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Chapter 23

Jacqueline Bennett Carter

New York City, October 1991

Jacqueline was never overly concerned with the details of her courtship with William being muddled by external parties. There were plenty of weirder arrangements out there. She did, however, hold a secret close to her chest that threatened to dismantle everything that she’d built.

Six weeks before William’s proposal (if it could even be called that), Jacqueline thought that she was getting her big break. She was almost officially broke but not quite, and after all her time in the Big Apple, she was counting on booking this new gig. She had a shot at a recurring role for a housekeeper on a daytime soap. She’d have to read for the part, but the official casting document specifically asked for a Negro actress. She never liked to go for those, truth be told, but at this point, she was desperate.

So her heart broke when the audition went poorly. The casting director said that Jacqueline was far too poised to be a maid, who in the script, was supposed to have hailed from the South. It was a role near perfect for her, but they simply didn’t find her read believable enough. She was dismissed.

That night, she set out to get drunk. She was ready to give up on her dreams, sick to death of waitressing, of escorting, of working in general. And she was sick of being poor. Jacqueline was sitting alone at a bar downtown, far away from the places that she and Donna usually frequented. Her hair was blown straight and feathered out, a big brown halo around her head. She only got one gin martini deep before she ran into a client of hers whose company she actually enjoyed. Now Jacqueline could not recall his name, but his strong dark-olive Italian features were always making an appearance in her memory. This guy was a typical Jersey commuter, middle management and conservative. He was a gentleman, or so he liked to think, and he paid well for her time. They’d never had intercourse. Their arrangement was a strictly fellatio-fund exchange, since he considered penetration to be crossing the line to infidelity, but on this night, because they didn’t plan to meet and because Jacqueline was hurtling toward despair, he wanted to comfort her. She must have seemed sad because he did ask her immediately what was wrong.

“Oh, I’ve just decided to waste my life in becoming an actress,” she said to him.

He gave her a sad smile. “I’m sure you’re not wasting it,” he said.

“Well, I’m not doing it either,” she said, tapping her self-painted Revlon red nails on the black lacquered bar. He swirled the ice in his lowball glass. She watched as his hand gripped it, his knuckles surprisingly worn for a man who didn’t spend much time outdoors. She turned to face him and draped her arm over the back of her high bar seat. This wasn’t how she usually behaved with him. She was too herself right now, had no energy to reach for a character. When he looked at her, he seemed to be expressing such care that it warmed her much more than the martini did.

“I used to win you know,” she said, “all the time. I used to win pageants. I won so many back home that I was a local legend. That’s how I got here, to New York. I won a lot of money as a kid, and I saved up, and I made it all the way from Kentucky to the big city. I used to win all the time. Now all I do is lose.”

“I’m sure you’ll win again. That’s just how it works. You can’t win ’em all, right?” he said, attempting lightheartedness.

“I guess,” she said noncommittally.

“What will make you feel better?” he said, looking at her through his jet-black lashes.

“Do you have a billion dollars?” she said, sighing.

“Not today,” he said and laughed. “But I do have good advice, so tell me your problems for a change.” And she did. As she detailed her string of rejections, she felt a loosening, like the stench of her failures was no longer as potent. She made some jokes, and he laughed at them. As it does, the comfort led to sex, for which he paid her a satisfactory $300. In the moment she hadn’t been all that sure that she wasn’t just acting sad to play at his sympathies. She had so often spent time confusing when she was acting and when she was not. She didn’t expect to get paid, not really, but she was grateful for the money.

She wasn’t in the habit of tracking her cycle, but she definitely missed it when it didn’t show up. She kept giving herself one more day to get a period, but one never came. She didn’t feel a baby. She didn’t feel a heartbeat or a guest tenant in her uterus, a ridiculous thought, she realized, but she felt something she was pretty unfamiliar with, and that was fear. She didn’t want to confirm her suspicions and thought that she might be able to pray her period into existence. When that never materialized, she had to know for sure. She cursed herself for her uncharacteristically blasé attitude toward protection with him. She stared into space on her bed in Hitchings House, reluctant to go get a pregnancy test she was sure would be positive. But finally she did, and she peed on it in the common bathroom and walked to her room with the test hidden under her sweatshirt. She rested it on the corner of her old secondhand desk and waited. A little plus appeared in the results box, and her breath caught.

