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Chapter 2
Yet, instead of being an exhilarated first-time mother, Alison
was wrestling with the worst nightmare of her life.
Is my baby black or white?
she wondered as she watched the closed door of the bathroom in the left corner
of the childbirth suite for any sign of her husband Eliot, who’d been inside
for about five minutes. Her heart thumping in her throat, Alison grabbed
the bedrail and tried rising. She was determined, despite her
disheveled appearance and aching
episiotomy, to sneak into the nursery at the other end of the floor and
confirming her baby’s color.
If the baby was black, she planned to grab him and flee the hospital before Eliot saw him and a scandal erupted.
Alison had underestimated how much the ordeal of childbirth had taken out of her. Too weak to even get up, she slumped back onto the bed. Her panic grew.
I must do something
before Eliot sees the baby.
Suddenly she recalled that Reginald Hunter, her godfather and
dad’s campaign manager, was the only person she’d confided in about
the possibility of her baby being black, and that he’d asked her to call
in case of an emergency. This is more than an emergency, thought
Alison, glancing at the clock mounted between two windows
whose drawn blinds kept out the harsh sunlight. It read 2:15 P.M.
Good.
There’s
still time to call him before he leaves for
his fund-raising
meeting with Luther Kessler. Alison thought,
shivering slightly. Dressed only in a rumpled light blue hospital gown,
she tossed aside the warm blanket that had covered her up to her broad
shoulders – she’s been a swimmer in college.
Alison was about to reach for the phone on the cluttered cherry
nightstand when she heard the toilet flush with a gurgling sound. The
bathroom door swung open and Eliot emerged, holding the latest copy of Time
magazine. Its cover story was titled, HOW
TO WIN THE WAR ON TERROR.
Since their marriage less than ten months ago, Eliot’s once
chiseled face, with its mop of curly brown hair, had grown as pudgy as a
doughboy’s. There were even bags under his soft hazel eyes. And despite being
only five feet eleven inches tall, he now weighed a whopping 220 pounds,
astounding for someone who, when he’d run middle distance track in high
school and at Duke University, had weighed 146 pounds – all of it lean muscle.
I
wonder what’s making him eat like a pig, Alison thought with a mixture of pity and disgust when she
noticed how ill-fitting Eliot’s ivory shirt and corduroy pants were
because of his paunch.
Eliot
unwrapped his third thick chocolate bar of the day. "Listen to
this," he said, munching greedily as he plopped
heavily into an upholstered brown sofa next to Alison’s bed. “A
Democratic strategist says that for the party to regain the White House in
2008 Democrats need to link the war on terror with the struggle for social
and economic justice at home. What do you think?”
“Who’s the strategist?” Alison asked casually.
“His name is Myron Pearson,” Eliot said, handing her the
magazine. “He used to be a speechwriter for Clinton. He’s now his special assistant at the Clinton
Foundation in Harlem.”
Myron!
Alison stared at the photo of the tall, dark-skinned
man with a short, neatly-combed afro – the man she’d been on the verge
of marrying about a year ago, but who, at the last minute, had,
inexplicably and cruelly,
broken her heart. And to think that the baby she’d just given birth to
might be his.
Alison’s
face turned ashen.
“What’s
wrong, honey?” Eliot asked. “You look pale.”
“Oh,
nothing,” Alison said quickly, without looking at Eliot.
“Have you called the nurse?”
“About what?” Alison said distractedly.
“The baby, of course. We
haven’t seen him since he was taken to the nursery.”
“Oh, I did call,” Alison lied. “The nurse said he’s still
asleep.”
“Did
you notice anything strange about him?”
Alison shuddered. “Strange? What do you mean?”
“Well,
his skin.”
“What
about his skin?”
“It
seemed darker.”
“Are
you sure?”
“Yeah.
I noticed that after I cut the umbilical cord.”
Oh my God. He is Myron’s baby.
Eliot
shrugged. “On second thought,” he said, flicking on the Plasma TV mounted in
one corner of the white painted room, “it might have been my
imagination.”
