All of these qualities added, in his mind, to her general fineness. He couldn’t help thinking about what might have happened between them if he were single, which he hadn’t been in fifteen years. The bare, airy room felt too small for them both.
She read his mind. “You know, there was a time a man like you would have asked for my phone number. Back before I tore myself up like I did.”
“A man like me would ask for your phone number now,” Hilton said carefully, to reassure her that she should not be ashamed, “if a man like me weren’t married.”
“I guess you already got my number, don’t you?” She took his hand and pressed it to her chest near her collarbone, where beneath a thin film of perspiration her skin felt touched with fever.
another time, a different doorway
another life
His lips parting slightly, Hilton gently pulled his hand away and patted her firmly on the shoulder. Danitra laughed at the brotherly gesture.
“Don’t be looking at me like that, girl. I don’t know what you want with an old man anyway.”
“Not that old. I don’t see no gray in that beard yet.”
“You aren’t looking closely enough.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d better look no closer, seeing as you have that ring on your finger and you won’t take it off.”
Still smiling, Hilton shook his head. Her attraction was flattering. “Damn. You don’t give up, do you?” he asked.
“No, sir. That’s why I’m standing where I am right now.”
He saw a fleeting image of the two of them nude, entwined behind boxes on the carpeting, christening her new home, but he forced the thought away because he felt the heavy warmth of arousal growing beneath his stomach. He took a deep breath and pinched her cheek. “Good luck, sweetheart. I’m late. I’d better leave.”
“Yeah,” Danitra said, grinning knowingly, “you’d better.”
As Hilton climbed into the dented Corolla he’d driven since grad school in the late 1970s, the thrill of temptation buzzed in his mind. Instead of regret, he felt a sense of power over it, knowing he had chosen not to act. He had Dede, who even now was being lauded as a newly elected circuit-court judge, the only black woman in Dade with that title; and together they had Kaya and Jamil, whom only a certified fool would risk willingly. Cute wasn’t worth it. Ten times cute wasn’t worth it.
He knew and respected men who didn’t feel the same carnal allegiances—and he’d heard straight-faced arguments from black friends on how insulting it was to try to force fidelity, a European notion, on the descendants of African princes—but Hilton had already come too close to losing his own tribe from selfishness. Fucking around, as far as he was concerned, was just another form of selfishness. One he didn’t dare explore.
The Elks lodge on Northwest Seventh Avenue was flanked by rented limousines with tinted windows and three Miami police cars, sirens flashing, just in case any restless have-nots nearby got ideas about crashing the bourgeois party. Seventh Avenue was otherwise occupied by storefronts badly in need of paint and customers; the Burger King across the street was bustling, but the African-fashions store next to the lodge was nearly empty. Hilton adjusted the kente-cloth necktie Dede bought him from the little shop as he excused himself past the huddles at the lodge door. Inside, he scanned the balloon-filled hall for his family.
He saw Dede immediately, but she didn’t see him. She was center-stage with a dozen other black officials wearing name tags, posing for group photographs. She stood among the tallest, a graceful giant with a long neck and a sculpted natural that sloped above her forehead. Alongside her were two black mayors, state legislators, local commissioners, and two black U.S. congressmen. All had been guests in his home at one time or another. Hilton was struck by how impressive the group was and consciously stood a bit straighter when he reminded himself that his own wife was among them. Flashing bulbs lit the room like strobes.
A stage whisper floated to Hilton’s ear from behind him: “Psssst. Dad.”
He saw his daughter waving in her lilac taffeta dress from a table near the buffet line. Her permed hair was curled loose against her shoulders instead of in ponytails, the way he was used to seeing her. Apparently, she’d been allowed to wear a touch of rouge on her cheeks. She’d won many of these little compromises since her thirteenth birthday, or, as Kaya called it, her “teenagehood.” Jamil’s head popped up from whatever game he was playing crouched under the table. They had inherited their mother’s sharp jawbone and long neck, and their faces were smooth and round, looking nearly identical in a complexion mingling Dede’s darker shade with Hilton’s red-clay-tinged brown.
