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Authors: Pearl Cleage

Tags: #African American, #General, #Family Life, #Contemporary Women, #Fiction

Babylon Sisters (8 page)

BOOK: Babylon Sisters
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17

Bobby’s unexpected drop-by had really rattled me, but I still managed to get the wine, and the lasagna was perfect. We were only six, but we could have easily fed a dozen. Flora had grilled a variety of fresh vegetables from her prizewinning garden, with just a touch of olive oil and herbs. Aretha had roasted a free-range chicken with tarragon. Miss Iona had brought a pan of her legendary macaroni and cheese, and Regina had made a salad with fresh tomatoes and basil and mozzarella cheese that melted in your mouth. For dessert, Amelia had constructed six colorful parfaits.

The wine flowed freely and so did the conversation. The book was a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion that touched on sex, love, AIDS, desire, birth control, romance, religion, and whether or not any of us could imagine paying for sex, no matter how good it was supposed to be or how long the drought had lasted. We ranged in age from Aretha, at a blossoming twenty-five, to Miss Iona, who admitted to sixty-plus, with a few stops in between for the rest of us, but everybody said no way to the brothels. Paying for sex was beyond where their imaginations could take them. More important, as I picked up in the easy ebb and flow of our confessions and critique, my sisters had no reason to consider such an option because all of them were currently having sex. Every single one, including Miss Iona, who was keeping company with Mr. Charles, one of the senior gardeners, who was seventy-five if he was a day, and Aretha, who was due to deliver in less than a month. I was a minority of one.

Even Amelia had chimed in with an anecdote and answered my raised eyebrows with a giggle and a conspiratorial wink. Maybe I should have taken Bobby Hicks up on his offer just to see if I still remember the basic moves. I’d hate to have an opportunity present itself and be too rusty to take advantage of the situation.

As the evening started winding down, we found ourselves examining what it takes, other than sex, to make a relationship last.

“The thing is, you gotta have truth or the whole thing falls apart,” Aretha was saying. “I tell Kwame everything.”

“Some women think that telling a man the truth will ruin a relationship faster than infidelity, but I think they’re wrong,” Amelia said. “I have found that truth is a great aphrodisiac for men. If you tell them the truth, they know you don’t need their approval. It changes the balance of things in a way that is always sexier than pretending. Don’t forget, it’s a short step from feigning an interest in football to faking orgasms, and an equally mind-deadening waste of time.”

“I never told any man everything,” said Miss Iona, rolling her eyes. “There’s some things men don’t need to know.”

“Like what?” Amelia smiled.

“Like whatever I decide not to tell ’em,” Miss Iona said. “Telling a man the truth about everything all the time takes the mystery out of it. I’d rather keep them guessing.”

“Not me,” said Flora, whose husband was a well-known defense lawyer flirting with a career in politics. “I like to lay my cards on the table.”

“Me, too,” Regina said. “I believe that old Mark Twain thing about if you always tell the truth, you never have to remember anything.”

“I’m not saying you have to lie,” Miss Iona said, clarifying her position. “I’m just saying you aren’t required to tell everything you know.”

“What’s the difference?” I said. The distinction was starting to elude me.

“A lie is a deliberate distortion of the truth,” Amelia said. “I think Miss Iona’s talking more about letting people draw their own conclusions.”

“Exactly.” Miss Iona nodded, pleased. “Too much truth will drive a man crazy.”

Aretha just laughed. “Does Kwame look crazy to you?”

“As a bedbug,” Miss Iona teased her, knowing Kwame was as solid as a rock. “I’ve been meaning to speak to his mama about that very thing.”

Our evening floated to a close on the music of our laughter, and I thought how lucky Kwame was to have found a woman who would gift him with her secrets, because she trusted him to handle them as gently as he was going to hold their baby. Thinking truth could do that was crazy, all right. Crazy like a fox.

18

Amelia’s office was a bustling beehive of activity tucked away on a quiet midtown street whose only other commercial entity was a quiet little French bistro on the corner that Amelia used to woo her upscale clients and reward her associates after a successful trial. We had gone there for lunch to celebrate Jason’s acceptance to Yale and when Phoebe made the honor roll at Fairfield her first semester, but today both of us were too busy to linger over cappuccino in the middle of the afternoon.

I had spent the morning lobbying members of the city council in support of increased funding for homeless shelters and wondering if Bobby Hicks was an aberration or the first of many uncomfortable encounters. Last night after everybody else had divided up the leftovers, hugged one another good night one more time, and headed home, I stayed around to tell Amelia about my visitor. She was appalled that he made me speak to his wife, but not surprised that he hit on me, pointing out that Louis had said some of them would probably be flattered at the thought, however far from reality it might be. She voted on the side of his being an aberration, not a trend, and told me to come by her office around two so she could introduce me to her new intern.

