In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

  While Joe has graciously gone out to buy me a barbecue sandwich, I ask Mabel why she isn't as satisfied with life in the South as Joe.

  "Things are nicer here," she says, "but I don't make friends easily. All my friends are in Boston. Of course," she adds, "you have to live where you can live. And if leaving people you care about hurts, you're just expected to suffer."

  And I think, Yes, two hundred years ago you might have tried to escape to Canada, no matter what the slaves who'd already settled there wrote you of the murderous cold.

  Taylor Reese

  I have asked Taylor Reese to come by Joe's house so I can ask him how it feels to be a success.

  "I don't know how it feels," he says.

  He is the realtor from whom Joe Harris bought his house. He is also from our hometown. Rumor had it several years ago that he was becoming rich selling real estate in and around Atlanta. Living lavishly. Getting fat.

  "Nobody's buying houses much in this recession," he says, "it's been rough just keeping the business open."

  He has brought his young son with him, and I am immediately attracted to the child, who, at four years old, reminds me of his father years ago. The same deep-brown skin, the same laughing hazel eyes.

  I say: "You could have been my child."

  He says: "Uh-uh!"

  I fell in love with Taylor Reese when I was six years old. When I was fourteen and he sixteen we began going steady. Later we became engaged. Our relationship lasted for more than six years, throughout high school and well into my freshman year at college. The last time I saw Taylor was in 1965. I was in Atlanta on my way farther south to work for a summer in the Movement; he was married and about to become a father. He was not very political then, and I found it hard to relate to him.

  Now I discover he is political, but I don't want to talk about it. Or about selling houses, success, or the recession. I want to know if he is happy. I want to know if he is the same person I used to love. That he is still good-looking, though not as thin, I can see, and his after shave, as I tell him, is delicious.

  "I dream about you," I say.

  He smiles, whispers (because Joe and Mabel are in the next room), "We always have fantasies about making love with our old lovers."

  I smile back, though that is not what I meant.

  "You were my best friend for nearly seven years; we went through things together only best friends go through. I've always wanted to tell you how good I thought you were...."

  "Oh, yeah? Good at what?"

  "Not at anything in particular ..."

  He pretends to be crestfallen. We laugh.

  "But just good. I mean, you were loyal, you were gentle, you were thoughtful, loving. Good. The older I get, the more I can appreciate that. The more shameful it seems that people who once loved each other are urged to forget it. I want to know all about you. I would like to know your children. I want to know your wife. I want to know all that you've become."

  Looking at him, father, husband, businessman, grown-up, I remember things I never, now, think about. Our junior-senior prom, our Saturday-night dates, every single Saturday night for all those years. How, slowly, we grew apart, attached ourselves to other people, without trying to maintain what had been a great friendship.

  I do not tell him this, but my dreams about him are rarely erotic. He is simply, occasionally, in my dreams; perpetually slim, perpetually seventeen. Whether I am picking daisies or facing a firing squad.

  "You remain mysterious to me," I tell him. "Because I knew you so well, and now I don't know you at all." Perhaps it is the writer in me that is frustrated, hating loose ends of such personal significance.

  "I haven't changed," he says, and I am moved by the casual tenderness with which he caresses the cheek of his son, who stands behind him clinging to one leg. That gesture of nurturing affection, I recognize.

  Jackson, Mississippi, January 17, 1976

  I have a friend who hates neighborhoods. I hope I will always live in one. When my husband and I moved to Jackson to live in 1967 we were often afraid our house would be attacked. (Our interracial marriage was considered dangerous as well as illegal in Mississippi, though a U.S. Supreme Court ruling three months before we arrived struck down the statute forbidding it. And my husband, as "yet another Jew lawyer from New York," was welcomed only by the black community he served.) We bought a dog and a rifle, but we depended on our neighbors. If they saw a car full of strange white people cruising our street they called us, or stood on their porches until the car disappeared. When I drive past our old house on Rockdale Street I feel as if I'm coming home.

