Take the Long Way Home, page 2
“That you do,” Claudia countered, as she programmed Daria’s number into his Contacts and returned the phone to him.
She wanted to tell Ashley that she still had feelings for him, but not those that would translate as romantic. There had been a time when she did love him—enough to become his wife if he’d asked. But that was the past.
“What did I miss?” Yvonne asked when she rejoined them at the table.
“Not much,” Claudia admitted.
She chatted with her friends for another half hour before Yvonne said she wanted to drop Ashley off and drive back to Mount Vernon before getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. Claudia hugged and kissed Yvonne, and then Ashley before they left, wondering if it would be the last time the three of them would be together.
Claudia wondered if Ashley would take her up on her offer to return to Italy with her, or if he would decide this encounter would be their last. Either way, she planned to spend the rest of her life as an Italian citizen in the Eternal City.
* * *
Claudia took deep breaths to relieve the constriction in her chest, the closer the driver came to the town limits of Freedom, Mississippi. She had planned for a car service to pick her up at the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport and drive her to Freedom, then on to Raleigh. The trip from Mississippi to North Carolina was estimated to take more than twelve hours, and she’d called her daughter to expect her arrival sometime later that night.
When she’d left what now seemed a lifetime ago, she’d vowed never to return. However, before Claudia made the decision to move to New York, she’d offered to take Sarah Patterson with her, but her mother had refused with the excuse that she never would’ve been able to survive the frigid winters and therefore decided to move back to Biloxi. Sarah wouldn’t say it, but her eyes spoke volumes. She did not want to believe her only child was deserting her.
They passed through downtown Biloxi, and Claudia stared at the Black-owned bank where she’d secured a position after graduating college. She’d applied to several other banks in the city but was told they didn’t have any positions that would match her qualifications. She had politely thanked the men for taking the time to interview her when she’d wanted to tell them they were bald-faced lying bigots because she had as much or even more education than most of them. She finally garnered an interview at one of two colored banks and was hired on the spot.
Even when the US Supreme Court ruled segregation to be unconstitutional and the WHITES ONLY and COLORED ONLY signs had begun to come down, Claudia struggled to forget what she’d experienced when living in Mississippi.
Fifty-eight years.
That’s how long it had taken Claudia to find her way back home. But then she had to ask herself, where was home? Was it Freedom, Mississippi, New York City, or Rome, Italy? She’d spent more time away from Freedom than she had lived there, yet there was something about the all-Black town that had called out to her, that made her want to embrace it while inhaling the recognizable scents that had been so much a part of her innocent youth.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. It smelled the same but with subtle differences. Back then it had been an odor of curling wax in her mama’s beauty parlor and the lingering fragrance of Old Spice wafting through the connecting door to her daddy’s barber shop.
And she’d always associated mouthwatering aromas with her grandmother. Earline Patterson had gained the distinction of being one of the best cooks in all of Freedom. The chicken she’d fried in a cast-iron skillet with lard and butter was without equal among her peers. Her biscuits, cornbread, smothered cabbage, and pound cakes also received unanimous raves from anyone fortunate enough to sit at her table or able to sample a portion at church socials.
They were all gone: Mama, Daddy, and Grandma, her aunt, uncle, and her two husbands. Some were buried in the cemetery here in Freedom and another in a foreign land. Bending slightly, she placed a single white rose on the graves of her parents, grandmother, husband, and other long-deceased relatives.
She’d lingered longer than she had intended, because the late-spring suffocating heat made breathing difficult. She left the cemetery, walking to the car where a driver held open the rear door. “I’d like to stop downtown before we leave for North Carolina.”
The tall man nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Claudia slid onto the rear leather seat and closed her eyes. She didn’t know why, but suddenly she felt old. She was eighty-three, yet there were times when she felt as if she’d lived two lifetimes in one. A sad smile lifted the corners of her mouth when she thought about the four men who’d impacted her life. First there was Denny Clark, then Robert Moore, then Ashley Booth, and finally Giancarlo Fortenza.
She opened her eyes, her mouth softening in a tender smile when she thought about her first husband. Robert had taught her how to love herself, and in return she loved him selfishly. Claudia’s smile slowly slipped away as a wave of sadness swept over her. The love she shared with Robert was short-lived, and when she sought to withdraw emotionally from every man, Ashley Booth came into her life with the velocity of a twister sweeping up everything in its unleashed power. Ashley had introduced her to New York City’s elegant Black society. Her involvement with Ashley gave Claudia the confidence she needed when she was reunited with Giancarlo, who initiated her into a world most women dream of but would never experience.
Claudia still could not understand the strange hold Denny had on her, and she knew this visit to Freedom wasn’t only to visit the graves of her loved ones but also to symbolically bid Denny goodbye forever.
The Town Car maneuvered smoothly over the paved road leading to downtown Freedom. Claudia peered through the side window, staring at stores that no longer resembled those from her childhood. Her mother and father’s beauty parlor and barbershop now housed a chain drugstore. The candy store was gone, replaced by a Baskin-Robbins. Freedom had come into the twenty-first century boasting a fast-food restaurant, car wash, pizza parlor, florist, and a variety store advertising everything from small household appliances, beauty products, candy, and discount cards and candles.