“You’re late, Dad,” Kaya observed while Hilton kissed her forehead and massaged Jamil’s scalp.
“Watch out for my fade, Daddy,” Jamil said, patting his flat hairstyle back into place. Hilton couldn’t remember being that vain at eight, or at any age since.
“Mom made a speech,” Kaya said, and Hilton’s spirits sank. He’d left the house to help Danitra move out of the rehab center before he could listen to Dede practice her speech as he’d promised that afternoon. Now he’d missed the real thing too.
“Uh-oh,” he said. Uh-oh was an understatement. “I bet it was good, though.”
“Of course it was. She got a standing ovation.” Hilton gazed intently at the group posing for pictures, and Dede suddenly shifted her head and saw him. Not daring a smile, Hilton raised his hand to greet her. Dede’s face remained unchanged, unreadable. I’m sorry, he mouthed to her. Her eyes returned to the camera, and she managed an insincere smile for the picture. With her mother on vacation in the Bahamas, Hilton remembered, he would have been especially missed today. Hilton knew he was most certainly, without a doubt, in big trouble.
“I’ve got an idea,” Kaya said, close to his ear. “Say your car broke down. She’ll believe that. It’s always broken.” “Thanks a lot. I’m glad we raised you to be honest.” “You’d better have some excuse, Dad. She wanted you here.” Sorry, dear, Hilton rehearsed in his mind ruefully, I would have been here for your shining moment, but I was getting a hard-on for one of my junkie clients.
Once Dede joined them, Hilton won a reprieve from her solemn dark eyes in the stream of well-wishers who wanted to shake her hand, who remembered her from when she was only so tall, who’d contributed to her campaign and were so happy to finally see a sister in there. In these situations, Hilton envied Dede for her liquid smile and easy enthusiasm. She lost herself in the warmth of other people in a way he could not, grasping their shoulders, hugging them, taking telephone numbers with relish.
Dede maintained her gracious dignity while allowing an infectious playfulness to peek through. She had a peal of laughter he could usually hear from across the room. Maybe that was the African in her; Dede’s mother was Ghanaian and equally effusive. Dede’s nature spilled into her campaign, a clean race that found her victorious, despite their bare-bones finances, over an older white man with a recognized name. By the end, Kaya and Jamil were scrawling campaign signs with colored markers.
Hilton held Dede’s hand while she spoke to one person after another, brushing her knuckle gently with his thumb; this was half an involuntary impulse to remind her admirers that he’d had the good sense to choose her, half a silent apology. A black Metro-Dade police officer they’d both known for years, dressed smartly in his brown-and-beige uniform, kissed Dede’s cheek, then gave Hilton a soul shake. Curtis was a vice sergeant who often steered homeless addicts to Hilton’s Miami New Day center with his finesse for ignoring county paperwork. He’d brought Danitra after finding her asleep with a needle in one arm and her baby in the other, beneath the Interstate 95 overpass.
“Watch it, Hil, or I’m ’a take this lady right from under your nose. You know how they like the uniform, right?”
“Look here, you can try,” Hilton said.
“Curtis, you’d better go get a plate of food and stop being foolish,” Dede dismissed him.
Curt pursed his lips grimly beneath his moustache. He leaned closer to Dede, his voice free of mirth. “You let me know if you change your mind and decide to file a report on that thing. I’ll make sure it gets looked after.”
“Hold up. What thing?” Hilton asked.
Dede blinked rapidly and squeezed Hilton’s fingers hard. She was looking toward Kaya and Jamil, whose heads were bent hungrily over their food. “Not now,” she said. “I’ll let you know, Curt.”
As an afterthought, Curtis pointed to Hilton. “How’s that girl with the baby doing? Danitra?”
“She’s great. In fact, that’s where I was today, man. I got held up moving her into The Terraces.”
