Gold, Fire & Refinement

Chapter Three

"All things must change to something new, to something strange." ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Puttering around in the kitchen, Zarah was deeply inside her emotions. She felt her fiery passion burning hotter and hotter as she put the final touches on their lunch. It felt so good. Being deeply in love and living in the home, at least for a while, where they would live after the wedding. Where she and her man would live and love forever, as husband and wife. She started humming and dancing to oldies music she had blasting from their home's sound system, but even the music couldn't replace the thought that was uppermost in her mind. The one thing she knew for sure about her fiancé: He was ready to be a father. That's why, despite her worries, since she loved, adored, and wanted children too, there was nothing wrong with getting ready to get pregnant. 

"So. That's that," she said. "Harvey and I are having a baby. Next year." Singing the lyrics to the song "Same Old Love," by Anita Baker, when the song was replaced by Kathy Troccoli's "Everything Changes," she thought about how both tunes expressed what she was feeling. Then, out of nowhere, her mother's voice started playing in her head, drowning out the music.

"Are you sure you're ready to be a mother?" Hilda Brion asked that very question a month earlier. When Zarah stared back at her cross-examiner like a deer caught in headlights, her mother said, "You better start thinking about it baby. Because that man down there in that yard playing with all those kids? That man is ready to be a daddy." 

The last time Hilda visited, Yvette brought her for a three-day visit. Hilda was like a mother to Zarah's best friend, so Yvette always checked to see if see if "Mama Hil" wanted to go, any time she was making the hour-long drive from Pleasant Valley to Jackson. That Saturday morning, Zarah and her mother were sitting at a table on the balcony of the upstairs master bedroom. Their perch provided a perfect view of the yard and clearing behind the mansion. There, beyond the infinity swimming pool, closer to Lake Bellwood, her billionaire fiancé, dressed in black sweat pants and a white T-shirt, was having a ball playing a game he and Yvette made up. They were playing the game with several children, and several dogs.

"Hadn't been that long ago," Hilda said. "I was dead-set against you dating or marrying any white man. Especially since Eva Pearl ran off and got with that sleazy one she's with out in Las Vegas. I'm still praying for Pearl to leave her situation, but now? Now I can't imagine you marrying anybody else but this man. No black woman in Mississippi has ever had anything like all you soon will have. But all this stuff doesn't mean a thing, and I would drag you outta here all by myself if I didn't know what I know 'bout that man down there. He's different. He's not like no other white man I've ever heard tell of. It's almost like he's black, but he's not. He's white, but he fights for black folk because he knows it's the right thing for him to do. And he's strong, and determined. Courageous. And I like him, baby. I like him a whole lot."

 Zarah smiled. They were having one of their mother-daughter heart-to-heart moments. "I know," she said. "Mama, I know."

"It's not about this big old fine house," Hilda said, keeping her eyes on the game being played on the lawn below. "It's not about his billions or anything he's done for you, me, or for Josie. I'm for this man and this marriage because I know you love him with all your heart, and because I know he loves you the same way."

"I know Mama."

That weekend, Yvette brought her toddler twins, Zack and Zuri, and Josie's kids too. Zarah's niece, Kate, was nine, and her nephew, Kyle, was eleven. That weekend, Zarah and her mother were staying together in the upstairs master bedroom, and Yvette and the kids were staying in the spacious guest condo that was attached to Wilson Manor. The estate had a guest house too, but family and friends always used the attached condo, for now. It was built to be a home for a live-in nanny, once they had children.