P. G. County

by Connie Briscoe

  “That must be tough,” he said.

  “What? Running a salon?”

  “That too, but I meant raising your son alone.”

  She chuckled. “Oh Lord. There were days when I wanted to pull out every hair on my head, I kid you not.” There were still days like that, she thought wryly as Ashley came to mind. “But with patience and a little help from the Lord, I managed.”

  “Did his dad help much?”

  “Humph. Not one bit. But I think I did pretty good by myself. Kenyatta graduated from college and he’s got a good job.” Never mind that he was in love with a white woman. Hopefully, that would pass.

  “You should be proud of yourself.”

  Pearl shrugged. “You do what you have to when it comes to your children. How many do you have? I know you have at least one daughter.”

  “Just the one. Her name is Juliette.”

  “Right. I’ve seen her around the neighborhood. How old is she?”

  “Fourteen going on twenty.”

  Pearl laughed. “She’s a beautiful girl. So poised.”

  He smiled with obvious pride. “Thanks. She’s the light of my life. Just hate to see them grow up.”

  “Tell me about it. Enjoy her while you can. Here it is,” she said as they approached an Italian restaurant on a corner.

  “Let’s eat and talk cake.” He held the door open for her.

  The restaurant was small, with only a half dozen tables. The owner knew Pearl and greeted her warmly. She asked for a quiet table, and he sat them in a corner. They talked about business, P.G. County politics and their families, and before she knew it an hour had whizzed by.

  Patrick was a pleasant surprise. He was nothing like she would have expected, given that he was married to Jolene Brown. She had been around Jolene only a few times and that was more than enough, since the woman always acted like she didn’t think Pearl was good enough for her. But Patrick was so easygoing and down to earth. She felt comfortable with him immediately.

  Why was it that men always went for women like Jolene and only wanted to be friends with women like herself? They loved the ones who dressed like whores and flaunted every physical asset they had and acted like bitches half the time. Pearl didn’t understand it.

  They stood up and shook hands over the cake deal, then he walked her back to the salon. He took her hand at the door and smiled warmly. He had a kind smile, with perfectly shaped lips and a thin, neat mustache. That million-dollar smile would do him a world of good in politics. And those mischievous eyes would do him a world of good with women. Whoa. What was she doing analyzing his mouth and eyes?

  “I enjoyed that,” he said.

  She smiled and lowered her gaze. For some strange reason, he made her feel shy. And at her age, not many folks could do that.

  She realized he was still holding her hand. She wanted to pull away but she didn’t. She cleared her throat. “Well, I better get going.” Yes indeed. She needed to get out of there. It was starting to feel hot, and she was sure her hand must be getting clammy. But he held on.

  “This is going to sound strange, Pearl,” he said slowly, “and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way, but …”

  He paused, and she glanced down the block. What on earth was he about to say to her? She cleared her throat. She was tempted to yank her hand away and run into the safety of her salon.

  “I really enjoy talking to you. For some reason I don’t feel I have to put on an act around you, and I find that refreshing.”

  “Well, thank you. I, um, I like talking to you, too.” No harm in saying that, right? He probably just wanted to be her friend. That’s all most men wanted from her anyway.

  He was still holding her hand. Why was he holding her hand?

  “Can I call you sometime?” he asked.

  What did that mean? They had a business deal. She was gonna bake half a dozen cakes for him. Of course he could call her. No harm in that.

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Yes?” He leaned down to make sure he’d heard right. “You mean … I mean, I’d like to see you again … Socially.” He smiled.

  Socially? As in a date? He couldn’t possibly mean that. But he did and she knew darn good and well he did. Lord. She was so out of practice with this stuff. He meant call, take her out and get to know her. Of course she could never agree to that. Of course she had to say no to that. Of course …

  “That’s fine. I’d like that, too.” What the heck was she saying? Did her brain just fall out of her head and roll down the sidewalk?

  He squeezed her hand, then let it go, finally. He held the door open for her. “I’ll call you over the weekend, maybe on Sunday after church,” he said. “Just to talk.”

  She smiled her consent, and he turned and walked to his car. She stood in the picture window near the plant he’d bought for her and watched until he pulled away from the curb. So he was a churchgoing brother. She liked that. Yes, she really liked that.

  “Pearl. Pearl.”

  She realized that the receptionist was calling her name and holding up her phone messages. Get a bold of yourself, girl. She patted her short hairdo in place, took the pink slips and called her next client. She sat the woman in her salon chair, and they chatted, or rather the client did. Fortunately, it was Dawn, who could pretty much carry on a conversation all by herself. Pearl just smiled and nodded as she put on her smock and Dawn talked about her job, her kids and everything else in between.

  She was rusty, that was it. It had been so long since an attractive man had paid her any attention that she didn’t even know how to act. That was the only way to explain her behavior. What she had just done was plain stupid, not at all like her.

  Humph. She would straighten this mess out as soon as he called. If he called. He probably wouldn’t even contact her, except about the cakes. Look at her. Fat, boring. She would be shocked if he asked her out.

  She shook out a towel and draped it around the client’s shoulders. She took a deep breath. She had to put all these thoughts about Patrick aside. Right now she had a job to do.