If she hadn’t already spent the $300, she might have not stayed pregnant, but since she had, she was short on options. She continued to work, showing up to the diner every single day, working doubles, hoping to exhaust herself into a miscarriage. She bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked as many as she could stand before she got sick. She knew these were half-hearted measures for terminating a pregnancy, but she had no one to talk to about this and no real knowledge about how to handle it.

To her own dismay, she remained with child. Four weeks into gestation, she accepted William Carter Jr.’s proposal, which felt more like brokering a sale. She accepted him because he was the one who planted the seed of a billion dollars. That would certainly solve a lot of problems for her, but a man who wanted a family so much so that he proposed to a stranger was almost too good to be true. She looked at him as her salvation. She didn’t know him at all, but she knew he was practical and predictable, and that would be enough.

The week after they stood outside the diner and agreed to marry, they were married. It was a courtroom thing, downtown in a basement with long brown benches lining the walls. She wore a white pencil skirt with a matching blazer, a business suit for William’s proclaimed business arrangement. William had given her cash to get something, and she picked the outfit before she started hyperventilating in Macy’s in Herald Square because she was so overwhelmed with choices. William picked her up wearing a dark-gray suit, somber and serious.

She was sure they didn’t look like they were in love. After the deed was done, William awkwardly held her shoulders and hesitated before giving her a chaste, closed-mouth kiss that was captured on camera for posterity. They posed for photos outside East Side Episcopal to make the event seem more romantic, riding uptown in a chauffeured town car. She’d signed many more documents in that week than she had ever even known existed. There was the prenuptial agreement, of course, which detailed that she was entitled to nothing but that she was required to bear heirs. The unborn heirs would be the sole recipients to the Carter fortune, and they would decide what part of it their mother could have, if any. This was an interesting stipulation, and the only reason that she agreed to it was because she was already carrying what she hoped to pass off as Carter kin. This was already a gamble, and she wanted to ensure that there were no hiccups with the larger plan she needed to make work.

Then there was the nondisclosure agreement, which prohibited her from speaking with any members of the press unless preauthorized by William. Then there was the marriage license and name change documents, which officially made her Mrs. William Carter Jr. He’d allowed her to keep her maiden last name in the middle because he thought that it was phonetically appealing. The whole arrangement was so much more clinical than she expected, and in a lot of ways, that made the process easier. Everything was refreshingly up front on his end. On hers, she had to ensure the consummation of the marriage happened fairly quickly so as to maintain the continuity of the timeline. As the baby in her belly split cells and multiplied from a poppy seed to a lentil to a kiwi, she needed to make sure that William believed that in forty weeks or less, the child was his.

After the wedding, sitting across from one another in spacious leather seats, Jacqueline gave William a soft smile. She noticed that his jaw was set, uncomfortably so, the tension held there like a taut rubber band. She looked down at her left hand, where a slim gold band held a tasteful solitaire two-carat diamond and now a thicker gold band. She admired the classic gold band on William’s left hand, a costume for a new play. “So we’re on the way to the rest of our lives,” she said because she thought she should. Her words seemed to startle William, who was looking out the window.

With great effort, he stretched to lean forward and pat her leg and said, “I guess so.” William dropped his voice to a loud whisper. “Are you comfortable with having a—uh—wedding night?” he said.

Jacqueline smiled at his shyness. “I’m comfortable with that,” she said, trying to sound confident and reassuring, knowing that they’d have to have sex soon in order for the timeline of the birth of her baby to appear acceptable.

“I got a suite for us at the Plaza,” he said. “Have you been?”

“I have,” Jacqueline answered, remembering several nights there with Donna and girls from acting class, hoping no one there would recognize her.

The newlyweds remained holed up in their room for the entire weekend, and it wasn’t bad. William splurged on champagne and room service, and the high-thread-count sheets felt marvelous on Jacqueline’s body. The time with William was fine; the sex they had, short and perfunctory. Adequate. Jacqueline expected nothing more. She didn’t love him, no, but she loved what he was doing for her, and maybe she could love him one day. Years later, she would laugh at her girlish naivete.

