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Chapter 30

Tashia Carter

New York City, July 2015

The heat in New York was stifling as the weekend for William Carter Jr.’s birthday party approached. Tashia’s thighs rubbed together uncomfortably as she hunted through photo libraries, some without air-conditioning, in the fresh July hell. She couldn’t wait to get out of here. Tashia had mixed feelings about whether or not to ask Kennedy if she could bring Ernest as her plus-one. Technically, Tashia was a plus-one, and plus-ones don’t bring plus-ones, but she was sure it was going to be an amazing weekend, and it wasn’t like the Carter family couldn’t handle extra head count.

She and Ernest had been spending a ton of time together over the last few months. There were frequent stays at each other’s apartments, and she was starting to feel very comfortable with him. He was curious and engaged. He asked a lot of questions, which was a refreshing and different experience from other men that she had encountered. He had taken a genuine interest in her project, carefully examining old photographs and speaking about his own time at Princeton with an openness that she found refreshing. From what she gathered, he’d had it tough there. He hadn’t gone to a high school like hers, so he was somewhat unprepared for the levels of insulation around socializing that would be difficult to penetrate as an outsider. He’d felt slapped with the label of intruder, and she could relate to that. She found that he was still hardened by this experience, even after spending so much time in Ghana trying to reclaim a sense of identity.

She, too, discussed with him the awkwardness she felt at Dalton, how Kennedy was her first rich friend, and the way that she marveled at her life at first. “So, the first time that I went to Kennedy’s house, she let me use her personal driver to get home. And I don’t mean her family’s driver; I mean her personal one. All of the Carters have their own personal drivers and cars,” she said to Ernest early into their courtship at his apartment after he’d made her dinner.

“That is so—” he said.

“I know,” Tashia interrupted with a shrug. “But it is what it is.”

“So what did you think about that?” Ernest asked neutrally.

“Well, I was a kid. I thought it was weird and cool at the same time. But it wasn’t until later that I found out why exactly they all had cars,” Tashia said with another shrug.

“Security, or is it just because they have money to burn?” Ernest questioned with a smirk.

Tashia laughed. “Surprisingly, no. So listen to this: Everyone in the family had personal drivers and security details because of an incident that happened when Kennedy was really little. Her dad had just bought his first Rolls-Royce, and he was driving the family around when he got a flat tire. I mean, you know how dads are: they always want to show they can do something or whatever. So he goes to change the tire himself in the street, and there he is—sleeves rolled up and everything—when here come two of New York’s finest. They immediately ask for identification and whatnot, and when he tells them that the Rolls-Royce is his car, Kennedy and her brother and her mom have to watch as the cops shine a flashlight in his eyes and ask for proof.”

“Well, that happens to us all, I guess,” Ernest said, betraying no emotion either way.

“Her dad got so mad, apparently. I think Kennedy is probably going to drop this story in her video,” Tashia said, getting more animated. She noticed that Ernest wasn’t reacting to this recounting in the same good-natured way that he usually listened to her stories. He seemed less than amused, so she upped the theatricality. She accessed a deep voice to mimic William Carter Jr.

“You know how he talks. He would have a British accent if he could. He goes, ‘My taxes are paying for them to be this stupid!’ He was furious that the cops dared to question that his hard-earned money could afford him a Rolls-Royce. So then after that, he decided that driving himself was communicating that he was common, that he was low-class. Driving himself made him too accessible and vulnerable. So now, every Carter has a driver.”

Ernest didn’t seem remotely amused. “Yeah, well,” he finally said, “that’s a lot of gas.”

“Oh, come on.” Tashia reached out and shook the top of his hand across the table. “That was supposed to be a silly story. I was just trying to tell you that I felt like an alien too.”

Ernest maneuvered his hand on top and squeezed hers back. “No, I get it. I think it’s just hard for me to imagine that much money.”

“It’s hard for me too,” Tashia said. “And weird, which is really why the only thing you can do is laugh.”

“Maybe not the only thing. How do Kennedy and her brother deal with it?” Ernest asked.

Tashia considered his question. “Differently. Kennedy doesn’t really know when she’s being an alien because she tries really hard, but every so often she gets exposed—like she didn’t really know how to act in an airport for a long time because they always flew private. One time, in high school, I took her to a public pool in the Bronx, and she asked me who everyone else was because she thought they all had to be there for a party. She hadn’t ever been to a community pool before. And Asher is a little less ... aware. He’s aware of himself, I guess, but he doesn’t really think too hard about other people.”

