Family Affair
I knew the day had gone bad when the
white woman in the parking lot started to scream. I turned in the seat of my
mud-green Ford Fairlane, and watched as Marvella Walker and Valentina Wilson tried
to soothe the white woman. But the closer Marvella got to her, the faster the
woman backed away, screaming at the top of her lungs.
We were in a diner parking lot in South
Beloit, Illinois, just off the interstate. Valentina had driven the woman and her
daughter from Madison, Wisconsin, that morning.
The woman was a small thing, with dirty
blond hair and a cast on her right arm. Her clothing was frayed. Her little
blond daughter — no more than six — circled the women like a
wounded puppy. She occasionally looked at my car as if I was at fault.
Maybe I was.
I’m tall, muscular, and dark. The scar
that runs from my eye almost to my
chin makes me look dangerous to everyone — not just to white people.
Usually I can calm people I’ve just met
with my manner or by using a soft tone. But in this instance, I hadn’t even
gotten out of the car.
The plan was simple: We were supposed to
meet Marvella’s cousin, Valentina Wilson, who ran a rape hot line in Madison. The
hot line ran along the new Washington D.C. model — women didn’t just
call; they got personal support and occasional legal advice if they asked for
it.
This woman had been brutally raped and
beaten by her husband. Even then, the woman didn’t want to leave the bastard. Then
he had gone after their daughter and the woman finally asked for help.
At least, that was what Valentina said.
Marvella waved her hands in a gesture of
disgust and walked toward me. She was tall and majestic. With the brown and
gold caftan that she wore over thin brown pants, her tight black Afro, and the
hoops on her ears, she looked like one of those statues of African princesses
she kept all over her house.
She rapped on the car window. “Val says
she can make this work.”
She said that with so much sarcasm that
her own opinion was clear.
“If she doesn’t make it work soon,” I
said, “we could have some kind of incident on our hands.”
People in the nearby diner were peering
through the grimy windows. Black and white faces were staring at us, which gave
me some comfort, but not a whole lot since there was a gathering of men near
the diner’s silver door.
They were probably waiting for me to get
out of the car and grab the woman. Then they’d come after me.
I could hold off maybe three of them, but
I couldn’t handle the half dozen or so that I could see. They looked like
farmers, beefy white men with sun-reddened faces and arms like steel beams.
My heart pounded. I hated being outside
of the city — any city. In the city, I could escape pretty much anything,
but out here, near the open highway, where the land rose and fell in gentle
undulations caused by the nearby Rock River, I felt exposed.
Valentina was gesturing. The white woman
had stopped screaming. The little girl had grabbed her mother’s right leg and
hung on, not so much, it seemed, for comfort, but to hold her mother steady.
I watched Valentina. She looked nothing
like the woman I had met three years ago, about to go to the Grand Nefertiti
Ball, a big charity event in Chicago. She had worn a long white gown, just like
Marvella and her sister Paulette had, but Valentina came from different stock.
Marvella had looked like I imagined
Cleopatra had looked when Julius Caesar first saw her, and Paulette was just as
stunning.
But Valentina, tiny and pretty with
delicate features, had looked lost in that white dress. The snake bracelets
curling up her arms made them look fat, even though they weren’t.
They didn’t look fat now. They were lean
and muscular, like the rest of her. That delicate prettiness was gone. What
replaced it was an athleticism that hollowed her cheeks and gave her small
frame a wiry toughness that no one in his right mind would mess with.
I knew
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