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With a huff, Marcella turned from the mirror and faced her sister directly. “Wrong. We haven’t told him yet because we want to make sure we work first.”
“You just told me it’s working.”
“It’s new. We want to make sure. That’s why I’m going tonight—to see what his club is like, and if I can be comfortable there.”
“His club. You mean his criminal gang.”
“Jesus, Von. Back off. You’ve never met him. All you know is what I’ve told you.”
“And none of that is good.”
That was true, of course. Marcella had vented at length to her sister over the years about Eight. She’d felt no obligation to temper her rants with anything that might balance the bad with the decent. Venting wasn’t about fairness. “Because I was angry.”
“Because he abandoned you and your child.”
“Yes. But to be fair, I told him to fuck off and stay fucked.”
“Because he wanted to go halfsies on killing your son.”
“Listen!” Leaving behind her prep for the party, Marcella put her hands on her sister’s shoulders and pushed her all the way out of the bathroom, all the way to her bed, where, with another push, she forced her to sit, then perched beside her.
“I love that you want to protect us, but now you’re being ridiculous. You had an abortion, Vonny. You know it’s not killing a kid. I was pissed because of his attitude more than what he wanted. He didn’t want to be a dad, and I wanted to be a mom. He was flip and sarcastic, and when he saw I meant to stay pregnant, he panicked and got nasty. So I told him to fuck off. I told him I didn’t want anything from him but his absence. Yeah, it pissed me off a whole hell of a lot that he just shrugged it all off, but Eight is … complicated. And so am I. We made Ajax together, and in a way, we made the years since together. Now we’re trying to sort it out together.”
“You’ve called him racist more than a few times, Marcella. How can you be with a guy who hates so much of who we are?”
Marcella considered her fair, white-presenting sister and flipped through her mental files of things that would be counterproductive—to this conversation and to their relationship—to say. She’d said them all at some point, but now they were older, and Marcella had learned that sometimes there were more important things than having her say.
Yvonne had the exact same heritage that Marcella did; she’d simply gotten a genetic mixture that made life easier. Everybody assumed Yvonne was white until she told them otherwise or they met Marcella or their mother. Then they assumed she was adopted. That wasn’t to say she hadn’t experienced bigotry and racism as well, but it was, objectively, different from what Marcella, who looked Black, experienced.
So yeah, it rubbed her a little bit wrong to have her sister bring up racism in Marcella’s relationship. As if it hadn’t occurred to Marcella herself.
It had absolutely occurred to her, and she wasn’t entirely sure what she thought about it, or what sheshouldthink about it. Was Eight racist? Three months ago, she would have said yes without a qualm. She had said as much, to Yvonne.
But now the question and its answer were far more complicated.
Marcella believed that all white people, no matter how well-intentioned, how politically correct, how open-minded, were racist to some extent. That included her father and Chase. The entire system of education in this country—which held up white people as the pinnacle of discovery and achievement, which showcased the colonists and the later pioneers as heroes of manifest destiny and the Native tribes as antagonists and villains disrupting their progress, that gave a single page to the Middle Passage in whole textbooks about American history, and so much more white-centric perspective taught as objective fact—was inherently racist. So in that way, yeah, as a white student of a system with the racism baked in, he couldn’t help but be.
To that, add in that he’d been raised by clearly terrible people, in Oklahoma, a state with a racial history that could most kindly be described as troubling. And then top off with his general tendency to say the most outrageous thing he could think of, for the sheer enjoyment of pissing people off, and you had a whole shit sundae of evidence that Eight would not be marching in a Black Lives Matter protest anytime soon. He would have to be a hell of a lot more introspective and civic-minded to recognize the bias in what he was taught and work against it, to become anti-racist.
However.
Did he truly believe, in his heart, that white people were better than anyone else? She didn’t think so. He treated her with respect these days—in fact, setting aside their blowup over the pregnancy, he always had. He used words to hurt when they fought, but then, so did she. And he’d never said something racist to hurt her during a fight.
Even more importantly, he treated their son with love and care—and sincere interest.
Was Eight truly racist? Only to the extent that he was a middle-aged white man in Tulsa. He was uneducated about the issue. But he’d fight to the death anybody who treated Ajax, or her, as inferior, and she’d bet that once he took the time to really understand the issue, he’d grow. He said he wanted to be better, and she believed him.
“He’s a decent man, Yvonne. He treats us both with respect. He is trying to be a better man, and he’s succeeding. It’s working between us. If we can have this, if we can have each other and be whole with our kid, I want that. So please. Try to forget all my ranting and give him a chance.”
“A decade of ranting, sis. That’s a lot to forget.”
“I know. But if I can do it, you can. Please.”
Yvonne regarded her suspiciously for a while, then finally nodded. “Okay. Only because I love you and you want this. But if he’s shitty to you or Ajax, I’m going to jump so far down his throat I’ll be able to inventory his innards.”
Marcella laughed and hooked an arm around her sister. “You know, I’m the big sister. I’m supposed to protect you, not the other way around. I can take care of myself.”
Yvonne hugged her back. “In any other situation except romance, I know you can. But you’re a trash fire when it comes to love.”