At this, Tashia could feel the mood shift, and she let Ernest change the subject and steer the conversation for the rest of the meal. It was hard to explain Kennedy to other people, and even though she recognized how ridiculous her life was, she also felt a responsibility to protect her. She was glad that she had gone with the car story and not a description of their apartment, or their Vineyard house, or the Aspen one, or the boats, or the art, including a Koons dog and something from the Ming dynasty that Kennedy and Asher also smashed by accident.

She was aware that many things about the Carters would be off-putting to people, and she’d heard them all. Some opinions were even legitimate critiques; like Ernest had said, it was a lot of gas. The excess was not necessarily something that she agreed with, but she also couldn’t lie: her friendship with Kennedy had a way of demonstrating to her that life could be a lot easier. She did often have to fight the urge to push back or object if Kennedy parroted absurd things from her father, like a ventriloquist’s dummy from another time. For example, William Carter Jr.’s feelings about racism wouldn’t be something that she could share with Ernest.

Kennedy had expressed to Tashia that her father’s opinion on racism was that it was an inevitable reality but not something that required too much devotion or energy. William wanted his children to be people first, not just Black people, because that was reductive and unfair. Kennedy had paraphrased her father’s words to Tashia: There is no use in trying to convince people who are determined to find fault with you over something you cannot control, and this goes both ways. You can’t live for other people. Sometimes you have to choose the me over the we . There will be Black people who will want you to be a certain way. There will be white people who will want you to be a certain way. None of that matters. The only thing that matters and is useful is how you are able to process information that you have learned and how you are able to move forward in life. She had not understood it when Kennedy presented it originally, and it was not something she wanted Ernest to know.

Tashia felt relief that she stopped sharing about the Carters that night at family chauffeurs without wading into systemic inequality. Kennedy said that her father resented how much his race was paraded in public, as if he also had another responsibility to martyr himself for his community, and she didn’t want to have to do that either. This made Tashia cringe. For her, being Black was not like a T-shirt that she could put on or take off. It was an all-the-time thing, and she knew that it was for the Carters as well. But still, she found it very strange that they behaved as if Blackness was a temporary condition.

If ever Tashia broached this subject, Kennedy would imitate her father and say, “White people want to make us feel inferior because we are Black, and Black people want us to be a certain way to represent them, but it’s all a fallacy. And as long as I know that, it can’t hurt me.”

At first, this was a big source of tension between them, with Tashia thinking that Kennedy thought herself exceptional. But over many conversations, over many years, Tashia saw how much pain it caused Kennedy to be so constantly judged, and she understood that it was easier for her to disengage with external perspectives and magnify a voice that she felt was stronger. To Kennedy, her father was larger than life. He wasn’t an abstraction. He was real, but it was as if he were a living monument, and Tashia saw it in real time. This was not something that she could ever hope that Ernest would accept. For the most part, they didn’t have to talk about the Carters. She didn’t love to keep things from Ernest, but occasionally her friendship with Kennedy required keeping some secrets. The main thing that she couldn’t tell Ernest was that being around the Carters was electrifying. Her friendship with Kennedy allowed her to inhabit a covert, exclusive world. There was the regular world, where she lived her everyday life filled with lines, waiting, stress, drama, and uncertainty. Then there was Kennedy’s world, where everything was perfectly coordinated and private. They didn’t wait. They didn’t search or stress. They didn’t even have to ask for anything, and yet things came, and it all felt like magic. This was embarrassing to admit, because obviously when she was with Kennedy, she was on borrowed time, but it was part of the reason why she would never give up her friendship with her, no matter what.

The air-conditioning hummed as Tashia debated with herself whether or not to text Kennedy about bringing Ernest to the party. Tashia was scrolling on her phone, waiting to find the right words, but it was dying. Ernest had already passed out, as he usually did well before her, and so she crept out of bed in search of her charger. On the way, she decided she should text Kennedy and ask if she could bring him to the Vineyard. He would have fun, and it would be nice for them to be together, but she thought that it might be strange to ask if they could both stay at Watcha Cove. She grabbed Ernest’s laptop to quickly research motels on the Vineyard to price out if they could afford a weekend trip. She lifted the cover on Ernest’s silver MacBook, which he always left on, and frowned when she looked at the open window. It seemed to be a website dedicated to exposing the Carter Corporation. A website owned by Ernest.

She began to shake as she read, her left hand covering her mouth as her right used the track pad to scroll. It appeared as if Ernest was behind a website responsible for publishing an investigation into her best friend’s family. She gasped when she got to Kofi’s name. At the top left corner of the webpage, there was a timestamp indicating when it had been published. These findings were published in May. At the bottom of a page was a web counter for traffic, and it recorded a pathetic thirty-four page views, which helped her breathe an exhale of relief. Even though few people had seen it, it did not make the duplicity of what Ernest was attempting to carry out any less unnerving. She glanced at the bed to check that he was still asleep and with a shaky hand set the page to private to make sure that no one else could see what she’d discovered before she could tell Kennedy what was going on.

