Annie tears up, remembering the morning she first baked ginger snap cookies for the Conrad girls, how she felt so tired and alone that day, and how eating the broken cookie was a moment of communion for her and her unborn child, how she blindly consecrated then ate the most perfect cookie for him.
“Thank you, Doris,” she says, sniffling, holding back tears. The baby looks at Annie excitedly, and she playfully tells him, “Boy, you gonna get some after I eat it.” William and the girls laugh. Annie takes a bite, “mmmm, mmm, good, Doris,” she says.
Looking into her son’s laurel green pools, Annie finds sudden serenity in his eyes mixed together with forgiveness, remembering the joys of her own childhood. She feels like a girl again and takes a huge bite of cake, eyes tender and full of strength and love.
“Your cake is so good, Doris!” Annie says. “Thank you.”
***
Winston-Salem, NC. August, 2015.
Annabelle feels the heat filling her upstairs apartment. Two months, still no real leads. Back at her kitchen counter, she searches the internet for Cherry Grove Plantation. The enslaved would be on its property list, in Bethania’s historical archives. She searches for Aunt Annie’s parents’ names, Lonny and Lucy, maybe with a last name Wilson.
Annabelle’s search is now personified by a recent chance meeting, causing her to look for the first name and surname Conrad. Must be the thought of ginger cookies cooking in a wood-fired oven that’s causing my forehead to bead, she thinks, laughs, and takes another swig of beer.
Using the cool beer bottle, she closes her eyes and traces the baby fine hair along her temples, feeling fingers of perspiration tickling behind her ears to the nape of her neck – clinging, curling, speckling her hairline with thin ringlets of cinnamon colored curlicues, taming the periphery of her hair while the rest sprang in shoulder length coils caressing her face.
Over the summer her pale peach skin is sunbaked to the near exact color of her hair, and her freckles are darkened. She loves her summer skin and chooses to wear white almost every day to accentuate it. This is the week of the 2015 National Black Theatre Festival; Annabelle takes frequent walks downtown where tourists predictably walk up to her and ask if she is part Native American, to which she shrugs and says, “Sure.” She imagines they return to their hotels and possibly remark on the stunningly exotic creature they saw that day. Skin color is so fascinating to some people, she thinks. Shrugging, she concentrates more deeply on Conrad.
***
Annabelle met Conrad while shopping for groceries at ChefSmart off Stratford Road. A trained chef, she regularly makes monthly runs there to buy frozen jumbo shrimp for her catered events.
“Ma’am,” he’d said, “I don’t mean any harm, but you are the exact color of the red banks along the sides of Highway 8 north of here in Germanton.”
Showing no immediate acknowledgement, Annabelle tossed seven, eight, nine, ten bags of shrimp