The Color of Family (18 page)

“So what do they do, sit at the tables and have church, or do they take the tables out of there and roll in an altar?” Maggie asked with an urgency that said she truly needed to know.

“I don't know, Maggie, I've never been there to worship,” Aaron said impatiently, hoping to put an end to her questions about something he'd pondered long ago and many times only to find his musings pointless and meandering. “I'm just telling you, Maggie, that it is a church
and
a restaurant. Besides, I thought you knew. This seems like one of those quirky things you'd definitely know about since you know about every other one of Baltimore's oddities.”

“Well, I've got to tell you, this one I missed.” Then a low rumble of a laugh boiled up again from her belly, when she said, “But
our people sure can combine stuff, can't we? I mean a place to feed your soul in every way, I guess is what they were thinking. Next thing you know we'll be finding all kinds of combinations of things with places like
MR. JIMMY'S CHICKEN AND WAFFLES SHACK AND LAW OFFICES
, or something like that. Go in and get your divorce and a little chicken and waffles with some collard greens on the side.”

Rick stood stiffly by Ellie as she and Maggie and Aaron exploded in laughter throughout the kitchen. And though the humor seemed to elude him, he still said with a bookish weightiness that sucked the room dry of its former lightness, “Well, sociologically speaking, I think there's a connection to food and spiritual worship with African-Americans. It may even go back to the days of slavery the way African-Americans make food a part of the Sunday ritual. Going to church, and then having Sunday supper right after church was like an extension of that fellowship, breaking bread with relatives as well as fellow worshipers. In most parts of the South it's as natural a phenomenon as breathing.”

And now that the laughter had stopped, and there was nothing left in his kitchen but Rick's intellectual account of things, Aaron somehow felt dissected. Mostly, though, as he recalled his mother's new tradition of family dinner with Clayton, he felt ganged-up on. When did my mother and Rick become of like mind? he wondered. But he had to take them on one at a time, and right now, all that annoyed Aaron about Rick was hanging right there like stagnant air.

Dissected. There was no better way to define how Rick had just made him feel. As if Aaron, by virtue of being
African-American
were some sort of antediluvian subject to be studied the way an archaeologist might study the bones of prehistoric apes to know their social patterns. The worst part, Aaron believed, was that Rick's white maleness would put up a deflectable wall, built out of all the ways he would deny, deny, deny, that would never allow him to see clearly; that's why Aaron vowed that it was scarcely worth ever trying to tell him. It would be like spitting up in the air—it would just end up falling right back in his face.

And so it continued to echo through Aaron's mind, the way Rick said
“African-Americans”
with such affectation, as if it made him somehow evolved, enlightened and correctly liberal. And this
irked Aaron even more. He recalled the times he had argued up a purple storm his reason for disavowing that term,
African-American.
Yet Rick continued to use it in his presence with what Aaron could only deem as sheer disrespect of his view that it was an insubstantial description. Africans from Morocco and Tunisia living in America with green cards, he remembered telling Rick, were as white as Rick, yet these Africans were more entitled to that hyphenated status than those who were once simply known as black and born and raised in America, as were their parents and their parents' parents. Yet a Moroccan or a Tunisian would certainly not be what people, particularly sociologically exact and
up-to-date
white people such as Rick, have in mind when saying African-American. He could still hear himself shrieking this at Rick in their last go-around over the label as he pounded his fist. And so even with what he knew he would be up against this time as well, it would have been like stopping the order of nature as it flows in a river if Aaron had kept himself from saying, “I've told you before, Rick, I've never lived in Africa, nor have my parents nor their parents. And that would be the case for nearly every black person in America.”

“Aaron” was all Ellie said crisply, as if her brother should know that she'd had quite enough of his proclamations in the name of his people.