Her eyes caught a direct quote from William Carter Jr. that he had, to Tashia’s knowledge, only said to a very specific closed audience years before: “The key to a successful business is figuring out how to make a problem into a profit.” It was something he had said to Kennedy’s fifth-grade class, immortalized on video, taken by a camcorder but otherwise undocumented. The short clip, which Kennedy had sent to Tashia as a potential for the tribute video, featured dozens of glassy-eyed children listening to this man detail how he made millions and then billions. On that same day, he also said, “Everything is debt, and you need money to convince people they can lend you money.” The latter was likely going to end up on the cutting room floor, but the former was something Kennedy was considering adding to her video.

Reading this, Tashia realized that Ernest had been mining her relationship with Kennedy for information about the Carters, but she just didn’t know why. Why anyone would spend their time on something this extensive, this involved, this deceitful was beyond her scope of comprehension.

After the quote was an editorial note from Ernest, highlighting how William Carter Jr. was evading criticism about how Black billionaires and millionaires replicated a toxic form of capitalism that simply subjugated people in the exact same ways that Black people had already been subjugated for centuries. Ernest wrote, Carter is trying to rationalize in a way that would protect him from those who wish to criticize his lifestyle, because at the end of the day, he feels justified in having pride in his success, in his fortune. He wants to create conditions where he should not have to hide or shrink to make anyone else comfortable, and at the same time, he wants to make it clear that this world of wealth is his to inhabit. He wants to build a dynasty that would transcend generations, and this can only be done if he denies his own humanity.

Tashia turned down the brightness on the screen and tilted it downward so that she could keep reading. She continued to scroll, holding her breath the whole time. She arrived at the recounting of Esi’s story. She brought the laptop right under her nose to see the close-up photo of Esi’s teenage brother’s arm and saw that his injury was not the only one that the Carter Corporation was responsible for. Her conscience was in crisis. This was horrible, and if it was any other corporation, she would want to see everyone on trial. She knew that what Ernest wrote was true, but the way that he had sourced this information was so dishonest, and at her expense. She didn’t know what his objective in publishing any of this was, but she also knew that she did not have time to ask. When she had read the whole page, she closed the computer and sat in the dark for a long time.

She looked over at Ernest, who remained asleep, and was hit with a wave of revulsion. He had sat with her tonight and gotten more information about the Carters that he would no doubt add to his page in the near future. He had eavesdropped on her private conversations, used them for his own purposes, and for what? It seemed like he was just building a personal hate blog.

From the time they met, Tashia had appreciated his willingness to open himself up and discuss emotions with her, and she felt between them a growing sense of intimacy that she hoped would become permanent. She now realized that was over. Her feelings about Ernest aside, she knew she had to warn Kennedy. With her phone actually dead now, she packed up the remainder of her things and snuck out of the apartment. She was going to drive up to the Vineyard in daylight. This was something she needed to tell her friend in person.

Her rental car, a silver Toyota Camry, cruised up the Merritt Parkway. When she was halfway through Connecticut, she hit traffic, which was not surprising for a Friday in the summer. She switched her radio from the XM station playing R & B to the traffic news, and that’s when she heard the announcer say, “Shelter in place orders have been issued for coastal communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Heavy rain and hurricane-force winds are expected for the next twelve hours. Reports from Martha’s Vineyard say that international real estate mogul William Carter Jr. has died.”

Tashia briefly swerved off the road but quickly regained control of the car as the vehicles in the next lane and behind her laid on their horns as evidence of their disapproval. What did they mean, died ? She started hyperventilating and looked at the road signs, searching for the next rest stop. She gripped the wheel tightly and laser focused her eyes on making it the next two miles before pulling off into the gas station parking lot. She shifted the car into park and reached with a shaky hand to retrieve her phone from her purse.

She had been on the road for three hours now and had one missed call and three texts from Ernest, which she ignored. She opened up her recent call log and pressed Kennedy’s name. The phone rang six times and then went to voicemail. She called again. No answer. Her heart had still not returned to a normal pace. She tried Kennedy again. Still nothing. She opened a browser on her phone and went to the first news outlet she could think of, and that was the New York Times , and there, on the home page, was confirmation of the report that she heard on the radio: William Carter Jr. was dead. She knew she had to get up to Watcha Cove right away.