  “So how have you been, Dawn?”

  Dawn stopped in mid-sentence and stared at Pearl. “Girl, have you heard a word I just said?”

  * * *

  Jolene was beginning to realize that getting a man to leave his wife was tough as hell. She had been with Terrence for months and couldn’t pull it off. It was starting to look like a repeat with Bradford.

  She wiped her sweaty forehead with the towel draped around her shoulders, then increased the incline on the treadmill. Bradford claimed he didn’t love his wife, but he was still married. So go figure. Why did he insist on sticking with Barbara? Especially now that he knew she was available.

  Bradford had said that he didn’t think the marriage would survive another affair if Barbara found out about it. Unfortunately, the wife was usually the last to know about these things. She had always wondered why Terrence’s wife never became suspicious, even when he was with her two or three evenings a week.

  Maybe she should give Barbara a little nudge, open her eyes up to what was really going on behind her back. If Barbara knew that Bradford was up to his old tricks, maybe she would leave him. But how in the world could she accomplish that without implicating herself?

  Chapter 28

  Candice climbed out of her Ford Taurus and popped her umbrella open. It had been raining all day and she had to step carefully as she walked up the wet path to the house on Kansas Avenue. It was a tidy little brick affair in the middle of a block of row houses. The lawn was trimmed neatly, and the porch was covered in grass carpeting that had recently been swept clean.

  She walked up the short flight of stairs to the porch and shook out the umbrella, then raised her hand to the doorbell and paused. Her nerves were all over the place. She took a deep breath and pressed the button.

  She heard a thump, a door shutting or something, and then soft footsteps on a wood floor. The front door opened and an elderly wom
an peeked out from behind the screen door. She was black with a medium complexion and pure white hair pinned back in a bun. Her skin was wrinkled but had a soft dewy texture. She had warm brown eyes and a youthful smile.

  Candice had prepared for this moment, thinking out all the possibilities. The minute she reached the neighborhood, she thought the family living in it was probably black. But just because a distant cousin was black didn’t mean that her great-grandfather George was black. This woman could have been adopted. Rose could have been white and married a black man. Anything could have happened. It was not yet time to panic.

  Candice smiled. “Mrs. Johnson?”

  “Yes. And you must be Candice Jones?”

  Candice nodded.

  Grace Johnson unlatched and opened the screen door. “Come on in,” she said. “And get out of the rain. Such nasty weather we’re having. May I take your coat?”

  “Yes, the weather has been awful.” If Grace was at all surprised that Candice was white, she didn’t show it. Candice wasn’t sure what that meant. This was all so confusing.

  Grace hung her coat up on a rack near the door and led Candice into a small living room. It was filled with wood furniture that had been well kept over the years. A Persian carpet covered most of the floor. Handmade doilies graced the arms of the couch and a stuffed armchair. And an old console television sat up against a wall.

  “Can I get you something?” Grace asked. “Some water or a soda?”

  “No thanks. I’m fine.” Immediately she regretted not asking for something. Her throat was like gravel, but she wanted to get on with this.

  She sat on the couch and Grace sat in the armchair across from her. “My daughter had to go out. I’m sorry about that because I wanted you to meet her.”

  Candice smiled. “I’m sorry I missed her.”

  “Another time maybe. So. You wanted to hear about Uncle George, right?”

  Just hearing that name coming from this woman’s lips sent a shudder up Candice’s spine. She nodded. “Yes.”

  Grace clasped her hands together in her lap, and Candice noticed that she was holding a white lace handkerchief.

  “Well, let’s see. As you know, George and my mother were brother and sister. After his first wife died—she died pretty young and I never knew her name—George moved up north, where he met his second wife, a woman named Marianne. I believe you said they were your great-grandparents when we spoke on the phone?”

  Candice nodded. Strangely enough, she felt so calm. It was like she was having an out-of-body experience. Here she was sitting across from a ninety-something-year-old black woman and they had some of the same ancestors. She was a sweet, charming woman, but a black woman nevertheless.

  “Do you know anything about George’s parents?” Candice asked.

  Grace nodded and dabbed her cheeks with the handkerchief. “His father’s name was Andrew Blair. He owned a plantation outside Richmond and he also had a city mansion in Richmond.”

  Candice sat up eagerly. If Andrew owned that much land, it confirmed that he was white. “And he was married twice, right?”

  Grace shook her head and fiddled with the edges of her handkerchief. “As far as I know, he had only one wife. He never remarried after she died.”

  Candice frowned. “But based on my research at the National Archives, a woman named Caroline showed up as his first wife, and Sara was his second wife. She …” Candice paused. A strange look had come over Grace’s face.

  “Sara wasn’t his wife, dear,” Grace said softly as she twirled the handkerchief around her fingers. “She was a slave.”

  It felt like the couch had collapsed underneath her. Candice chuckled nervously. “Whatever makes you say that?”

  “Well, my mother told me, of course. You see …” Grace looked down at the handkerchief and opened it flat on her lap. Candice wished she’d leave the damn thing alone and go on with what she was about to say.

