Chapter 27

Monique was sitting in my desk chair and I had gently pulled her to her feet and into my arms. I then initiated a passionate kiss and she immediately responded in kind. After a couple of minutes she broke the kiss.

“I can’t believe that a white boy would find me so attractive,” she smiled, as she gently stroked my erection through my pants.

“I don’t think of you as ‘black’. I mean obviously your skin color is different and that can be exciting, but inside, I feel like we are the same. I feel that way about Jen and Janie too.”

“So do I,” she smiled as she pulled me to my bed and we continued to kiss and pet. Monique had been sexually touched by Edgar Blanton and several salesmen. She had been forced to give Edgar several blow jobs. She had offered me one, but I told her that we weren’t ready. I knew that in some ways, that wasn’t true. I mean, I was more than ready to explore every inch of Monique’s obvious glory and for her make me feel good, but I wasn’t ready to do something to Monique that Edgar Blanton had done to her. I had other reasons, too. I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. They insisted that I should wait to engage in sexual relations until I was old enough to be emancipated, and part of that was displaying the kind of maturity not to give into immediate temptations. The problem was that Monique was one of those incredible temptations.

“I can take it out and do it if you want,” she offered, as she rested her hand on my thigh.

“No, darling. We’re not ready.”

“I just said I’d do it for you.”

“I don’t want you to do it for me. When we’re both ready, you’ll do it for you.”

Monique began to cry.

I whispered in her ear, “It’s okay, baby. I’m only fourteen and you’re sixteen. We have plenty of time.”

“You’ll get sick of me ... sick of us ... if we don’t...”

Then it occurred to me. Was the reason they were pushing Phyllis at me so hard was so she could be a sexual placeholder for them?

“Monique, darling?”

“Yes, Tommy.”

“I’m going to tell you the same thing that I told Jennifer yesterday.” I said pausing for emphasis. “You’re mine. You’re mine for as long as you let me have you. That can be for a week, a month, a year, ten years or forever. The same is true for Jen and Janie.”

“What about Phyllis?”

“If she wants me, the same may hold true for her too, but she has to think of Susie too.”

“Oh, Tommy. She wants you so badly. Whenever I mentioned your name at work, she would get a dreamy smile and say how wonderful you were and how lucky I was to be with you. This is so out of character for her. You remember how serious she was at work?”

I nodded.

“She told me that she used to have problems with the salesmen. When she first started working there, they all wanted her and she would go out on dates with them. They only wanted one thing and when they got it, they stopped wanting to go out with her for a while. Then they would ask her out a couple of months later expecting her to put out, since she already had. When she wouldn’t, they called her frigid. Once they even drugged her and she found her clothes torn. At that moment she decided that she was through with men.”

“But her appearance?”

Tears were still running down Monique’s beautiful face. “She drastically changed her appearance.”

Then, I knew. “She was a redhead like her daughter.”

Monique nodded.

“Her clothes and makeup?”

“Yeah.”

“She changed her looks so they would lose interest?”

“Exactly.”

I began to cry too. I decided that when the time was right, I would have Phyllis any way she wanted me. I would be her friend, lover, babysitter or father for Susie ... whatever she needed, I would be it.

We lay like that for a while comforting each other. While I was still a virgin, my innocence had been thoroughly shattered over the last few weeks. There was a lot of bad, but it had really been fleeting for me. The good, had been just as frequent and lasting. I was resolved to helping Phyllis and Susie and continuing to deepen my relationship with Monique, Jen and Janie. I stemmed the flow of my tears and helped me to focus on my Monique and what she needed. When I talked about my parents’ expectations, we both grudgingly agreed to be good. That didn’t mean that we couldn’t have a little fun until then.

We lay on my bed until I heard my mom call up to me to do my chores. Monique dried her tears and smiled.

“I’ll be the best milkmaid ever.”

I laughed and laughed even harder when I applied a boxing metaphor to her statement. Monique was competing with my mom, Janie and Jen for the vacant title formerly held by Grandma. Grandma had hung up her milking pail, but was a legend under the udders. What was I? I couldn’t be a milkman because I didn’t have any bottles to deliver. I figured I would just go by ‘milk maniac’. That earned a serious hoot from Monique.

We each picked a cow and soon had completed our mission. Grandma smiled as she saw us bring the milk to Grandpa. “You know, if we keep having more visitors, Youngster, we’ll need another cow.”

