The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  “Well, what’s it like, this feelin’ you have? Is it like butterflies in your stomach, or somethin’?”

  “It’s somethin’ like that, like butterflies, except it’s not really in my stomach. It’s up higher, more like right here flutterin’ all through my chest,” Antonia said as she fluttered her fingers across her chest.

  They walked on, up one street, then down the next. She and Cora talked and laughed and sighed over Emeril while they munched on the cornbread Antonia had tucked in her pocket. Before Antonia knew it, an hour and more than just a little change into the next had gone by, and Antonia would never make it back, she knew, in time to get to her mother’s errands. “I’ve got to get on home,” she said as she watched Cora fuss with the baby until she was distracted by a white woman approaching with the joy of a newborn baby in her eyes.

  “Oh my lands,” the woman said as she reached them. “Is that Lori-Ann and Charleton’s baby?” she asked Cora as she bent down to coo at the baby.

  “Yes ma’am, it is,” Cora said.

  The woman stood with a bearing that had completely changed in its composure, as if it were someone else’s giddy face that had come skipping over just seconds before. “You’re the baby’s mammy?” the woman asked.

  “Yes ma’am. I’m the baby-sitter till the end of the summer.”

  “Well, does Lori-Ann know that you’ve got this baby out here? This baby’s only three months old. Nobody takes a baby out this soon.”

  “Well, she told me to get him out to get some fresh air and sunshine, ma’am,” Cora said nervously, as if suddenly in doubt that she was actually following the right woman’s orders.

  “Oh, well, if that’s what she said,” the woman said skeptically. Then she looked at Cora with her head high and her eyes downcast and said haughtily and as if expecting Cora to shrink, “I’ll be talking to her, though.”

  Antonia watched the woman suspiciously with a side glance, then said, “Let’s go, Cora.”

  And just as they were about to continue on their way, the woman said to Antonia, “You look familiar, girl. Who do you work for?”

  “I don’t work for nobody,” Antonia said flatly. Then with her lost anger rising up from somewhere, she turned to face the woman and said, “I’m nobody’s mammy, and I’m nobody’s maid. And Cora here’s nobody’s mammy, either. She’s a baby-sitter.”

  The woman’s face grew stern, her lips shrinking into their red-lacquered thinness. Then she said, “There was positively no cause for your sass-mouth, girl.”

  But Antonia just took Cora by the arm and went on her way, leaving the woman standing there in her stew, and once they’d gotten far enough away, she said to Cora, “You see what I mean? You see what they think of colored people? We only good to them for cleaning their mess, burpin’ their babies, and fixin’ their food. And in Agnes Marquette’s case, givin’ her sex. We ain’t even people to them. What in the world is Emeril thinkin’ he’s getting himself into, Cora? What in the world.” Then before Cora could answer, Antonia heard the rumble and bell of the streetcar approaching from behind, and when she looked up, a stop was just ahead. She let go of Cora’s arm and took off running. “I’m gonna catch this streetcar, Cora. I’ll see you later when you get home.” And off she went and climbed aboard the streetcar just in time.

  So by the time Antonia and Tippy had finally found their way home after piddling time away with Cora strolling through the streets of the Garden District, it was already late afternoon. She walked into the house apologizing. “I’m sorry, Momma, that I wasn’t back in time to go to the store for you.”

  “That’s all right,” she said in the guilt-slathered tone mothers use when it’s actually not all right. “Emeril went for me before he headed up to Mississippi.”

  “He’s gone already?” Antonia asked with disbelief. He couldn’t have been gone, not with them still mad at each other. “Well, what did he say?”

  “It’s funny you should ask,” her mother said with a bewildered half-smile. “He wanted me to tell you that he forgives you and that he still loves you even though you’re fou-fou. I don’t know what it all means, but then again I never do when it comes to you two. It’s like y’all have had a language of your own right from the day you was born.” Her mother went on down the hallway and into the kitchen, chuckling at her children who live in their own world. “I’ll call you for supper when it’s ready.”