Miriam St. Jacques had been working for Amelia for a couple of months as a general office assistant, and she was looking for a younger sister she had lost track of. That was all I knew, but Amelia supervised a bilingual staff of lawyers who did a lot of work with clients of mine. It was not unusual for them to have interns or part-time employees who needed assistance.

When I walked in, Amelia was standing in the lobby shaking hands with a distinguished-looking Japanese gentleman who was bowing and smiling happily at whatever deal they had just closed. Amelia was smiling, too. He nodded politely as he passed me on his way out, and Amelia watched him head for his car, which was waiting with his driver at the curb.

“Good afternoon, Counselor,” I said. “Doing good or doing business?”

“The idea that those two things are mutually exclusive is such a twentieth-century idea,” she said, grinning. “Mr. Tanaka wants to do business in Atlanta. He needs a translator.”

“You don’t speak Japanese.”

“No, but I’m fluent in African-American with a specialty in Atlanta Negro dialects.”

“You’re crazy.” I laughed, waving at the receptionist and following Amelia to her office. Every cubicle, every desk, was occupied with people who were moving through their tasks efficiently and without visible stress in spite of the obvious need for more space. Amelia was going to need to expand pretty soon or they’d be taking statements on the front porch.

Sitting at the desk outside of Amelia’s office, frowning intently at a computer screen, was a striking girl who looked about eighteen. Her skin was very dark and so smooth it seemed to have no pores at all. She had huge, dark eyes and a strong nose over a perfectly round, full-lipped mouth. An unexpected dimple in the middle of her chin was a lovely surprise. The only thing that marred her appearance was a painfully cheap wig perched on top of her beautiful head like a hat from hell. The long bangs and feathery layering of the clearly synthetic hair partially obscured her face and made you want to brush it aside so you could admire what God had made in this girl.

She stood up immediately when she saw us coming her way. She was tall and skinny, with the awkward grace of hopeful young womanhood, and I knew who this was at once.

“Miriam St. Jacques,” said Amelia, “this is Catherine Sanderson. Catherine, this is Miriam.”

She smiled shyly from under that godawful wig, and I shook her hand and smiled back. Amelia ushered us into her private office and closed the door.

“Sit down, sit down,” she said as we crowded in and took our seats around a small round conference table. Miriam looked very nervous, but Amelia got right down to business, turning to the girl as if she didn’t even notice the wig hat working its show.

“I’ve told Catherine a little bit about you and your sister, but why don’t you tell her what’s happened up to this point?”

That didn’t seem to reassure Miriam.

“All of it?” she said so softly I could barely hear her. She spoke English with a French accent, but it was easy to understand her.

Amelia shrugged. “All that you think it’s important for her to know.”

That was still too open-ended. This girl’s country had been a poor, angry, violent place for most, if not all, of her life. How could she begin to tell me where she’d been and what she’d seen? She looked at me helplessly.

“Why don’t you tell me how you came to Atlanta?” I said, knowing she was here now on a temporary visa, due in no small part to Amelia’s sponsorship. “Did your sister come with you?”

She nodded, relieved at a question she could answer directly. “We came together, Etienne and me. From Florida.”

I smiled, trying to get her to relax. “Etienne is an unusual name for a girl.”

She smiled a tiny smile back. “My father wanted a son so badly, to be named Etienne, as he had been named for my grandfather. When my sister was born, and Mama said there would be no more children, he insisted on calling her Etienne anyway.”

“How did you get to Florida?”

She looked at Amelia, who nodded. “It’s okay. She’s a friend.”

“My parents paid a man to bring us, my sister and me, on a boat. There were fifteen of us. All women. My sister was fourteen.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back. “She’s fifteen now.

“Some people met us with a van, two vans, when we landed. It was a beach, but it was very dark and there were no lights or signs, so I don’t know where exactly we were. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I said, imagining the terror of such a landing. “Did you know the people who met you?”

She shook her head. “No. They were men, four men. They loaded us in the vans, seven in one, eight in the other. We had to sit on the floor. No seats and no stopping. No food. They gave us water, twice, and told us to be quiet unless we wanted to go to jail or back to our country.”

She couldn’t even say its name.

“Some of the girls were crying, but my mother had said these men were going to help us get jobs, so we could become citizens, so I told my sister not to be afraid. I told her everything was all right, but it wasn’t all right.”

Her eyes filled up again and she shook her head miserably. “When we finally stopped driving, we still didn’t know where we were. Most of us spoke French, maybe a little English, but the men who drove us were speaking Spanish, so it was hard to know what was going on. They put us in a house with so many women, one bathroom, sleeping on the floor.”

She wrinkled her nose at the memory.

“They told us that was where we had to live, and that if we came outside, our neighbors would call the police and they would come take us away.”

