“Liliane, sweetheart, can you believe what good time Auntie Aurelia and Lollie made from St. Louis?” S. Bliss was gleamin’. She was radiant. Now, my mama was a stockier woman than S. Bliss, but not a whole lot more. She was as comfortable with her body as any unannounced Negro leftist, but more so just because we were LaFontaines and could do as we chose. We always chose ourselves or the race, which presents few dilemmas to my mind. Aurelia was buoyant as a woman’s smile when a man’s made love terribly well and wants more, even though she was simply sittin’ in a kitchen chair, sippin’ coffee.

I like to think I’m just like her: what every mother of a son warned against and every, well most, daughter’s mother half prayed for, half prayed against. How did Lili put it? Bloodlines versus upward mobility; joie de vivre versus noblesse oblige. This, the nexus of post-Reconstruction alliances. Eventually, E. Franklin Frazier would come to our rescue, but at this point in time he didn’t grow orchids.

“Aw, don’t tell me. This our Liliane. Why I would never have believed it, if I wasn’t lookin’ at her myself. Bliss, you could have spit her out, I do declare!” Mama bent over Liliane’s frame, wrappin’ her up in a rollin’ hug. Lili looked startled, looked like her eyes and body were askin’ me: “Why is Aurelia doin’ this to me?” I shrugged my shoulders and winked at her. What else could I do? My mama liked to getta hold of things she loved; Bliss liked to look. That’s all there was to it. But Lili and I had the best of both sisters: one could hug us and one gazed.

Maybe that’s why it felt so still and alone in Liliane’s house. I’m used to seein’ my friends, my mama’s friends, and all of those folks’ friends roamin’ the halls of our house, almost settin’ up house in our house. Everybody assumed cause S. Bliss is a LaFontaine and they are close to God that God must be very quiet.

Liliane’d been raised among her mother’s orchids as if she were one herself. Where in the mix of rice and collards I know to be my life was she to surface? And then how would we survive: did anyone care?

It’s time to see S. Bliss’s gardens.

“Oh, good lord, Bliss, you’ve changed it again,” my mama squealed. Her eyes widened as she swept by the arcs of paths nestled between the water lilies and weepin’ willows. S. Bliss found her way to shadows where she disappeared and all my mama could see was the breadth of the garden.

With her voice floatin’ like a fragrance, S. Bliss quipped: “Aurelia, I don’t want my Liliane to draw the same gardens forever, you know.”