Snapshots

Special Agent Regina Hamilton walked from the bathroom wearing the hotel robe that had been provided. The hot shower she had just taken, helped calm her. A little TV would help in getting her mind off the current case she was working on. She needed these couple of hours she had been given before going out into the field.

She picked up the TV remote and turned the set on. She surfed the channels until she came to a local news station. A news report had just ended and was replaced by a commercial. She took a seat at the foot of the king-sized bed and pulled the towel off her head. She leaned over so that her below-the-shoulder length auburn colored hair fell in front of her. She looked at the tangled mess and sighed. She didn’t have time to wash it. She flung her head back, sending her hair behind her, just as the news returned to the TV. The next story was about a drive-by shooting in the 9th Ward section of the town.

“There is too much violence in New Orleans,” she said out loud. Just the brief reminder of violence drew her mind back to her case.

Regina rose from the bed and walked over to the small table that came with the hotel room. She had thrown the Carlos Jimenez file on the table when she had returned to the room earlier. She now looked at the pieces of paper peaking from the closed file. Her handwriting glared at her. It was the profile material she had developed on Jimenez.

She opened the file and touched the papers. The case would soon be over, and her notes would go into the major file at the New Orleans bureau office. Her testimony would be used in the prosecution of Jimenez. She smiled at her success.

Since joining the FBI five years before she had felt she was always trying to prove herself. Compared to the males in the agency, there were not many women and even fewer African American women. She had once seen the statistics for the country: 8050 female agents out of approximately thirty-five thousand active agents. The number of African American women was 2090. The number of African Americans agents Regina had seen in her five years of service: maybe three. Regina did not know where most of the female agents were assigned.

It was not that she wanted to have a buddy to hang out with in her off time or to partner up with. She was tired of the overly macho men in her section who treated her like she always needed their help. She was a token member not because of her race but because of her sex. She had never been a token anything prior to being accepted into the agency. Regina had never let the fact of being female get her into or out of situations. She made high scores in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat in training at Quantico. She had been the top in her graduating class in college and at the academy. Excelling came to her naturally.

Her father once told her that she would have to fight her way to the top because there were always going to be obstacles in her way that she would have to knock down. She hadn’t had to fight yet but she was always ready.

Regina smiled at that statement. She never thought her father was disappointed that his first child was a girl. He treated her like some of the men under him in the service. Like with them, he prepared her for the world, and he had done a wonderful job of making sure she would hold her own in any situation. And she had. He stressed to her often that some battles she would have to walk away from and others she would have to face.

Regina’s life changed at fourteen when her father transferred the family to Virginia from California. Regina had to make new friends. The transition from a small-town community and school to an inner-city school on the outskirts of DC was challenging for Regina.

At her new high school, the “bad” girls and the misfits had targeted Regina for acting too “not black.” Regina took the advanced math and science courses and Arabic as her foreign language. She had assumed that these courses were the reasons for the taunting which began on her first day of classes in the ninth grade. It was not until later in the school year that Regina found out the real reason for the animosity of her classmates.

A product of a mixed marriage, her mother white and her father African American, Regina had a light brown complexion, light brown eyes, and thick, wavy brown hair that stayed in a waist length plait most of her primary school life. She considered herself a darker version of her mother.

Her sister, Penelope, or Pennie for short, on the other hand, looked more like their father in coloring. Her skin tone was a deep brown. Her hair was straight like their mother’s but a little lighter shade of brown. Her eyes were hazel which often reflected her mood or the color of the clothes she wore. Pennie was the baby and her parents treated her that way. She got away with everything. Pennie did look up to Regina when they were younger, and she often followed Regina around because she wanted to be just like her big sister.

It was Pennie who often looked out for Regina. When one of the “bad” girls grabbed Regina’s plait one day on the way home from school and pulled her to the ground, Pennie, fearing for her sister’s life, ran the two blocks home to get their mother.

By the time Rose Hamilton made it to the place where her oldest daughter was, Regina was just picking up her books from off the ground with the help of some other girls. They were all smiling at each other. Rose stopped running and put her hand over her heart when she saw that her daughter was okay.

Regina never told her family what happened that day because she had been embarrassed. She had gotten up off the ground, wrapped her plait in a tight bun on her head and pushed the bully girl down. She had raised her fist ready to box, like her father had once shown her, and took a defensive stance. The bully had not been prepared to fight. She had only wanted to see if Regina’s hair was real. When Regina’s hair came with her body at the tug, the other girl had been shocked. Regina had immediately relaxed her stance and started to laugh. She helped the other girl to stand and helped get grass and twigs from the girl’s clothing. Regina’s mother had just run up when they were handing each other their books. The other girls were also laughing. From that day on, Regina was always hanging around those same girls who became her best friends throughout high school.

Regina’s cell phone rang interrupting her trip down memory lane. She walked over to the table by the bed and picked up her phone. She recognized the number and set the phone back down. She did not want to speak with Miles. It was over with him, and he had to move on because she had.

Regina had met Miles Calhoun at Pennie’s wedding. Pennie had married a computer analyst that had helped in the development of the system at the insurance company where Pennie worked. Brian Sawyer told everyone that Pennie’s computer had shocked him the day he had walked into her office to work on it. He had never been shocked by a computer. She had not been at her desk when he came in for the repair. When the most beautiful woman he had ever seen came into the office to check the status of her computer, he knew his life would never be the same. One year later, they were married.

Of course, Regina had been Pennie’s maid of honor. She spent most of the reception dodging people who wanted to know if she was next or how did she feel now that her younger sister had married before she had. Regina never answered any of them. She excused herself and found a quiet place to stand. On one such escape to the balcony of the reception room, she met Miles Calhoun, a local prominent black lawyer. Miles was an acquaintance of Brian.