The word silenced the room, and Bree’s face turned hard. So did Patty’s and Naomi’s.
You heard the word used every day on the streets of DC, one person of color to another. But hearing it from the lips of an old white Southern woman in reference to my dead father, I felt like she’d slapped me across the face with something unspeakable.
Her daughter was dead. She was distraught. She didn’t mean it. Those were my immediate responses. Then I noticed that my aunts weren’t as shocked as the rest of us.
“Aunt Hattie?” I said.
Aunt Hattie wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Ethel didn’t mean to shame your father’s name or yours, Alex. She’s just telling it like it was.”
Pained, Aunt Connie said, “Back then, your father was Marvin Bell’s slave. Bell owned him. Your mother too. They’d do anything he asked.”
“’Cause of the drugs,” Ethel Fox said.
I suddenly felt so hungry, I was light-headed.
“You don’t remember Bell coming to your house when you was a boy to bring your mama or papa something?” Aunt Connie asked, spooning the eggs onto a plate. “Tall white guy, sharp face, slippery, like Ethel said?”
Hattie added, “All nice one second, meaner than a crazy dog the next?”
Something blurry, troubling, and long ago flitted through my mind, but I said, “No, I don’t remember him.”
“What about—” Aunt Hattie began, and then stopped.
Aunt Connie had fetched plates of potato pancakes, crispy maple bacon, and a mound of toast from the warming oven, and she set them and the freshly made scrambled eggs on the table. Naomi and I attacked the food. Stefan’s fiancée pushed at her eggs and bacon and worried a piece of toast.
I stayed quiet as I ate. But Bree asked all sorts of questions about Marvin Bell, and by the time I set my fork on my plate, stuffed to the gills and feeling a lot less light-headed and achy, there was a thumbnail biography of him developing slowly in my mind, some of it fact, but most of it opinion, rumor, conjecture, and supposition.
Slippery described Bell perfectly.
No one at that table could peg exactly when Marvin Bell took control of my parents’ life. They said he’d slid into Starksville like a silent cancer when my mom turned twenty. He came bearing heroin and cocaine, and he gave out free samples. He got my mother and a dozen young women just like her strung out and desperate. He hooked my father too, but not just on the drugs.
“Your father needed money for you boys,” Aunt Connie said. “Selling and moving for Bell made him that money. And like Ethel was saying, Bell had his hooks into them so hard, they were just like his slaves.”
Ethel Fox said, “Once, Bell even ran your daddy out of your house, tied him with a rope to the back of his car, and dragged him down the street. No one moved to stop him.”
Flashing on that memory of the boys being dragged on a rope line the day before, I gaped at her, horrified.
“You don’t remember, Alex?” Aunt Hattie asked softly. “You were there.”
“No,” I said instantly and unequivocally. “I don’t remember that. I’d…remember that.”
The very idea of it made my head start to pound, and I just wanted to go somewhere in the darkness and sleep. Both my aunts and Sydney Fox’s mother looked at me in concern.
“What?” I said. “I just don’t remember it ever getting that bad.”
Aunt Connie said sadly, “Alex, it got so bad, the only way your mom and dad could escape was by dying.”
Hearing that after so long a day, I hung my head in sorrow.
Bree rubbed my back and neck, said, “Is Bell still a dealer?”
They argued about whether he was. Aunt Hattie said that soon after my father died, Bell took his profits and went twenty miles north, where he built a big house on Pleasant Lake. He bought up local businesses and gave every appearance of a guy who’d straightened out his life.
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Ethel Fox snapped. “You don’t change your spots just like that, not when there’s easy money to be made. You ask me, he runs the underworld of this town and the towns all around us. Maybe even over to Raleigh.”
I raised my head. “He’s never been investigated?”
“Oh, I’m sure someone has investigated him,” Connie said.
“But Marvin Bell’s never been arrested for anything, far as I know,” Hattie said. “You see him around Starksville from time to time, and it’s like he’s looking right through you.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bree asked.
Hattie shifted in her chair. “He makes you uncomfortable just by being near, like he’s an instant threat, even if he’s smiling at you.”
“So he knows who you are? What you’ve seen?” Bree asked.
“Oh, I expect he knows,” Connie said. “He just don’t care. In Bell’s kingdom, we’re nothing. Just like Alex’s parents were nothing to him.”
“Any evidence linking Bell to Rashawn Turnbull?” Bree said.
Naomi shook her head.
Patty Converse seemed lost in thought.
I asked her, “Stefan ever mention him?”
My cousin’s fiancée startled when she realized I was talking to her, said, “Honest to God, I’ve never heard of Marvin Bell.”