  "I got your room all ready for you, soon as you called," Lorene says. Lorene and her family live in the house next door to where we used to live. She works as a nurse's aide at a local hospital. Her husband, Thomas, used to own a small neighborhood grocery store, but now it is not clear what he does. I suspect he is out of work, but he is not the kind of person to offer that particular information. Thomas and Lorene remind me of people I knew growing up in the country: completely accessible and dependable, generous beyond all understanding, so black and yet so unconscious of blackness as an ideology that to visit them is to take a mental rest.

  They have three small children, two of them born during the year and a half since we moved away. Thomas is holding the baby, watching television, and attempting to repair a broken toy at the same time. Like most of the people I've talked to, he intends to vote for Jimmy Carter for President. There is a curious pride in the fact that Carter is a Southerner. "A decent, intelligent white one, for a change," everyone says. Though Thomas likes him simply because he raises peanuts, on the theory that "a man who raises peanuts for money can't help but do the country good."

  "I was in New York City once," he says in a slow, deeply accented voice. "Couldn't make sense out of it. The sun rose in the north to me the whole time I was there." He puts the baby in his walker and tosses the broken toy behind his reclining chair. "I drove through Brooklyn one time by mistake. It looked like Korea during war. How in the world do you live there?"

  "In my usual country style," I laugh. "With a big flower garden, a smoky fireplace, and a very slow mailman."

  Living in Brooklyn (though I commute to Manhattan two or three times a week) is remarkably like living in Mississippi, in fact. My Civil Rights-lawyer husband was suing racist real-estate dealers in Jackson before we left. He is now filing identical suits in Brooklyn. And, again, what makes life bearable, even happy occasionally, is the proximity of our neighbors, a multiethnic conglomerate of peacemakers in the war-torn city of New York. I lapse into the usual brownstoner's paean to my neighbor's rose gardens, the way they sweep their sidewalks, the way, in Brooklyn, anything is an excuse to plant another tree. My wonder that the people on my street, who have long since become my friends (willing to look after my house or my child on a moment's notice), are so civil and generous and clean they are nobody's idea of what New Yorkers are like.

  "Yes," says Lorene, "but what's the worse thing that's happened to you since you moved to New York?"

  And she's right to be skeptical, because something horrible has indeed happened. I approach her question, as they say here, from the long way.

  "You know how, growing up in the South you might be afraid, for good reason, of white people, but you're never afraid of blacks?"

  I remember a good illustration of this lack of fear: "When I was a little girl, some black convicts were cutting a road near our house, and one of them used to come up to the porch and ask for water. Back then convicts wore those suits like black-and-white-striped pajamas, so he really should have looked strange to us, but he didn't. We'd give him water, dinner, anything we had, and then we'd ask to walk back to the road with him. We'd go strolling up the path with this convict who was in prison for killing a man, and never once were we afraid. We believed him innocent, even if he was guilty."

  "You're sometimes scared of other black people in New York, aren't you?" asks Lorene.
r />   "For the first time in my life." (Of course I have lived in the city before; once, on the lower East Side in a building that had no door. But I was too young then to be afraid of anything.)

  For a long time we do not speak; we watch the children playing, struggling over a toy.

  "I guess that takes some getting used to," says Thomas.

  But I'll never be used to it. The bond of black kinship--so sturdy, so resilient--has finally been broken in the cities of the North. There is no mutual caring, no trust. Even the rhetoric of revolutionary peoplehood is hissed out threateningly. The endearment "sister" is easily replaced with "bitch." My fear is part grief, and if I were ever attacked or robbed by another black person I doubt I'd recover. This thought itself scares me. There is also the knowledge that just as I'm afraid of them, because I no longer know what behavior to expect, they're afraid of me. Of all the vile things that have happened to us in America, this fear of each other is to me the most unbearable, the most humiliating.

