Gold, Fire & Refinement

Chapter One

"Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."  ~Benjamin Franklin

For the second time in one month, thirty-eight year-old Harvey Evan Wilson had to figure out how to tell his twenty-one year-old fiancée something she didn't want to hear. Something that was the opposite of what she wanted to hear about their wedding plans and where they would be getting married. She'd already had to put up with a lot of racist nonsense from a member of his family who didn't want him to marry her or any other black woman. And now he had to go home to tell her he promised that family member—his maternal grandmother, they would accept her invitation. Without talking to his fiancée, he told his grandmother they would have their wedding at her antebellum home in the Mississippi Delta, on an estate that was once a slave-owning plantation.

Working at his massive 1890s Scottish Partners antique desk, inside his luxurious and comfortable four thousand square-foot ninth-floor office suite, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his white dress shirt. The richest man in Mississippi decided it was time to take a break from assessing the merits of a proposal for an eight-hundred-fifty-million-dollar real estate development project in Australia. He had a bigger problem on his plate today, and no amount of money could solve it. After breathing a deep sigh of dread, he took a big sip of a triple shot. Four fingers from a bottle of 1926 Macallan, the world's finest single-malt scotch. The whiskey was last year's Christmas gift from his uncle: a man who believed nothing could calm nerves better or faster than expensive scotch. After taking another drink, he started hoping his uncle was right. Scotch in hand, he rose from his chair and walked over to his twenty-feet high floor-to-ceiling wall of windows. He needed time to think.

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The skyline view before him included parts of the Wilson Office Park's impressively designed complex which housed several of the tallest buildings in downtown Jackson. One held his financial investments and real-estate development company; another the state's largest non-profit organization, the H.E. Wilson Foundation and the DuBois Project offices, and the third building housed an international broadcasting corporation that belonged to him and his cousin, Thurgood Williams. The building where he was now, the fourth one, was the home of Wilson Publishing. 

His publishing company was where he worked most of the time, when he wasn't working at one of his other businesses, or one of his offices in Jackson or somewhere else in the world. WPI was where he got to do the work he loved most—being publisher of several successful national magazines, all targeting black Americans. It was where he had fallen madly in love with a young journalist, his fiancée, who was now at his home making a romantic lunch for the two of them.

Three weeks ago, after speaking with his pastor, he had to deliver the news that the church they both agreed would be great for their wedding ceremony was off-limits to interracial couples. As if that wasn't bad enough, he knew the news he had to deliver to her today, about where they would be getting married, would hit a lot harder. Dreading seeing disappointment in the eyes of the woman he loved, he another sip of whiskey.

He took another drink. It was a sad day. The day he uncovered the hate in his pastor's heart. A man he once admired told him he couldn't allow them to get married at the church he'd belonged to for years. He went home and told Zarah he'd left his church, for good, following his disappointing visit with his pastor, and she reminded him that racism wasn't new to her. "I'm not surprised," she said. "There are still a lot of people—in this state, in our country, and in the world, who feel the same way your pastor feels, about race. They see you as one of them, so we might as well get ready for more of this. Unless you're ready to spill your black beans, we'll have to deal with this and probably a lot more. But at least we'll face it together." Looking at him with love and empathy in her eyes, at just twenty-one years old, she said, "Who knows? Maybe it's all for the best. Maybe it's good this happened." He wrapped his arms around her and pulling her close before asking what she meant. "Well." She looked up at him. "Now that we know where we won't be getting married, we can start planning to have our wedding right here, in our home. In the exact spot where you asked me to marry you, and where I said yes."

How could he tell her what he had to tell her? How could open his mouth and say that now, everything had changed again? That they wouldn't be getting married at the home they dreamed up and built together. That he'd made an irrevocable promise to his biological mother's mother, and now they wouldn't be saying their vows to each other in the forever special place where he asked her to marry him. The exact spot in their home where she said yes.

He poured another two fingers into his shot glass. Running his fingers through his hair, he took only one gulp and finished it off. He needed a cigarette, but he'd stopped smoking ten years ago. After dry washing his face with both hands, he sat back down at his desk, leaned back in his chair, and then covered his face with both hands. After delivering the news he had to deliver to his fiancée, news about where their wedding would be taking place, he was just hoping the woman he knew he couldn't live without would still want to marry him.

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