Crimson Footprints (6 page)

Grandma Emma struggled to
her feet.

“
I would like to volunteer
my grandbaby, Deena Hammond, for the job.”

“
What!”

Emma gave Deena a look of
warning before turning her attention to First Lady
Phillips.

“
As I’m sure the church
knows, my grandbaby be in charge a building them big ole buildings,
what you find down there on the rich folks part a town. So I ‘spect
this would be nothing to her.”

Nothing?

“
Well praise the Lord,”
Lenora Howard crooned.

“
Praise the Lord!” the
congregation echoed.

Deena balked.

She wanted them to stop
praising the Lord, but the words wouldn’t come.

“
Amen! Amen! Deena Hammond,
Emmanuel Rises own certified architect, is going to bless us with a
new Fellowship Hall,” Lenora continued.

“
I can’t—I don’t have the
time—” she mumbled.

Deena sunk into her seat,
horrified as her pleas were muffled by applause.

When the family arrived at
Grandma Emma’s place after the eleven o’clock service, Deena washed
her hands and went to work prepping Sunday dinner. Her grandmother
labored next to her in silence, coating catfish with cornmeal and
chicken with flour so both could be fried. Afterwards, she would
dice the boiled chitterlings.

Chitterlings.

Deena could remember the
first time she laid eyes on the pig entrails—in fact, most of her
family could. She’d sampled the offal without knowledge of what it
was before spewing it into Grandpa Eddie’s face. He’d wanted to
beat her, he always wanted to beat her, but the family laughed
until it would’ve seemed as though he were a poor sport for hitting
her.

Eventually, Deena grew to
like chitterlings, or chittlins as they were called, boiled in a
broth and served up with a dash of hot sauce. In fact, she grew to
love many of the foods that had been so foreign to her when she
first joined the family—fried chicken gizzards and chicken livers,
okra and black-eyed peas, pig’s feet and neck bones. As a child,
she’d been curious about the hodgepodge assortment of food on their
table, while delicious; she knew scraps when she saw them. Grandma
Emma explained to her that the African American food tradition was
born of a necessity for survival. Slaves would make do with what
they had—things they could grow and meat discarded from the
master’s kitchen. As a young girl, it fascinated her that black
people had such a rich food tradition, an actual meaning attached
to the food they favored. Her mother’s Spaghetti Wednesdays and
Meatloaf Sundays could hardly boast the same.

It wasn’t long before
Grandma Emma took Deena under her wing and showed her how to clean
chitterlings, pick the freshest collards, and deep-fry a catfish.
Each Sunday, Deena studied hard, in an effort to cook like her
grandmother, like a black person.

She studied other things in
her effort to seem blacker. She watched her cousins for the
appropriate fashions, the proper use of vernacular, and suitable
music and television programs for a young black youth. As a
teenager, she pretended to love hip-hop in public though she
listened to pop and classic rock in secret.

It was all an attempt to
fade into the fabric of the Hammond family—and by fade she meant
disappear. Oh, there were times when she was the center of
attention, when her contrary ethnicity came up, but many more when
she simply went unnoticed. And while unnoticed wasn’t synonymous
with acceptance, it was a step in the right direction.

Two hours past the end of
church service, the Hammond family gathered around the supper
table. There were two of her three aunts, a smidgeon of cousins.
For a painful moment, Deena’s thoughts turned to Anthony, who would
never be around to lie about why he’d skipped dinner
again.

“
So, I was thinking that
you could put one of those pretty roofs up in the fellowship hall.
You know, like them ones that aint nothing but windows? That should
be good,” Grandma Emma said.

“
Naw, what you should do is
a regular roof but paint like angels and demons and stuff like the
one they got overseas,” Aunt Caroline said.

Did she mean the Sistine
Chapel?

Deena looked past her aunt
in a plea to her aunt.

“
Grandma, please. I can’t
do this. I don’t have the time to work on a new fellowship
hall.”

