. yeah . . . Desi?” her brother Junior replied awkwardly.
“Junior?” she asked, not sure she had heard right.
For many years she hadn’t heard from her family all that regularly, and Junior hadn’t called her directly in all that time.They had been close growing up, but they had grown far apart when she announced she was pregnant. Junior had probably been more disappointed in her pregnancy than her parents had at the time.
Desiree closed her eyes and remembered the sting of his desertion. She shivered and bit her bottom lip as she awaited his response.
“Yeah, it’s me. Um, look, I . . . I . . . just called to tell you . . . ,” Junior said, stumbling over his words.
Desiree sucked in her breath, not realizing that she was squeezing her phone so tight, her knuckles had turned white. “What?” she said almost breathlessly.
“Nobody is dead,” Junior said, picking up on her fear. He knew her so well. They knew each other so well.
Desiree’s shoulders relaxed. “Okay, then . . . ,” she said, almost tapping her foot in anticipation. She was really confused by his call now.
“Pop is sick. Real sick. This summer might be—” Junior said, but Desiree spoke up before her brother could finish.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
“But there’s one more thing,” Junior continued. “He wants to be in Idlewild, at the summer home. I know that might be . . . you know . . . for you, it might be . . .”
Desiree was fine until she heard her brother say she had to meet them at their Idlewild summer home. The section of the Michigan lake country known as Idlewild was a historic resort community that got its start as a refuge for Black vacationers before the Jim Crow era. It held a lot of beautiful memories for a lot of people, but for Desiree, it held memories that were both beautiful and ugly.
“Why?” she rasped, her voice barely above a whisper.
Her brother sucked his teeth, and Desiree knew he was probably judging her already. “Because, Desi, that’s what Pop wants,” Junior replied flatly.
Desiree snapped her lips shut, closed her eyes, squeezed her cell phone until her fingers ached, and mumbled her weak response. “Okay, Junior. I’ll be there.” Her entire body began to tingle the minute the words left her mouth. She hated herself right after that. She wanted to scream, “Daddy knows I don’t want to go there! Especially at this time of year, when everyone is there!” But she bit her tongue and held in her feelings . . . all over again.
Now, as Desiree drove toward familiar yet foreign territory, her head swam with thoughts. What if someone brought up the subject? What if she couldn’t explain her son’s familiar face? What if her father forced her to announce, once and for all, that she had a child?
Desiree let out a long sigh. More like a cleansing breath. She’d need to employ all her meditation practices over these next two weeks. Being around her family and being in Idlewild this time of year could potentially throw her back into a deep depression and an anxiety state. Desiree swallowed hard, just thinking about the days she’d spent crying in her closet and how she’d sent her son on playdates so she could lie in total darkness and embrace the dark places to which her mind would take her. Tyree was the only thing that had saved her back then.
Tyree stirred next to her and interrupted the negative thoughts that had crept into Desiree’s head. He lifted his head and stretched out his long arms.
“Dang, Ma. We ain’t there yet?” he said as he peered out the window.
“Ain’t? What have I told you about that word?” Desiree said, side-eyeing the love of her life.
“We are not in front of anyone right now! You said not to use Ebonics in front of people,” Tyree responded.
“Boy, you know what . . . ?” Desiree replied, reaching over and playfully swatting his arm. They both started laughing.
“I mean, ain’t that what you said?” Tyree said, needling his mother some more.
“Ew! Only you can get to me like this,” Desiree said lightheartedly, unable to remain annoyed with her son for long. “Only you . . . the person I love the most.”
“You know I’m just joking, Ma. I know how to conduct myself. I code switch with the best of them. I’m the Jay-Z of code switching,” Tyree told her.
“Code switch? What the heck is that? Now I have to learn a new term?”
“Yeah, code switch. It’s, like, you can be all down and speaking Ebonics one minute, and then somebody white and uptight comes by, and you code switch it to perfect and proper English. Switching the code, faking it till you make it. I’m the best at it. I mean, I only been watching you do it all my life,” Tyree explained, with a shoulder shrug.
“Me?” Desiree asked. “What do you mean?”
“Ma, c’mon. We live in a mixed neighborhood, but clearly, you’re more comfortable with the people there who obviously have more. It’s like you code switch in reverse,” Tyree answered quickly, as if what he was explaining to her was obvious.
“Boy, what?” Desiree’s voice went high, and her eyebrows folded into the center of her face. She was really confused now.
“You are bougie. There, I said it. Okay. You are a code-switching bougie person, and you can turn it on and off like a pro.”
“What? Okay, now you’re going too far,” Desiree said, dropping her voice an octave. “Bougie? Me? What does that even mean?”
“Ma, it is clear to me and everyone else that you grew up privileged but ended up in our neighborhood, for some reason. You don’t speak a certain way unless you’re around certain people. You have a certain way you do things—even the way you cook! All proper, with an apron on and stuff. And I have seen that you kind of dumb yourself down when you speak to Kyle’s mom, since she’s clearly not as, you know, smart or polished. But when you speak to Jawan’s mother, who is an attorney and grew up probably like you did, you’re all smart and, you know, proper and prim, which, I would say, is more like you,” Tyree said, his tone getting a bit more serious.
Desiree’s eyes grew round, and her eyebrows went up to her hairline. She was struck silent for a few minutes, and that wasn’t an easy task. She had never thought of it the way her son had just explained it. She also had never thought he would be as sharp as he was at his age. He was sharp enough to figure her out, despite the fact that he’d seen her steeped in only one social class all his life. She actually had to admit silently to herself that she code switched, and that she was aware of doing it. She just hadn’t known it was called code switching.
“I don’t know. I think I’m always the same,” she replied, slightly defensive.
“I think not,” Tyree replied, laughing. “I guess I’m about to step right into your bougie childhood in a minute. Let’s see how it goes,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a mad scientist.
“Yes, let’s see how it goes,” Desiree mumbled under her breath.
Chapter 2
Nothing Gained
The sand sparkled brilliantly in the afternoon sunlight at the Johnson family’s summer home in Idlewild. The house—a sprawling mansion on the water—sat along the most exclusive stretch of the beach, and so every room had a magnificent view. The property also boasted a private dock. There Carolyn Johnson, the family’s matriarch, stood with her arms folded across her chest, staring out at the beautiful landscape. She inhaled the fresh scent of the wind off the lake and let out a long, exasperated sigh.
Each summer for forty-one years, Carolyn and her husband, Ernest, had been coming to Idlewild—a place built specifically for elite African Americans, who had vacationed there since the turn of the twentieth century. With every passing year,