After their weekend at the Plaza, Jacqueline moved in with her new husband. William relinquished his studio bachelor pad and within days got them a new home. This apartment, in a high-rise building in Midtown, chosen for its value to William’s work commute, was on the fourteenth floor out of twenty-six. It had a living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and small quarters for staff, which they would have had if William was not hoarding his wealth. Though he had some money now, William was militant about how to spend it. He was determined to build up a fortune, not blow one. “We don’t just want to be rich; we want to stay rich,” he would say, more to himself because Jacqueline barely spent anything.

William was invested in keeping his home a private space, and Jacqueline soon learned he had a strict schedule that couldn’t be disrupted by any means, making it impossible to host guests. That’s exactly what he said before shutting off the light on his nightstand when she’d mentioned that her friend was coming to town. His obsession with privacy, a quirk bestowed upon him by his mentor, was something he took, like everything else, to an extreme. Jacqueline wasn’t sure how much of it was in the interest of self-preservation and how much was just plain fear. Still, over time she learned to manage him the best she could. She was overly accommodating to his whims and idiosyncrasies, like she was with any client.

At William’s direction, the Carters didn’t have staff until much later. William allowed for the expense of a weekly housekeeper, who changed the bedding and did the laundry. They had a dishwasher, and Jacqueline had started learning to cook, but most nights they ate out. He was mostly content to leave the domestic responsibilities to her as long as she followed through on his wishes for privacy, presentation, and organization of the home, which she did perfectly. They lived on a deserted island up in the sky, and thankfully, Baby Asher’s presence invited more opportunity for communal interaction as a family. But William was reticent about that too. As Asher grew into toddlerhood, William said that the boy needed to “make the right friends” so that he would be comfortable when he “attended the right schools” eventually. Going to random parks and playgrounds not frequented by the right people? Wasn’t going to happen.

While William worked, Jacqueline remained at home with Asher all day, maintaining the house and learning how to navigate a neighborhood with an infant. William had also given her the task of researching the New York City Black Elite so as to complete his mission of becoming one of them.

The Black Elite, composed of an old guard as historic as America herself, were scattered all over the country, the power players on a team that William was hungry to join. The New York scene was interspersed with investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, and other highly paid professionals. This was long before those careers became pedestrian and powerless, but at the time it was impressive for African Americans to achieve such professions against all odds, especially in the United States. They attended schools like Morehouse and Spelman but also Harvard and Yale. In this department, she was at a deficit. William, on the other hand, had been tangentially included in their ranks by virtue of attending Harvard, but since he had no pedigree, he was woefully excluded from most of their private socializing.

That’s where Jacqueline could help. What she lacked in impressive family history and education, she made up for in European features and pleasantly medium-tone skin. She hated this, an old echo from pageants coming back to haunt her. When she first started competing, she was told by every other older woman to stay out of the sun, to wear a hat, to wear long sleeves and gloves. She in fact passed out in the July heat at a church picnic when she was twelve, trying not to get too dark so that she could win a pageant the next month. She woke up dazed, surrounded by people fanning her red face. She pulled at the gloves and dress, desperate to break free. “Oh no, baby,” she heard an older woman say. “Don’t you have to be up on that stage soon? Can’t let you get too black.”

Jacqueline didn’t know then that she was destined for motherhood, but she’d sworn that she would never do that to her own children, finding such ideas beyond repugnant. Still, when dealing with the elite world, she was aware of the currency of her complexion, that she’d garnered favor with her looks, and that was just one more box checked. She resented it, but she’d learned a long time ago to work with what she had. She reluctantly recognized that Asher, who was blowing spit bubbles in his playpen, a shade lighter than her, was in an even better position for social mobility.

At first, Jacqueline was afraid that Asher’s appearance, so fair and so lean, would make William question his parentage, a wager she made the day she decided to become William’s wife while already pregnant. But William seemed to be willfully blind to the ways that he and his son had few genetic similarities, immediately declaring his love for the infant at his birth. The only thing that he had ever said about it was a single comment made the day after Asher had been born. William turned over the infant’s tiny hand, which was balled up into a fist encased in a gray cashmere mitten to mitigate scratching, and pushed up the edge of the onesie to expose a tiny wrist. While running his finger gently across his pale skin, he said, “His veins almost look blue, don’t they?”

