Double Lives

Book 4: Lexington, Alabama Novel

by Mary Monroe

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Historical Fiction; Southern

Synopsis

The latest shocking twist-filled novel in the award-winning New York Times bestselling author’s Depression-era Alabama saga tells the riveting tale of identical twin sisters with a talent for switching lives and hiding their scandals—until one risk too many changes their lives forever. Reminiscent of Monroe’s classic, captivating Mama Ruby series.

Since childhood, identical twins Leona and Fiona Dunbar have been getting in—and out—of trouble by pretending to be each other. Yet underneath, they couldn't be more different. Outspoken Leona lives to break rules, have a good time, and scandalize their respectable hometown of Lexington. Fiona is a seemingly-demure churchgoing girl who is the apple of her domineering, widowed mother Mavis’s eye.
 
But together, the twins have fooled teachers, boyfriends, bosses, racist police—and most importantly, strait-laced Mavis. Even when Leona does jail time for Fiona, their unbreakable bond keeps them fiercely loyal. . . . So when Fiona feels stifled in her passionless marriage, and Leona is heartbroken over losing her one true love, it's perfect timing to change places once again . . .
 
Leona is shocked to discover she enjoys the security of being a wife and homebody.  And the unexpected spark between her and Fiona’s husband is giving her all kinds of deliciously sexy ideas. Meanwhile, Fiona enjoys being free, single, and reveling in the independence she's never had. And the more she indulges her secret, long-repressed wild child, the more Leona’s ex-lover becomes one temptation she’s having trouble resisting . . .
 
As the sisters’ masquerade ignites desires and appetites they never expected, it also puts their most damning secrets on the line. Once the fallout rocks their small town, can Fiona and Leona's deep sisterhood shield them from total disaster and help them reconcile their mistakes? Or will the trust between them become a weapon that shatters their lives for good?

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

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 not to have a son, but I was a tomboy, so that was as close as he’d ever get. I spent a lot of time recalling some of the good times I’d had with him. While all Fiona wanted to do was sit around the house and read magazines and help Mama cook, I played ball with Daddy and we went fishing several times a week. There was times when he would get terribly sad about the way things was for colored folks. So he did something that made him feel better: He got drunk. When we went fishing, he’d stop at one of our neighborhood moonshiners’ houses on the way to the lake and buy some moonshine. I noticed how “happy” he seemed when he drank and that made me happy. He would move quicker, his deep-set black eyes would shine like new coins, and a smile would spread across his dusky brown face and stay there until he sobered up.

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.

“Don’t you ever kick my child again, you white devil!” Mama roared.

I had never seen her so mad. There wasn’t too many other customers in the store, but I don’t think Mama would have cared if there had been a hundred. She still would have risked her life to protect me.

The woman’s mouth dropped open, and her eyes grew large as saucers. Before she could respond, Mama balled up her fist and socked her face so hard, her hat flew halfway down the aisle. The woman yelped and stumbled against a magazine rack and knocked it to the floor.

“Come on, sugar! Let’s make tracks!” Mama hollered. She scooped me up in her arms and sprinted out the door before anybody could stop us. I was so proud of my mama that day. She ran with me in her arms all the way back to our house on the other side of town.

Mama made me promise not to tell anyone what had happened. She convinced me that if I did and the news got to the white folks, they would burn down our house with us in it. They had done that to another colored family last year.

She still shopped at that store. But every time she went, she wore a pair of old glasses that Daddy used to wear, a dollar bill–sized bandage on her jaw, and a floppy straw hat that covered so much of her face, she didn’t look nothing like herself.

I chuckled to myself just thinking about that incident now. I chuckled even harder over what Mama had just said about Fiona being the kind of daughter every mother wanted.

“How do you know she ain’t loud and rowdy when you ain’t around? I can act like a ‘proper little lady’ and not get my clothes dirty if I wanted to and then you wouldn’t know me from her.”

Mama gazed at the ribbon tied around one of my braids. “That’s why I still make y’all wear different colored ribbons.”

Even with the hardships we had to face, we still managed to have fun from time to time. I had some fond memories. When we was in fourth grade, Fiona got picked to play Cinderella in our annual school play. I had been dreaming about playing one of the most beloved characters in fairy tales, but our teacher would only give me a role as one of her ugly stepsisters. I was so horrified I cried in front of the whole class. They laughed and that made me feel so much worse, I cussed at them and almost got kicked out of the play. Fiona begged our teacher to let me stay in. And then my wonderful sister consoled me the best way she knew how. She secretly played the ugly stepsister and I got to be Cinderella after all.

