The Color of Family (3 page)

There were several seconds of meaningful silence in the room before Aaron spoke. He looked at one or two of the clips, then asked, “Ma, why are you still on this thing? I thought we had all this settled. I thought we had made it clear to you that Clayton Cannon is not your brother's son.”

“You didn't make anything of the sort clear to me.” Antonia was immediately perturbed. “I know my blood, and that boy has my blood running all through him just as sure as you two do. That boy sitting down there in Harbor Court Towers, the prodigious musical genius brought up out of the great, albeit sometimes backward, yet always musical, state of Louisiana is your cousin. Emeril was my twin. I shared a womb with him and I would know more than anybody when a part of him is still living.”

“Okay, Ma, that's it. I don't have time for this,” Ellen said. “You either stop this nonsense or, I swear to God, in the morning I will have you committed to Shepherd-Pratt. And I mean what I say.” And with that threat, Ellen stormed from the room and walked toward the hall with determined thumps to her measured steps.

“Ellen, honey, please wait. Please just listen to me, sweetheart,” Antonia implored desperately. For as much as she knew how the mere mention of Clayton Cannon spiraled her daughter downward into her basest self, Antonia still couldn't help herself. And she thought that without her self-imposed control, she'd be writing to Clayton Cannon constantly; maybe even sitting on the bench at the harbor every day waiting to catch a glimpse of him as he stepped from the front door of those elegant apartment towers. Of course, even now, it was difficult for her to admit to herself without the prickly heat of embarrassment that she'd actually done just that the day after reading that article on him in the
Sun
papers only three weeks ago. It was right there in plain print that he lived in Harbor Court Towers. It was as if fate had given her the go-ahead. Still, if Ellen only knew how hard she struggled against her temptations daily, maybe then she'd understand.

She put the clips in her hand down on the table and followed her daughter into the hallway. She steeled herself against the pain of rejection and said, “Well, you go right on ahead and have me committed. But I'm doing this for you and that grandchild of mine you're growing right there inside you. He or she has got a right to know their kin, don't they? Knowing that that child's great uncle is close to the finest pianists in the world should be that child's birthright, and it will be as God is my witness!”

Then, without waiting for Ellen's response, Antonia took two more steps toward her daughter—but watched as she turned and walked out the door. “And I'll tell you something else,” Antonia proclaimed, “I have the truth, and the Bible says ye who has the truth shall be free from the sins of the world!” Antonia's love of quoting from the Bible had yet to leave her since the day it started when she was sixteen years old and carried with her the self-righteousness of having sat for one solid week to read it, book by book, gospel by gospel, chapter by chapter and psalm by psalm. But even though the quotes sounded nearly authentic, they were always her own skewed version of the real thing. She went back to Aaron in the dining room, who looked lost and somehow doubtful of something, and she smiled nonetheless eagerly. “There always comes a point where the children think they know more than the parent. At least you'll listen to me.”

“Ma, I'll listen to you, but you have to listen to me, too. What
you're doing could affect all of us in a really bad way. We could all be investigated as deranged nuts. I could be taken completely off the air at the station and blackballed altogether in the news business. And Ellen, she's just scared. You know, Ma, this whole thing could compromise her standing at the hospital. This kind of thing could get around all of Baltimore. You know this is a small town at its heart.” And in his voice was the crackling desperation one gets when trying to speak reason to the unreasonable.

She wasn't about to budge, though. She shoved two things at him. One was a newspaper photograph of Clayton Cannon standing in front of a sleek black piano and the other a snapshot of her brother. She said, “You can honestly tell me that you don't see my brother through all that white? His white skin be damned, look at his eyes, and then look at Emeril's and look at mine. Those are Emeril's eyes. Those are my eyes.”

Aaron obeyed his mother and without looking into the layers of her eyes, he only skimmed over them, saying, “Ma, I've told you before and I'm telling you again, I don't. I want you to stop this now. You have no proof that he's your brother's son.”

“The hell I don't! His mother, that Agnes Cannon is a lying snake-in-the-grass. She's made that boy believe all his life that his daddy is that part-Cajun-part-cracker Douglas Cannon. These pictures are all the proof I need.”

“And I say you need more. Besides, that's a pretty caustic accusation you're making against Agnes Cannon, and Douglas Cannon, too, because you're basically saying that he's too stupid to know that a half-black child isn't his.”

Antonia looked sternly at Aaron through narrowed eyes, then said, “Let me tell you something that you'd better remember for the rest of your life. The dumbest woman can fool the smartest man any day of the week.”

“Aw, Ma, come on,” Aaron said wearily.

But Antonia was not about to argue this a second longer. She was not going to give up her effort to claim her nephew, and Aaron was never going to believe she was doing anything more than obsessing over her own delusion to keep a dead twin's memory alive. “Are you going to take these things or not?”

“Again, why do you want me to take them?”

“Because I'm about to make my move and I want you to have
the proof in case something happens to me. I don't trust that Agnes Cannon. I believe she'd do anything to keep that boy from knowing he's black.”

As if he hadn't even heard his mother's paranoid ranting, Aaron asked, “What kind of move are you about to make, Ma?”

“Why do you care? You think I'm crazy anyway,” she said, gathering the clips from the table.

Aaron took the yellowing scraps from his mother and held her hand. He looked deeply into her eyes in a way that seemed filled with a sad farewell. “Momma, I'm really worried about you. Maybe you should see your doctor.”

“Just take these and get on out of here. I don't need a doctor, and you'll see that when it turns out I'm telling the truth. Goodbye.” She pushed him into the living room and through it into the hallway. She pushed him all the way to the door.

Aaron stopped and turned to face his mother. “Ma, I love you and I'll do anything for you.”

