Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (8 page)

One day, Mama Lela said something peculiar, something I couldn’t quite understand. It made her laugh, and when I seemed confused, she said another thing that didn’t make sense, and she laughed at that, too. Later, when I asked my mom what Mama Lela had meant, she told me that sometimes when people get to be very old they experience something called
senility
, which makes them do and say things that don’t always make sense. Mom didn’t say that Mama Lela
was
senile, only that older people sometimes brush up against senility from time to time, like it was a wall of wet paint. “Some folks call it the Second Childhood,” Mom had said, and those words, in a single flash, made me trust Mama Lela. I felt comfortable around her, even when she said cryptic things that made her giggle to herself. It meant that from time to time she was a child, just like me.

I stayed indoors most days, sitting on the floor or reading in one of the chairs by the record player. I imagined my cousins playing in the woods on their visits to this place, but the woods were yet another unknown for me, so dark and alive. I worried that a wolf or a bear would find me there and carry me away. Even when Mom and Mother went out visiting or shopping, I stayed inside with Mama Lela, not bothering to decipher too much of what she said. I was afraid. Not for me but for my mom out there on those
country roads. I can see very clearly now what my fear was built of, but I couldn’t have put it into words easily then. Partly, I was afraid of the kinds of dangers I sensed must be lurking out there. The wolves and the bears that lived in my mind’s woods, yes, but what I really feared were the dangers that had to do with people. I was afraid of having my mom pulled out of the car by an old country sheriff, the kind I’d seen in movies, who would call her
gal
instead of
ma’am
, and who’d tell her to
git along
, warning her not to go looking for trouble. The kinds of human harm that sat just outside of the frame of those stories of the long-ago days down south, just beyond the edges of Daddy Herbert’s woods, just around the wrong bend. The terrible threats to people like us, threats of violence and scorn. Things people did to people they didn’t view as people. Murders. Lynchings. Even just a few words spat out with the right kind of force. It’s what the history I already knew had convinced me that our chapter of the past was built on, and what I tried to keep separate, for my own protection, from my view of my parents as children of the South, what I made an effort to avoid all reminder of, even if it forced me to steer clear of whole regions of the past for fear of catching a passing glimpse. Was all of that gone, along with the smokehouses and the acres of cotton, or had I just been lucky enough this trip to avoid it?

I was afraid of something else, too. Mother was sixty, and she still worked a little, cleaning for a family I surmised must have been white. The kids, one of them was named Butch, called her by her first name (or a version of it:
Ma-gree
, probably from Marguerite, which wasn’t exactly her name but was close enough, he and his parents must have reckoned). She cleaned for them and looked after the kids, which I figured made her their servant. If Mother were to visit them and bring my mother along with her, I was afraid it would make my mother into a servant, too, in their eyes.
I didn’t want that, didn’t want anyone to think they could send her chasing after their children or tidying up their mess. I was scared, whenever she left, of this threat and the other, and in the long, still afternoons while she was out (afternoons that were dark, because the curtains were always drawn just as the day was getting hottest), I sat trying to play patiently beside Mama Lela, who rocked in her chair beside me, laughing and spitting into her Folger’s can and talking to someone who may or may not have been me.

Because I never asked, I did not know if my mom knew how to steer completely clear of those kinds of dangers, if there was a woman inside the woman I knew who spoke the language of racial deference, or if she was, instead, fearless of standing her ground and staring down her opponent. I didn’t even know if the word
opponent
set up the right way of thinking about it; was the South really, after all, just a simple matter of wrong versus right? I did know that my mom knew how to speak with the elderly black men and women who came out onto their porches to greet us or who asked us in for glasses of water or iced tea. She called them
sir
and
ma’am
, and she offered to attend to them, even in their own homes, fetching them pillows for their backs or stools for their feet. Being beside her when she was like that, I could make out a version of her young self, but I also saw how that respect for her elders was alive in the mom I knew at home in California, the one who took me with her on visits to the convalescent home, where we chatted with old ladies whose children were busy with other things.