After Asher was born, Helen Hudson, now known as Helen Neal, called unexpectedly to let Jacqueline know that she was coming to New York City. Jacqueline and Helen had managed sporadic contact over the years, letters here and there and the occasional phone call to catch up, but their close friendship had ended when Jacqueline secretly boarded a bus to Manhattan without telling anyone.

Helen was now a mother of two, and as she promised, began having children almost immediately upon graduating high school. She had one girl and one boy and was an active member at Zion Baptist Church in Louisville where Martin Luther King Jr.’s brother, A. D. King, was famously a minister, as she never failed to mention. Helen and her husband had moved to and settled in Louisville, making a comfortable life for themselves and their charming offspring. Exactly what she said she was going to do. The consistency in Helen’s ambitions and how her life looked was impressive. For Jacqueline, who’d done almost the complete opposite of what she set out to do, her life was a combination of envy and embarrassment.

“Girl, I didn’t know that you’d become so bougie,” Helen said to Jacqueline as they sat in Freds at Barneys for lunch, shopping bags at their feet, Jacqueline bouncing one-year-old Asher in her lap.

In the moment, Jacqueline had laughed off the comment, declaring, “Honey, I’m still the same girl from Elkin, don’t you worry.” Still, Jacqueline had heard herself when she spoke, how her southern accent was nowhere to be found. She also was aware that the places that she had taken Helen to on that trip were telling a different story. She was not the same girl from Elkin, and when she recounted what happened as she sat across from William at the dinner table later that night, his reaction startled her.

“She said ‘bougie’?” William questioned. “She actually said that?”

Jacqueline had moved on from Helen’s comment, wanting to give William more context. She started to tell him about how a sales associate at Barneys had suggested that Jacqueline and Helen could not afford to shop there. But William was stuck on bougie, even though the racist sales associate was far more offensive.

To meet her oldest friend, Jacqueline had selected a black A-line Ala?a skirt with a matching cropped cardigan. She wanted something that felt both understated and impressive, and this was perfect. Or it was perfect until Asher left an explosion of soupy shit all over the whole thing at the exact moment she was carrying him to his stroller in order to leave. Years later, she would hardly believe she once parented so closely as to be covered in her own child’s feces. But in that moment, between the baby’s cries, his need to be held, and her rapidly fraying nerves, the zeal to dress to impress completely evaporated.

As a backup, she’d set Asher down in his crib, quickly showered, and grabbed one of William’s Harvard sweatshirts, something that he barely ever wore anymore since he spent most of his time in a suit, pairing it with a pair of Levi’s jeans and sneakers. She grabbed a baseball hat as well to conceal the fact that she’d run out of time to do her hair, disappointed that, yet again, another New York plan had fallen apart. Fifteen minutes later, when Jacqueline had met Helen in front of Barneys and the two had walked into the store, an older white sales associate had immediately looked Jacqueline’s disheveled outfit up and down and said, “Is there anything I can help you find? Perhaps six would be a good place to start.”

The sixth floor was where the most casual and contemporary clothes were found. To which Jacqueline had replied, “Thank you, but I’m fine on three. My regular associate, Carolyn, usually does pulls for me.”

Back home, and with Helen, Jacqueline had called the white woman racist, pure and simple. But later, at dinner, William wasn’t convinced.

“That shop girl doesn’t know you or who you are,” he declared. “She’s judging you based on what she saw, and you know better than to walk into Barneys looking any kind of way.”

William was gearing up for a lecture and barely noticed how his wife shrank back at his words. “But your childhood best friend coming to visit you in New York and insulting you like that is really what you should be upset about,” William continued.

“I don’t think she meant what she said in a mean way,” Jacqueline said softly.

“Didn’t she?” William asked.

“Well, no—she was just saying that she thinks I’ve become different living in New York, and I have. I’ve changed.”

“She didn’t say that though. If she wanted to say you’re different, she would’ve said that. What she said was ‘I didn’t know that you’d become so bougie.’ That’s an insult.”

“Don’t be so sensitive. It’s not an insult. It was just an observation,” Jacqueline said.

