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Hattie got a stricken look and turned her head away.
Connie rapped hard on the edge of the skillet with the wooden spoon, glanced at me, saw my confusion, and then looked to Sydney’s mother and warned quietly, “Ethel, you know you don’t want to be accusing that Marvin Bell of nothing unless you got fifty God-fearing Christians behind you saying they saw it too, in broad daylight and with their own two eyes.”
“Who’s Marvin Bell?” Bree asked.
My aunts said nothing.
“He’s slippery, that one, always in the shadows, never showing hisself,” Ethel Fox said. Then she pointed a bony finger at me. “And you know why your aunts ain’t saying nothing to you ’bout him?”
My aunts wouldn’t look at me. I shook my head.
“Marvin Bell?” Ethel Fox said. “Once upon a time, before he went all proper, he owned your daddy. Your daddy was one of his niggers.”
Chapter
20
The word silenced the room, and Bree’s face turned hard. So did Patty’s and Naomi’s.
You heard the word used every day on the streets of DC, one person of color to another. But hearing it from the lips of an old white Southern woman in reference to my dead father, I felt like she’d slapped me across the face with something unspeakable.
Her daughter was dead. She was distraught. She didn’t mean it. Those were my immediate responses. Then I noticed that my aunts weren’t as shocked as the rest of us.
“Aunt Hattie?” I said.
Aunt Hattie wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Ethel didn’t mean to shame your father’s name or yours, Alex. She’s just telling it like it was.”
Pained, Aunt Connie said, “Back then, your father was Marvin Bell’s slave. Bell owned him. Your mother too. They’d do anything he asked.”
“’Cause of the drugs,” Ethel Fox said.
I suddenly felt so hungry, I was light-headed.
“You don’t remember Bell coming to your house when you was a boy to bring your mama or papa something?” Aunt Connie asked, spooning the eggs onto a plate. “Tall white guy, sharp face, slippery, like Ethel said?”
Hattie added, “All nice one second, meaner than a crazy dog the next?”
Something blurry, troubling, and long ago flitted through my mind, but I said, “No, I don’t remember him.”
“What about—” Aunt Hattie began, and then stopped.
Aunt Connie had fetched plates of potato pancakes, crispy maple bacon, and a mound of toast from the warming oven, and she set them and the freshly made scrambled eggs on the table. Naomi and I attacked the food. Stefan’s fiancée pushed at her eggs and bacon and worried a piece of toast.
I stayed quiet as I ate. But Bree asked all sorts of questions about Marvin Bell, and by the time I set my fork on my plate, stuffed to the gills and feeling a lot less light-headed and achy, there was a thumbnail biography of him developing slowly in my mind, some of it fact, but most of it opinion, rumor, conjecture, and supposition.
Slippery described Bell perfectly.
No one at that table could peg exactly when Marvin Bell took control of my parents’ life. They said he’d slid into Starksville like a silent cancer when my mom turned twenty. He came bearing heroin and cocaine, and he gave out free samples. He got my mother and a dozen young women just like her strung out and desperate. He hooked my father too, but not just on the drugs.
“Your father needed money for you boys,” Aunt Connie said. “Selling and moving for Bell made him that money. And like Ethel was saying, Bell had his hooks into them so hard, they were just like his slaves.”
Ethel Fox said, “Once, Bell even ran your daddy out of your house, tied him with a rope to the back of his car, and dragged him down the street. No one moved to stop him.”
Flashing on that memory of the boys being dragged on a rope line the day before, I gaped at her, horrified.
“You don’t remember, Alex?” Aunt Hattie asked softly. “You were there.”
“No,” I said instantly and unequivocally. “I don’t remember that. I’d…remember that.”
