It was his son Doug who told me, decades later, that his dad had leukemia. All those years of fixing cars, inhaling gasoline, washing the grease from his hands and arms with it. He also told me the doctors gave his father little hope of recovery. My brother, however, sixty-one and young at heart, was determined to live. He had consented to a challenging and high-risk chemotherapy treatment, in lieu of a bone-marrow transplant. Not many patients survived it.
They’d told Jack I wouldn’t be coming, to give him the excitement of a surprise. Poor thing, they said, she’s in California, reeling from earthquakes, fires, and storms. She’s probably not stable enough to send you a card! When I appeared, he was only mildly surprised. He had believed I would come simply because he was in danger, and his hello was sassy and assured. “How ya doin’?” he asked. Then, as always, he said, “You look like a Georgia peach.” His lively eye and satisfied chuckle caught me off guard. He looked anything but sick. Here he was, fat, balding, rueful, content. A Buddha. Where was the man we all thought might die?
While the chemo dripped into his veins and I massaged his swollen legs, I witnessed and became part of something that felt holy. From his hospital bed my brother responded with cheerful good humor to an endless stream of people who came to sit with him. Old and young, all colors, men and women, children. All of them happy to be in his presence as he lectured his doctors about his treatment, kibitzed with his nurses, gave advice as needed on everything from marriage to baseball and divorce, commented on O.J. Simpson (innocent! he thought), the weather, world peace. Good-byes were reluctant, drawn-out affairs; no one ever seemed eager to leave his room.
I hadn’t spent more than an hour alone with him in the decades since I used to live with his family during summers. My life as writer and activist, mother, and family rebel had taken me far away. Whenever I read my work in the Boston area, I invited him, and he appeared, his face glowing from the front row, but I was usually too pressed for time to follow him home. How good his life must have been to inspire the love I saw around him now, I thought, realizing I had been but one recipient of it.
During our take-away dinner I looked around me at my large and handsome family sprawled about my brother’s bed, some of them relatives I rarely see, and then usually at funerals. There were brothers and a sister, grown-up nieces and nephews, hazily remembered cousins, and tiny tots darting about the floor. The harmony resulting from my brother’s peacefulness prevented the small room from feeling crowded. As we sat there, eating and talking and watching figure skating on television—this was everybody’s passion, and one I would not have guessed, never having sat with them this way before—a feeling of belonging, which I never experience in California, came over me. This is my family, and I love them, I thought. Really in amazement. After thirty years far from this familial coziness and my brother’s undauntable spirit, I had come home.
My brother died on July 1, 1996, a year and a half later than expected.
* The names of family members in this essay have been changed to protect their privacy.
Sunniness and Shade
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS WITH THE WOMAN WHO MADE ME A MOTHER
Daughters Everywhere
First I see her smiling face as she stands at the gate to our house, waiting for me to open it. She has forgotten her key. I am always struck by her sunniness. It amused me many a gray day when she was an infant, and we lived in a dangerous and dreary Mississippi. There were glowing pussy willows outside her windows and bright posters on the walls; I awakened to the sound of her singing. When I poked my head into the vibrant room, she greeted me with a toothless grin. Today, at twenty-five, a sunny optimism is still her fundamental nature, though by now I have seen its other faces of sorrow, anger, cloud, and storm.
As soon as she walks through the door we embrace. She sighs, deeply, resting her head on my shoulder. I silently thank the Universe she has returned to me once again. I am always shocked she is so tall. My cheek lies just above her heart. I am reminded of her father; he is six feet. Of my parents, my mother, especially, whom Rebecca resembles, who was five feet seven. I often exclaim, “You are so tall!” She laughs. Kisses my forehead. “Mama,” she says, indulgently. She doesn’t bother to remind me I am short. For many years she did a curious little dance when we hugged, a kind of flapping of her knees against mine. It was uniquely Rebecca’s, and endearing, if somewhat strange. She no longer does that, and I miss it. I think she dropped it while a student at Yale.
She has always been appreciative of our living spaces: as we walk from the front door through the parlors to the kitchen—in San Francisco—she notices every single thing. If there is a new painting, she stops to look at it. A piece of sculpture she’d forgotten, she’s delighted to see it again. I love how observant and enthusiastic she is, for I know that, being this way, she will always enjoy life. As I put on the pot for tea, she moves about, touching, sniffing, exclaiming, and smiling; and I settle into a motherly busyness that expresses the pleasure I anticipate from my daughter’s visit home.
Twenty-five years we’ve been together. One of my longest relationships, and the most important. As I pour our tea, I look at her and think: This completely separate person came out of my body; I have the stretch marks to prove it. I remember her turning in my womb, sucking her thumb, dragging a bedraggled pink blanket everywhere. Riding her first bicycle. At two she read her first word: “book.” By the age of three she could pack her own suitcase. I see her flying out the door of our house in Jackson, Mississippi, a straw hat on her head, on her way to Jamaica with her father and me. I remember—a dozen or so years later, also in Jamaica—Rebecca lying injured in the middle of the highway, a victim of a motorcycle accident. I remember holding her broken foot, in the car, all the way back to our hotel, her teenage boyfriend, Brian, who traveled with us, glancing anxiously back at her from the front seat.