She stabbed at her collard
greens in despair. “You just don’t know my boss. He keeps us on a
short leash. In-kind donations have to be vetted through the proper
channels. And anyway, I’m swamped at work.”

Emma glanced from Deena to
Caroline, tapping ash on the side of her dinner plate.

“
If you don’t put that
goddamned cigarette out at your father’s table,” Grandma Emma said
through gritted teeth.

“
Alright,
alright.”

With an exasperated sigh,
Caroline stumped her Newport on the plate, ashes cascading into
three fat pieces of catfish. She shifted in her seat and with two
fingers, plucked the fabric of her dress from the wet folds beneath
her breasts.

“
Listen,” Grandma Emma
turned back to Deena. “I gave them people my word that you gone do
that hall, now you ain’t gone make no lie out of me,” Emma said
with the point of her fork. “You understand?”

Deena lowered her
gaze.

“
Yes ma’am.”

Emma turned to her
granddaughter, Keisha, Caroline’s fourth child. She was the same
age as Deena.

“
Now where’s that eldest
child of yours at?”

“
With his daddy,” Keisha
said as she poked at butter beans with a fork. “He’s the only one
that really comes to see about his kid, you know? Snow’s a good
dude.”

Caroline nodded. “He’s got
some ways about him, but he does handle his business.”

Aunt Rhonda looked up. “So
he still deals drugs?”

Deena grinned. She loved
Aunt Rhonda. The woman was an oasis of sanity in the Hammond desert
of madness. The youngest of Emma and Eddie Hammond’s children, she
fled the Hammond household three months shy of her eighteenth
birthday to pursue a nursing degree at the University of Florida.
Now she worked in the maternity ward at Jackson
Memorial.

“
Not everybody can go to
college, Rhonda,” Caroline said with a roll of her eyes. “Like I
said, he’s got his ways. But my grandson Curtis don’t never go
hungry.”

“
Mhm,” Rhonda said, lifting
Coca-Cola to her lips. “But shouldn’t you thank the taxpayers for
that?”

Deena giggled.

“
And what the hell are you
laughing at?” Keisha snapped.

“
Nothing.” Deena lowered
her gaze. “Nothing at all.”

“
Right answer.” Keisha
snapped.

The smell of weed met Deena
from across the table. When she looked up, her eyes met Keisha’s,
darker and flitting with scorn. Never had she been able to figure
out what she’d done to earn Keisha’s wrath, but she’d owned it from
the start. Memories of an eleven-year-old Keisha flaunting Deena’s
wardrobe at school each day still ate away at her. The last gift of
a once doting father, Keisha had taken Deena’s clothes with glee,
relishing both them and the shock on her classmates faces each time
she recanted the story of how Deena’s father’s had died.

“
Bet if the church was
payin’ ya, you’d have time for the hall,” Keisha smiled.

She plopped a sliver of
cornbread into her waiting mouth and grinned.

“
Mhm,” her mother Caroline
agreed.

Emma grabbed a few thick
pieces of fried chicken from the tray and dropped them on her plate
before turning a critical eye on Deena’s food. Collard greens,
stewed okra with tomatoes and onions, butter beans and cornbread.
No meat. Not a single piece.

“
Chile what in the world
wrong with your plate? “ Emma demanded.

Keisha and Caroline
snickered.

Deena glanced down.
“Nothing. I thought I’d try to eat a little healthier.” That, and
she was saving room for dinner with Tak.

“
Child, gimme that
plate.”

Emma produced a large,
demanding hand. “You gone starve yourself listening to these white
folks bout what you gots to eat. You gots black blood in ya. You
needs to eat black folks’ food. Simple as that.”

Deena handed the plate over
and watched in dismay as she dumped an assortment of chicken and
catfish on it. Her gym’s treadmill didn’t have a setting high
enough to run off all that fat.

