“That’s not funny, Mama,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
“No, it isn’t funny, and I made it myself.”
“Are you going out somewhere on strike then?” I gave a little laugh.
“No,” she said. “I am on strike right here.”
I went to wake up Althea. I didn’t know what else to do.
Althea was older, but she mostly didn’t know anything.
Still, maybe together we would have an idea.
We went to the kitchen, and I told Althea what Mama said. “And I’m hungry,” I finished.
“So,” Althea said, “eat.” She looked at herself in the mirror, rearranging her bangs.
I stuck my head into the living room. “Mama,” I said, “are you going to make corn cakes this morning?”
“Definitely . . .” Mama said.
“Oh, good,” said Althea.
“. . . not,” Mama finished.
“Are you going to make anything at all?”
“I am going to make tracks. Nothing but tracks.”
She stood up and started slowly circling the room, carrying her sign and chanting.
“What’s Mama saying?” Althea asked.
We listened hard. It sounded like: “I don’t know, and I don’t care. Going to spend the day in my underwear.”
“Man,” I said. “Mama has gone bananas.”
Althea looked scared. “What’ll we do?” she asked.
“We’ll have to bring her to her senses,” I said. I sat down at the table and wrote a note:
Dear Mama,
Now cut that out. We will make our bed, if that’s what you want . . . right after we eat. But you should not go on strike. It could be bad for us. We are only little children and we need a mama to take care of us.
Lilly and Althea,
Your only daughters
I took the note to Mama. Mama read it. She took a pencil out of her pocket and wrote an answer. She folded it and gave it to me. In the kitchen Althea bent over my shoulder, and I unfolded the note and read what Mama had written.
“HA!” it said.
“Is that all?” asked Althea.
“That is all,” I said.
“What is the matter with Mama? I didn’t do anything.” Althea looked around, waving her hands over the dishes in the sink, her books and papers on the floor, her left boot under the table.
I said, “Neither did I. Except that night when I wouldn’t set the table, and we had to eat on the floor.”
Althea said, “I liked it. It was like a picnic. And all I did was, I was late for dinner.”
“Five times.”
“Well, that’s better than six.”
“Mama sure got tired of sending me down the street looking for you,” I said. “And I sure got tired of going too.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” I pushed the laundry basket aside and sat down. “First, let’s eat.”
We poured milk over cereal, and I spilled some, and Althea put her finger in it and wrote a bad word on the table, and I told her to stop that, and we had a very small fight right there.
Mama started chanting louder and louder and stamping her feet while she was walking around on strike.
“Man,” Althea whispered. “We better be quiet.”
So we went into our room to think about things. Well, I did. Althea went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. When she opened the door it was all steamy and a big cloud followed her out and she said, “Is Mama still— you know?”
“Yeah,” I said. Althea had her hair in this new ’do, and she asked me if I liked it.
“I don’t know,” I said, and Althea said, “You can never make up your mind about anything,” and we had another very small fight.
And then Mama started chanting again. Louder. And with new words: “I don’t care, and I don’t know. I’m on strike and ready to blow.”
I peeked out into the living room. “Wow,” I said. I turned to Althea. “She has on the green dress!”
“Oh, man,” Althea said. “This is serious.”
This green dress was one Mama got from a friend, and it was so shiny you could almost see yourself in it, and Mama had green shoes too, and you could see your face in them if you bent over, and she was leaving.
“Mama,” I said, “where are you going?”
“Out,” she said.
I was cool. “Out where?” I asked. “In case someone calls.”
“No one will call. But I left a note just in case.”
“Oh. What does it say?”
“It says I went out.” She pulled on her wooly gloves.
“That’s not telling us very much, Mama.”
“Strikers do not have to tell everything they know.”
“I don’t want to know everything you know, Mama. I only want to know where you are going.”
“I told you. I am going out. Do not worry. I’ve checked with Mrs. Watkins upstairs. She will be home all day if you need her. The icebox is full of food, and the drawer is full of socks. You’ll be okay.” She went out. And she slammed the door.
I looked at Althea. Althea looked at me. Althea looked in the mirror. We looked at television. There was nothing good on, but we watched till we couldn’t stand it any more.
“Well?” I said.
“Well, what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel lonely, and you’re right here.”
“Me too,” Althea said. “I feel lonely and awful. In my stomach, right here.” She put her hand on her chest, right where mine was hurting.
“Mama is mean,” I said.
“She is?”
“She left us, didn’t she, without a word?”
“Well, yes.”
“I don’t think she’s mean. I miss her, and I love her, and I’m going to cry.”
“No, you’re not. No crying!”
Althea’s chin quivered, and her voice shook, and she hollered at me. “Yes, I am. I’m crying. I want Mama to come home.” Big tears came out of her eyes and rolled down her face.
I said, “Here now, listen to me. We should keep busy. That will help the time pass faster.”
“No.”
“Yes it will. Before you know it Mama will come back and you’ll say, ‘Oh, Mama—back already?’”