  Antonia’s head dropped with the heaviness of her rightful shame for her unkindness to her brother, then she climbed the stairs to her room. Once she closed the door, she sat the basket down, Tippy’s cue to step out and go to her soft spot, which just happened to be Antonia’s. So Antonia also plopped onto her bed, as Tippy curled up right beside her, right in the middle. Antonia rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling and the angst of having been left behind with her last words of hatred filled up every nerve she had.

  The nape of Antonia’s neck tingled with the same feeling that had lumped up in her stomach and throat and had sent them fluttering so frantically into her chest that sometimes she couldn’t know if she’d ever draw her next breath, and it was no emotion she could name. The closest she could come to what it might have been was the sensation she felt when they were ten and Emeril was hit in the head with a baseball and had to get twenty stitches from Dr. Dupres. That day was just not right, because before she’d even gotten the word that he was lying over on the dirt field bleeding from his head, she couldn’t shake from herself a desperate need to simply lay eyes on him. And with Emeril gone till Sunday, and with the very last emotion she’d given him having been her wrath, something now was just not right and would never be right until Emeril was back and she could drown him in her contrition. She would make him everything he loved in one meal. She’d make him some monkey bread, and fried catfish, and fried shrimp, and his all-time favorite, fried okra. And by the time he’d find himself completely sated, he would remember none of her anger that made her speak in a tongue of evil.

  But even with her plan for penitence, and even though she knew that there was nothing for which her brother wouldn’t forgive her, Antonia couldn’t swim to the top of something that had taken her completely underneath it. Every breath seemed a struggle. And that’s why by the time Junior Jackson had run all the way to their house and banged on the front door like he was half crazed on homemade hooch, she was pacing the floor just as fiendishly. She heard his muffled voice in the downstairs hallway and something had set him beside himself. Antonia grabbed up Tippy and darted from her bedroom and then she sprinted down the hall once she heard her mother moan and then scream. And she didn’t even need to get all the way down the stairs before she knew exactly why Junior was there. Still, even though she knew, all she could do was stand in the middle of the staircase and stare through Junior as her mother collapsed to the floor.

  “Antonia,” Junior said with his voice about to break in two. “I’m really sorry. It was such a bad crash. Emeril and Willie both died. The ambulance had to come way from a colored hospital that was fifty miles away. By the time they got there, they was dead. I’m so sorry. I shoulda been with them! I shoulda been with them!” And Junior slid down the wall that was barely holding him up, and when he reached the floor he sobbed in heaves.

  Antonia caught hold of the banister and lowered herself to the stair behind her, and squeezed Tippy to her breast. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, side to side, holding Tippy, stroking her, rocking and rocking, and trying with everything in her will to un-hear what she’d already heard. Then it hit her. This could not be rocked away. That’s when she sat straight up, as still as air before a life-altering storm. Something had claimed her, and so she could not be responsible when she pierced the air with a scream that she couldn’t recognize as her own, nor could she stop. And then throwing her body prostate and stiff, she slid down the remainder of the stairs, her head hitting each stair with a frightening thud, loud enough, it seemed, to knock her clean out. She spilled partially
into the front hall, still screaming as if her mind had just split in two—one part on those steps shrieking with the desperation of wanting to just die right there, the other part on that death road in Mississippi with her twin.

  Antonia moaned with the memory of that desperate wail as the pen with which she was writing Agnes Cannon slipped from her limp hand. She slumped onto the desk, resting her head on her arms, and she wept with the shame of her last words to Emeril, but without shame for her tears. And her years-old sorrow didn’t let her so much as flinch when her yellow cat, Tippy the Fourth, jumped with its feline surprise onto the edge of the desk and meowed right by her ear, as if to sing her empathy. Antonia sat up and took Tippy the Fourth onto her lap and stroked her head lightly, then put the cat’s face next to her own and closed her eyes with the comfort her cat gave her. Then she said to the cat, “I miss Emeril, you know. And I miss Tippy. But I’m glad I have you.”