Hilton was so distracted by his concern over the secret Curtis and Dede shared, wondering what would be so pressing that she would consider filing a police report, that it didn’t occur to him until after he’d spoken that this wasn’t the way he’d intended to explain his late arrival. In fact, this way was dead wrong. He’d all but decided Kaya had a point, that it might be better to stretch the truth a little bit this time. Dede might see something in his eyes when he talked about Danitra, and the last thing he needed was to rouse in her the beast they’d spent hundreds of dollars in marriage counseling to quiet.
“I should have known,” he heard Dede mutter, and he knew the beast was stirring already.
CHAPTER 2
Anyone who lives in Miami or a subtropical climate knows that the color black draws heat, so it’s best to avoid it or else squirm with discomfort; in this way, Dede Campbell’s dark mocha complexion drew Hilton James. He saw her walking beside a duck pond on a pathway winding across the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami, a woman with height and nicely proportioned heft and a natural shaved nearly to her scalp in 1978, when brothers and sisters were still growing Afros as high as they could reach. Her loose-fitting dress was bright yellow, dangling against her body’s gentle curves past her knees. Even from where he sat on a bench across the pond, Hilton could see she was wearing sandals and had a sterling silver bracelet draped around her left ankle. Silver glistened against her skin as though the precious metal were mined for that purpose alone. Her gait foretold all her ambition, all her confidence, all her promise. Hilton had come to grad school for two things: his master’s in public administration and to find a wife. Not even necessarily in that order. The sisters he’d met in the working world during the two years he’d spent as a teen counselor in Liberty City just hadn’t been doing it for him. They could boogie on the dance floor, and he’d found his own sweet corner of ecstasy between hot thrusts in his bedroom, but when it came to conversation and vision he was coming up dry. Forget about sisters, some of his friends told him when he complained, their arms wrapped around white women with blond locks and imaginations fixated on the Congo.
Forget about sisters. He wouldn’t forget about this one. He found the bench every day at the same time, waiting for her to pass. Most days she didn’t. But some days, especially Wednesdays and Fridays, she did. He followed her at a distance and watched her take steps two at a time into the law school. He’d braced himself to discover that she might be an actress or a music major with her head untroubled by the worldly concerns that consumed his thoughts, but she wasn’t. Damn if she wasn’t a law student. This was fate, he decided.
He had them married with two sets of twins before he’d even spoken to her or asked her name. After three months he was kicking himself because he hadn’t found the nerve to stop her on the path and introduce her future husband.
When he was invited to a black graduate-student mixer at the union sponsored by UM’s Black Student Society, he chuckled at the invitation, thinking there wouldn’t be more than a half dozen people there. But he knew she would come.
Seeing her there in a white sundress with thin straps, Hilton mustered the resolve to walk up to her. Her name tag identified her, so he tried to sound familiar: “DeeDee, it’s great to see you. I’ve noticed you around. Can I get you a drink?”
She looked at him skeptically, not the way he’d hoped. Her face was wrinkled with a confusion over who this fool was pretending to know her; then she remembered her name tag and raised her long, unpolished fingers to touch it. “DAY-day,” she said. “It’s pronounced DAY-day. It’s African.”
Strike one against him. He had to be especially smooth now. “Are you from Africa?” he asked, already counting that question as strike two. Of course she was, with that glorious skin and her natural face pure of makeup and the traces of a clipped accent under all that America.
“My mother is. She’s from Accra.”
“Ghana,” he said quickly, too quickly, trying to impress her.
She smiled, seeing all this at work in his mind. “Yes. Ghana,” she said.
Uncomfortable pause. “Would you like a drink?” he repeated.
“Fruit juice, if they have any,” she said, looking his face over and then glancing at his name. “And when you come back—Hilton—try to be yourself. I’ll like you better that way.”
After a year’s worth of Earth, Wind & Fire concerts, poetry readings, and black-student meetings, they were engaged. A year after that, no sooner than she’d taken and passed the bar exam, they were married at Overtown’s St. John Baptist Church, where Dede had come up. Lionel Campbell, her father, owned a small black weekly newspaper and knew everyone, so the church was filled beyond capacity. Well-wishers who couldn’t get in fanned themselves and cackled on the front steps, their voices floating through the walls as Hilton and Dede said “I do.”