  "It's the drugs," says Lorene.

  "Those little nasty spaces they have to live in," says Thomas.

  "All those from the South," says Lorene, "probably miss their gardens."

  "Miss going fishing."

  "Miss trees."

  "Miss having people smile at them out of true affection."

  This is the most quaintly put reason, and perhaps it is the truest of all.

  Mrs. Cornelius

  I walk half a block down the street to the first place my six-year-old daughter went to school. It is a neat brick house with trees and swings in the yard.

  "How is my Rebecca?" her former teacher, Mrs. Cornelius, asks.

  She is stout and black-skinned and warm, and is exactly the sort of person I wanted my daughter's first teacher to be. The nursery school is a large, spotless room added to the house four years ago, and I gaze at the small chairs and tables almost with longing. In Brooklyn my daughter attends a fine public school, with loving teachers and friendly classmates, but it is not the same.

  "Your Rebecca is fine," I tell her. And we chat about the changes in the school since we moved away. But I have really come to thank her for what she and her school meant to me and my child.

  "When I was four years old," I tell her, "my mother could no longer take me to the fields with her when she went to work. She asked Mrs. Reynolds, the teacher in the local primary school, if she could accept me in her first-grade class. I started the very next day. Though I was the youngest person in the class I was made to feel entirely comfortable. Mrs. Reynolds taught me that school is a wonderful place, full of people who care about you and your family, and understand you and your ways, and love you for what you are.

  "When Rebecca was only one, you took her in, because being home all day with her while trying to write a novel was driving me crazy, and it will be because of you, when she grows up, that she will know the meaning of supportive affection and generosity, even from strangers."

  Mrs. Cornelius pooh-poohs the assertion that her school is the best I expect Rebecca to know, wherever she is in her life, because it was here that the culture and the curriculum matched serenely, where Rebecca learned to sing "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round" as readily as "You Are My Sunshine," where she could hear the story of Harriet Tubman read to her and see Harriet herself in her teacher's face.

  Boston, Massachusetts, January 25, 1976

  "The schools in Boston are back where they were when black folks stepped off the boat. Or were dragged, let me say. If all this racial furor keeps up, I'm sending my child south to school."

  Martha is a large cinnamon-colored woman with a pleasant voice and large, beautiful eyes. She is disabled and on welfare. She cannot leave the state. Her daughter, Doris, is fifteen, and the local schools have left her with terrible grammar and no easy comprehension of what a sentence is.

  Martha is from Georgia, and has lived in Boston for nearly ten years.

  "I always thought Boston was the best," she says. "The best place for schools, for hospitals, for intelligent, nonracist people. Well, another dream down the drain. Next to Boston today, Mississippi looks good."

  I too have always loved Boston. I used to spend summers here, working and going to the beach. Many of my relatives live in Dorchester, a predominantly black section of the city. My brothers came to the city penniless, worked hard at dirty jobs nobody else wanted, until they could afford to buy nice homes on pleasant streets. Now, though their homes are still in good shape, the neighborhoods around them are in a shambles. Because of massive unemployment in the black community, and the consequent inability to pay mortgages, houses have been abandoned by the dozen, vandals have broken out windows, torn out the plumbing, set fire to whatever they couldn't steal. Driving up once familiar Blue Hill Avenue to visit them I discovered I no longer knew where I was. Whole blocks are boarded up, trash clots the street corners, once-lovely homes have the look of having been assaulted: paint peels, doors fall off hinges, windows are stuffed with rags. The people on the street looked conquered.

  Martha worries if her daughter spends an unguarded five minutes in the street. Police protection of residents is a joke. In short, Boston could not care less about its poor black citizens: it has segregated them into a ghetto and it is only when they attempt to send their children outside the ghetto to school that they receive any attention at all.

  "But you brought Doris north to escape the South," I say.

  "And I'll send her south to escape the North."

  I wonder if America will ever have a place for poor people. It appears they are doomed to be eternal transients.

