Gold, Fire & Refinement

Chapter Thirteen

"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see." ~Winston Churchill

After passing through the city, knowing it would be only a little while until they'd be turning onto the road leading to the McNeese Plantation, Harvey wanted to prepare his fiancée, in case his grandmother was still up. "Maybe getting to know you," he said, staring straight ahead, "and why I love you, maybe that'll inspire Grandma Betty to work on herself. She wants our old relationship back, hers and mine. The one we had before the insult. She invited us both. So. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe she can change."

Zarah looked at him and smiled.

"You changed," he said. "I mean, I know you're still working on not despising all white people just because a lot of whites are racist toward blacks."

"And have mistreated, abused, and murdered blacks for over four centuries."

"And you're still trying not to hate all whites. I mean. I know there's no comparison, between you and Grandma Betty. But. I guess I'm saying if you can see a need to change even one iota, maybe anything is possible."

Staring out the window, Zarah laughed. "As bad as racism is, for me and other black people, I don't know if I ever felt about all whites the way your grandma seems to feel about all blacks. I used to avoid white people, yeah, like y'all were the plague. Because. In many ways, for us, a whole lot of y'all are."

"You had plenty of anger, for good reasons, I know."

"But your grandma is angry because, deep in her heart, she is just as racist as your great-great-grandfather. The one who tried to force your Grandma Betty's father to join the Klan."

"Which he did, but then he faked his own death and walked for months to start a new life, with a new name and identity, to get out of it. Because he never wanted to join in the first place."

"Still. If I ever hated all whites? I wouldn't be engaged to you."

"Still, you had to change ... before you let me come into your life. You changed. 'Cause you really stopped hating at least one of us." 

He was glad to see her smile when she gently poked him in the side. She was feeling better and that made him feel better. Like maybe this visit wasn't going to be horrible. Maybe it would be good, after all. He pressed his foot against the gas pedal to get them to the turnoff as soon as possible.

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Zarah leaned back and closed her eyes, then she sighed. There was something her fiancé needed in his life that he could only get from being close to the mother of his biological mother. Although he loved his stepmother as though she were his real mom, his maternal grandmother was a living person who knew and loved his mother, an angel that he remembered loving when he was a child. It was her own loss that helped her understand. When she was nine, her father died from complications of a congenital heart condition, and she still missed him.

She understood how it felt to lose a loving parent. She understood the need to reconnect, in meaningful ways, with memories of them. Her father had been gone from her life more years than she knew him, and she still missed his presence. Every day.

She opened her eyes when she remembered something she'd forgotten. Something that happened at the ER before they decided to get the pregnancy test. She looked at Harvey and then cocked her head to one side. "Hey, what did that doctor mean?" she asked. "Remember? The one who said he was standing in for one of the regular ER doctors? When you mentioned your grandma was a patient there, you asked if he knew her, and he said, 'Oh yeah, Mrs. McNeese is a very lucky woman.' What did he mean by that?"