  “Andrew Blair had two families, really. His white family and his black family. He and his slave Sara had two children together, my mother, Rose, and George.” Grace looked at Candice, her jaw set firmly.

  Candice stared at the woman in disbelief. She shook her head. No, no. Impossible. This woman was saying that her great-great-grandfather cheated with a slave right under his wife’s nose? “That … that doesn’t make sense. I don’t see how he could have managed that. I mean—”

  “Well, from what I’ve learned, it wasn’t all that uncommon. Although Mama used to say that after a while Andrew’s wife refused to go to the plantation. She stayed in Richmond at the city home. So he kept Sara and her children on the plantation, and his wife and her daughters in Richmond, and he would travel back and forth.”

  Candice realized that she was sitting so far on the edge of her seat that she was damn near about to fall off. She sat back and chuckled, more from bad nerves than from anything funny. Certainly there was nothing remotely amusing about this. “That’s quite a story,” Candice said. “I’m sorry,” Grace said sympathetically. “You really didn’t know about Sara, did you?”

  Candice closed her eyes. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “I really am sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “I think I’ll take something to drink now,” Candice said with a deep sigh. “May I have a glass of water, please?”

  “Certainly.” Grace stood and left the room.

  “Oh hell,” Candice muttered. This story was so farfetched, and yet all the missing pieces seemed to fall into place. What should she do now?

  Grace returned with a tall glass of ice water, and Candice drank half of it. “Um, do … do you have any proof of all this? I don’t mean to doubt you, it’s just that I … I … this is so unexpected for me and—”

  Grace held out her hand. “Wait here a minute. I have something I can show you.”

  She walked off and Candice held the cool glass up to her forehead. Right now she could use a real drink but this would have to do.

  Grace returned with an envelope and sat in the armchair. She pulled out a photo and handed it to Candice. It was a black-and-white picture of a dark-complexioned black woman with her hair tied up in a scarf. She wore what looked like a long dress made of muslin or cotton. Her face was devoid of expression, but her eyes looked weary and wise.

  “That’s Sara,” Grace said softly.

  Candice nodded. Of course. She smiled thinly.

  “Would you like a copy?” Grace asked. “It’s the only one we have, but I’m sure I can get my daughter to have a copy made for you.”

  Candice looked down at the photo again. It was hard to believe that the woman in this photo was related to her. No, she had seen and heard enough. She didn’t need the photo. She held it out toward Grace.

  “No, thank you. But I do appreciate you showing it to me. Um, this is all so confusing, and I …” Candice’s voice trailed off. What could she say? Nothing made sense anymore.

  “May I get you another glass of water?” Grace asked. “All the color’s drained out of your face.”

  “Yes, please.” Candice watched Grace leave the room and wondered if she would ever be able to gather the strength to get up and walk out. Even if she did, it wouldn’t be her, Candice Jones. It would be some other woman with some other life, some other past. It would be a black woman who looked white.

  Grace returned with another tall glass of water, and Candice gulped it down.

  “Are you feeling any better, dear?”

  Hell, no, Candice wanted to shout. She felt lousy. But she nodded to reassure the woman.

  “You know,” Grace said thoughtfully, “we always wondered what happened to that side of the family after George moved up north. We knew that he had married and had children but we never met any of them. We suspected that George was passing and that maybe that was why he kept the two families apart.”

  Candice frowned. “Passing?”

  “Passing for white.”

  “Oh. Right. But why would he do that? I don�
��t understand.”

  “Maybe he thought it would let him lead a better life. It happened more than people realize.”

  “Do you think George’s second wife, Marianne, believed that George was white?” Candice asked.

  “Probably, since he never brought her back to visit his family in Virginia.”

  “Jesus,” Candice murmured under her breath.

  Grace stood and walked to a side table. She picked up a photo framed in silver and brought it to Candice. “This is my mother and father, Rose and Peter.”

  Candice took the photo. So this was Rose. It was a formal portrait of an attractive couple dressed for a special occasion. And if she hadn’t been told otherwise, she would have assumed that the woman was white or ethnic. She handed it back to Grace. “Very nice.”

  “It was taken in the 1930s, I think. My father had retired by then.”

  “What kind of work did he do?” Candice asked.

  “He was a physician,” Grace said as she sat back down. “As was my husband. My mother was a teacher, and so was I.”

  “Oh? That’s impressive.”

  “We are a family of high achievers,” Grace said proudly. “You can see that although my mother could have passed, she chose not to. George hurt my mother deeply by doing that, and I don’t think she ever really got over it.”

  Candice raised her eyebrows. How about what he had done to her family? What he was still doing to them from his grave. Her family had been living a lie all these years. “At least you knew who you were and where you came from. We didn’t, apparently.”

  “My mother felt as if her brother was ashamed of her. They were very close before he left for Massachusetts, but he never talked much about his life up there whenever he came back to visit. So she assumed that he was passing and that we weren’t good enough for him and his new life. Never mind that her husband was a doctor and she was a teacher. To have your own brother reject you for that … well, it really hurt Mother.”

  Candice nodded. It was strange to think how the horrors of slavery were still hanging over all of their lives even today. Or maybe not so strange. “I see how that would have hurt your mother.”