Emma dropped the plate in
front of Deena with a scowl. After succumbing to her stare, Deena
reluctantly poked at a crispy piece of chicken thigh.

“
Eat!” Emma
snapped.

And with a sigh, she dug
in.

“
So,” Aunt Rhonda said
brightly. “What are you working on these days,
princess?”

Deena was the only one she
called princess, and the only one whose job necessitated
variation.

“
Renovations for a
parochial school. I’m making it handicap accessible.”

She tasted the collard
greens. They were salty.

“
So, basically you putting
a wheelchair ramp in,” Keisha said.

“
Well, not exactly. There’s
a complete re-envisioning taking place. We’re turning over every
stone to make the place not just handicap accessible but handicap
friendly, as well. Hallways are being widened, walls knocked down.
We’re even putting Braille—”

“
It’s a lot of crackers
that work with you, huh?” Keisha said.

Deena froze.
“What?”

“
Crackers. White folks,”
Keisha rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Never mind.”

Her mother laughed. “She
ain’t notice them, girl. She one of them.”

Keisha’s laughed reminded
her of a siren.

“
I’m black,” Deena snapped.
“Just as much black as I’m white.”

But her aunt laughed. “Well,
I can’t tell.”

“
She right, Deena, whether
you like it or not. You ain’t got nothing from your daddy. It’s
like that white woman just spit you out.” Grandma Emma said. “White
as snow, don’t ‘cha know. White as snow.”

Deena lowered her gaze. It
was always the same. She was Gloria Hammond’s daughter. White as
snow, don’t you know.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tak’s condo was a high rise
on Ocean Drive, center stage on South Beach. “The Jewel on the
Beach” was what they called the property, and from what he could
gather, they took the claim literally. His loft, a three bedroom on
the twentieth floor, had been purchased by his father at the
vision-blurring price of 2.5 million. With it came private ocean
access, a spa and fitness center and 24-hour white glove service.
He was still trying to figure out what that one meant. Still, his
place was a tattered old tent compared to the Mediterranean
masterpiece his parents called home.

The Jewel was a
thirty-story, sleek and lofty post-modern design envisioned by an
M.I.T. professor who was once his father’s classmate. Tak
remembered visiting the property as a potential buyer with his
father and watching him scrutinize fixtures, pull out measuring
tape and harass the real estate agent for blueprints. When he asked
him just what he was doing, his father frowned with that
all-too-common sneer of impatience and said, “Michael Cook was a B
student. Any work by him needs to be double checked.”

When Tak graduated from
UCLA, there’d been no discussion about him remaining in Cali. His
father simply told him that he was to pick a condo somewhere in
South Florida and that would serve as his graduation gift. Had he
been a different sort of father, Tak would’ve taken the gesture as
an indication that his father wanted him near. But since he was
Daichi, Tanaka he figured it simply never occurred to him to ask
his son’s opinion about where he might want to live.

Still, the condo was beyond
generous, and Tak couldn’t help but be excited about it. And though
it was expensive, he could afford the property tax on it. Thanks to
his father, he’d never had to prescribe to the struggling artist
routine. A trust fund of upwards of twenty million released to him
the day he graduated from college had ensured that Tak would never
have to lift brush to canvas should he not desire to. But he
enjoyed work and enjoyed earning his own income.

No one, it seemed, knew how
much his father was worth. He kept his wife, children, everyone,
save the IRS and a lone accountant, swathed in ignorance. For
years, Tak ran a guestimate, tallying projects and expected payouts
in the hopes of figuring out his father’s elusive worth. But when
he gained access to his trust fund and found that it alone more
than what he’d figured his father was worth, he knew that math
wasn’t his field.

After graduation, Tak
educated himself on market trends, invested his money aggressively
and kept up the frugal spending habits he’d developed in college.
The result was a net worth that swelled from twenty to twenty five
million, and more importantly, the sense that he shared
responsibility for his fate and success.