Thunder In Her Body (50 page)

Lynette didn’t mind being the aggressor either when it came to lovemaking.  On his way to an important meeting one afternoon, she waylaid him in the hallway, leaning him up against the wall.  Understanding her mood, Blaze teased her with his lips and held her face between his hands. Both of her hands were free.  She reached down, unzipped the fly of his blue jeans, reached through all the fabric and grabbed the malleable flesh.  Squeezing it like warm already used putty, she kneaded his pliable flesh until it resisted manipulation and began to grow in her hands.  She used both hands so she could hold everything down there.

“You get this when I get back,” he said, speaking onto her lips.  Pushing himself back off the wall, he breathed heavily, looking down at her.  The look was so passionate that it could’ve been confused with anger.  But he wasn’t angry, he was in need and in a hurry.

“When I get back,” he repeated pulling himself back into his jeans.  Down the hallway to the door of the garage he walked quickly, turning around to her momentarily.  “When I get back.  All you want then,” he reiterated, a small smile crossing his lips.

Two years after BC was born, her beloved mother passed away.  It was a peaceful death, surrounded by most of her family.  Blaze carried the baby almost everywhere they went so Lynette would not have to struggle with their “strong little Indian,” which Blaze had started calling him.  He was a beautiful child, with straight black hair, round cheeks, a huge smile, dancing dark eyes covered by extremely long eye lashes, and a way of turning his head to the side, which won the hearts of the mourners at the funeral services.  Even at that age, Blaze exercised a certain amount of discipline, and unlike a few other children in attendance, he was not allowed to talk out loud or step out of the pews.  He would learn respect for ritual early in life.

There was no estate to settle, as Bertha really had nothing much to leave to her children.  There was only enough to give her the proper burial that she deserved, and Lynette had subsidized that process years ago.  She left a few precious pieces of jewelry, clothes which were donated to Catholic Charities, and three daughters imbued with love and kindness toward all of God’s people.  Her son, their brother, had preceded her in death by many years.

Apparently, it had bothered Aaron over the years ever since he’d known Lynette.  While visiting Blaze on a quiet evening shortly after they returned from the funeral, Aaron broached the subject to Lynette, asking why her mother had not
passed
for white.

“Your mother’s skin was alabaster white.  Her hair was straight and snow white and she had bright green eyes.  Why in the world did she choose to live as a black woman, instead of a white one?  She was obviously more white than black. I don’t mean any harm, Lynette, but by God I don’t understand why a white woman would endure the insults Negroes have had to endure – the limitations on where they could live, what jobs they could have.  I just don’t understand.  She could’ve been anything she wanted to be.  She was a beautiful woman in her youth.  Look at you.  Why did you all do it?” he asked in a painfully confused way.

“People who
pass
generally live a lie, and live most of their lives in terror of being discovered.  That’s a dreadful way to live,” Lynette explained dispassionately.  “For men and women of child-bearing age, they fear that genetics will expose them, and they’ll have a child or children who are obviously of mixed race.  You can’t have two supposed white parents producing a tanned child with kinky hair without suspicion and tremendous recrimination.  On top of that,
passing
means giving up all semblances of relationships from the birth family.  Or at best, having a secret family that no one can ever know about.  Making up stories of why you have no other family, to conceal the truth; or hoping that you never open your front door, and find a relative from
that part of the family,
standing there.  Think how easy it would be to be blackmailed, especially if your life was in the public eye or you’d achieved some sort of social prominence.  Oh, passing seems so easy, until you measure the costs.  Women have been beaten, turned out into the streets, sold into prostitution or worse yet, killed for being discovered as a racial fraud.  There can be a high cost to pass for white in America, with black blood running in the veins,” she concluded.  She was silent for a moment, as Blaze observed pain beginning to show on her face.  Racism in America was hard to understand, even for a woman of Lynette’s intelligence and education.

“My mother’s life might have been so very different if she had passed.  With her drive and determination, her innate intelligence and education, she might’ve had lots of career choices.  She chose to teach and she left a legacy in the lives of her students.  Who knows who she would have married?  But then, she wouldn’t have had me, and I probably wouldn’t have met Blaze.  I can’t imagine going through this life without him, even though we found each other late in life.  So, as most things turn out, something very good came from Mama’s decision to honor the black blood in her.  When you think of it, that’s a privilege white people don’t have.  Mama had a choice.  It doesn’t matter that it was made because of the ingrained racism in America and the terrible cost of crossing the invisible color line.  She had a choice, and she gave up possible wealth and privilege in order to live an authentic life,” Lynette said, with a tiny smile creeping across her lips.  She took no insult from Aaron’s question.  She only wondered why it hadn’t been raised earlier.

Lynette walked out of the room for a few minutes, then returned in the way women do when they’re not finished with an argument or felt a need to continue the conversation.

