Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [2]
“You tell them you as white and as African as their mommas,” her aunt Til would say.
“They called me shit-colored,” she’d say.
“You tell them shit comes in all colors, even black like their mommas,” her other aunt, Ness, would say.
The aunts helped Clarise to be tough and un-flinchable in the face of hurtful childhood insults. They knew firsthand the starchy taste of persistent teasing. Spinsters, they’d been called; old maids, hags, he-women, funny honeys. Had to teach their baby sister, Clarise’s mother, how to hurl the insults right back when she’d come home crying, telling the aunts the names they’d been called. So they were expert when it came time to help Clarise become a master at quick comebacks to the assaults on her strange looks. Soon the other children were so terrified of Clarise’s ability to string words together like beads on a necklace, wrap them around some child’s neck, and send that child home crying and choking, they promptly stopped calling her half-breed, mulatto, massa’s child, witch’s nose. And even though her odd look as a child metamorphosed itself into an exotic form of beauty when she became a teen, she didn’t want her own children to tote the barge of her childhood looks. She knew Finch would dilute her looks in their children and give them thick, pressable hair and earthy-toned complexions. Not only was he dark brown, but he had very nonextreme looks: a normally round face, a typically short nose, eyes and lips that were neither large nor small. Plus he had nice, amply sized legs, an appetite like a country preacher, and his very chest expanded when he looked at Clarise, as if he were saying, “Right here, pretty baby, lay your head right here,” meant she wouldn’t have to worry about dying young like her mother did from the tainted, naked parts of lying men.
When the time came for Clarise to sneak out of the window on the Queen Street row house and spare her dear aunts and uncles the expense of a wedding, she wrote two letters. She’d had to write only two letters because she’d known no other family, no grandparents, no cousins. One letter she left in the shed where the aunts cured their ham; she thanked them for advising her so well. The other letter she propped next to the uncles’ lead crystal sugar bowl in the center of the breakfast-room table; she wrote how much she’d miss their tapioca and begged them not to cry. Then she climbed out of the dining-room window into the alley that smelled of honeysuckle and bleach mixing well with Finch’s Colgate aftershave.
Finch stood there wide-backed, flat-footed, trying not to sneeze. He lit up the alley he was beaming so, and patting his breast pocket that held their bus tickets to Elkton, Maryland, where the justice of the peace was, and then to Atlantic City to the Cliveden Hotel on Kentucky Avenue for their honeymoon.
The aunts knew the very second Clarise snuck away from their home. Ness, the younger, softer sister, sat straight up in her bed when she heard the hushed giggles before they evaporated into the alley like blowing bubbles. She called across the room. “Til,” she said. “Til, she’s gone.”
“We knew it was coming,” Til said.
“But he’s a poor man, Til.”
“What colored man isn’t?”
“Daddy wasn’t.”
“Daddy’s dead. Whole breed of colored men like Daddy gone to glory. Probably looking down and shaking their heads at lesser versions of themselves that don’t even own a pot to piss in.”
“You think this Finch will do right by our girl, Til?”
“We did right by her.”
“Lord, yes, we did.”
“And she knows not to settle for less than what’s she’s used to.”
“Pray, pray she knows it.”
“Strong child.”
“Well, well. Thank you, Sister, she is strong.”
“And we got her inheritance stitched between the mattress springs should they really fall on hard times.”
“I’m so thankful, Jesus.”
“And our hacking