But he continued as if Ellie had said nothing. “As for Micah's following some sort of anthropological tradition possibly brought over from Africa with Sunday supper, I can't say for sure because quite honestly, man, I've never thought enough about it to study it. But I doubt it. It sounds to me more like some myth you should be exploring in one of your novels. And if I were a betting man, I would say that there're probably more black families who go to church and then come home every Sunday without feeling the need to do the whole Soul Food thing.”

There was a full and hearty silence in the kitchen, ripe for echoes of enmity. And Rick seemed to have wallowed in it all before he finally responded. “You know, Aaron, when I told you that that movie was my favorite movie about African-American family life, I didn't tell you about it to be mocked now for it. And as far as
African-American
is concerned, I have every right to use a term that I consider a respectful way to honor the past, pres
ent, and future of an entire race of people that white America never wanted and never accepted in spite of a legacy that they set in motion. Maybe that's not important to you, but it certainly is to me.”

With a smile too private to be seen by anyone but himself, Aaron relaxed. And sitting right on the edge of his mind, ready to explode through voice and words was Aaron's question,
“And you don't see this as stinking of your white liberal guilt?”
But instead of saying what would drive his sister to have a fit powerful enough to bring that baby right out onto his kitchen floor, he only said, as carefree as if it were all far behind them, “All right, let's eat.”

He put several dishes in Maggie's hands, then gathered up all he could carry of the food and went to head out of the kitchen. And it was only when he turned to see what was keeping Rick and Ellie from following him that he saw Rick's wounded face, the same face of some nameless boy in his memory from the playground of his childhood who could never seem to fit in. Aaron, being who he is, simply could not leave Rick there to flounder in his awkwardness, waiting for contrition that would never come, so he said, “Come on, man. It's cool. It's over. We have a difference of opinion about this and we probably always will. It's no big deal. I say what I feel, you say what you feel. That's just how it goes. That's just family stuff.”

“Yeah, all right,” Rick said as he looked at Ellie for some sort of affirmation.

She smiled softly, then turned with hardness to Aaron and said, “I get whiplash craning my neck to look at you up on your soapbox, baby brother.”

“Whatever, Ellie. Let's just eat.”

“Well, where's Poppa?” Ellie asked. “I called him and told him to be here at eight-thirty. He said he'd be here.”

“It's only eight-thirty-five, Ellie. I'm sure he'll be here. And he just got off the plane from New Orleans this afternoon, so give him a minute,” Aaron said, smiling with the thought of Ellie and Antonia being essentially the same person when it came to their lack of patience. Yet, were he to tell her so, he knew with every bit of instinctual self-preservation that she'd throw a wild fit of temper, so he simply said, “Just relax, he'll be here soon. Besides, you
know Ma has probably asked him a million questions about why he's coming out here. That could take time.”

“Well, you're the one trying to rush us to sit down for dinner.”

“There's no rule that says we have to wait for him if everybody's hungry and wants to eat now. All I'm saying is put the food out to give everybody the option.”

“Well, I want to wait for Poppa.”

“Do what you want, Ellie,” Aaron said firmly, as his fraying patience with her contrariness inched toward full.

Maggie walked past Aaron with her arms full, and just before she went through the door to the dining room, she said in a tone that seemed to consign shame, “Sometimes when I listen to the two of you it makes me glad that I'm an only child. I swear, it's always something with you two. You find the craziest things to fuss over.”

Aaron said nothing as he followed Maggie into the dining room. Before he had emptied his hands of the food, the doorbell rang. “That must be Poppa,” he said, setting the last dish of food he carried on the edge of the table. He went off to the door with quickness, swung it open, and stepped outside. “Hey, Poppa,” he said as he took his father close in his arms and, in spite of the icy wetness from a frozen rain that had been falling all day and was now coating Junior's overcoat, shared a father-son hug that included the standard back-pats required to make it manly.

“How are you, son?” Junior said as he stepped back to hear the answer.

“I'm doing okay, Poppa. Come on in and eat. We just put dinner on the table.”

“Have y'all started eating yet?” Junior seemed to ask with some worry as he peeled off his coat.