“Please let me out here,” she directed the driver as he pulled over, parking along the street facing the town square. Claudia waited for the man to get out and open the rear door for her. She placed her hand in his, allowing him to assist her to stand.
Bittersweet memories assailed Claudia when she exited the car to walk along the main street, stopping to peer into windows of several stores. The heat was proving to be unbearable, and when she turned to go back to where the car was parked, she collided with someone. She mumbled an apology before she glanced up to see somebody from her past. Suddenly she felt a chill as if she’d been doused with a bucket of ice when she recognized the man with the cold blue eyes—eyes that would haunt her to her grave.
She managed to step around him and headed back to the car. The driver got out at her approach and opened the rear door. Claudia collapsed on the rear seat, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. And when she looked out the side window she saw the man, standing motionless, staring back at her. Despite the years, she’d recognized him, and he seemed to recognize her. Reaching for a bottle of water, Claudia removed the cap and took a swallow.
“Are you cool enough back there, ma’am?” the driver asked.
She forced a smile. “Yes, thank you.”
“I’m planning to stop in Mobile, where you can stretch your legs and get something to eat before we continue.”
“That’s fine.” Claudia would’ve agreed to anything if they did not make another stop in Mississippi.
Once the car began moving, she chided herself for wanting to come back to a place where she’d endured fear and unhappiness, but knew she had to because she needed closure. Claudia did not want to admit to herself that her life was like a book—with a prologue, and then filled with many chapters until it concluded with an epilogue.
It didn’t begin in 1940—the year of her birth—but in late spring, 1952, when she’d met Denny Clark for the first time.
PART ONE
1950s
DENNY CLARK
Chapter 1
Extending your hand is extending yourself.
—Rod McKuen, Book of Days
Claudia Mavis Patterson made an auspicious entrance into the world in the small, all-Negro town of Freedom, Mississippi, in the spring of 1940, surprising her parents because her mother had had no indication she was even pregnant.
As an only child she’d grown up pampered by her business-owner parents. Earl operated Freedom’s only barber shop, as his father had before him, while Sarah was the owner of one of two beauty parlors in the town of 1,837 residents.
Claudia was troubled by an indiscernible restlessness not found in many children, and by the time she’d turned eight she had become aware of it for the first time. She loved Freedom, but she wanted to be elsewhere whenever she opened a book. Books had become her lifeline to the outside world. Her aunt Mavis, her mother’s older sister, gave her books as gifts rather than toys or dolls.
Mavis Bailey, who taught grades one through eight in Biloxi, told her niece that books enabled her to glimpse into a world beyond the boundaries of Mississippi. Claudia read about people who lived in China, England, Germany, and Italy. She’d overheard some of the older residents talk about bad White people, but her parents usually hushed them up or sent her away so she wouldn’t listen to their private conversations.
She was curious about some of the White people she occasionally saw whenever her family left the environs of her hometown, seeing repeatedly the WHITES ONLY and COLORED ONLY signs, signs that were unnecessary in Freedom. Resigning herself that Freedom was her home, giving her all she could wish for as a child, with its own school, movie theater, business district, and a hospital with a permanent staff of two doctors and three nurses, she felt protected. However, everything that was safe and idyllic came to a startling end in the spring of 1952 for twelve-year-old Claudia.
It happened as she walked home from school with her best friend, as she did every day. She always looked forward to her walks with Janice Mason, because Janice knew things most girls their age were not exposed to until after they were married.
“Why must you fib about things?” she asked Janice.
“I’m not fibbing, Claudia. I swear I saw—”
“Don’t swear, Janice,” she interrupted. “You know God will strike you dead if you swear.”
Janice stopped, resting one hand at her waist. She stared at the long-legged girl whose body had yet to begin to show the feminine curves of a young woman on the threshold of puberty. It was apparent Claudia Patterson was going to be a beautiful woman. Her thick, curly brown hair was styled in two braids that were pinned across the crown of her head. Her face was slender, with exceptionally high cheekbones, her nose short and straight and her mouth wide and handsomely generous. Her complexion reminded Janice of a baked peach. It was as if the sun had kissed her cheeks, turning them a velvety red-gold brown.
“I did see them doing it,” she continued in a soft whisper.
Claudia’s large, light brown eyes widened. “Doing what?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know, Janice.”
Janice moved closer to Claudia as a battered pickup truck came down the dusty road toward them. The driver slowed and executed a U-turn. His passenger stuck his head out the window. Grinning and displaying a mouth filled with tobacco-stained teeth, the man’s light blue eyes squinted at the two girls. He pursed his lips and a stream of brown spittle landed only inches from the toes of their black patent-leather Mary Janes.
He doffed an imaginary hat. “Afternoon, ladies. Wanna ride?”
Both girls shook their heads, too frightened to speak. They knew not to speak to strangers, especially White ones. And these two were what colored folk called cracker trash.
“Leave ’em ’lone, Bobby,” the driver ordered, squinting at Claudia and Janice. “They ain’t nothin’ but babies.”