“Yeah, yeah, I love you too. Good-bye,” she said, giving him the bum's rush. Abruptly, her door was shut and bolted.

She went immediately to her writing table that sat in front of her favorite chair in the entire house. She proceeded to write, writing faster than her mind could gather up the words. She stopped only to study, once more, a picture of her nephew whose eyes as round as marbles of green-speckled honey and head of curls that were just one gene away from kinky made him as much like her as his straight and pinched nose and wafer-thin lips made him a part of Agnes. Yet even though she and Agnes were displayed so prominently in him, he still looked like an all-American, full-blooded white man; just an ordinary white man who turned a deep shade of pink when he laughed too hard or had too much hard drink. Antonia and Emeril, in Clayton, had been completely subdued by Agnes. Damn that Agnes.

Antonia's pen moved across the page as if it were being guided by a much more powerful force than merely her will. It was anger. Anger in its purest. Antonia wasn't going to sit by and abide by this betrayal of her brother a second longer. Over the years, Antonia had written letters to Agnes that varied in the levels of her wrath. They had gone unanswered year after year, after year, and Antonia had long grown tired of waiting. She wanted to know her
nephew. She wanted to touch the only piece of her brother's flesh left on earth. So she wrote:

Then without warning, her pen just stopped moving, and her mind was forced to the very hour Emeril died. It happened only hours after the exact moment when Antonia knew for certain that Emeril, along with God and that Agnes Marquette, had created a life. It was a hot day in July, and she awoke with the pain of her monthly, but that was only second to the agony of the dream she'd forced herself to leave. Her sleep vision was of Agnes, skipping round and round the Dupreses' willow carrying Antonia's old yellow basket filled not with Tippy, but with fish. There were fish of all kinds, but mostly red snapper and one salmon with a big fishy smile. Agnes just skipped and skipped and smiled as big as that salmon with just as much guile. And Antonia remembered that, when she forced herself awake, she had the sprinting heart that could only be imposed by a nightmare, not a mere dream. This, she knew, had been a nightmare indeed, particularly since her mother's old bayou wisdom believed, and thus made her believe, that a dream of fishes was the certain sign of a birth to come.

So she jumped up and splashed herself with a bit of water, then dressed fast. She scooped Tippy up from where she lay curled lazily at the foot of Antonia's bed and put her in the old yellow basket. As she scurried down the hall, past her brother's empty room, headed for the back stairs that spilled into the kitchen, she heard her mother's call.

“Antonia,” her mother beckoned with distress. “Where're you goin'? I'm gonna need you to go down and buy me some corn and tomatas. You done slept half the mornin' away as it is, not to mention the day.”

“All right, Momma,” she said without really heeding a word of her mother's. “I'll be right back, Momma. I gotta tell Emeril somethin'.”

“Emeril's gone, girl. He ain't down at the Dupreses' today,” her mother bellowed down the stairs. “Said he was goin' over to the Garden District lookin' for lawn work. Said some friend of his told him 'bout somebody over there needin' somebody to look after their yard.”

But this time, her mother's words stopped Antonia where she strode. The Garden District. That's exactly where she was headed, but not because Emeril was down there looking for a job in some white man's yard. What did he need with a job over there with him working at the Dupreses' the way he did and being paid generously to do so? She was headed there because she knew that one of those moneyed families—she didn't know which one, but Cora Calliup from next door said they lived in a house that was the color of flamingoes with lawn jockeys on either side of the porch steps—had let that Agnes Marquette into their home as the charge of their children. Antonia didn't know the name of these misguided people, but unless there was more than one pink house with little black men holding lanterns, finding Emeril and saving him was going to be easy, because something, maybe those fishes in her dream, maybe that extra twin sense, told her that that's where she'd most likely find him. What kind of people, especially of the Garden District variety, would look at Agnes Marquette and not see that she was simply not fit to care for cat or child? And then there was Emeril, sniffing after that girl's secrets, that weren't so secret, with such hunger that he'd put himself in peril by sneaking over to the wealthiest white part of town for sex while the children in Agnes's care skipped rope or played tag. So Antonia asked her mother, just to be certain, “Momma, where'd you say Emeril had gone?”

“He's down at the Garden District, Antonia. What do you want with him, anyway?”

“Uh, I need to tell him that Junior Jackson won't be goin' with
him and Junior's cousin Willie up to Jackson, Mississippi, tonight for a visit with Willie's girl.” It wasn't altogether a lie. Junior wasn't going, that much was true, but he had told Emeril as much days before.

“Well, you hurry on back here, now,” her mother said. “And don't you go messin' things up for Emeril. That's one hard-workin' boy. I wish he could light some of his fire underneath you.”

Antonia rolled her eyes up in her head, then mumbled to Tippy, “She would die if she only knew what kind of fire he's got lit under him. And she'd double-die if I had it lit under me.” Just before she dashed from the back door, she snatched a square of cornbread from the basket on the edge of the counter and went on her way.

Antonia, with Tippy in tow, got off the streetcar in just one hop. She stopped to situate her cat better in the basket and then went on her way to find the street and then the house that held her brother. She turned onto the street with confidence, but that's when she discovered that there was indeed more than one flamingo pink house on the rue. So she approached the first one, which was the second in from the corner, and studied every inch of the front lawn without spotting one small ceramic black man dressed up for the sport of kings. And just as she was about to walk on, someone called to her from just inside the screened door.

“You lost, gal?” a woman said.

“Yes, ma'am. I'm lookin' for a pink house with some lawn jockeys.”

“Well, that could be the DuBoises' or the Laniers'. Which one do you want?”

Antonia hesitated, since she wouldn't know a Lanier or a DuBois if one came up and slapped her on the bottom, so she asked, “Which one has the two young children, a boy and a girl, and a baby-sitter named Agnes?”