One Blood (49 page)

“
Thanks for coming, Pop,” he said quietly.

Moses nodded and patted his hand. They stared at each other from across the table.

“
You know the thing I’ve been trying to figure out?” Lincoln asked, finally.

“
What’s that?” Moses replied.

Lincoln smiled. “What were you doing at Angola that day?”

Moses’ smile faltered and he looked away.

“
What? What is it?”

“
It doesn’t matter anymore, Son,” Moses whispered.

“
Oh, come on! They’re getting ready to end me. Least you could do is be straight with me.”

Moses stood up, knees popping, and ran his fingers through his salt and pepper afro.

“
I’m sorry for yelling,” Lincoln said. “Please sit back down. Please?”

Moses considered this and then his shoulders slumped in a gesture of defeat. He sat back down.

“
Lincoln,” he began. “What I’m going to tell you has no bearing on anything. I want you to know that.”

“
Okay, Pop,” Lincoln replied uneasily.

“
That day. I came that day to confront Panama…I mean Malcolm.”

“
Confront him about what?” Lincoln asked.

“
Don’t make me tell you, Son. You’re better off not knowing, believe me.”

“
I want to know,” Lincoln said, no longer slouching in his chair. Crawfish were burrowing deep in his gut.

“
Okay. Here goes.” He exhaled deeply. “Son, you know that Randy Lafitte killed Walter Simmons, right?”

“
Of course.”

“
Well, that’s only one side of the story.”

Dear God.

Lincoln steeled himself. He was more afraid of what Moses was about to say than anything he’d ever faced in his life.

“
You sure you want to hear this?”

Lincoln wasn’t sure of anything anymore, but he motioned for Moses to go on.

“
I was there that night. I went to talk to Walter about a sermon. When I got there, his office was on fire. Up on his floor, someone broke down the door from the inside. It was your mother. And someone else.”

“
Who?”

“
Malcolm.”

Lincoln’s head was swimming.
Why hadn’t Panama X ever told him this?

“
Juanita thought she was protecting you. She didn’t even know the whole truth until later. Until she saw your face for the first time.”

“
What truth!” Lincoln screamed. A guard knocked on the door, signaling the end of their time.

Moses blurted out the rest.

“
This is going to sound crazy, but somehow Malcolm took over Walter’s body the day before he was murdered. He had sex with your mother as Walter and that moment decided everything else. The next day, Randy forced Walter’s secretary to call your mother at gunpoint, threw Walter in the closet, and waited for Juanita to arrive. Juanita said that seeing you for the first time sparked a memory she’d repressed for years. A memory of what happened after she went into Walter’s office. Before Malcolm broke her out.”

“
How do you know all this?” Lincoln asked.

“
We found it with Amir’s effects in a shoebox. There was a letter she’d written to Malcolm that she never mailed.”

The guards opened the doors as Moses said, “She was raped, Lincoln. Randy raped her.”

Lincoln had accepted that Randy was his father, and now he knew how it had happened. But he was still confused.

“
What do you mean, Malcolm took over Walter Simmon’s body?”

“
I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. But Malcolm was somehow able to insert himself into someone else’s body temporarily. He took over Walter’s body to be with Juanita.”

Lincoln’s mind was on fire. “Are you saying that either Randy or Malcolm was my father?”

Moses met his eyes. “Malcolm was deluded, Lincoln. Even if his laying with Juanita did impregnate her, you would still be Walter’s child.”

Lincoln processed Moses’ words as the guards tried to cuff him. He struggled and the battering began. They held him down until they chained him. They held Moses back.

As they dragged him out of there, Moses yelled, “Lincoln! Son! This doesn’t change anything! It doesn’t take away anything you’ve done!”

Moses kept yelling, but Lincoln could barely hear him over his own truculent thoughts. His head swirled as the guards brought him into the injection center, a tiny room that became very cramped with the four men, gurney, and heart monitor currently crowding its space. They didn’t waste any time strapping him onto the gurney. He was immediately relieved that his last wish had been honored.

The gallery seating before the room’s only window was blessedly empty. Lincoln held no illusions he would die in peace, but at least he’d limited the number of people who would know how he went.

Didn’t I make the right choice, Kris?

Lincoln knew that Kris couldn’t communicate with him anymore, but over the past year he’d kept up an ongoing dialogue with the friend he’d be joining any minute now.

They affixed telemetry wires to his newly shaved torso. The executioner/physician entered as two of the three guards left, their duties done. He pressed a button and the heart-rate monitor came to life, conveying the news one bleep at a time that Lincoln lived, for now. The physician swabbed both of his arms, filling the room with the scent of rubbing alcohol.

Next, an I.V. was inserted into his right arm. The physician moved around the gurney to insert another into his left arm. Lincoln had read about the process of his death and knew that only one I.V. was necessary to carry out his execution. The other was reserved as a backup in case the primary line failed.

“
Starting saline drip,” the physician said to a man who’d just entered. Lincoln turned his head and laid his eyes on the new Warden, a hard-looking brown-skinned black man with narrow soul-piercing eyes and a mammoth face covered partially in unkempt black and grey whiskers.

“
Proceed, Doctor.”

Lincoln took his eyes off the Warden and focused back on Moses’ revelation. Jhonnette had explicitly told him he was definitely Randy’s son. Just like Isaac had been Luc Lafitte’s illegitimate child. Still, hadn’t Panama X always treated him like his son as well?