“I’m gonna share this with you.  I’ve told Blaze this.  I’ve always been in a unique positio
n in this color-conscious world, and yes, I have taken advantage of it.  I sometimes get to know the inner workings of other people’s minds just because of my color.  Sometimes white people,
slip
and say what they really mean among their peers.  Now I don’t want to intimate that all of them do it, but trust me, it’s more common than one might think.  Anyway, they utter statements about
them or those people, or that kind.
  Sometimes they just come on out and say nigger, kike, spick or wetback, when they feel safe around people who might share their views.  Oh, they’ll deny on a stack of bibles that they have racist views, but when you scratch the surface, there it is.  We’ve heard elected officials slip.  I remember many years ago when I was a social worker, one of the agency directors told a stupid joke about tying little black boys to fishing poles as bait to catch alligators in Louisiana.  He thought it was funny.  As the words came out of his mouth, more than half the assembled group was deadly silent and looked at me to get my reaction to so senseless and ignorant a joke.  I’m sure one of his aides later told him why his “joke” fell flat.  He didn’t know that a black woman was sitting in his midst, only about five chairs from him.  So you see, I’ve been privy to conversations and actions of people who felt safe with expressing their views, most of which were and are based on out-dated, unexplored stereotypes.  But people like me really get to measure the barometer of racism here in this country.  The comfortable theme is to say that it is dead here in America.  Oh, if only the truth was really told!  Racism, bigotry is alive and well all over this country.  On the other side of the coin, I’ve been around lots and lots of blacks – remember we’re now African-Americans – who resent me, or at best are suspicious of me because I look white.  They don’t feel they can trust me because they know that I’d probably get services, privileges, or accommodations that they’d be denied.  And they’re right.  In the worst case scenario, that I’d
sell out
to any white faction to get favors for myself personally.  There’s racism on both sides of the coin.  It is degrading and restrictive.  I’ve been in department stores where no one paid attention to my shopping, but followed a darker-skinned African-American customer around watching to see if they were trying to steal something, just because they were obviously black.  This color thing in America is insanity.  It defies reason.  Yet we hear all the time on TV, and in the media how color-blind America is.  And that’s bull!  In another instance, how many movies or television productions do we see about Native-Americans that are positive.  Most of it is about the abject poverty on the reservations; suicide rates and murders.  They’re either depicted as the noble savages or just ignorant savages.  The pity of it is that we are all the same.  We may have definite and identifiable DNA traits in the human genome, but we’re all human.  We all bleed.  We all give birth in a human way and none of us get out of this life alive.  When our time is used up, we die.  How we live in between is what matters, and frankly, color doesn’t or shouldn’t matter.  Somehow, some people just believe they have to be better than someone else, and to bolster themselves that way they have to dehumanize others; pick categories of people.  I never will forget what happened when I treated my sister to an Alaskan cruise.  We were assigned to an eight-person table for dinner.  When I sat down everyone was friendly.  My sister wanted to run to the gift shop before dinner, so she was delayed at first.  Everyone was fine.  The couple who sat across the table from me said they were from Georgia.  Of course they were curious about Texas.  Both of them conversed, though the husband was somewhat quieter.  He was friendly though.  When my sister, who is obviously black, arrived and sat down at the table, his head sort of jerked back and he kept looking from her to me with a frown.  From then on he was silent, but he kept staring at her.  Before the dessert was served, he left the table and never returned.  In fact, for the duration of the next five nights, he never came back to the dinner table.  Everyone else inquired about him, thinking he had come down ill or something.  His wife, who did come back for a few of the dinners, made excuses for his absence.  I strongly suspect that he couldn’t countenance eating dinner with a black woman, or black women, once he realized I, too, was black  .If I’m correct, he couldn’t go back to wherever he came from and admit that he had dined with some
nigras.
  My sister and I thought it was pitiful, but then it was his loss.  We made friends at that table and his poor wife, who was very pleasant, ate her sumptuous dinners with us but without him. As the slaves used to say, ‘How long oh Lord, how long?’” Lynette walked slowly out of the room again, leaving both men quiet.  Thinking.

Chapter 3
4

¤

The Mountain

A
s time went on, Lynette stopped dying her hair.  It had nothing to do with Blaze as his beautiful locks continued to turn silver.  She just decided to be more natural.  It was time she let the examples of graceful aging take their place in her life.  Still, at over 60, she didn’t look more than a woman in her late forties.  Living good, loving lives was good for them both.  He stopped aging – just stopped.  There were no more lines in his face than the day he and Lynette met.  And his bride, his wife, still had no crow’s feet around her eyes.  He joked with her about that – how young she looked, and he was sincere.  She always told him that the lines were there, they were just filled with adipose tissue.  That was one of the benefits of being
zaftig – Rubenesque,
filled-out!  Blaze liked the way she filled out her jeans, too, and whenever he could, he got into them.
He was just a horny, virile old man, and she figured at this rate, they’d still be bouncing around on their mattress into their eighties.  He reminded her that he had degrees in Biology, and he had identified her as his special bird –
a brown-breasted, coral-lipped mattress thrasher!

Lynette could only ascribe Blaze’s virility and continued stamina to the strength of his breed and the incredibly difficult training he had to undergo to become a Navy Seal.  Then, too, ranch work was hard, and he worked hard, keeping his body in relatively good shape.  On the other hand, she was just a “strumpet in disguise,” and she’d been horny since she was about twelve.  What a match they were for each other.  And what an idealic life they had together, in this most beautiful spot in the whole of New Mexico, with Sierra Asombroso looming majestically above them.

Yet this mountain, the mountain that she loved so dearly, almost took him away from her.  During the winter that BC was ten – the winter with the highest snowfall recorded in over 40 years, Blaze took some friends skiing in her bowl.  There had been avalanche warnings posted for about a week, but with shells shot into the overhanging snow ledges, dislodging them, the adjacent slopes were declared safe for expert skiers.   With companions challenging him on virgin snowfall, he and the four other men locked on their goggles, adjusted their clamp-on boots and headed downhill on a black-diamond run.  They let out individual yells as each launched themselves forward, carving wide S’s as they careened toward the bottom of the slope.  The run was fast, the cold air stung their faces and the emerging sun made the snow glisten like billions of white diamonds.  Toward the midway portion of the run, they heard a crack – a sharp crack – as if a huge tree had snapped in half.  They turned to see the first horizontal break in the snow pack working its way across the upper level of their run, then came the roar.  A deafening roar, and the earth shook beneath their skis.