Page 9 of Seven Days in June

And Black drama.

“Assess your pain level, Spawn of My Loins,” Lizette ordered in her outrageous southwestern-Louisiana accent.

Genevieve raised her head up from the pillow, giving it a little shake. She did this every morning to see how bad it was and determine how many painkillers she’d need to take to start the day. Luckily, she wasn’t in agony. It was just a slow, steady pounding on a door. She could still breathe between thuds.

“I’ll live,” she reported.

“Good, then gimme a story.”

“I’m sleeping!”

“You ain’t. Come on, you know I can’t sleep without a story.”

“Can’t we go back to when you used to do the stories?”

“I would, but you abolished my storytelling five years ago, you little shit,” she cooed, her breath bourbon-scented.

Years before, Lizette would come home in the mornings and regale Genevieve with tales before she got up for elementary school. Their favorite ones involved long-ago scandals from Lizette’s Louisiana hometown, Belle Fleur. And though Genevieve had never been there, she knew the place by heart.

Belle Fleur was a tiny bayou where there were only about eight last names, Black was the race, Creole was the culture, and everyone could trace their bloodline to the same eighteenth-century pair: a French plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Along the way, their descendants mixed with Haitian Revolution rebels, Indigenous peoples, and Spaniards to produce a rich, insular, filé-flavored culture both highly religious and deeply superstitious. And colorful in the extreme.

The most colorful, though, were Lizette’s mother and grandmother. Their reputations were as wild and dramatic as their names—Clotilde and Delphine. Their lives had been affected by murder and madness and mysterious rage. Explosive secrets and a conspicuous absence of fathers. It was as if Genevieve’s entire matriarchal lineage had spontaneously regenerated from alien pods.

As a little girl, Genevieve assumed that these were tall tales, half-truths. But her grandma and great-grandma sounded fabulous, just the same.

Lizette wasn’t sentimental. The only moment that mattered to her was the one she was in. But she did keep a thin, fraying scrapbook, which Genevieve had discovered in a cardboard moving box as a kid. On the last page, there were two four-by-six black-and-white photos with “Delphine” and “Clotilde” scrawled under them in Lizette’s Catholic-school cursive. Genevieve stared and stared into their faces until her eyes unfocused, the photos blending into each other. It was like time hiccupped. And she knew Lizette’s stories were real.

Delphine and Clotilde looked haunted, intense, wild. They looked like women who were born with the wrong mind at the wrong time. They looked like her mom. They looked like her.

And suddenly, the women didn’t seem fabulous. They seemed dark, dangerous, and self-destructive. And it was too familiar.

There were corners of Genevieve’s brain that terrified her. She was friendless and restless, and pain ruled everything. On her best days, she felt as if she were clinging to sanity by her fingernails. If her great-grandma, grandma, and mom were nuts (and yeah, her mom definitely was), then she was right on their heels.

Genevieve wanted to be normal. So she decided to tell the tales instead. Since it was usually too early in the morning to think of anything original, she’d just plug Lizette into movie plots.

“There was once,” she started, “a down-on-her-luck cutie named Lizette. She wore thigh-high boots and a platinum bob wig and worked…um, on Hollywood Boulevard. In human resources. One night, she meets a dashing, wealthy businessman. He doesn’t care that she can’t eat lobster correctly…”

“Pretty Woman,” sighed Lizette. “Richard Gere’s Black—I feel it.”

“You think everybody’s Black until proven otherwise.”

“I won’t know peace till I see his genealogy report.”

Lizette felt that since Belle Fleur was full of Black folks who looked white, numbers suggested that many whites could be Black. It was all a fine line in the South, she’d say. Given that those sinning, raping plantation owners had both white babies and Black babies, everyone was six degrees from being one or the other. Which was what scared southern white people the most.

Lizette let go of Genevieve’s hand and launched into a catlike stretch. “I’m gonna have atimefalling asleep. Honey, can you brew me up some Lipton’s?”

Genevieve nodded robotically. It was 6:17, and she should’ve been asleep. But this was her job. She was in charge of daytime. So she disentangled herself from Lizette and shuffled down the short hallway to the kitchen.

The hallway was dark, but the kitchen light was on. This was odd. Lizette was maniacal about keeping lights out unless absolutely necessary. To keep the light bill reasonable, and also for mood lighting.

She froze, a creeping feeling rising in her chest.

Nooo. Not today, of all days.

She’d begged her mom not to invite her boyfriends over. And Lizette always assured her that she’d stop, that their home would be a no-man zone. But by the end of a long, liquor-soaked night, Lizette never remembered her promises. Or why she’d made them in the first place.

She smelled him before she saw him. Hennessy and Newports. There he was, a small round man who looked about sixty, slumped over their tiny Salvation Army kitchen table, snoring jaggedly. He was wearing a cheap suit—shiny at the elbows and knees—and a lush, curly black toupee that was as crooked as it was shameless.

---