AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you like this story, please provide me your feedback and let me know it. Also, any input you have as to what you would like to see happen with these characters would be great. Finally, like Mary Katherine, I am looking for my Miss Violet, so if you are out there, I want to hear from you.
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Day One...
Mary Katherine slowed her BMW and pulled over as the police car with the blaring sirens zoomed past her. This is par for the course for this neighborhood, she thought, as she headed to her mother's apartment. She hated coming to this part of town...the ghetto. Why her mother continued to live here was a mystery to her. There were lots of low income places available in much nicer neighborhoods. Thank God, she had the good sense to get an education and get the hell away from this environment.
Mary Katherine pulled up to the tenement apartment building that her mother lived in. Her apartment was directly above the liquor store and the fried chicken take out place. There was always a crowd of drunks in front of the liquor store and the local thugs were on the corner as usual selling crack. She parked her car and put the steering wheel lock on. Even though her car had the most modern alarm system, she didn't trust anyone in this neighborhood and wanted to make it as difficult as possible for them to steal her car.
She walked up the three flights of stairs to her mother's apartment. The hallway reeked of the various meals that the tenants were cooking. Also, with the thinness of the walls, you could hear anything from babies crying, to cursing and arguing, to the latest profanity filled rap music. Once again, she was amazed that she had grown up here and thanked her lucky stars that she was able to escape. After only one knock on the door, her mother threw open the door and wrapped her arms around her. Her mother was a sizeable woman, who was proud of her obese frame.
"Kizzy, it's so good to see you, baby!!!" her mother said, as she continued to put her in a bear hug.
"Mother, you know that I don't like to be called that. My name is Mary Katherine now. Please call me by my proper name!!!" Mary Katherine corrected her mother. She knew that she would be going through this routine with her mother, but it was exasperating all the same. She was born the year that Alex Haley's movie Roots came out, and for some ungodly reason her mother decided to name her Kizzy. She often wondered if her father had bothered to stick around until she was born, would he have intervened in her mother's decision of a name choice. Since she was the product of a "hit and run" as her mother put it, she knew nothing about her father.
Throughout her teenage years, she was teased and tormented by her peers about her name. Her 18th birthday present to herself was to head straight to the courthouse and legally change her name. In choosing her new name, she wanted something that sounded elegant, dignified and...White. Not only did she want to rid herself of her ridiculous first name, she even went so far to change her last name to O'Hara in tribute to her idol and heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. So that is how Kizzy Jenkins became Mary Katherine O'Hara. When she started college that fall, not only did she have a new name, but she had a whole new persona to go with it. She learned the benefits of an education at an early age, but it paid off when she was awarded a full four year scholarship to Yale, which allowed her to escape the ghetto that she grew up in. The day she headed to Yale, she knew her life would change for good.
"Mother...? Why you gots to be so proper? Why you just can't call me Mama? I did give birth to you, and I named you Kizzy. It aint fitting for a child to go and change the name that your Mama gave you," her mother fired back.
This was going to be an interesting couple of hours she thought. She looked over at the table to see that it was piled high with fried chicken, collard greens, corn bread, chitterlings, and sweet potato pie and a pitcher of sweet tea. Great, I'm going to have to be in the gym every day for a month after this meal, Mary Katherine thought.
Mary Katherine got through the next two hours visit with her mother and made excuses of having an early meeting at work the next day in order to end her visit. She only came to visit her mother once every two or three months. She usually encouraged her mother to come to the suburbs to visit her for their get togethers. Her mother enjoyed cooking for her and felt that she was too thin. If she ate like this on a regular basis, she'd be as big as her mother, Mary Katherine thought.
A couple of hours later, Mary Katherine was grateful to be back home in the comfort of her three bedroom townhouse in the suburbs. She had just stepped out of the shower and was standing in the mirror admiring herself. At age 35 she was quite an attractive woman. She stood 5'8" and weighed about 130 pounds. She unwrapped the towel from her head and let her damp hair fall down to her breasts. Thank God for hair weaves she thought. The style that she currently wore was identical to the honey blonde colored tresses that Beyonce wore. The grey contact lenses that she wore really complemented her honey blonde hair and brought out the color of her eyes. Yes, she was an absolute stunner, she thought to herself. Although she was not quite as light skinned as Beyonce, she was quite pleased with the caramel color of her skin tone. She took every precaution to stay out of the sun and to cover up, otherwise she would be looking like one of those dark Hershey chocolate colored black women that she despised. Her mother was a darker brown skinned woman, so she surmised that the one "gift" that she did get from her father was her caramel skin tone.
It always amazed her that most people considered "proud black women" to be those angry militant crazed black women. She was not that kind of "sista." She was educated with a Master's degree from Yale and she loved her job as a marketing VP with a top fortune 500 company. She made a six figure salary, lived in the suburbs and lived quite comfortably. Her neighbors were upper to middle class and to her knowledge, she was the only black person living in her subdivision. She had been living there for two years now and the only other black or hispanics that she had seen coming and going were the domestic help that worked there cleaning other people's homes. She thought that perhaps there were a handful of Jews that lived in the neighborhood, but like her, they were the exception to life in this Waspy white existence. Yes, life was good she thought. Her current existence was the complete opposite of the ghetto life she had known growing up with a mother on welfare.
Yet, with all of this there was something missing. She had this burning desire that she yearned to fulfill. She got into bed and flicked on the TV and DVD player and put on her favorite movie -- Gone with the Wind. She loved this movie. The thought of black people being slaves subservient to their superior White masters, turned her on. She was definitely born 150 years too late she thought. Mary Katherine fast forwarded through the DVD to her favorite part of the movie.