“Really, Grandma?”

“Well, Amber and Daisy aren’t too old, but we’ll need to work a younger cow in sooner or later.”

Grandpa came back from where he stored the milk before he pasteurized it. “New cow?” he asked.

“Well, I can’t make all the dairy products if the youngsters keep drinkin’ all the milk,” she smirked.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Johansson,” said Monique.

“Sweetie, you’re supposed to call us Grandma and Grandpa, remember?”

Monique smiled.

“Well, if your brother is coming to live with us and the Matthews you’ll be visiting a lot, not to mention you and Tommy’s other fillies and their families, then we should get at least one more cow.” said Grandma.

Monique laughed and Grandpa blushed.

Grandma then turned to me, “Besides, Youngster, your mom and dad are getting a live-in guest moving in this autumn when the expansion is done. Grandpa and I are thinking of inviting our dear friend, Sylvia Schmidt to move in with us. Sylvia is a widow and has been a mite lonely lately. I’m sure that she’s missing companionship and other things that widows tend to miss,” she added, while winking at my Grandpa, who lowered his head and failed to stop blushing.

I was blushing and while Monique had a dark complexion, I’m sure that her face was hot too. I remember Aunt Sylvia spending a lot of time here when Grandma was sick. She’d often spent the night. I could tell that there was a strong affection between my grandparents and Sylvia Schmidt. I just didn’t realize how strong.

Grandma’s words also got me thinking about what Dad was telling me about yesterday. He said that ‘chickens were coming home to roost.’ I may have been a kid, but I knew what that expression meant. Something or now I believed, someone from Dad’s past was returning to his life and Mom was excited about it. From what I had recently learned about my mother, was this someone was a woman? Then I began to understand something. Who would give their eleven year old kid books by Robert A. Heinlein? The answer? Parents who wanted their kid to understand polygamy and polyandry. From what I’ve learned, both the Matthews and Johansson’s had a proclivity for such philosophies. Facing the fact that with my girls, I was the worst offender of all of us. I realized that it was not my fault. I had fallen out of both family trees and managed to hit every branch along the way as I fell.

Grandma then drove home the point. “It’s about that time for the cows to start calving anyway, as we don’t want their milk to dry up. We’ll just have to have the Turner’s bull, Sampson over to visit the cows the next time they’re in season,” grinned Grandma, as she winked at me.

Leave it to my grandmother to embarrass me about sex.

We had one of Grandma’s delicious chicken casseroles for supper and then we had a family meeting to discuss Willie.

“Judge Hairston expressed a number of concerns with placing Willie with us,” stated my father.

“About us being white?” I asked.

Dad sighed. “In a nutshell most of his concerns are about us being white.”

“We’re not bigots,” stated Granddad.

“And he’s not saying that we are. In fact, he thinks it’s commendable that we want to do this for Willie. A number of problems stem from the fact that we are very different culturally from Willie and the judge is concerned that Willie will grow up not understanding what it means to be a black man in America.”

“I understand his concern, but we weren’t exactly raised to be ‘ghetto’,” chimed Monique.

“I don’t think that’s what the judge means,” I said looking toward my dad.

Dad smiled at me. “What do you think he means, Tommy?”

“We have started hearing a lot about the ‘black experience’ in school.”

“You mean historical figures?” asked Mom.

“Not just history, but science and the arts, too. We learned about people like George Washington Carver, who was a great agricultural scientist and was responsible for the propagation of peanuts, of Dr. Charles Drew, who devised the first blood bank and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who was the first doctor to perform open heart surgery. There have been great literary figures like the poet, Langston Hughes and poet and essayist, James Weldon Johnson. Don’t forget music, where you have great composers like Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. The list of black people who have made the world a better place is virtually endless,” I said and was rewarded with a big Monique smile. “What I’m saying is the judge wants to make sure that Willie doesn’t just lose the understanding of what it means to be black.”

“Tommy, I think I know who I want to speak for our family,” grinned Dad.

We talked about a number of different things. Apparently the judge would have preferred that Willie go to the Baptist church, but acknowledged that it would be a hardship for our family to split up. He felt that church was about both God and family and if Willie was to be integrated with our family, he should go to church with us. In the end, the judge was balancing the stable family life he would have on the farm, brought up by professional and educated people versus the difference in culture. Dad was convinced that the judge saw the value in education and felt that Willie would have opportunities with us that he wouldn’t have elsewhere.