But Loretta had drummed it into her head since she was a child that she was going to marry a rich man. And that required a specific kind of preparation, a kind that you didn’t need college to achieve.
Barbara Jean’s mother taught her to dress in the manner that she associated with glamour—everything shiny and/or revealing. To make sure Barbara Jean talked like a high-class woman, her mother put belt lashes across her back if she dropped gs from the ends of her words, the way Loretta did. Barbara Jean and her mother joined First Baptist Church because the richest and lightest-skinned black people in town went there. Her mother weighed her every week to make sure her weight was always within man-catching range—something she and Clarice shared in common, Barbara Jean later discovered.
Barbara Jean thought it was funny that, when she finally did find a rich man, Loretta’s life lessons had proved useless. All that had mattered was that she pass his family’s skin color test. When she was introduced to Lester’s mother, the old woman held a brown paper bag up to Barbara Jean’s cheek and, judging her just a smidge lighter in comparison, said, “Welcome to the family.”
During the winter of Barbara Jean’s senior year, she wasn’t thinking about her education, or marrying rich, or anything. She was crazy in love with a white boy who was poorer than anybody she knew. Loretta must have been spinning in her grave.
Even as she fell more deeply in love with Chick, Barbara Jean saw more of Lester. She was too naïve and too blinded by her feelings for Chick to even notice that the hours she spent with Lester were also a kind of dating. He often showed up at the All-You-Can-Eat with James and sat for a while at the window table with Barbara Jean and her friends. But Barbara Jean never thought anything of it. Everyone, it seemed, put in time at the window table. Little Earl, that obnoxious Ramsey Abrams, Clarice’s silly cousin Veronica. Even Chick became a regular guest at the table when he wasn’t on duty, since he and James had become good buddies.
Sometimes Lester drove his young friends to Evansville and other nearby towns in his beautiful blue Cadillac, treating them to dinners they could never have afforded on their own. Always, he was a perfect gentleman. Lester never so much as held Barbara Jean’s hand, much less made any sort of advances. She enjoyed his company and was flattered that he wanted to be her friend.
Clarice told Barbara Jean several times that Lester was interested in her, but Barbara Jean didn’t pay much attention to her. Barbara Jean shared Odette’s opinion that Clarice, already having scripted her own happy ending with Richmond, was now eager to write one for everybody else.
On a January night in 1968, Lester took James, Richmond, and the Supremes out for a ride in his Cadillac and then to dinner at a nice place in Louisville to celebrate Richmond having broken a passing record at the university. Barbara Jean enjoyed herself. The food was good and the restaurant was the most glamorous place she had ever stepped inside of. But she couldn’t wait to get back to Chick. It was Chick’s birthday and she had saved up to buy him a Timex wristwatch with a genuine leather band, which she thought back then was the height of elegance. She kept an eye on James all through dinner, waiting for his yawning to signal that the evening was over. But James didn’t start to fade until 10:00, and it was nearly 10:30 when they began the forty-minute drive back to Plainview.
When Lester dropped Barbara Jean off, she found Odette’s parents in Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s living room. Laughing and bobbing their heads to a scratchy old record playing on the stereo, they waved hello to Barbara Jean through a haze of bluish-gray smoke as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. The four of them stayed up late that night, the way they always did when they got together. When the Jacksons finally went home at around 2:00, Big Earl and Miss Thelma went straight to bed. They fell into loud snoring not five minutes after their bedroom door closed. For the thousandth time that night, Barbara Jean looked out the window to see if the storeroom light at the All-You-Can-Eat was still on. It was, so she tiptoed down the stairs and went to see Chick.