Everybody praised “Fiona” for playing her part so well. After we had switched back to our real selves, our teacher told me she was sorry she couldn’t let me play Cinderella. Her excuse was that I wasn’t “dainty, poised, and polished” like Fiona.

The following year, our teacher picked Fiona to play Sleeping Beauty. It was the only role I’d wanted more than Cinderella. Fiona let me play that one too and I got even more praises than I received for playing Cinderella.

T HE NEW CENTURY HAD STARTED ONLY EIGHT YEARS AGO AND everybody from President Teddy Roosevelt to the elderly colored people who had been born into slavery and still living was predicting that the 1900s would be better for everybody. Even as young as I was, I knew it was only half-true. I’d overheard grown folks conversating about how things was going in the country, so I knew that white folks made all the rules, and they only benefited them. Colored folks had to do whatever they said. The same laws that they came up with to protect them and make their lives easier was made to keep us down.

I was sorry to see our birthday party come to an end. By the time me and Mama finished cleaning up the kitchen, all our guests had gone home. Fiona had claimed she was too “sluggish” to help clean up. She couldn’t have been too sluggish because she was next door playing with one of the girls who lived there. Lazy was a better word in my book. I figured that was a privilege for girls who was too dainty, poised, and polished to do anything unpleasant. I didn’t mind having to do extra work around the house when Fiona didn’t want to. Something told me that I would also have to work much harder than she did for everything I wanted in life.

Me and Mama had left the kitchen and moved to our front porch steps where the flies and gnats was so bold, we had to swat the same ones two or three times. There was so many dark clouds in the sky, it looked like a dingy gray blanket.

“This smells like tornado weather. If it is, I hope it won’t cause as much destruction as the one we had last June on your birthday,” Mama said in a worried tone.

Our last tornado had demolished the homes of two families we knew, killed three people, uprooted the pecan tree we’d had in our front yard, and blew our next-door neighbors’ mule into the next county. I was worried too, but I didn’t want Mama to know that. “Aw, Mama. That little windstorm wasn’t so bad. All it did to our house was blow out all the windows in our bedroom. We didn’t get to have no party, but me and Fiona had fun helping you tack up the cardboard to cover our windows until you got enough money to get them fixed.”

“Leona, I hope you will always look at bad things with a hopeful eye. You’ll enjoy life better. But just in case we have another ‘little windstorm’ when we go in the house, get out the quilts so we can make pallets on the living room floor for us to sleep on tonight. If we huddle up together, we should be all right. I wouldn’t want to live if something was to happen to one of y’all.”

“Mama, I promise you, ain’t nothing going to happen to me or Fiona . . .”

All of the colored folks lived in the same part of town. The houses on our street was small and shabby, but we all had decent-sized backyards and every single one had enough room for a small vegetable garden. There was a few colored folks in Lexington with money, like the folks who ran the colored clinic. They lived in the nicer, bigger houses two streets over from ours. Even though the doctors could afford to live in a better neighborhood, they couldn’t because of the strict segregation laws. Mama said that them stupid laws had been made to protect the white folks from us. But they was the ones killing and tormenting colored folks, so how was segregation “protecting” them from us? I wondered.

On the other side of the trees behind our house was a street with more small shabby houses where the colored moonshiners did their business. There was a heap of white moonshiners too, but most of them lived in the more rural areas. Mama said the white folks with class like the ones she worked for bought their liquor from the few stores in Lexington that sold it, and from bootleggers. Most of the white-owned stores that sold alcohol and the bootleggers only dealt with white folks. So colored people made their own moonshine and made a good profit.

We had the party in our backyard, and one of the men in our neighborhood who went hunting a lot had gave us one of the squirrels he’d recently shot.

“Thanks for the party, Mama,” I said. “We didn’t get no nice store-bought gifts, and I wish we could have had something better to eat than squirrel sandwiches, but we still had fun.”

Mama gave me a stern look. “In the first place, there is a heap of folks that would give anything in the world to have a squirrel sandwich. We ain’t in no position to be so high and mighty. In the second place, don’t thank me, thank God. If it wasn’t for Him, we wouldn’t be eating no meat at all.” Mama leaned over and retied the ribbon on my braid. It had loosened up and was dangling in front of my face.

“Do you have to tie it so tight?” I complained with a grimace.

“If I don’t, it might fall off.”

I snickered. “And you wouldn’t know if I was Fiona or me, huh?”

