Double lives, p.1
Double Lives, page 1
Also by Mary Monroe
The Lexington, Alabama Series
Mrs. Wiggins
Empty Vows
Love, Honor, Betray
The Neighbors Series
One House Over
Over the Fence
Across the Way
The Lonely Heart, Deadly Heart Series
Can You Keep a Secret?
Every Woman’s Dream
Never Trust a Stranger
The Devil You Know
The God Series
God Don’t Like Ugly
God Still Don’t Like Ugly
God Don’t Play
God Ain’t Blind
God Ain’t Through Yet
God Don’t Make No Mistakes
The Mama Ruby Series
Mama Ruby
The Upper Room
Lost Daughters
Gonna Lay Down My Burdens
Red Light Wives
In Sheep’s Clothing
Deliver Me From Evil
She Had It Coming
The Company We Keep
Family of Lies
Bad Blood
Remembrance
Right Beside You
The Gift of Family
Once in a Lifetime
“Nightmare in Paradise” in Borrow Trouble
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
Double Lives
MARY MONROE
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PART ONE - 1901–1934
Chapter 1 - Leona
Chapter 2 - Leona
Chapter 3 - Fiona
Chapter 4 - Fiona
Chapter 5 - Fiona
Chapter 6 - Leona
Chapter 7 - Fiona
Chapter 8 - Leona
Chapter 9 - Fiona
Chapter 10 - Fiona
Chapter 11 - Leona
Chapter 12 - Fiona
Chapter 13 - Leona
Chapter 14 - Fiona
Chapter 15 - Fiona
Chapter 16 - Fiona
Chapter 17 - Leona
Chapter 18 - Fiona
Chapter 19 - Leona
Chapter 20 - Leona
Chapter 21 - Fiona
Chapter 22 - Fiona
Chapter 23 - Leona
Chapter 24 - Fiona
Chapter 25 - Leona
Chapter 26 - Fiona
Chapter 27 - Leona
Chapter 28 - Fiona
PART TWO - 1934–1938
Chapter 29 - Leona
Chapter 30 - Leona
Chapter 31 - Fiona
Chapter 32 - Leona
Chapter 33 - Leona
Chapter 34 - Fiona
Chapter 35 - Leona
Chapter 36 - Fiona
Chapter 37 - Leona
Chapter 38 - Fiona
Chapter 39 - Leona
Chapter 40 - Leona
Chapter 41 - Fiona
Chapter 42 - Leona
Chapter 43 - Fiona
Chapter 44 - Leona
Chapter 45 - Leona
Chapter 46 - Fiona
Chapter 47 - Leona
Chapter 48 - Fiona
Chapter 49 - Fiona
Chapter 50 - Leona
Chapter 51 - Fiona
Chapter 52 - Leona
Chapter 53 - Leona
Chapter 54 - Leona
Chapter 55 - Leona
EPILOGUE - Leona
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
DAFINA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
900 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Copyright © 2024 by Mary Monroe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
The DAFINA logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949925
ISBN: 978-1-4967-4315-2
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: April 2024
ISBN: 978-1-4967-4317-6 (e-book)
This book is dedicated to LuBertha and Otis Nicholson.
Acknowledgments
I am so blessed to be a member of the Kensington Books family. My new editor, Leticia Gomez, is so easy to work with! Thanks to Steven Zacharius, Adam Zacharius, Michelle Addo, Lauren Jernigan, Robin E. Cook, Stephanie Finnegan, the fabulous crew in the sales department, and everyone else at Kensington for working so hard for me.
Lauretta Pierce, you are amazing. Thanks to you, my website keeps getting better and better.
I am so lucky to be represented by Andrew Stuart, one of the best literary agents on the planet.
To the wonderful book clubs, bookstores, libraries, and my readers, thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting me for so many years.
Please continue to email me at Authorauthor5409@aol.com, visit my website at www.Marymonroe.org, and my Facebook page.
Peace and blessings,
Mary Monroe
PART ONE
1901–1934
Chapter 1
Leona
ME AND MY IDENTICAL TWIN SISTER, FIONA, HAD STARTED SWITCHING identities when we was toddlers. It was fun fooling folks. If somebody told her to do something she didn’t like, I’d do it in her place and vice versa.
Nobody ever caught on to what we was doing. Even when we approached middle age, we didn’t stop. But I wish we had. Our last and most elaborate switch was the reason somebody I loved got butchered to death.
I wanted to help ease my guilt by telling my side of our story from the beginning. And my twin wanted to tell her side.