William took notice that she was getting defensive, but neither would take themselves out of the moment enough to calm down. Jacqueline didn’t enjoy arguing with William either, especially because he was so skilled at speaking that she often found herself outmatched. William also never wanted to take it easy on her, thinking that every opportunity was one for learning.

“Jacqueline, what do you think the word ‘bougie’ means?” William asked. He placed his fork and knife down on his plate and calmly waited for her response.

“It’s just slang, William. It means fancy, rich, kind of showy. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s not what bougie means,” William said before reaching for his wineglass. He was entering into some kind of performance now, bolstered by the fact that he found her definition of bougie to be unsatisfactory.

“Bougie is a derivative of the word bourgeoisie . The bourgeoisie represent the middle class, a middle class trying to emulate what they think it means to be a part of the aristocracy. But these people don’t know. They don’t have seats at the table. The bourgeoisie live outside of the confines of court. They’re relying on gossip and observation to ascertain what they imagine an aristocratic life looks like. They get a distilled version of what it means to be an elevated member of society, and then they dress themselves up and parade as such so that they’re able to feel important.”

“William, there’s no way she meant it like that, okay?” Jacqueline said.

“There’s no other way she could have meant it, Jacqueline. Bougie is being used as a weapon. It signifies that you don’t belong just as much as that Barneys woman who said you don’t belong. Saying that you became bougie means that she thinks this is a learned behavior and that you don’t deserve class mobility because it isn’t consistent with her opinion of you. Don’t you see that?”

“I didn’t know that dinner needed to include a history lesson,” she replied.

“We’re living history, Jacqueline. Us. When I become a billionaire ... how many Black billionaires do you think there are?” he asked.

He didn’t wait for her to respond. “There are none currently. There are two men born in the United States other than me who might get close and amass a fortune of one billion dollars or more. Just two. And do you know how many billionaires there are in the world? The whole world? Eighty. Out of billions of people, only eighty have a billion dollars. That is history, and I will not be convinced that we’re pathetically mimicking the aristocracy when we are the aristocracy.”

“Okay, William. I get it,” Jacqueline said finally, conceding to her husband and hoping that would satiate his need to argue.

“I don’t think you should be spending any more time with Helen,” William said, picking up his fork and knife and resuming his dinner. It wasn’t just important for Asher to have the right friends, but Jacqueline had to as well. He’d given her a luxurious life, and most days this was something she found comforting, even freeing in some cases. Someone who made all critical decisions and gave her a life of extreme comfort was what she thought every woman prayed for, but she’d never quite counted on it coming with so many restrictions. Donna had told her a long time ago, “You have to just let them lead”— them being the men—and in most cases, Jacqueline was happy to do that. But sometimes William was simply too much.

Some weeks after this discussion, William broached the topic with Jacqueline about her returning to school. He felt that it would be a crucial part of the kindergarten application process that both of Asher’s parents were college graduates. He suggested that she apply to and enroll in Columbia because it looked better for the children to have two Ivy League–educated parents. William said that he would “take care” of the admissions process, that a Black student interested in continuing her education would be a noble endeavor, and he knew “many people who would want to support this.”

Just like he said, Jacqueline was accepted to Columbia’s Division of Special Programs, a school she entered under the private tutelage of someone who spent their career as an actor in London’s West End. Jacqueline would be earning not a degree, but a certificate in theatrical arts, although no official materials would ever say as much. She and William diligently worked on Asher’s kindergarten applications, which read “William Carter Jr., Harvard College, Harvard Business School and Jacqueline Bennett Carter, Columbia University.” This was as much as anyone needed to know. William had assumed that his résumé would help to legitimize Jacqueline’s, and like he had on many things in the last few years, he had bet right.

Now in her thirties, she was pleased that she no longer had to waitress and experience the train delays and commuting drama that living in Harlem resulted in, but that also meant that her acting dreams had dried up. She was still acting, she supposed, but taking on the role of mother. But now that she had officially transitioned out of her twenties? Her career on screen or stage was definitely over before it began. She did mourn what could have been, but after a depressing number of years sharing a run-down dormitory with all those other girls clamoring for a new life in some way, Jacqueline told herself that she had ultimately lucked out—that if she played her cards right as wife to this complex man who yearned for status, she would have access to a grand stage that would encompass the world.