The man the driver had called Bobby licked his thin, stained lips. “Not the blacker one. Look at them tits on her.”
Janice pulled her books closer to her chest to conceal the swell of growing breasts that had become her greatest source of pride. Her body had begun developing at nine, and now at twelve was full and lush with a feminine ripeness some women twice her age would never claim.
“I said leave ’em ’lone,” the driver repeated.
Bobby winked at Janice. “I likes them black and ripe. And you sure is a beauty. I’m going . . .”
Whatever he said was lost in the noisy sound of the truck’s engine as it sped down the road, raising a cloud of lingering dust. The books in Janice’s arms fell to the unpaved road. The tears filling her eyes spilled over and streamed down her silken ebony cheeks. The sound of the books hitting the ground pulled Claudia out of her shocked stupor.
Lowering her own books, secured by a leather belt, to the road beside her best friend’s, she pulled Janice against her body, holding her tightly. The two girls comforted each other once they realized how close they had come to harm.
“The Lord is punishing me,” Janice cried against Claudia’s shoulder. “He’s punishing me for sneaking out at night and peeking through the window when Mister Bill and Miss Hester were in bed together doin’ it.”
Pulling back, Claudia stared at her friend. “You were spying on them?” Janice nodded. “That’s a sin!” she said accusingly.
“I know.” Janice pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from the pocket of her dress, wiping her runny nose. “I ain’t gonna do it no more. I swear, Claudia.”
“Don’t swear, Janice!” she screamed, temporarily forgetting her fright.
“I know. But I’m so scared.” She gave Claudia a questioning glance. “Wasn’t you scared of those men?”
She wanted to lie but didn’t. “Yeah. I was plenty scared, too.”
“You going to tell your daddy?”
Biting down hard on her lower lip, Claudia shook her head. “No. I don’t want trouble. Daddy would go hunting for those two rednecks and he would wind up dead. And you know we’re not supposed to take the long way home.”
“You’re right,” Janice agreed. “We don’t say anything. Cross your heart and hope to die.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Claudia repeated, making an X over her left breast.
Picking up their books, the two girls quickened their pace and turned off at a clearing and took a shortcut to the residential section. They hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when both heard a weak, wavering cry for help. It sounded like the mewling of a kitten, but then a kitten couldn’t talk.
Janice’s slanting dark eyes widened as she stopped and turned slowly. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Claudia replied.
The burning rays of the hot spring sun did not reach the ground through the overgrowth of towering pine trees as the girls listened, trying to discern where the noise had come from.
There was another moaning sound. Janice shook her head, taking a step backwards. “I’m going, Claudia.”
“Don’t . . .” Her words died on her lips as she stood and watched Janice run away. “Fraidy cat,” she whispered.
What she did not want to admit to herself was that she also was afraid. But her curious nature always got the better of her. She’d asked her mother why, so many times that Sarah would say, Hush, baby. Just accept it. But what she did not want to do was accept it. She had to have an answer. That’s why she’d suggested taking the longer road home from school instead of the more direct route. She wanted to see as many places as she could beyond Freedom’s boundaries.
She heard the sound again and followed it to a dilapidated building leaning at a right angle in a clearing nearly obliterated by an overgrowth of trees and shrubs, and moved closer. A small shriek of fear escaped her parted lips as she stared at the body of a White boy curled into a fetal position on a pile of dirt. She gasped, then clapped a hand over her mouth when she saw hunks of flesh hanging off his back. It was apparent that someone had whipped him and then had left him to die.
He raised his head from the dirt at the sound of her voice. Opening his eyes, he stared up at her, his tortured gaze filled with a suffering she’d never seen. Not even in an injured animal. Her dog had broken away from his restraint several months before and wandered into a trap set for a raccoon, breaking his front legs. The pain in her pet’s eyes was not as intense as the one she saw in the boy’s eyes with his bared back festering with open wounds. An army of insects had invaded the blood pooling around him.
Her first reaction was to run. Why, she thought, was she suddenly coming face-to-face with White people within a span of minutes when in all her twelve years of living she had never exchanged a word with them?
“Help me,” he groaned, closing his eyes at the same time his head fell back to the ground.
“I . . . I can’t,” she stammered.
“Please. Oh, God—let me die.”
Even though he’d closed his eyes, Claudia still saw them. They were the same blue eyes as the man in the pickup truck. Staring at the fallen body, she realized the boy posed no threat to her. He lay bleeding, unable to move. Although he appeared taller than she was, she doubted whether he weighed more than she did. She could see every rib in his emaciated body. But who, she wondered, had whipped him, and dumped his body near a colored town? And she was mature enough to know that any White person found beaten in a town filled with Negroes was trouble for her people.
“I’ll be back,” she promised. Turning away from him, Claudia took the same route as Janice, running in the direction of her grandmother’s house.
Slowing her steps as she approached the large white house with the wraparound porch, she spied Earline Patterson sitting on her rocker, sewing, and listening to her favorite series on the radio, which sat on a table inside the house close to the screened door.