I only knew of three other sets of identical colored twins in Lexington, Alabama. There was two elderly men who nobody had trouble telling apart because one was real fat. Then there was the Miller sisters at our church who was ten years older than us. One had a purple birthmark the shape and size of a quarter smack dab on the side of her right jaw. And then there was them two boys who was three years behind us in school. One was cross-eyed. They wasn’t really twins, though. They’d started out as two parts of a set of triplets. When they was a year old, a snake bit the third boy on his rump and he died. After that, everybody referred to the other two boys as twins. Them other twins didn’t get along with each other like me and Fiona did. Me and her was so close, we’d do anything for each other, even die.
Mama told us there had been a real bad storm the night me and Fiona was born in June 1901.
“The wind was so strong it blew part of the tin roof off our house and the rain flooded our living room. If that wasn’t bad enough, it blew out every lamp in the house, except the one in my bedroom where I was giving birth. The midwife got so spooked, she left in such a hurry, she forgot to collect the dollar she charged for her service. And she never came back to get it. Folks said that was a bad omen, but I just laughed.” Mama’s words would come back to haunt her (and me) someday.
Our parents was old enough to be grandparents when me and Fiona was born. Daddy was forty-nine and Mama five years younger. Daddy had been married twice before. Both of his previous wives died before they could give him any children. Mama had never been married before Daddy.
“How come a pretty woman like you waited so long to get married when your friends—even the ugly ones—got married in their teens?” I asked her one day.
Mama looked nervous and started fidgeting before she answered. “I had a heap of boyfriends, but I was really particular about who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The right man didn’t come along until I met your daddy. He was so good to me, I promised him that I’d stay with him for the rest of my life. And that if he died before I did, there’d never be another man for me.”
Mama would keep the promise she’d made to Daddy. After his death, she would never keep company with another man for the rest of her life. He died in his sleep when me and Fiona was six-and-a-half years old. It was January 4, 1908. Mama took it so hard; she couldn’t get out of bed for the next few days. Her best friend took care of the funeral arrangements and stayed at our house to look after me and Fiona. The same lady also packed up Daddy’s things and gave them to anybody who wanted them. The things nobody wanted, like his underclothes, Mama made me and Fiona put the items in a pile in our backyard and set them on fire.
Like everybody else, Mama’s friend couldn’t tell me and Fiona apart. When one of us misbehaved behind her back, she took a switch and whupped us both to make sure she got the right culprit. Even at that young age, whuppings didn’t faze me. The way Fiona screamed and bucked like a wild bronco you would have thought she was being tortured to death. I knew then that my sister was always going to be too “fragile” for her own good. I got tears in my eyes the day she told me, “I wish I could be more like you.”
I missed my daddy. We all knew he’d been disappointed
Mama never allowed anybody to drink in our house. She didn’t even know Daddy drank as often as he did, which was every time me and him went fishing.
“Clyde Dunbar, don’t you never bring none of that unholy water into this house!” I heard her tell him one day when she smelled alcohol on his breath.
From that day on, Daddy would chew a plug of tobacco each time after he’d been drinking. It only made his breath stink more, but at least Mama couldn’t smell the moonshine.
“Leona, I hope that by the time you get old enough to drink, things will be better for us and you won’t need to drink,” he told me one of the last times we went fishing. I usually did whatever Daddy wanted me to do. But I was so curious, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to do some drinking myself. I wanted to feel “happy” like Daddy and I planned to do it as often as I could.
On the second day in June the year Daddy died, Mama gave me and Fiona a party to celebrate our seventh birthday. While I was helping Mama clean up the mess we had made in the kitchen, she told me that when the midwife delivered me and Fiona, she named us right away.
“Leona was my grandmamma’s name. She birthed eighteen babies. The first eight belonged to the white man who had owned her during slave days.” Mama stopped wiping the counter and folded the dishrag. “Fiona was the name of a real nice old white lady I took care of until her family moved back to Ireland.” There was a misty look in her eyes that I’d see almost every time she brought up my sister’s name.
I propped up the broom in the corner next to the churn we used to turn milk into butter and plopped down in a chair at the table. I loved conversating with Mama. It seemed like every time she talked to me when Fiona wasn’t around, I learned more things about her that I didn’t know.
“I never would have guessed that you’d name a child after a white woman, especially because of the way they treat us,” I said.
Mama raised her eyebrows. “Hush your mouth, girl. All white folks ain’t bad. I done worked for some that treated me like family.”