One evening Mom and Mother came home with bags of groceries, fixings for a big meal and a fresh cake or two. My uncle Slade was on his way home from college for a visit, and we were going to sit up and listen to his stories. I was excited. My mother told me her brother was “crazy,” but she said it in a way I knew meant he was funny, a jokester, like other of my uncles, someone
who could rouse everyone to laughter. Slade, who was near Dinah in age, maybe a bit older, maybe a bit younger, was going to be successful; everyone knew it and said it and spoke about him with unfettered pride. I thought of him as someone I’d like, someone like my brothers, for whom I felt a similar admiration.

Slade was small, only about as tall as my mom. He had a big, strong voice and my mom’s broad smile. That night after dinner, sitting on the couch that would unfold into his bed for the night, he’d told story after story about his life at school, stories about growing up in Leroy, stories I didn’t understand but that I laughed at anyway, just glad for the chance to lean back into my mother’s arms full of ease and mirth. His stories triggered other stories, too, even ones that were about his brothers and sisters who weren’t there with us. It was as if this small group of siblings coming together—three of thirteen—had brought the whole family into being, just like Jesus said in the Bible,
Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them
.

In one story, the schools had recently been integrated, and the black school that my aunts and uncles and mom had attended quite happily was disbanded. The teachers who knew them because they lived side by side as neighbors or even family were shuffled to other places, and the children were bused off to schools where for the first time they’d be learning alongside whites. It had meant buying one pair of shoes for each of the school-aged children, kids used to running around outdoors in bare feet, no matter the weather. Once, my uncle Carl made the mistake of leaving his oxfords on the heater overnight, and when he woke up in the morning, the rubber soles had melted. (I pictured them warped and liquidy, just like what had happened to Dinah’s record of “Le Freak.”) He’d had to squeeze his feet into a Sunday pair belonging to his sister Willa.

Uncle Slade remembered how, much later, after most of my aunts and some of my uncles had moved up North to New York, his brother Samuel had been threatened by an acquaintance. It probably had to do with money, but whatever the cause, my aunt Gladys caught wind of it and tried to set things straight for her brother by getting her hands on a pair of brass knuckles and showing up at the man’s door wielding them.

Stories that, in another context, could have been viewed as sad or dangerous were occasions for joy on that night. And it was true that they somehow brought the rest of the family, even Daddy Herbert, back together.

“I saw me a pretty lady,” Uncle Slade said once my eyes started growing heavy. He was mimicking a comedian on the circuit down in Louisiana, where he was in college. “I saw me a pretty lady,” he continued, “and I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna give that pretty lady a rose, and then I’m gonna
sock it to her.
’ ” It made no sense to me, but the music of it, the way those last four words kicked up in volume and dipped down in pitch, once again picked us all up and whisked us into laughter. My mom said it, too, later that night in reference to another story, “So why don’t you go on and
sock it to her
?” And we’d laughed again. My laughter was built upon visceral bliss; I still had no idea what the joke meant or why it was funny. It just caught me up in the glee everybody else’s understanding had tipped them into. It felt good to be awake and accompanied at this hour, an hour when I might otherwise have been lying in bed struggling to relax into sleep. I tried my hand at using the phrase, too, though I got mixed up along the way and said
“chuck it”
instead of
“sock it,”
and I suppose the error of what I’d said was funny in its own way, and it got everyone laughing all over again.

