Taffy

by Suzette D. Harrison

“You were her treasure, the forcefully conceived,” Taffy intoned, touching her grandmother’s sable-rich skin looking like Africa spit out that white sailor’s blood and swallowed NuNu entirely.

“Don’t eat poison someone else serves. What’s done is done.” NuNu’s voice melted slightly. “Let it go for your good not hers.”

“The life of all flesh is in the blood,”

Swinging the door open, Taffy stood immobilized as her world wobbled and fractured beneath a haunting potpourri of red warmth, peppermint, and long, lost love.

Did her best to be unaffected by the lopsided grin of the boy she once loved, fought to ignore an unwanted thirst for the man he’d become who looked dangerously delicious.

Roam was tantalizing, frightening. Remarkable face, clef chin, sculpted lips, grin mischievous, and teeth too-pretty-for-a-man. Beneath this polished façade Taffy glimpsed Roam’s force and power within. Raw strength met fresh rhythm and flow. Roam Ellis had gone off and grown into himself.

Poppy grunted again, thinking on his boy being chained to Mississippi like a common criminal, charges mounting to nothing more than being bold and Black in a white man’s world.

Story was, nurse at the Colored hospital misspelled his name at birth. Should’ve been that ancient, cultured city of mythic proportions. Came out, instead, like something without restraint.

Drew. It’s a payday, not my person. And I do what I do without skinning and grinning.”

But let’s be real: race will always be attached to whatever Colored folks produce,” Roam stated, inherently pragmatic. “That’s the cost of living in America.”

But it’s time to change policy and practice, not just preference or privileged participation. After all, policy dictates. Policy-makers dominate.”

“Colored women don’t get the chance to reconstruct ourselves. Most of us doing what we have to, not what we want. So you and I are blessed in having a chance at what we love.”

“Miss Marva, I’m not fixin’-ta-bout-to!” Taffy squealed. “Do my hair, please.”

The work week with its cares was over. Masks worn in the white world were stored. Women were home where they mattered, with names other than ‘gal’ and faces refusing to meld into a monolithic nonentity. Having no one to satisfy save themselves, they threw pleasure in pots and seasoned food as if fixing life up right.

Sit straight…lift your chin…enunciate when speaking…smile politely despite a fool’s being in your face…and direly important…don’t marry a dark man.

Hope often shattered with mirages of Up North freedom reduced by restrictive covenants, governmental prejudices, and riotous pogroms leaving Black blood on northern shores. Trickles flowed back below the Mason-Dixon, preferring a familiar foe to peculiar adversaries in a failed Promise Land.