  "When I leave here," says my brother, a "Bostonite" for nearly twenty years, now looking forward to the freedom of retirement, "I intend to miss it like a toothache."

  He, too, is going back south, back to the country.

  "I want peace," he says. "Cleanliness and space around me. And just some time to be myself, before I die."

  It is an old dream, but no less unfulfilled for all its age.

  *Many names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of my friends and relatives.

  1977

  MY FATHER'S COUNTRY IS THE POOR

  The drab, monotonous postwar architecture of Helsinki concealed the tremendous vibrancy of the youth who were gathering there from all over the world.

  In the brief two weeks of the festival, there were spectacular cultural programs, mass political rallies, and countless seminars on the struggle in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East....

  The cultural presentation given by the Cuban delegation was the most impressive event of the festival. Not that they performed in the most polished, sophisticated manner, but because their performance conveyed a fiercely compelling spirit of revolution. They were the youth of a revolution that was not yet three years old. With the U.S. delegation as audience, the Cubans satirized the way wealthy American capitalists had invaded their country and robbed them of all traces of sovereignty. They presented their attack on the invaders in plays, songs, and dances. During those days, long before Women's Liberation had been placed on the agenda, we watched the Cuban militia women zealously defending their people's victory.

  It is not easy to describe the strength and enthusiasm of the Cubans. One event, however, illustrates their infectious dynamism and the impact they had on us all. At the end of their show, the Cubans did not simply let the curtain fall. Their "performance," after all, had been much more than a mere show. It had been life and reality. Had they drawn the curtain and bowed to applause, it would have been as if their commitment was simply "art." The Cubans continued their dancing, doing a spirited conga right off the stage and into the audience. Those of us openly enthralled by the Cubans, their revolution, and the triumphant beat of the drums rose spontaneously to join their conga line. And the rest--the timid ones, perhaps even the agents--were pulled bodily by the Cubans into the dance. Before we knew it we were doing this dance--a dance brought into Cuban
culture by slaves dancing in a line of chains--all through the building and on into the streets. Puzzled Finns looked on in disbelief at hundreds of young people of all colors, oblivious to traffic, flowing down the streets of Helsinki.

  --Angela Davis, writing on the 1962 World Youth Peace Festival in Helsinki, Angela Davis: An Autobiography

  PERHAPS I SAW Angela Davis at the festival. Perhaps we met. She was not ANGELA DAVIS then. Impressed by the Cubans, I too joined the conga line and danced my way through the chilly Helsinki streets. This was my first trip abroad, financed by remarkably generous women of Atlanta's black churches, who supported me and another young woman from Spelman College in our desire to see the world from another continent and demonstrate--after the United States resumed nuclear testing in 1961--our commitment to world peace.

  Although in 1962 Angela Davis and I were both eighteen years old, her political autobiography proves she was far more politically mature than I. She appears to have grasped the international nature of oppression while I could barely see beyond the struggle of black people in the small towns of Georgia. Indeed, I was so ignorant of history and politics that when I left the festival, went to Moscow and was taken on a stroll across Red Square, I could not fathom for the longest time who the Russians were queuing up to view in Lenin's tomb.

  And yet, I knew enough to know I wanted the world to survive (though, ironically, I was myself at this time illogically suicidal). I wanted peace and the abolition of the possibility of nuclear war. And I believed my job at that point (being powerless to do much else) was to begin to see other peoples not as strangers but as kin.

  My sense of the Cubans' spiritedness stayed with me. One of them gave me a copy of Fidel Castro's History Will Absolve Me, which I read in a tiny, wood-paneled compartment of a Russian train winding its way across the spectacular Crimea, and I read and cried, cried and read, as I recognized the essence of a struggle already familiar to me. In this passionate defense of the Cuban people's right to revolt against tyranny, I could not help but hear the voices of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, and, especially, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" would so closely resemble it.