It was late when our laughter died down, after midnight,
though the sky had been pitch-dark with just the pinprick light of stars for hours. Waiting for Mom to brush her teeth and prepare for bed, I studied the pattern on the quilt in our room, trying to take it in as if my own story were stitched into its blocks. And as I breathed in the smells of the place, still strange, though less so by then, it struck me. There was so much I would never understand, so much that would never belong to me, not really. There were even parts of my mother that I might never fully get a handle on—aspects that had come to life upon her return here and that would go dormant again once we were back in California—but wasn’t there a way to see all of that as a good thing, to take it as proof that we are, all of us, made up of near infinite facets? It wasn’t a calming thought, but at that very moment, happy from the evening, and with my mother all to myself again for the night, I wasn’t in need of assurances.
Chuck it to me
. We were one day closer to leaving, and I had one very small thing to carry away with me.

A HOME IN THE WORLD

S
chool days, I’d wake up to eggs and toast, and after my mother had tied my hair in one or two or three ribboned pigtails, I’d walk the few blocks up Cement Hill Road with Benji and Bryan, neighbor boys in my second-grade class at Amy Blanc Elementary School. I was proud to be setting out on my own, but occasional rumors of far-off kidnappings—children who had been lured into strange cars and never seen again—made me cautious. “Walk straight to school,” my parents would tell me. “Stay together and don’t go off with anyone, no matter what they say.” Once, when a city worker spreading a fresh layer of asphalt onto the pavement whistled in my direction, I challenged Benji and Bryan to an impromptu race, just in case the man was scheming to abduct us. I was jittery and out of breath when we made it to the playground but also relieved, as if a tremendous threat had been cleverly averted. It wasn’t until I sat down at my desk that I realized the man had merely been trying to alert me to a bookmark that had fallen from my open schoolbag.

While I was at school, my mother taught basic reading, math, and a class called Life Skills to men and women at the local adult school two miles away in the old part of town. It was the first job I’d ever known her to have, and the idea of her as somebody else’s teacher rendered her inscrutable, someone who no longer fit easily within the cage of my mind. She had held down a job teaching
grade school years before I was born, but I only ever thought of her as mine, ours, snug in the center of our home, cooking for us, loving us, keeping us clothed and fed. It’s not that I thought she was incapable of more; I’d just assumed that the world was of interest to her only when it crossed into our private sphere, a view that had likely been shaped by my own seven-year-old sense of what mattered most. Still, if Mom had been a teacher once upon a time, it meant that she had belonged to more than just us. It meant that she had held sway over classrooms of boys and girls, captivating them or leaving them feeling restless and bored. It meant that she had caused them to smile or struggle or groan at the prospect of some new challenge and that she was expert enough to sit over their work with a red pen, filling the margins with her praise and censure.

The very next thing that entered my mind, when I thought of her like this, was a feeling of alarm. Alarm mixed with the most futile kind of retroactive fear. What if the boys and girls all those years ago hadn’t liked her? What if they’d called her names behind her back or defied her outright? I longed to protect my mother from whatever pranks and fits those kids had been capable of, but of course I was too late, and so it was a relief when my thoughts returned to the present. At least in the here and now, I’d be able to see for myself if she was happy or sad, proud or harried. My mind was also eased by the fact that her students this time around were grown-ups. A grown-up would never misbehave the way a kid would.

I tried to imagine my mother standing at the head of a classroom on her first day, writing her name—
Mrs. Smith
—on the blackboard as a way of saying,
Let’s begin
, to the roomful of new faces. I envisioned her walking up and down the aisles of desks, making sure that each head was properly bowed over the task at
hand. Of course she was a lovely teacher, gentle, kind, and playful just beneath the surface. I never knew exactly how to imagine her adult students then, those men and women hungry for reading and math, eager to grow and to change. I see them now as nervous but trying to seem merely hardened. I see them as men and women who were poor, wanting to stand up finally to their own past resignations and defeats, to get out from under the fact that they’d never been taught to claim a genuine space for themselves or envision a big enough goal. I can see them now in a way I couldn’t then, and still I wonder how they saw her. Did she put them off, the way she’d put that woman named Maggie off, as impossibly upright? Or was there someone in whom she inspired devotion, someone for whom the sound of her voice or the smell of her perfume was all it took to make a problem go away?