“Pffftt!” Mama waved her hand and gave me a mean look. “I ain’t worried about that.” And then she got real serious. “I know you and your sister better than I know myself, so I know y’all ain’t got no reason to swap places just to pull a prank on me, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. Poor Mama. She had eyes and a brain, but she couldn’t see or think straight. She didn’t know me and Fiona as well as she thought she did. We traded places all the time! How could we not when all we had to do was switch our hair ribbons? And we only switched when one, or both, of us had something to gain.

Because I was so tough and “unladylike,” when Fiona did something bad, I took the blame for her. Like last month when she was playing with matches and caught the living room curtains on fire. When Mama confronted us, we both denied doing it. “I want y’all to go out in the yard yonder and each get a switch off that walnut tree so I can whup both of y’all. That way I know I’ll get the right one.”

By the time we got out to the yard, Fiona was already howling like a stuck pig. “Leona, I don’t want to get a whupping. Can you trade ribbons with me and say you was the one playing with matches?” she sobbed. She had that pleading look in her eyes that always broke me down.

I couldn’t say no to her even if I wanted to. I was strong and rarely got sick, but when we was younger she had one affliction after another. She had pneumonia twice within eight months when she was four and almost died. A year later, she had a five-day-long coughing spell. Right after she got over that, I woke up one night and seen her sitting on the floor in a corner. Fiona was scared of the dark, so Mama always set a kerosene lamp burning on top of a wooden crate by the door when we went to bed. “Fiona, why are you sitting on that hard floor?” I asked.

“I’m scared to go to sleep. If I sit up, I can stay awake.”

“Why don’t you want to go to sleep? Mama said you need as much rest as possible. What’s the matter?”

“Last night and the night before I dreamed I went to sleep and never woke up.”

“Oh. But the doctor at the clinic said you should be fine now.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t die from no sickness. Something just reached out and took me.”

“You mean like the bogeyman?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see nothing but a dark shadow.”

“Well, I ain’t scared of the bogeyman or nothing else. Come get back in the bed. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.” When Fiona got back in the bed, I wrapped her in my arms and held her the rest of the night. That was the position we would sleep in for several weeks, which was how long it had took for her not to be too scared. Sleeping like that was uncomfortable for me, but I didn’t mind. Protecting my other half had become my mission.

Even though I was twenty minutes younger than Fiona, I felt like I was obligated to protect her because she was such a scaredy-cat. She was terrified of dogs, cats, bats, horses, cows, every insect in the world, and even cute little creatures like ladybugs and butterflies. Just the threat of a whupping would paralyze her with fear.

I misbehaved way more than Fiona and Mama always chastised me with a switch. When she didn’t feel like doing that, she would scold me so hard that one time she lost her voice.

We was still choosing our switches when Fiona got in front of me and asked, “Well, you going to take the whupping for me or not?”

“I guess so.” I didn’t mind making life easier for her, but it was nice when I got some benefit out of it. “What’s in it for me?”

“I’ll pay you a penny.”

“Well, a penny don’t go too far these days. If you make it two, I’ll tell Mama I was the one playing with matches.” Fiona stole the money to pay me from Mama’s coin purse.

The next day, when Mama realized some of her change was missing, she confronted us. I took another whupping for Fiona.

Me and Fiona looking exactly alike had other advantages that didn’t involve whuppings or scoldings, especially when we became teenagers. Fiona was smarter than me at school. Sometimes she did my homework so I’d get a good grade. Once she even posed as me and did a oral book report on a book I hadn’t read, but she had. The teacher was so impressed, she gave me a A+.

One day at recess a older girl who liked to bully younger kids put a frog down the back of Fiona’s blouse. Fiona was still terrified of small creatures, so she exploded and clobbered that girl like she had stole her candy. None of the colored folks we knew had telephones yet, but news traveled fast in Lexington. One person could tell ten others something and in no time, almost everybody in our neighborhood would know about it. Mama knew about Fiona’s fight before we even got home from school that day. “Y’all get in that bedroom and get out of them school clothes. And then, Fiona, you go out in that yard yonder and get a switch.”

As soon as we got to our room, Fiona looked at me and didn’t even have to ask. “Don’t worry, I got this one,” I told her as we traded ribbons. Whupping her angelic Fiona must have really hurt Mama because she cried after she was done. To be more believable, I cried too.

When we went to school the next day, several of our classmates told me that same bully had been laughing about Fiona getting a whupping. As soon as we went to the yard for our recess that morning, I gave that heifer a black eye and was glad to get another whupping when I got hom. . .