Years later, describing their introduction, engagement, and wedding, and most especially Dede’s rainbow-kissed African ceremonial wedding dress, Hilton related the story like a fishing yarn, remembering each detail, treating it like a dream. He would cling to those details in coming years, when the dream began to fall apart and daily realities took root between them.
Neither of them changed. Dede had always been more quick to anger and had a tendency to snap when annoyed. Hilton had always retreated into silence when confronted, and he’d always had a full schedule of meetings and appointments, squeezing his time with Dede around them. And she’d always felt a need to keep track, asking him where he was at five o’clock, at six o’clock, an implicit reminder that she did not trust him to roam alone. This annoyed him like nothing else.
It didn’t help him that his life was full of women. His boss at the Miami New Day Recovery Center, where he had started a job as the head social worker, was a woman; many of the counselors were women; the workhorses at the Miami Action Coalition, a civil rights group, were women. They called him at home and on weekends, and when Dede complained, Hilton tried to explain that he could not simply tell them, “I don’t care who’s having a seizure or which building is burning down, my wife doesn’t want me to take calls on Sunday. Sunday is our time.” Perhaps he should have said it, but he didn’t feel he could. He wanted—expected—her to understand that.
Dede had her own brand of commitment, but she was more adept at saying no than he was. Her inspirational speaking appearances or participation in free legal clinics were carefully selected, and she made it a point to inform Hilton each time she turned something down for the family. For the family. It sounded like a curse, the way she said it.
He tried to make it up in other ways, by surprising her with exotic dinner recipes when he could (he was a good cook, as good as she), by arranging flowers and candles in their bedroom, by cornering her for midafternoon lovemaking in the walk-in closet while Kaya watched cartoons in the living room. But all it took was one phone call and Dede’s announcing “It’s some woman for you” in a tone that painted him as a dog to unravel all the work.
It got worse after Jamil was born. His son’s birth coincided with his promotion to assistant director, so just when Dede wanted him at home the most he was staying at the office until eight o’clock most nights. He cut out much of his other volunteer work, he called her on the hour to update her on when he would
be getting home, but it couldn’t slice through the awful silence when he returned after dark and leaned over his new son’s crib and wondered what once-only achievements he’d missed while he was away.
The cutbacks didn’t last long, though. As Jamil grew, so did Hilton’s schedule of meetings in Overtown, in West Perrine, in Liberty City, wherever the disenfranchised tried to organize and asked for his help. One week he never made it home before eleven. He was spared Dede’s wrath only because she was sleeping.
“Why don’t you just tell me who you’re seeing and get it over with?” Dede said to him when he was in bed one night, dumbfounding him. She was holding a white dress shirt he’d just tossed into the bathroom hamper, her fingers closed tightly around the collar. She pushed the shirt into his face, and he saw the faint smudges of brown makeup, like dried finger paint.
At first he was numb with confusion. What woman had gotten close enough to him that day to muss his clothes? Then he remembered Beatrice Price. “Oh, Jesus,” Hilton said, and he couldn’t help it: he laughed.
His laughter enraged her. She whipped the shirt into his face so hard that one of the buttons bit into his cheek. “Don’t make me out to be a fool, Hilton,” she said in a deadly tone.
He might have read her tone and simply apologized, but he was angry at the accusation and at his smarting cheek. “You’re making yourself out to be a fool,” he said. “I won’t answer that. This is bullshit.”
“And then you lie,” she said in a sweeping vibrato, as though this is what she’d always expected. “You can’t be a man. All this time, all the time you spend away, a meeting for this and that every night, all the times I call your desk and you’re out—”
“Have you ever heard of field work? I’m supposed to sit on my ass behind a desk all day?” he shouted. Hilton knew Kaya would hear him from her bedroom across the hall, but he couldn’t bring his voice down: “So you’re checking up on me? Do you follow my car in the mornings too?”