“You guys have some serious security here,” she observes, sticking out her hand. “Tee Butler.”
I recognize the nickname from reading her memoir. Shaking her strong hand, I pull her into the house. Tim Weathers gives me a wink as I shut the door.
“After what happened to Keisha,” I say, by way of explanation.
“Oh, I get it. I wasn’t criticizing.”
“My daughter and a friend are in the kitchen. They can’t wait to meet you.”
“Great,” Serenity says, following me down the hall.
I lead her into the kitchen, where Mia and Annie stand like the children in The Sound of Music waiting to be presented to the baroness.
“Annie, Mia, this is Serenity Butler. Serenity—”
“Hey, Annie,” Serenity says, stepping forward and giving my daughter a high five. The writer glances back at me. “I saw who was who by the timing of their smiles.” Serenity turns to Mia and points at the T-shirt she’s wearing. “UCA, huh? You a cheerleader?”
“Used to be,” Mia says awkwardly.
“Me, too. Waaay back. Hey, I know ‘Serenity’ is a mouthful, okay? My friends call me ‘Tee’ for short. Why don’t you guys call me that?”
“Tee,” Annie says, testing the name. “That’s cool.”
“In South Louisiana ‘Tee’ means ‘little,’” Mia says. “They use it instead of ‘Junior.’”
“You mean like ‘Tee Neg’ or ‘Tee Jean’?” Serenity laughs. “You got people from South Louisiana?”
Mia’s blushing now. “Some cousins.”
“Me, too. But my ‘Tee’ is just a diminutive.”
The conversation falters for a few seconds, and in that span I notice a keloid scar a little in front of Serenity’s left ear—a dark, U-shaped ridge at the hinge of her jawbone, about the size of a half-dollar. It’s not a bad one, but most women would try to minimize it with makeup. Yet Serenity leaves it exposed for the world to see. Since keloids are characteristic of African-Americans, perhaps she uses the scar as a badge to confirm her race beyond doubt? As I wonder about this, I realize I’m not the only one staring at our visitor’s face. Mia is gazing at Serenity as though confused by something.
“Mia,” I say softly.
Mia snaps out of her trance and blushes even deeper red.
“It’s okay,” Serenity says. “When you title your book ‘The Paper Bag Test,’ once people find out what it means, they all stare.”
“What’s the paper bag test?” Annie asks.
Serenity smiles patiently. “In the black community, back in the day, people with lighter skin tones were looked at as higher on the social scale.”
“By white people or black people?”
“Both. But it was black people who created the test. It started down in New Orleans. If you were going to an exclusive party, or thinking about joining a sorority, say, they would hold up a paper bag by your face and check your skin shade. If you were lighter than the paper bag, you were considered suitable. If you were darker, you didn’t get in.”
“Gyahh,” Annie says. “That sucks.”
“You said it. And I’m exactly the color of the average bag. Which caused me no end of problems. When you live on a borderline, nothing’s ever easy. Sometimes I was in the cool group, sometimes I was untouchable. I got to know both sides.”
“That’s kind of cool, actually,” Mia says. “For a writer, I mean.”
“I guess,” Serenity concedes. “But for a young girl trying to find her way, it sucked.”
Annie laughs, proud of having chosen the proper description of Serenity’s plight.
To change the subject, I say, “So, you taught Keisha in college?”
“As an undergrad. She had a lot of fire in her, even then.”
“Keisha’s so awesome,” Annie says. “She isn’t afraid of anything.”
Serenity smiles with her mouth closed, but I can read her response in her eyes. That’s probably not true anymore.
“Okay, guys,” I say, clapping my hands to punctuate the end of this exchange, “Serenity and I are going down to my office. I’m going to give her some background on Natchez and the Double Eagles.”
The disappointment in their faces contains more than a little resentment, but I’ll have to endure it. Annie’s not ready for the conversation Serenity and I are likely to have.
My basement office suite is centered around a twenty-by-twenty room, with brick pillars replacing a load-bearing wall I removed during the remodel. Two doors lead off to rooms I use for storage, printers, and the like, but now those rooms have cots in them, for the security guys to catch naps when they need them.
“Thanks for being so nice to Annie,” I say as Serenity walks to the bookshelves that line one wall and begins perusing spines.
“I like her,” Serenity says. “She look like her mother?”
“Spitting image,” I confirm, but I add nothing more on that subject. “I read your book last night.”
“Yeah?” She looks back over her shoulder at me. “What’d you think?”
“Honestly? I was stunned. I didn’t expect that kind of mastery in a first book.”
Serenity moves slowly down the row of books, dragging a forefinger along the spines. “What was your favorite line?”
Not many writers would ask this. Is she testing me? To see whether I really read her book?
“There were lots of good lines. True insights. One of my favorites was something your uncle said. The one they called Catfish? About how being from Mississippi makes you different.”
She smiles. “Mississippi blood. That part?”
“That’s it.”
A distant fondness comes into Serenity’s eyes, and she quotes her uncle word for word: “I been all over the South, man. Cutting pulpwood and playing the blues. Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke. That’s Mississippi blood.”
“That says it, right there,” I tell her. “‘Beat but not broke.’”
“It’s a lot more poetic than ‘Mississippi exceptionalism.’”
We share a laugh, and somehow this mutual appreciation of our common history banishes the awkwardness of being alone without really knowing each other.
“You remind me of another writer,” I tell her. “He’s not from the South, but he had a black father and a white mother.”
“James McBride?”
“How did you know?”
She clucks her tongue once. “A lot of people say that. If McBride wasn’t so damned good, I’d be offended.”
“Because my first point of comparison is a mixed-race writer, and not just Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty?”
“Of course. But I get it. I’m not na?ve.”
“It was McBride’s prose I was thinking of. The gift for detail.”
“You don’t have to dig yourself out of a hole.”
“I wasn’t . . . shit, okay.”
Serenity stops her slow progress along the shelf and takes out a volume by Shelby Foote. She looks at the title page, then slides it back in.
“So how does it feel to win the National Book Award?” I ask.
“Pretty damn good, I won’t lie. How does it feel to sell millions of books?”
“Not bad.” We share another laugh. “Maybe we all want what we don’t have,” I suggest.