The saline flowed freely through his veins. Next, Lincoln would receive three sequential I.V. injections. The first would be sodium thiopental to render him temporarily unconscious. This would be followed by an injection of pancuronium to paralyze his skeletal and respiratory muscles, resulting in eventual death by asphyxiation. Finally, he would receive potassium chloride to stop his heart for good.

I need to know the truth.

This final uncertainty was a fate worse than anything awaiting him in the syringes.

“
Administering sodium thiopental,” the physician remarked in a tone similar to how Lincoln imagined he would tell his wife he was headed out for groceries.

“
Thank you, Doctor,” the Warden replied. “This is it, Lincoln. Do you have any last words?”

Panic descended over Lincoln and he blurted the first thing that came to him. “Looks are deceiving!”

He noted the Warden’s perplexed expression as he simultaneously felt like something was dragging him into a deep dark hole. He tried to fight this sensation with the entirety of his being, but he was overmatched. Before he was swallowed by the void, his last conscious thought was a desperate plea for another chance.

* * * * *

“
He’s out,” the physician stated.

“
Good,” the Warden replied. “Let’s get this over with.”

“
Excuse me, Miss, you can’t be in here!”

“
You’re very wrong about that,” Jhonnette Deveaux replied before blowing a dark substance into the faces of the Warden and physician.

The doctor dropped the I.V. needle and collapsed.

Jhonnette unstrapped Lincoln, and then paused to sling an eye-patch through her hair and over her right eye.

* * * * *

Lincoln knew the darkness well. He’d lived in life’s considerable shadow since birth. But he’d never experienced anything quite like the deep dark that swallowed him after that second injection. At first, there was nothing, and then he felt the blackness enclosing around and within him like a living, breathing organism determined to crush him with its oppressive weight.

For a long while, he fought against this beast until he heard faint beeps similar to Monday morning trash pick-ups back when he lived with Moses.

I’m never going to see Moses again. I’m not going to see what kind of man Brandon becomes.

These facts were unbearable. Lincoln burrowed out of the black hole like someone buried alive. He clawed at the dirty grime of his subconscious trying to find purpose. An indeterminable amount of time passed before he eventually pulled himself through the final layer of mental dirt. Until he felt the darkness release him.

Lincoln’s body rushed forward from the back of his mind to full awareness. The first sensations of waking were of mingled pain and stiffness. He was having trouble breathing. And he wasn’t alone.

Lincoln opened his eyes, just like he’d done in another hospital room long ago, and saw Jhonnette hovering over him. She was wearing an eye-patch like Panama X and smiled a brilliant smile at the sight of him.

“
Welcome back to the realm of the living, Lincoln. I told you your story wasn’t over. Consider yourself reborn.”

* * * * *

Acknowledgements

Wow, so this is what it feels like to write an Acknowledgements section—alternately exhilarating and unnerving. Well, it took me nearly twelve years to get to these final words and I promise to make them count!

There’s no way I can take sole credit for this novel
,
I’ve had far too much help from far too many collaborators to be that bold, or delusional.

The first seeds of the novel, originally titled Simmons Park, were planted when I read Stephen King’s
It
,
The Dark Tower
series, and
The Stand
. The water on the seeds planted by Stephen King definitely came in the form of Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
and Richard Wright’s
Native Son
.
Their powerful examinations of race from two wholly different perspectives showed me that great books had to do more than entertain, they had to educate as well. Bigger Thomas from
Native Son
was actually the beginning of Lincoln Baker. I imagined taking up where Wright had left off with Bigger and examining what Bigger would do with a second chance. Anne Rice’s
The Witching Hour
was the sun shedding light into the darkest parts of my psyche. But the seeds didn’t fully germinate until I discovered Wilbur Smith’s
The River God
and Tananarive Due’s work—most especially
The Between
,
The Good House
, and
The Living Blood
.
One Blood
would not exist in its current format without the master classes in fluid prose, setting, character development, pacing, and the importance of details given to me while reading these amazing works.

I began this process a true amateur who dared to start a novel after never having written anything longer than a poem. This book has had many incarnations and setbacks over the years. Every leap forward came as a result of seeking creativity beyond the rough caves of my imagination. As a young writer, it is important to invest time in learning about your craft. I still have the notes I took in that January Creative Writing Class at Florida A&M University during the 2000 Spring Semester. It was in this class that a writing exercise inspired the initial idea for the story.

I looked for inspiration in other writers, but also found it in the form of feedback from several key early readers:

Nekeisha B., you were the first person to ever invest precious time reading over my early drafts. Your words of encouragement kept me going in those hard early days.

Tony H., you challenged my initial premises and forced me to step up my game. I hope to follow in your footsteps and be as successful as you have been with
The Invisible Enemy: Black Fox
and
The Invisible Enemy II: Vendetta
.

Alicia S., you were so right! I’m four years late from our original publication timeline…thanks so much for all your support in the early years. You are one of the few people who were there at the very beginning of my writing career. I can’t wait to hear what you think about the book.

Zakiya C-J, our mutual love of Stephen King and shared living experience in Brazil (and astrology – Cancers rule!) has created a great friendship. I remember nervously handing over pages to you and the feedback you gave me came at a crucial juncture.