  When she went to put Tippy the Fourth back onto the floor to scoot her on her way, she caught a glimpse of the unfinished letter to Agnes Cannon that, lost in her heartrending memories, she’d forgotten she was writing. But when she looked at it, and put it in its proper perspective alongside the memories of her dead twin, Antonia remembered all over again why she vowed, on the day her brother died, to hate Agnes forever. Had Agnes’s wiles not lured Emeril to the Garden District that day, maybe Antonia’s last words to her brother would have been kinder. She laid her pain at Agnes’s feet, and she’d give the woman no recourse but to accept it.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The waiting room was filled with the faded echoes of yesterday’s voices when Ellen walked in; so unusual for 7:30 in the morning, she noted, when any other day of the week every patient scheduled for the next hour tried to get there to be the first one in and the first one out. But today there was no one.

  She rounded the corner to the receptionist’s desk to find Nancy, the nurse she was certain she couldn’t do without, sitting at the desk in the receptionist’s stead.

  “Good morning,” Ellen said brightly. “Where’s Sharon?”

  “She went to get breakfast,” Nancy said. “She’ll be right back.”

  Ellen turned to look over her shoulder at the empty waiting room, thinking maybe someone had slid in right behind her and she hadn’t heard. “So nobody’s here, yet?”

  “Your eight o’clock, eight-thirty, eight-forty-five, and nine o’clock all canceled. The weather, you know. But Mrs. Simms is here,” Nancy said, lowering her head to look across her brow at Ellen.

  Ellen returned the look of skepticism, then said, “Don’t tell me. She’s in there nursing that big boy, right?”

  “Yeah. I let her go into the exam room and do it because, remember the last time, she was in here and Dr. Murphy came in and saw her and was too flustered to speak straight?”

  Ellen blew out a long, wearied breath. She walked around the desk and removed her lab coat from the hook where it hung behind Nancy’s chair. As she put it on, she said, “Don’t remind me. He went on for twenty minutes about how odd it was to see a woman nursing a boy that big.” Ellen walked to the front of the desk as she buttoned her lab coat. With the last button, she said, “Okay, listen. I’m going to need you to keep her son out here, at least until Sharon gets back, while I have a talk with Mrs. Simms.”

  “Ellen, you’re going to talk to her about breast-feeding that boy?” Nancy asked with eyes that spoke of her shock.

  Ellen looked curiously at Nancy, then replied, “Well, I’m going to suggest that she might want to give it up after the new baby comes. But what I really want to talk to her about is her use of these herbal supplements she’s been taking.”

  “She’s still doing that?”

  “You bet she is. And I don’t know how many times and in how many ways I can tell her that she’s putting herself and the baby at risk. I’ve told her time and time again that I strongly do not recommend her doing it, but she just comes back to me with the fact that she does it under the supervision of an herbalist. Anyway, I’ll examine her when Sharon gets back so that you can assist.” Ellen took the ring of keys that Nancy handed her, opened the file cabinet, and locked her purse inside.

  Stepping around the desk, she picked up the manila folder containing her patient’s charts and asked, “Exam room A?”

  “Yep,” was all Nancy said.

  Ellen knocked lightly, then entered before the woman could answer. She stepped into the room, then smiled distantly at Mrs. Simms as she watched the woman fasten her nursing bra and pull her top down over her belly full of baby. Ellen became suddenly aware that the woman’s blond and gray hair seemed thinner and her face more drawn and sallow, certainly making her look older than she looked just one month before; far older, Ellen thought, than the woman’s thirty-five years. “Good morning,” she said, with slightly less shine than she’d offered Nancy just minutes before.

  “Good morning, Dr. Barrett. D.J., did you say good morning?”

  “Good morning, Dr. Barrett,” the boy said.

  “Well, good morning, D.J.,” she said reaching out for his hand. “How’s school going?”

  “It’s good,” he said as if he meant it. “I’m in kindergarten.”

  “I know that. Do you like kindergarten?”

  “Oh yeah. My teacher says I’m good at a lot of things.”

