Day 920: 5 Minute Freewrite CONTINUATION: Monday - Prompt: corn cake
As Mama Morton and Victor Morton her son had observed, Mrs. Maggie Thornton was working strategically in her first meeting with the Morton family, right down to asking Mama Morton to show her how to make corn cake.
Because of the racial history of the United States, Mrs. Thornton felt it was very important to come humbly to this family of Black billionaires that had sprung out of and had to escape the county she also had grown up in, in which people who looked BASICALLY like her had tried to destroy the sister and brother who had founded Morton Technologies. Sheer White jealousy of Black success, and the violence that came from that, was a known historical occurrence. Mrs. Thornton had to make it clear that she was not part of that program, even though she was not trying to get at the family wealth but just marry its White adoptee.
Yet it was more and less complicated than that … Mrs. Thornton was deeply concerned that her husband-to-be maintain all his emotional support networks, and the last thing she wanted to do was be a wedge driven in.
The Milanos, the Lees-and-Fairlanes-of-the-mountain, the Mortons, and the Hamiltons still to be met: all of them provided different variations of families that had enjoyed long, successful marriages and had great love and respect for what it took to build a family over generations. The irony of Captain Lee, a 27-year widower, being so comfortable in those environments was both his endless longing for what he had never had the chance to build because of the death of his wife and son … and also the desire that had never died for a second chance, although he had not consciously admitted that to himself before meeting Mrs. Thornton, a widow who had lost her husband and daughter.
To have a family in the midst of a larger community made up of loving family units … it was what both Henry Fitzhugh Lee and Maggie Milano Thornton had known growing up, and their mutual longing to have that again was one of the elements that had drawn them together. This is why Mrs. Thornton had actually succeeded where 27 years of women had failed: Captain Lee innately recoiled from women who wanted the “nuclear unit” or a “power couple” that advanced jointly as an individual would who was interested in public acclaim and material advancement as a first priority.
Captain Lee attracted loads of such women because he was a colonel in the Army in addition to being a police officer in Big Loft, and unmistakably a man of power … but the personality traits that had led him to the behind-the-scenes life of Special Forces and Judge Advocate General service also led him straight away from the kind of women who wanted to be out front in society.
One could see it while he was with the Mortons – a Lee, from that slave-owing and fought-hardest-for-slavery-in-history Stratford line, sitting happily in charge of no one in the midst of Black people that could buy or sell everything he owned at least 200 times over, drawing no more attention to himself than he couldn't help owing to his resemblance to his most famous ancestral uncle … content to be the white sheep in the family, grateful to be allowed to be considered such 27 years after the obvious connection had ended … the love he shared with the Mortons, giving and receiving, was enough. No such man, content as he was, had any need or ambition to gain position to prop up his ego; he did not need anything that was “out front” in a country that denied the Mortons the same privileges.
Mrs. Thornton had carefully observed her future husband: in his choice of places to go, he went around a circle of peace … into Creation if alone, into music-making if wanting the company of a handful of others, into family if he wanted the crowd … whatever woman wanted to be at his side for life had better be able to operate in or at least be supportive in all three fields. The third required sharing on a deeper level, a sharing of time in life with other people who, outside the Milanos and their oodles of in-laws, might or might not be as accepting of Mrs. Thornton.
Mrs. Thornton was not naïve: she knew the younger Mortons were not as thrilled about accepting another White relative into the extended family, and she knew some of the Morton women who were near her age and had hoped Captain Lee would fall for them (although that was hopeless … Captain Lee could never have done that because they would have been too much like and not enough like Vanessa, and had told some of them so) were furious.
However, Mrs. Thornton understood that accepting Captain Lee at nearly 46 years old was accepting the package that came with his life so long as that package encouraged his spiritual and emotional health, and the Mortons as a whole were a big and key piece of that package. He had practiced his Italian for two months before meeting her family; she had learned how to make corn cake. It was just the kind of thing you did to build family in the midst of family.
That evening, Mrs. Thornton and Captain Lee said goodbye to the Morton family because he had to be back to work that Monday morning, and although they would take different flights, they were going to the airport together. Her flight actually went out first, and as they parted at the gate, she felt in his good-bye kisses and in his embrace a difference in him that he put into words between kisses:
“Thank you, Maggie, for coming … I love you so much … thank you … thank you … .”
His voice was trembling, his eyes were fever-bright, and his body was clearly saying he did not want to let her go before a fuller expression was made. Captain Lee was very reserved, so for him to be that close to going into an ecstasy of love in public said a lot.
“You're welcome, Harry … see you back at home.”
Mrs. Thornton was giddy by the time she got onto the plane from those kisses … he was one of those who could quickly communicate his feelings physically, and it had been a good thing they had been at the gate and she had to board just then. She texted him before takeoff:
“You know, we could have changed our flight to Las Vegas,” she said, teasing him about the fastest way to get married in the country.
He texted back just a few minutes: “Woman, don't make me come get you off that plane – don't tempt me like that!”
And then, at long last, he gave in and put on a line of laughter emojis, followed by a dozen hearts.
Henry Fitzhugh Lee using emojis? That relaxed in his new love?
“Mission accomplished – thank You, Lord, thank You,” Mrs. Thornton said as she turned her cell phone off and dug her knitting out of her bag.
Photo by Virgil Cayasa on Unsplash