“Naw, not at all. Ellie made sure of that. She would have chewed off our hands if we had looked as if we were going to as much as take a crumb off the crust of a piece of chicken,” Aaron said as he closed the door and took his father's coat.

And from behind him, Aaron heard Rick say, “How are you, Dr. Jackson?”

“Just fine, son,” Junior said, handing his coat to Aaron.

But Ellie had a point to make that had to come before greeting her father. “I heard that,” she snapped at her brother from the aperture separating the living room and dining room.

“Good, because I meant for you to hear it,” he said with humor as he followed his father toward the dining room, laying the coat across the back of a chair in the living room. When he reached his sister, he playfully chucked her on the chin and said, “But that's why you're the family's sweetheart. This family wouldn't be nearly as colorful without all those neurotic ways of yours and Ma's we've come to love.”

“I am
nothing
like Ma,” she said with a firmness that seemed more intent on convincing herself than the rest.

“You're exactly like your mother,” Junior said as he took a seat at the head of his son's dinner table. Then he chuckled and added, “But you only inherited the best parts of her neuroses. The ones that are easy to find charming. That's the only reason why I drove on ice-covered roads to be here tonight, because you made it sound as if it were a matter of life and death when you called me down in New Orleans yesterday.” He took his napkin from underneath his silverware and spread it across his lap, then drew in a deep breath. After letting it out, he smiled at Ellie, and said; “Yet, something tells me it's not, but I showed up anyway. It's one of your more charming neuroses—making something out of very little.”

“Smooth save, Dr. Jackson. Very smooth,” Maggie whispered as she put a kiss on his cheek. She moved around his chair and sat, right across from Aaron, and Ellie sat down next to her. So she said to Ellie, “There are worse people in the world to be like other than your mother.”

Ellie took a piece of fish from the platter, then scooped up a spoonful of collards and replied, “That's easy for you to say, Maggie, because she's not your mother. When Antonia Jackson is your mother you're dealing with a whole other ball of wax.”

“I suppose so” was all Maggie said before digging into the food herself.

“And besides,” Ellie continued as if someone had asked her to, “there is no way I'd do something quite so irrational and neurotic and downright insane as believe some white man is my nephew and then harass his mother until she had no choice but to invite me to lunch. Did you know about that, Poppa?”

“Yeah, that was the first thing she told me today when I got back,” he said directly.

Ellie looked incredulously at her father, then said, “You know? And you think this is okay? You're not at all ready to lock her up and keep her from going anywhere near that woman?”

“Look, Ellen, your mother's got a lot of air to clear with Agnes. She's waited a long time to do it, and I think that meeting that gal face-to-face after all these years just might do your mother some good.”

Aaron stared for several long seconds at his sister, taken with but not terribly amazed at how swiftly she worked when her will had a particular ambition. And for one mere second he let his mind wander and imagine that she'd already had a room with brown-speckled linoleum floors to camouflage food thrown in fits of rage and walls the mind-sickening color of mint green reserved for their mother. He plucked a piece of chicken from the pile, then said, “Well there's nothing like getting right down to it, hey Ellie?”

“Why waste time, Aaron? That's why we're here, isn't it? To talk about Ma and the way this obsession with Clayton Cannon is making her mind take a turn south. If that's not why we're here then I should leave right now, because I think she needs some serious, serious psychiatric help. That's just my professional opinion.”

“What about your opinion as a daughter?” Aaron asked pointedly. “Are you really ready to brand Ma as insane? Because I'll be the first to admit that I've had quite enough of Clayton Cannon, but honestly speaking she's no more obsessed now, Ellie, than she was when we were growing up.” He paused briefly to gather his thoughts, which were actually not terribly far from Ellie's, but certainly closer to the fence. He dropped his hands helplessly into his lap, then said, “So okay, maybe she does need to see a therapist of some kind, but you're acting like she's psychotic, Ellie, and needs to be locked away and heavily medicated to protect society at large, or something.”