“I will not.”
“Yes you will. Now come on.” I took Althea to our room by the hand. “Here,” I said. “Separate the clean stuff from the dirty stuff.”
“If it’s on the floor,” she said, wiping her eyes, “it’s dirty.”
“No, no. There’s a difference between floor-dirty and wearing-dirty. Now do it.”
Althea made piles of stuff as I threw it out to her, her head in the closet, like a dog digging a hole and throwing dirt up behind him. I gave Althea fifty cents and the bag of laundry and she came back for fifty more, and then she ran to the Laundromat. While she was gone I made the bed. Althea had 51 books and 6,789 crumbs in her side. I also swept the floor.
Althea came back and said that she was not busy any more and the time was not either passing fast. “It’s only two o’clock,” she said. She started quivering her chin-skin again, and I put both hands up.
“Wait!” I hollered. “Don’t do that. We’ll cook!”
Althea looked at me funny.
“You know. Like bake.”
So we did, and I made a cake, and it smelled chocolaty in the oven, and the icing was warm and sweet. Then I set the table and Althea made the tacos, and we went into the living room and sat.
At five o’clock Mama came in.
Althea jumped up. “Oh, Mama,” she said. She threw her arms around Mama. “Where’ve you been?”
“Well, I went to the library and got a book about voodoo and then to the art museum, to look at watercolors, and then I bought something at the Emporium.”
“What did you buy?”
“A new green dress.”
I stood up and went to the kitc
hen. I turned on the oven for the tacos.
Mama put on her apron and made a salad. Althea brewed tea, and I grated cheese.
Mama pulled her new green dress out of the bag. We stood around her and said how pretty it was.
And it was, too.
Nancy West
The Peach-Colored Crayon
In the summer of 1958, when I turned seven years old, my mother became active as a volunteer for an organization called the Fresh Air Fund, which provided “summer vacations” (actually a couple of weeks living with a suburban family), for inner-city children, most of whom were black. That year, we had the first of what would be several regular yearly visits from a little girl named Viola, who was exactly my age and lived in the Bronx.
Since the plethora of toys available in the stores was still a phenomenon of the future, all of the little girls in the neighborhood had the same kind of doll. My mother bought one for Viola, and we spent hours playing “house” and “school” with our dolls. My mother went to the five-and-ten store in town and bought a pattern, and sewed several identical doll dresses, one for each little girl on the block. The morning that she finished the dresses, I went with my mother to deliver them. We started at the house next door, and presented the dresses to each delighted child.
The last dress was intended for Celeste, who lived across the street. Her family had moved into the neighborhood only recently, so I didn’t know her very well yet.
When Celeste’s mother opened the door, she just stared at us. My mother started to explain about the doll dress, and held it out to Celeste, who reached for it eagerly. But before she could take it, her mother pushed her hand away. “She doesn’t need it,” Celeste’s mother said firmly. My mother was puzzled. But Celeste’s mother glared at us. “You have no business bringing a Negro child into this neighborhood. ”She slammed the door, leaving my mother and me speechless on the doorstep.
I suddenly realized that Celeste’s mother was talking about Viola. It occurred to me just then that somewhere along the line, I had stopped thinking of Viola as “a Negro child.” The other kids and I had been somewhat suspicious of her when she first arrived, since none of us had ever met anyone who looked like her before. But Viola had certain talents and abilities that quickly endeared her to us: she knew how to braid, and she could jump rope better than anyone on the block, including the two fourth-grade girls who lived at the end of the street. By the second or third day that she was with us, Viola was just one of the kids. But Celeste’s mother didn’t know her the way we did, so to her, Viola was just “a Negro child.”
But that same afternoon was my friend Karen’s birthday party, so I all but forgot about the incident with Celeste’s mother. We wasted no time trying out all of the new toys Karen had received as birthday gifts. One of the most intriguing was a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. This was the top-of-the-line, most expensive box of crayons there was, the one with the sharpener built right into the box, and we were all envious. Karen brought the precious crayons and stacks of paper out into the backyard, and we crowded around the picnic table, perusing the colors. We marveled over “burnt umber” and “periwinkle,” and the subtle difference between “blue-green” and “green-blue.”
But when we came to the crayon named “flesh,” I looked at Viola. I knew what the word “flesh” meant, and I knew that the name was wrong, but the other kids paid no attention. After all, they didn’t know Viola the way I did. Viola hadn’t lived in their houses, hadn’t shared their bedrooms. And she hadn’t run barefoot on the beach with them, and discovered, as Viola and I did one afternoon, that the soles of her feet were exactly the same color as the sun-browned tops of mine.
I told my mother about this misnamed crayon. “It’s not fair!” I complained. My mother agreed, and, always the social activist, she suggested that I write a letter to the Crayola Company. With my mother’s help, I carefully wrote the letter out in my very best handwriting, addressed the envelope, and put on a stamp.