“Oh. Well, I hope I get to meet some like that when I get old enough to work for them. Fiona is a pretty name.” I paused and gave Mama a thoughtful look. And then my tone turned harsh. “I wish you had named me that! Leona is a old lady’s name!”
Mama didn’t raise her voice the way she usually did when I sassed her. She continued to talk in a low, gentle tone. “Well, if you live by the Good Book, you’ll be a ‘old lady’ someday.”
Mama went on to tell me that she had the midwife tie a shoestring around one of my ankles so she could tell us apart.
“The day after y’all was born, I told your daddy to give y’all a bath. I was still feeling poorly, so I had been lying down all that morning. That oaf took the shoestring off you and couldn’t remember which one of y’all to put it back on! For all I know, you could really be Fiona and she could be you. That’s why I never dressed y’all alike. And it’s the reason I always made you wear a blue ribbon on one of your plaits and Fiona a red one, even when y’all go to bed for the night.”
“I’m glad you don’t want us to dress alike. I’d hate it if she ruined one of her frocks and switched it with one of mine.”
Mama laughed. “Fiona wouldn’t do nothing like that. Anyway, doing them ribbons every day got to be tedious real fast. But it was necessary. I never bathed y’all at the same time so I wouldn’t get mixed up and put the wrong ribbon on the wrong head. I washed y’all’s hair a day apart. I had hoped that by now one of y’all would have changed in some way so I could tell who was who without them colored ribbons.” Mama heaved out a heavy sigh.
“Like how, Mama?”
“It would help if one of y’all gained some weight or lost some so y’all wouldn’t be the same size no more. By y’all wearing them ribbons twenty-four hours a day, they get frayed real quick. If something was different about y’all, I could save money because then I wouldn’t have to buy so many.”
“What about that scar I got on my knee when I fell off the porch last summer? You could tell us apart then.”
“Yeah, but after that scar healed up, y’all was exactly the same again. I never thought having twins as identical as you two would be so stressful. Sometimes I feel like I been blessed and cursed at the same time.”
I snickered and stared at Mama from the corner of my eye. “If we wanted to play a trick on you, we could do it real easy. All we’d have to do is trade ribbons.” I laughed, Mama didn’t.
She gave me a hot look and wagged her finger in my face. “Oh, I ain’t worried about that. Fiona is too virtuous to do something that deceitful. I declare, your sister is the kind of proper little lady every mother would like to have. She can even play in the yard without getting her clothes wrinkled or dirty. When you come in from playing, you look like you’ve been rolling around in a pigpen. You are so uncouth, you belch in church without covering your mouth, you roll your eyes during the service, and get into fights left and right. God bless your soul. I wish you could be more like Fiona.”
Hearing Mama praise my sister and berate me didn’t bother me at the time. It would someday, though. But I knew she loved me and would even die for me, which had almost happened the week before Christmas last year.
Me and Mama had gone to the only general store in Lexington that sold everything from clothes to household items. She wanted to buy a wreath to put on our back door to replace the one that a deer had chewed up. There was a heap of trees across the dirt road behind our house. Every year we and our neighbors had to chase away all kinds of creatures that would mosey up onto our porches and make a mess.
I was glad to go shopping with Mama, even when she didn’t buy me nothing. Colored folks was only allowed to shop in this particular store for two hours a day, only on Friday and Saturday. Fiona had been sick that Saturday afternoon and stayed home so Daddy could tend to her.
Whenever we went shopping with Mama, she made us hold on to the tail of her dress so we wouldn’t stray off and get lost. This particular day, I let go of her dress for a few seconds so I could pull up my socks. When I attempted to grab hold of Mama’s dress again, I wasn’t paying attention and I grabbed the dress of a roly-poly, middle-aged white woman. She had on a garish hat that looked like a cross between a parasol and a bird’s nest. The way the woman reacted, you would have thought I had pulled a gun on her. Her piggy blue eyes squeezed into slits and her nostrils flared open like a bull.
“Don’t you tetch my hem with your filthy black hands, little nigger!” Before I knew what was happening, she kicked the side of my leg like I was a mad dog. I got whuppings that caused me more distress, so I didn’t even flinch or stumble. Her calling me a nigger hurt more because no white person had ever called me that before.
Mama heard the commotion and stomped back down the aisle to where I was. My mama was a medium-sized woman at the time, and she looked so harmless and demure. Nobody would have ever thought that she was capable of violence. But she turned into a mama bear, a grizzly one at that, in a split second. The look on her face would have scared the devil himself. Her lips was quivering and her jaws twitched. Her eyes looked like they was trying to pop out of their sockets.
