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“I felt so bad for you that day—the way she was talking to you in front of Tyrian,” Val said to me, talking about Jamison’s mother and how Val felt she’d only moved into the house to ruin her marriage. “I wanted to say something. I kept telling myself, ‘It’s your house, Val! It’s your house!’ But I don’t think I ever really believed that.”
“Well, you know the law is on your side with this. Right? You can stay in that house no matter what—at least until you figure out what to do next,” I said.
“I can’t. I won’t stay in that house with that woman.” Val leaned in toward me and wiped tears from her eyes so I could see she was speaking from her clear mind. “I think she did it—she killed my baby. I know it.”
“Val, you’re very upset, and I know Mrs. Taylor is a handful, but she’s not—”
“She is. She is. She did,” Val said harshly. “You tell me what else could make me come in here like this? See you and not walk right out the door? You think I want to sit here in front of you of all people and talk about how my marriage is falling apart?”
“No. I don’t,” I said.
“I feel like everyone thinks I’m crazy and I’m running out of options. The woman killed my baby.”
“But it was on the news that you had a miscarriage,” I said. “How could she have anything to do with that?”
“She poisoned me,” Val explained.
“Come on, that doesn’t happen in real—”
“Well, it happened to me,” Val said, cutting me off like she’d heard my response a dozen times.
“If you’re sure she did, then did you call the police? Have her arrested?” I imagined Mrs. Taylor being dragged out of Jamison’s house in handcuffs. How much losing his grandmother would hurt Tyrian. How horrible his grandmother had always been to me.
“I had the doctors at the hospital run extra blood work. They didn’t find anything,” Val answered.
“Okay—so she didn’t—”
“She did,” Val said firmly this time and so clearly I knew she believed every word. “Look, I’m not here to make you hate Mrs. Taylor. I know you have to live with her because of your son. I just want to know what my options are. You know, moving forward.”
“Well, I’m sure whoever sent you here told you this is a counseling services center for divorcing women. Our first priority is to keep our members happy. And we advocate that in every way. So, if you decide you don’t want to get a divorce, we’ll support you. If you do, we have legal services, counseling, scholarships, grants, group sessions. Whatever you need to make it through, we can arrange it,” I explained. “You said you don’t want to go back to the house—I can get you a hotel room. And if you don’t feel safe, you can stay here overnight. We have people here around the clock who can help you.”
Val started crying again and the shock of her situation made her breathing heavy like that of a child who’d survived an angry beating. She rested her arms on the table and cried into the palms of her hands.
“Val? Val?” I called, trying to hand her a tissue. “Lift your head. Look at me. Listen.” I reached over the table to the woman on the other side and touched her gently.
She shook her head in defiance of my demand and I remembered just how young she was. Beneath all of that old attitude, she was still a growing thing. Just like I had been when I went through this.
“Val, you can do it. Look up at me,” I said again. “Look!”
She slowly lifted her head and the full exhaustion was in every fold of her face.
“Good,” I said. “Listen to me. Can you do that?”
She agreed with a nod.
“You’re going to be the one doing the work here. You. No one else. We help. But you work,” I said. “You remember that girl in the red suit and red heels and red lipstick and nails and phone I met in Jamison’s office?”
“Yes,” she said weakly.
“You’re going to need her now. You’re going to need her strength to get through this,” I said and I was crying then too. “You’re going to have to summon her up, so you can be fit for your fight. Now is not the time for being weak or being nice. Now is the time for you to stand up for yourself. Time for you to be a woman.”
Val caught a smear of snot and tears on her arm and sat up again to look me straight in the eyes.
“Now, you say that woman did something to your child?” I said and honestly had no idea as to where that statement came from. “If that’s true, you have every right to defend yourself. If it was me and someone did something to Tyrian—if I believed they did something to my boy—there’d be payment. And you have every right to collect.”
Emmett Louis Till was murdered over a lie that he’d wolf-whistled at a white girl. After the little black boy’s body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his muddled remains were clothed, packed in lime, and placed in a pine box so they could be returned via train to his grieving mother in Chicago.
Like most black children growing up in the South, Jamison had learned the true story of poor Emmett Till during a Black History Month lesson when he was in middle school. While the other kids in the classroom turned away when the teacher, an ambitious recent Clark Atlanta University graduate with long dreadlocks who was determined to teach the children the truth of what happened to Till, showed them a picture of his battered body, Jamison cried and walked out of the room. When the teacher caught up with him down the hallway, Jamison said he was afraid that would happen to him someday. The teacher explained that she hadn’t shown him the picture to scare him; it was supposed to illustrate what happens when people stick together. How Till’s mother’s insistence that every newspaper run pictures of her son’s dead body had resulted in an international uproar about racism in the American South that eventually led to a trial in the most racist state in the union—a trial against two white men for the murder of a black boy. And though the men were later acquitted, the trial itself was a success because it sent a message to everyone that shining a light on injustice was the best way to get justice where none seemed possible.