What she was describing was not news to me. People who come here illegally are terrified of being discovered and sent home to face whatever made them flee in the first place. Nobody risks life and limb to head out across miles of ocean on a rickety old boat if they’ve got any better options at all. Whatever made Miriam’s mother spirit her away from Haiti into the arms of shadowy strangers must have been every mother’s worst nightmare. Could I have kissed my Phoebe and put her on that boat? I hope I never have to find out.

“Tell her about the jobs,” Amelia prompted gently.

“Yes, yes, the jobs. They got us jobs cleaning.”

“Cleaning what?”

“Office buildings. The big glass ones. After everyone has gone home for the night. They would pick us up in darkness, drive us there, wait for us to finish, and take us home in darkness.”

“Did they pay you?”

“They paid us nothing. Barely enough to feed ourselves. The rest of the money they kept for themselves.”

Somebody was amassing a sizable fortune trading on frightened people’s misery. Maybe Ezola’s programs were working so well, she was pricing her maids out of the market. These guys could charge less because they didn’t pay anything. It was all profit.

“I told my sister it was wrong what they were doing and I was going to make them pay us so we could get our own place and live like human beings, but they sent my sister away. I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t.”

She stopped and took a deep breath, fingering a gold locket around her neck.

“They told me she ran away, but Etienne would never run away without me. Mama told us to stay together. She didn’t run. They took her.” Her voice cracked a little, and she pursed her lips as if to keep herself from saying any more.

“Took her where?”

“They wanted her,” Miriam said softly. “I know they wanted her even though she was a child. They wanted her and I think they took her. If I had stayed there, I think they would have taken me, too. So the next time they dropped us at work, I slipped out through the basement and ran as far as I could away from there until I was in a place with houses and trees. I hid until morning. When it got light outside, I saw a woman, a white woman, but she had a little girl, so I ran up to her and told her some people were after me and they had kidnapped my sister. She took me to the police.”

When Phoebe was a kid and we traveled internationally to places where she didn’t know the language, I told her that if she ever got separated from me to find a woman with a child and ask her for help. Miriam’s experience had proven the wisdom of that advice.

“Did the police help you?”

“They asked me so many questions,” she said, getting agitated. “How did I come to the United States? Who were the men in the vans? How long had I been in Atlanta? Did my parents have enemies? Where was the house where we were taken? So many questions and I couldn’t answer any of them.”

Amelia broke in before Miriam got too worked up. “They blindfolded them coming and going to the job site, but we’ve got some clues based on things Miriam remembers that might at least narrow it down to a certain neighborhood.”

“Good,” I said. “These places move around a lot just to stay one step ahead of the law and anybody else who’s looking for them, but they tend to stick to one general area.”

These would be places where people were too poor or too high or too scared to care who lived in the house with the boarded-up windows and the two rottweilers chained up in the front yard.

“The thing is,” Amelia said, “it looks like these guys are using more and more of these women as prostitutes in the same way they use them as janitors. What Miriam is saying bears out what we’ve been hearing.”

“Do you have any proof?” I’d been hearing the rumors, too.

Miriam shook her head, the wig trembling slightly. “Just things some of the women said. Two other girls ran away before they took my sister. Both of them were very young, like my sister, and very beautiful.”

“Show her the picture,” Amelia said.

Miriam opened the locket she’d been fingering and showed me a small photograph of a smiling young girl, her open face so alive you would swear you could hear her laughter.

“I have to find her,” she said softly. “Whatever they have done to her, she is still my baby sister and I’m supposed to take care of her.”

She closed the locket slowly and dropped it back inside her blouse. “I promised my mama.”

Something about the simplicity of the way she said it really touched me. Like there was no question of whether she would do this, only a question of how.

“I’ll see if I can find out anything,” I said. “Give me a couple of days to poke around.”

Gratitude washed over Miriam’s face, and she grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said over and over again. “Oh, thank you.”

“It may take some time,” I cautioned her. “These guys sound like pros.”

The smile faded from her face, and I immediately felt bad for robbing her of a moment of optimism in what was a terrible situation.

“Don’t worry,” I said, to reassure her. “I’m a pro, too.”

As I walked to my car through the crisp fall day, I thought about how many women were going through what Miriam had just described. I had heard so many stories of sexual abuse, but so far no organized ring had emerged in this area. I hoped this wasn’t the start of something bigger. Forced prostitution was my great fear for these women, and many of the people who work with me share it, but we don’t know what to do to stop it from happening. The sexual marketplace, voluntary and involuntary, is such a brutal, dehumanizing, scary place that nobody on the outside can stand to look at it long enough to clean it up. Probably because at some level, we all know that what the elders say is true:
When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks long into you.

BOOK: Babylon Sisters
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