A bonus of being Rebecca’s mother has been the love I’ve felt for each of her Significant Others.* There was Brian, a boy from the neighborhood, who was an early passion; Omari, a Kenyan from the island of Lamu, with whom Rebecca lived for several months, who used to call me in the middle of the night, when she was ill with malaria, to tell me not to worry; Bechét, the son of a friend, who seemed so much like my own child that when he and Rebecca separated, I was as sad as she was. At present there is Shawn, a smart and gentle woman who feels like a second daughter. This attachment to my daughter’s partners surprised me; no one had warned me that when they suddenly disappeared from her life, they disappeared from mine. And that I would miss them. Or that, while they shared her life, I would feel I had two children to enjoy and worry over, not one.
I have loved being Rebecca’s mom. There’s no one I’d rather hear from, talk with, listen to. Except for those times when I’ve had to face the ways in which my being her mother made life harder for her. I believed the sunniness because it was real, but also because I thought it meant she was okay. Over a decade after her father and I separated, she confronted me with the hurt, confusion, deep sorrow, and depression she experienced, losing the safety and warmth of our marriage, intolerable for us but a sanctuary for her, and told me how she’d kept that side of herself hidden, especially her grief, for fear I would not be able to accept it. Accept her. My defense was that I had done the best I could, and that I refused to be judged. What she wanted, she said, was my simple acknowledgment, a feeling acknowledgment, of her suffering. I found this very hard, for it seemed to deny the difficulty of my life as her mother, and as a working, creative person, who had tried to do the best I could by both of us, sometimes under impossible circumstances and without support.
As a child, though my parents stayed together in a marriage that lasted over forty years and seemed to continue even after my father’s death, I often felt abandoned, because both my parents worked. By the time I was ten, I was the family’s housekeeper during the week, while my mother and sister worked in town; I felt like Cinderella as I attempted to care for a household that in
cluded a sexist father and brothers who were not taught to tolerate sensitivity. However, no matter how grim my existence was, I put on a cheerful face for my mother, whose exhausted face at the end of her day—cleaning another woman’s house and caring for another woman’s children—made me weep, inwardly, just to see her. Her place of solace and renewal was her garden, into which she retreated, leaving me with my fears and worries unheard, unexpressed. This behavior, I realized, had been reenacted by me and Rebecca, for when I became a mother battered by the outside world, my “garden” was my work. Having trouble dealing with Mississippi in the Sixties? Write your way out of it. The illusion I’d indulged was that because I’d married someone very unlike my father, and because I was a writer and not a laborer/housewife, and because I was an educated woman, and because Rebecca had been spared siblings, her experience as a child—I thought of her as extremely privileged—bore no resemblance to mine. I was so wrong. Behind the brave smiles she’d given me, during her years of sadness and feelings of abandonment, had slumped the little dejected girl I knew so well, twin to the one I had also been.
This realization catapulted me into a period of intense dreaming that led to partial recall of my own childhood—I had mercifully forgotten whole years of it—and culminated in a series of paintings (both savage and sad) that took me back to my anger. An anger well hidden by depression and thoughts of suicide. When I emerged, my heart broke open to my daughter’s solitary suffering, locked in her shining, smiling ways.
“I did my best,” I was finally able to say, “and still I hurt you. I am so sorry.” My daughter is compassionate and forgiving. More than that, she is understanding. We sit, sipping our tea, and talk frankly about “the old days” of her growing up, my inadequate, perhaps, but still fierce-hearted mothering. Rebecca has made me a mother. Because of her I’ve reunited with banished bits of my own life; to know again the daughter and the mother I was, and to feel pity and empathy for both; to appreciate the admirable daughter courage that, though self-denying and therefore fore painful, still springs from a valiant solidarity with the mother who, in this world, always has too much to do and too few to help her. I’ve also discovered the world is full of mothers who’ve done their best and still hurt their daughters: that we have daughters everywhere.
* Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.
Audre’s Voice
You Thought Trees Were Green Clouds
The first time I heard Audre Lorde’s voice was in the spring of 1973. I was living in Jackson, Mississippi. She called from New York to read a statement that she and Adrienne Rich were preparing for delivery on National Book Award night. All three of us had been nominated: Audre and I suspected the winner would be Adrienne—no black woman poet had ever been selected before—but I realized as we talked that Adrienne and Audre were friends and that they were determined not to have something so extraneous as an award come between them. I firmly supported this attitude. Audre and I went over the statement, the gist of which was that whoever was selected by the National Book Award Committee would accept the award in the names of the other two, as well as in the name of all women, those who would understand the significance of our statement and those who would not. Adrienne Rich did win, and she read our statement in her strong and brilliant voice, and to this day I feel this means we all won.
