Chapter 1: The new family

Stella Harris walked onto her front terrace and placed the large tray of teapots, cups, saucers and accompaniments required to serve tea to her five seated guests. Stella Harris was the unofficial head of the unofficial Maple Grove residents association and today was a day for a coming together.

Maple Grove was a ten year old gated community of just 9 bespoke homes in a leafy suburb of Boston and home to some of New England’s white upper middle class where husbands were generally stockbrokers and investment bankers and the only wives that worked were a couple of senior partners in a law firm. All the residents were between the age range of 45 and 55 who’s offspring had pretty much all fled the nest or were at university.

Stella was pretty much the self appointed head as her and her husband John had been the first residents and she had used her self confessed inquisitive disposition to get to know the business of all the other residents by simply befriending them as soon as they had each moved in.

On this midweek summers morning she had been joined by some of her friends and neighbours: Sofie, Emma, Kate, Alexis, Amanda and Nicole for the very purpose of getting first look at the, soon to be, new occupants of number 9 which was the house standing tight at the end of the development and the only view of the driveway was from Stella’s front terrace.

As the discussion turned to the six of them wondering what the new residents would be like Stella informed the group that she had heard from one of the many contractors who had been working at the property that the new owner was in the construction business but that was all she had found out. “Well we shall all get to see soon” commented Sofie, tapping the same embossed invitation, all the residents had received a couple of months earlier, sitting on the table to a garden party at number 9 that coming Saturday from “The Jackson Family”

A little after 11AM two black Range Rover cars with tinted windows cruised past and parked on the driveway at number 9. The six of them sat in silence staring at the cars, awaiting the first glimpse of the Jackson’s. The silence was broken by several gasps when almost in unison Lenny and Michelle Jackson stepped out of the cars and surveyed their new home.”Good Heavens” said Emma, as they all stared at the first ever Black residents of Maple Grove.

The conversation quickly turned to them expressing their displeasure at having a black family moving in and not really sounding too keen on going to their party, until Alexis announced that they may well be very nice, just different than everyone was used to. “Besides” she said, holding up the invitation and tapping her finger on the R.S.V.P lettering. “We have already all accepted the invite.

Lenny Jackson was from the deep south and the only son of a Black farming couple. He had gotten a football scholarship to Boston College (BC) and had come to love New England, especially when he had met his, wife to be, Michelle, who was studying physiotherapy at the same college.