What I wrote in that letter was the truth, as I saw it, the summer that I turned seven: that “flesh” can’t be just one color, because my “flesh” and Viola’s “flesh” were different all over our bodies, except for the soles of her feet and the tops of mine. I knew that the name of this crayon wasn’t fair to Viola. I knew this because we were friends, and we played and ate and slept and swam together.
I never received a reply to my letter.
Viola came and stayed with us for four or five more summers, until she got too old for the program. My mother stayed in touch with her and her family for a few more years after that, but eventually we lost contact. I grew up and moved away and had my own family. I don’t know what became of Viola.
But when my own daughter turned five, she had a birthday party, and someone gave her a box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. It was the top-of-the-line, most expensive box there was, the one with the sharpener built right into the box. After the party, after I had gathered up all the torn wrapping paper and thrown away the paper plates full of melted ice cream, I opened up the box of crayons. I looked through the box until I found the crayon I wanted, and I pulled it out of the box and held it up. The label read “Peach.”
I don’t know when, or why, the Crayola Company changed the name of that crayon. And I don’t know if my letter had anything to do with that. But I like to think that it did. After all, they say that you can’t really understand another person unless you walk a mile in their shoes.
Or run on the beach together, with bare feet.
Phyllis Nutkis
7
MOTHERS
AND DAUGH-
The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. Like father, like son. Like mother, like daughter.
Anonymous
The Bike Trip
My mother’s life was one huge story, and a major chapter was “the bike trip.” In 1956, my mother, June, rode a three-speed Schwinn from New York City to California, not because she wanted to be a wild girl, not because she wanted to prove anything, but because she wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.
As a child, I’d sit on my mother’s lap and say, “Tell me the stories.”
And she’d start with the beginning: about how she couldn’t afford a plane ticket or a train ticket to see the country, so she decided to ride her bike. About her girlfriends thinking she was crazy; girls didn’t do those things; it was unsafe. About convincing a Girl Scouting friend, Teri Foster, to ride across with her. “We didn’t really think we’d do it, riding bicycles across the country! But then Schwinn sponsored us, and then the Today Show heard about us, and then we had to. It was a lark, really, something to make my friends laugh, and now here we were, two girls on bicycles wanting to ride to California.”
“What did you have to pack?” I said, leaning back into her.
“I didn’t know what I’d need, so I brought along a little of everything.” And she’d describe how she packed a bathing suit, cocktail dress, high heels, pearls, some shorts and shirts, red lipstick and a Bible. “A bathing suit for hot days, an old wool sweater for cold and always my saddle shoes because they were the best. They held up in the heat, stayed warm in the rain and still looked nice at the end of the day.”
She still has them.
“But why’d you bring a cocktail dress and high heels?” I asked, and this would always make her laugh, make her pull out red lipstick from her shirt pocket and smear it on her lips.
“Back then, you couldn’t go out to eat in shorts or sandals. You dressed for dinner, and we were invited out quite often. By cowboys, businessmen, but usually preachers from the local churches. We were celebrities.”
There was no talk about fear or worries about the unknown. She simply got on her bike and rode. She didn’t have an itinerary, no specific route, other than pointing her bike west and riding.
“They didn’t have motel chains back then, so we just asked farmers or preachers, mayors or policemen if we could sleep in city parks, front yards or barns.” The to
wns they passed through called them “celebrity girl cyclists” and they were given keys to cities, parades and new tires. “Sometimes we got to sleep in an extra bedroom of a kind person, but usually we requested camping under the stars. We had our sleeping bags and always made a campfire. We invited anyone who passed by to sing Girl Scout songs with us.”
She sang in hoedowns in Colorado, and was a chambermaid in the Grand Canyon “when money got low. I didn’t have a credit card, and there were no ATMs back then for money.” And she talked about the West being some place dyed in red and rock, with sunsets that held the sky.
My favorite part was watching her face when she talked about California. “We finally got there; we were set up on blind dates. Guess who my date ended up being?” she’d always ask, and I’d always answer loudly, “Dad!” They were married three months later.
I came along six years after that.
And always, I craved being inside her stories. I wished to run my fingers over the edges of the Rockies, along the glowing yellow fields of Iowa, wished to splash inside the ponds of New England under stars. I wanted to touch her life, know her inside this special place she called her “adventure of a lifetime.”
As I grew older, I stopped sitting on my mother’s lap, listening to the old stories of her three-speed, her bicycle bell, the steak and Manhattan dinners in her cocktail dress, that ride across the country. I had other things on my mind, places to go, people to see and didn’t have time to listen to her past. I moved away from home after college and traveled in my Chevy Malibu, this lime green dream of a car that held six and went fast, always on the highway. I had my life, or so I thought, until trips back home were filled with worries: Dad with another stroke, Mom counting her blood pressure pills, organizing doctor visits and falling asleep in her old rocking chair, the one that held us together when I was a child. I’d go into the garage where her dusty bike leaned and ring its rusty bell, the old flag still hung lopsided from the handlebars.