Many years later, a summer in the early Eighties, I heard Audre’s voice again, this time in my small living room in San Francisco. She had been brought by Adrienne Rich and her partner, Michele Cliff, and while we chatted about the allure of the city, and how I had come to live there, Audre impressed me by her quiet scrutiny and detailed identification of the numerous rocks my daughter, Rebecca, and I had collected. What I didn’t know at the time was that Audre had once taught at Tougaloo, a small black college in Mississippi where I had also taught, that we had both been interracially married, and that, like me, she had a daughter. (Audre had a son as well.) I was to find this out later, from reading her books. These were similarities—and of course we were both black women poets who loved rocks and books—that were never claimed and the possibility of a connection that was never explored. Was all this sheer coincidence or was there a deeper kinship than either of us, at the time, could recognize?
The third time I heard Audre’s voice was in the late Eighties; I do not recall the season. I called her in St. Croix, where she was living after many years of treatment for cancer, to express my dismay at comments she had made about me in an interview. She had questioned my use of the word “womanist,” in lieu of “black feminist,” saying that it appeared to be an attempt to disclaim being feminist; she had mentioned as well that I had chosen to speak about the controversy surrounding the film The Color Purple—ongoing at the time—to a white audience, using a white medium. I pointed out to her that it is a necessary act of liberation to name oneself with words that fit; that this was a position her own work celebrated. As for The Color Purple event, I explained I had been interviewed by Barbara Christian, an African-American critic, on a hookup to dozens of universities and colleges across North America, some black, some racially mixed, some white. We talked until Audre seemed to understand my point about using the word “womanist”: more room in it for changes, said I, sexual and otherwise. More reflective of black women’s culture, especially Southern culture. As a woman of Caribbean heritage, she appreciated this point, I think. She hadn’t actually seen The Color Purple broadcast herself but had relied on someone else’s report about it. We ended our conversation amicably.
The fourth time I heard Audre’s voice, in early summer of 1995, I was sitting beside Adrienne Rich at a screening in San Francisco of the wonderful and moving film about Audre’s life, A Litany for Survival, directed by Michele Patterson. Adrienne and I had bumped into each other on the way to the theater, delighted and amazed that the three of us—Audre, Adrienne, and I—would be brought together once again. Audre’s voice, rich and firm and true, filled the air. Her Amazon beauty glowed from the screen. Seeing her with her partner, Dr. Gloria Josephs, as they lived the serene and simple life of black women close to the edge of many things, including the Caribbean sea, was an experience of infinite meaning. I felt Audre’s strength, and Dr. Josephs’s, flowing into me. There was something timeless about them, a rightness that could not be overlooked or denied. These were women who loved women, loved each other, fought Audre’s cancer together, enjoyed happy meals with friends, shared a coconut. You could see in them the ancient tradition of woman-loving being humbly and proudly carried on.
And for the last two days, as I write this in late summer of 1995, I have been listening to Audre again, reading from her work on tapes loaned me by a friend. As I listen, enthralled, I muse about why it might have bothered her that I prefer “womanist” to “black feminist.” Or why she misunderstood my effort to reach out and connect with the many people who needed a dialogue about a film based on my book. I am glad that I called immediately after reading her comments and that we talked, sister to sister. I feel this more strongly than ever, listening to her now. For it is really an honor to feel accountable to Audre; to know that it matters deeply that we at least attempted to come to an understanding directly, between ourselves.
While I was meditating this morning, thinking of Audre’s incredible legacy of courage and deep intelligence, I thought: She is clearly a fallen warrior. But immediately I thought: But how far can such a magnificent warrior fall? Not far, as we read in her books. Not far, as we hear in her voice on the numerous tapes she recorded. As she herself says about Malcolm X, I do not think I fully grasped her greatness while she lived, though I knew she was formidable. What I love about Audre Lorde is her political and emotional honesty, her passion for living life as herself, her understanding of what a privilege and joy this is. I love her patience, as she taught generations (by now) of women and men the sweet, if dangerous, fun of self-love. I love her cool stare back into the eyes of death, as cancer stalked her, and finally dragged her do
wn.
I miss her. Listening to her voice makes me want to talk back to her. That is what I am doing here.
Audre, as I listen to you, and reread your books, I learn many new and endearing things about you: That until you were four, because your vision was poor and you didn’t have glasses yet, you thought trees were green clouds. That the first woman with whom you made love didn’t particularly appeal to you until you’d actually kissed her. That you sometimes thought of your white, Jewish husband as your third child. You are actually so much yourself, as you ramble the fields and corridors of your own unique life, you make me laugh, as anything that is original and spontaneous might. Once, when I was praising you, someone referred to you as a professional lesbian, because you always implacably presented that inseparable part of yourself. I was saddened by this attempt to minimize your bravery. I always saw your behavior, hiding nothing of importance, as the ultimate expression of dignity, and it is that word, along with others—determined, spirited, powerful, loving, and grand—with which, it seems to me, you are still only partially characterized.
Dreads
It Must Be Like the Mating of Lions
It has been over ten years since I last combed my hair. When I mention this, friends and family are sometimes scandalized. I am amused by their reaction. During the same ten years they’ve poured gallons of possibly carcinogenic “relaxer” chemicals on themselves, and their once proud, interestingly crinkled or kinky hair has been forced to lie flat as the slab over a grave. But I understand this, having for many years done the same thing myself.