instead, he stood from the table, newspaper in hand, and said crisply, “No.” And with that, Junior floated from the room like an amorphous vapor that was headed for anywhere it could twist and turn and eventually vanish.

  Antonia only stared after him, part of her wanting to follow him, but most of her simply wondering if Junior’s reality had been able to be split in two—life in Baltimore, and life in New Orleans. And she supposed that when a man had polarized his life with two disparate women like herself and Cora, reality could only be so—in halves. So she put her attention back on her potatoes, and could not fathom just how it might come to pass that she would be able to throw that locket in Junior’s face and simply say, I know.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Clayton sat in the master’s throne at the dining room table waiting for his dinner, wearied from a weeklong European tour, not to mention the oddity of Europeans that never failed to amaze him. There was nothing specifically anomalous about them other than their unrivaled arrogance in believing they could lay claim to him simply because it was from European stages that he had been catapulted to the heights of his renown. And as he noticed the old wooden clock that made itself the center of attention atop the buffet, his mind was forced back to his first night on the continent in Milan. It was at a reception in his honor where he found himself in the company
of a woman trying to do the same thing as that clock—make herself the center of attention. The only thing was, as offensive as that clock was to him, she was nowhere near as charming. She was an Englishwoman, the wife of some bloated-belly Englishman who moved and spoke with the superciliousness of a man who, under less cultured circumstances, might try to pass himself off as aristocracy. Clayton could barely abide what the English accent did to his ears to begin with, but he could still hear the woman’s nasally accent as she spoke with rather proficient haughtiness at the way America was only capable of producing the lowest levels of talent, among the likes of which were Madonna and Britney Spears. “And whether a performer can play the kazoo or sing like a badly wounded animal, Americans don’t care because they’re merely seduced by the celebrity,” he heard her shrill voice echoing in his head. And Clayton actually laughed out loud when he remembered that in less than two minutes of berating Americans’ seduction by celebrity, she was inviting him to take summer holiday with her, her husband, and his belly at their villa in Lake Como. “Everyone would just die of envy if they knew you were taking holiday with us.” Was someone as narcissistic as this woman capable of seeing the irony in which she was swathed?

  Susan came into the dining room carrying a casserole, and before she could set it down in the middle of the table, Clayton said, “I’ve been thinking that we should find something else to put on that buffet. What do you think?”

  “What’s wrong with my grandmother’s clock?” she asked with a guarded tone.

  “Well, Susan, I’ve never bitten my tongue about the fact that I think it’s a terrible-looking thing. I’m just saying, now that we’re here in Baltimore and considering we’ve been dragging that thing up and down the road since we’ve been married, maybe we should rethink the clock and all this stuff that we’ve had since we first moved up to New York from New Orleans. You know, get a more updated look in our home.”