What if it wasn’t?
Alison wondered. Part of her wished
she could, once and for all, tell Eliot the bitter truth, that Dylan might
have been fathered by a black man; however she refrained. He’ll go nuts. And a scandal would destroy Dad’s campaign.
She
could just see the lurid headlines: Daughter
of Democratic gubernatorial candidate gives birth to Black Baby while
married to White
Man.
While
Eliot channel-surfed, Alison recalled how she’d met Myron at a
Democratic Party fund-raiser for Howard Dean’s Presidential bid in Portland,
Oregon, about two years ago. She'd just graduated from the Columbia
University Graduate School of Journalism and was working in the "Rose
City" as an investigative journalist for Street
Roots, a nonprofit, grassroots paper dedicated to empowering the
poor and the homeless. She and Myron had been planning a quiet
August wedding, attended only by close family members and friends, when
Myron abruptly called off their engagement. The reason he gave was that
his mother didn’t approve of his marrying a white woman.
Feeling
humiliated and betrayed, Alison had abruptly quit her job and returned
home. Two weeks later, following a blind date arranged by Hunter, she’d
agreed to a marriage proposal from Eliot, the only offspring of one of the
richest and most influential conservatives in the South. Both her mother,
Darlene, and her best friend, Chanel Moore, a news anchor on Channel 8,
had warned her against rushing into a marriage with Eliot, pointing out
that she was acting purely out of anger at the way Myron had treated her.
Alison
had dismissed both warnings with a curt, “It’s my life.”
Chanel and Mom were right,
Alison thought as she watched Eliot stop at a broadcast of the talk show Hannity
and Colmes on Fox News.
Eliot
muttered his approval as conservative pundit Sean Hannity – whose
latest bestseller, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty against Liberalism,
he’d read with avidity and approval – lambasted liberal Democrats
opposed to the Iraq war as Benedict Arnolds who were giving comfort to Al
Qaeda.
Infuriated,
Alison reached for a leather-bound anthology of Great
English Poems on the side table. Embossed with the letter A
in calligraphy, the book was a wedding present from Hunter. She was about
to read one of her favorite poems to distract herself from Hannity’s
liberal-bashing when a commercial break came on.
“I’m
going down to the cafeteria,” Eliot said. “Can I bring you
anything?”
“I
could use some Dannon yogurt and a piece of fruit,” Alison said, despite
not having much of an appetite following the ordeal of childbirth.
Eliot
grabbed his blue double-breasted sports jacket from a hook behind the
door. He was about to head out when something stopped him. Hand on the
brass doorknob, he turned to Alison and said, “I think I’ll stop by
the nursery on the way to the cafeteria.”
“What
for?” asked Alison.
“To
check on the baby. I’m still bothered by how he looked.”
A
cold lump of dread wedged itself in Alison’s throat as she watched Eliot
leave and head down the marble hallway toward the nursery at the other end
of the floor. Oh, God, what if he finds a black instead of a white
baby? I better call Uncle Reggie.
Alison grabbed the phone on the cluttered nightstand and dialed
Hunter’s number.
******
To buy the first of three installments of Al Qaeda in America, click on one of the buttons below.
Al
Qaeda in America, Part I for Microsoft Reader, $4.99
Al
Qaeda in America, Part 1 in PDF, $4.99
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of page
Books
Kaffir Boy
Kaffir
Boy Page
Back Cover
Preface
Chapter One
KB in America
KB
in A Page
Back Cover
Chapter One
Love in B&W
Love
in B&W
Dust Jacket
Reader Reviews
Preface
Mark's View
Gail's View
African
Women
AW
Home
Back Cover
Reader Reviews
Preface
Chapter One
Ubuntu (Novel)
Ubuntu Page
Dust Jacket
Chapter One
Miriam's Song
Miriam's
Page
Dust
Jacket
Dedication
Preface
First Chapter
Reader Reviews