Note to readers: This story takes quite a while to get to the sexual content. It has a long backstory set up. It's also longer than my usual stories are. I hope it's worth it to those of you who choose to give it a chance. If you're more interested in a story that gets to the action faster, this one may not be for you, and I understand. I have stories like that elsewhere on this site. Enjoy!
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My name is Henry Douglas III. I'm 6'1" with blue eyes and back in 1979 I had dark wavy hair and I was very fit from playing baseball and golf. I'm from Charleston, South Carolina, one of the most beautiful cities in the US. Actually, the residents of Charleston think it's the most beautiful, no ifs, ands or buts about it. I grew up here in the 1960s and 70s, a turbulent time in America and especially here in the Southern States as we went through the changes based on race we should have gone through a hundred years before.
Of course, I understand that now. When I was a child in the 60s and a teen in the 70s, these things weren't so obvious to me. Things were as they were. My family was very comfortable, actually rich. My father was a senior partner in one of the busiest law firms in the city, specializing in estates and probate law and made a very good living. Me and my older sister, Evelyn, wanted for nothing. We had a grand old house in a beautiful neighborhood. My mother Rae was a real "Southern Belle" who could trace her family back more than 250 years to 1714 and she came from "old money". Dad was a descendant of a "Carpetbagger", a Northerner who came south after the Civil War to make his fortune in textiles. He was my great, great grandfather and my namesake.
One of the "advantages" of growing up well to do in the South in that era was almost every family had a maid, or a domestic, always a black woman. If a woman of our social status didn't have a domestic come in six days a week, she was ostracized by the other women of the neighborhood. They were a real gossip circle, my mom and her friends, and they could be fierce. Our maid was this sweet lady, Edina Robertson.
Edina was there in the morning to serve breakfast, there when I got home from school, there through dinner at 5:30 promptly every day until she went home at 6:45, six days a week, with Sundays off. I loved that woman. It was Edina who I first saw when I came home in the afternoons, Edina who bandaged my skinned knees, Edina who did so many things, I almost thought she was my mother. My mom was busy in the afternoons either playing bridge or at one of her social clubs. Daughters of the Confederacy, garden club, book club...yes, my mother was a very "busy" lady. My father, Thomas, was also a busy man. He made it home for dinner every night, but often was involved with his own friends in the evening, two or three nights a week. At least I spent time with him on the weekends.
That's the fake idyll I grew up in. On the surface, it was perfect, but underneath, there were tensions. Tensions of our society, with its Jim Crow laws and people demanding they end, and even tension at home. She never talked about it, but my mother was certain my dad was having an affair. Evelyn, who was three years older and whom I was close to, broke that bit of news to me when I was 15. It was devastating and I held a serious grudge against him for a long time.
Anyway, Edina was the most stable force in my life. I could always count on her. Until I was about 8 or so, I never thought about where Edina went when she left us at night. I don't know where I thought she went. I just never gave it consideration. So I asked her one afternoon.
I was sitting at the kitchen table after school, drinking milk with a couple of her homemade molasses cookies and I just asked her "Edina, where do you go at night? Why don't you just stay here with us?"
Edina kept preparing our dinner and she said "Honey, I go home to my own family. You didn't know that? Miss Rae never told you about my family?" I could hear a little change in her voice that I couldn't identify.
"No. I didn't know anything. I'm sorry."
"Henry, why are you sorry?"
"I don't know. I guess I feel bad because I don't know your family."
"You always was the sweetest little man. I wish you did know my children."
"You have your own children?" I was fascinated. I wanted to know about her children. "What are their names? How old are they? What about your husband?"
"Hold on, there. One at a time. I have three children, Henry. Gus, he's 19 now, Alton, who's 14 and smart as a whip, as smart as you are. And my youngest is Grace, who's 8, just like you. She's also very smart, and she's so pretty! She's going to break a lot of hearts." Edina said with a big smile.
"What about your husband?" I took it for granted there had to be a husband.
Edina got sad then. "I lost my husband 4 years ago, Henry. He was working in a lumber mill and he had an accident."
I was horrified that Edina, my second mother, had lost her husband, and it hit me that she was raising her kids alone while working for us six days a week. It was like I suddenly woke up from a deep sleep, my eyes open for the first time. I cried for Edina, bawling even and she stopped what she was doing and held me to her large bosom. "Oh, honey, don't cry. You're just the sweetest thing." She crouched down so she could look at me eye to eye. "Listen to me, Henry. I know you're sad, and I appreciate how you feel. This job, working for your family, lets me take care of my children. I miss them, I wish I could spend more time with them. But they got a roof over their heads, and they got food in their bellies. Gus has a job and he looks after his brother and sister to help me, and Alton, he's going off to college in a few years, and Grace is going to do the same some day. I miss my Leon, miss him a lot. But I don't want you to be so sad about it. Understand me?" I nodded my head, but I was still upset. I just loved that woman so much.
After that, the things I took for granted, things I didn't give two thoughts about before, became apparent to me. The Jim Crow laws were officially gone by that point, but the social customs they codified were still there. Black men were still expected not to look at white women, even when they were working for them. Schools were supposed to be integrated, but my school was still 100% white and I had no clue what the school the black children in our community went to was like. The more I thought about it, the more resentful I became. Things my parents just expected to be the norm were making me angry. By the time I was 14 I was challenging them more and more, especially when they said something derogatory about black people. We argued a lot. And I wanted to meet Edina's family. I was becoming adamant about it. My parents were just as adamant in insisting that it wasn't going to happen. They gave all these reasons that on the surface sounded reasonable, how busy their lives were, how Edina needed her one day off to be alone with her kids, so on and so on. I knew it was all bullshit. They didn't want to mix socially with any black people, let alone the family of "the help". They would have looked down on Edina and her family if they were white. Being black made it even worse.
It's a terrible time when you realize your parents are not the good, decent people you believed they were all your young life. When I was 15, before Evelyn went off to U of South Carolina for her freshman year, I went to talk to her about it. I asked her how we could not notice how our parents were such terrible racists.
Evelyn stopped packing and sat next to me on her bed. "Henry, listen to me. Don't think I haven't noticed how you've changed the last few years. I've heard you and seen you getting angrier over the issue of race here. And I know you're angry with mom and dad. God knows, they are not perfect people. They let us be raised by Edina mostly, not that she wasn't great. I love her too. Dad screwing around on mom." I blushed at that; I'd never heard my sister, raised to be a Southern Lady like our mother, used any sort of foul language before. "And their attitude on race...it's something that should have died years ago. But they grew up with this and their friends all grew up with this. It's complicated. The world is complicated. Can I give you some advice? From your big sister?"