  “I’ll bet you are.” Then Ellen reached for the boy and took him by the hand and said, “Say, D.J., how would you like to go out and color with Sharon when she gets back? In her drawer she has that basket of crayons.”

  “The one with every color in the world?” he said excitedly.

  “That’s right,” Ellen said with a giggle nearly as innocent as the look in D.J.’s rounded eager eyes.

  “Yeah, I want to color.”

  “Okay,” Ellen said as she opened the door. “Why don’t you go right out there with Nancy and she’ll get you all set up. Sharon will be back soon. And your mom will be done in a minute.”

  When the boy left, Ellen closed the exam-room door, then went over to her stool and lowered herself onto it with a pregnancy induced slowness. She looked up at Mrs. Simms and smiled thinly, then said, “I know you know what I need to talk to you about.”

  “Yes, I do,” the woman said softly as she diverted her eyes out the window.

  “Mrs. Simms, you simply cannot go on taking those herbal supplements. I have told you this from the very beginning of your pregnancy, yet you continue to use them.” Then Ellen’s mind caught a memory of the boy who just left—the big boy who’d be going on to the first grade come the fall—and thought to tell this woman that there simply needs to be a healthy cut-off point for nursing, somewhere before he says, “Hey Mom, I’m going to ride my bike over to Druid Hill Park and toss some balls around; I’ll be back in an hour to nurse.” But she thought better of it, and said instead, “I looked at your blood work from the last time you were here and it shows that these supplements are throwing your hormone levels off. Your numbers are fluctuating all over the place and that could cause more harm to the fetus than the nutritional boost you and this herbalist think it’s getting.”

  “Dr. Barrett, I just wish you Western-educated doctors would open your minds to the possibility that there’s something to this,” she said as if frustrated to no end. The woman then snatched her eyes from the window, looked at Ellen through the armor of her defenses and continued, “You know, I have a good friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer and didn’t go the route of chemotherapy, but chose instead a homeopathic course of treatment. That was six years ago and she’s still alive to tell the story. I think at some point you all are going to have to recognize that this isn’t just witch doctor science.”

  “Everyone has some kind of story about homeopathy saving someone’s life. I think it’s incredible that your friend took that kind of gamble and seemed to have success with it, but make no mistake, she was an exception and not the rule. I wouldn’t recommend it, and not because I’m
trying to push, or have been brainwashed by Western medicine, but because it’s the only game in town right now that has been tried and works. And I wouldn’t even be having this discussion with you if you weren’t pregnant. But the fact, Mrs. Simms, is that your body is naturally producing everything you need to keep this baby thriving in your womb. Everything else you’re taking is excessive, and even unnecessary. You’re simply taking dangerous chances, Mrs. Simms. That’s all I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “How can anybody be against anything that’s natural?”

  “All medicine is derived naturally, Mrs. Simms. And that’s my point precisely. Somehow, you’ve come to believe that anything manufactured by a pharmaceutical company is poisonous compared to what you can buy in a health-food store, and I’m simply telling you that this is patently untrue. Any herb can be poisonous to the human body.”

  “Look, Dr. Barrett, my mother drank and smoked when she was pregnant with me. She wasn’t a drunk, and she didn’t drink heavily, or anything like that, but she certainly drank socially when she was carrying me, and socially in those days sometimes meant a drink a day. To me, that says a lot about how careless she felt about the life she was carrying.” The woman stopped as if she were holding some other emotion at bay, then she continued: “And I know you think, just like everybody else, that I’m off the wall for continuing to nurse D.J. I saw the way that doctor looked at me and then turned his head away as if he was witnessing something depraved the last time I was in here. I see the way you look uncomfortable whenever I nurse him.”

  Ellen looked squarely at Mrs. Simms and replied, “The doctor you’re talking about is my boss, the head of gynecology and obstetrics for the hospital, and yes, I must tell you that he was taken aback when he saw you nursing a child far beyond the years of breast-feeding. But Mrs. Simms, since you brought it up, I have to tell you that at his age, D.J. gets more nutritionally from his regular diet than he’s getting from your breast milk.”