Until the end, my mother never discussed her way of being. She avoided explaining the impetus behind her emigration from Barbados to New York. She avoided explaining that she had not been motivated by the same desire for opportunity which drove most female immigrants but instead had followed a man whom she had known in Barbados as her first and only husband’s closest friend—a man who eventually became my father. She was silent about the fact that she had left her husband, by whom she had two daughters, after he returned to Barbados from the Second World War addicted to morphine, and that, having been married once, she refused to marry again. She was also silent about the fact that my father, who had grown up relatively rich in Barbados, had emigrated to America with his two sisters and his mother—women with whom he continued to live, throughout my childhood, in a brownstone in Brooklyn. My mother never discussed how she would visit my father in his room there, at night, and afterward sneak back to her own home and her six children, four of them produced by her union with my father: two girls and two boys. She never explained the bond that they shared, a bond so deep and mysterious that we children felt forever excluded from their love, and forever diminished by it.
My mother also never told me whether she recognized or understood where my fascination with her would take me, a boy of seven, and eight, and ten: to a dark crawl space behind her closet, where I put on her hosiery one leg at a time, my heart racing, and, over the hose, my jeans and sneakers, so that I could have her, what I so admired and coveted, near me, always. As a Negress—for that was what she called herself—my mother was powerful in her silence, and for years she silently watched me, her first son, try to emulate her forbearance. She avoided discussing what that forbearance was worth.
For years before and after her death, I tried to absorb my mother by referring to myself as a Negress, and by living the prescribed life of an auntie man, which is what Barbadians call a faggot. I socialized myself as an auntie man long before I committed my first act as one. I had four older sisters, and I also wore their clothes when they were not home; the clothes relieved some of the pressure I felt at being different from them. My mother responded to the Negress inside me with pride and anger: pride because I identified with women like herself; anger because I identified with women at all. When I was five or six years old, we were sitting on a bench in the subway station near our building, and seated not far from us was a woman my mother knew from the neighborhood, with her teen-age son. My mother did not speak to this woman, because she did not approve of the woman’s son, who, like me, was a Negress. Unlike me, he dressed the part. He was wearing black shoes with princess heels, flesh-colored hose through which dark hairs sprouted, a lemon-yellow shift with grease stains on it, a purple head scarf, and bangles. He carried a strapless purse, from which he removed a compact and lipstick, so that he could dress his face, too. As my mother looked at that boy, she brushed my eyes closed with the back of her hand, and she hissed the words “auntie man.” I’ve never known whether she was referring to both of us.
Did my mother call herself a Negress as a way of wryly reconciling herself to that most hated of English colonial words, which fixed her as a servant in the eyes of Britain and of God? I don’t think so; she was not especially interested in Britain or in history. My mother was capricious in her views about most things, including race. As a West Indian who lived among other West Indians, she did not feel “difference”; in her community, she was in the majority. She dropped her West Indian accent a few years after she became a United States citizen, in the early nineteen-fifties. She didn’t like people who capitalized on being exotic. She didn’t like accents in general. She lived in America and wanted to sound like an American, which she did, unless she was angry. She was capable of giving a nod toward the history of “injustice,” but only if it suited her mood. I think my mother took some pleasure in the embarrassment that white and black Americans alike felt when she called herself a Negress, since their image of her, she thought, was largely sentimental, heavy with suffering. When my mother laughed in the face of their deeply presumptuous view of her, one of her front teeth flashed gold.
My mother’s lack of interest in politics freed her mind for other things, like her endless ill health, which she treated as though it were a protracted form of suicide. She first became sick when my father fell in love with someone else and her thirty-year love affair with him ended. The difference between my mother and my father’s new girlfriend was this: the new woman consented to live with my father while my mother had not. (After my mother refused to marry him, in the early fifties, my father never asked her again.) When my mother became ill with one thing and another, I was eight; by the time she died, I was twenty-eight. I was so lonely knowing her; she was so busy dying.
My mother was always polite, even at the end. For a long time, she imposed her will by not telling anyone what was really wrong; this kept everyone poised and at her service. She would not speak of the facts that contributed to her dying. She was quietly determined, functional, and content in her depression; she would not have forfeited her sickness for anything, since it had taken her so many years to admit to her need for attention, and being ill was one way of getting it. When diabetes cost her one of her legs, she said politely, “Oh, I’m dying now.” When they removed a lymph node in her neck as a test for something, she said politely, “Oh, I’m really dying now.” When her kidneys failed and a machine functioned in their place, she was still polite. She said, “Well, I’m dying.” When she lost the vision in one eye, when, eventually, she could not breathe without effort, when her blood pressure was abnormally high and her teeth were bad and she could not urinate or take sugar in her tea or eat pork or remember a conversation, she remembered these two things: that she was polite and that she was dying.
One of my aunts told me that my mother encountered my father’s girlfriend once, on the street, and took a good look at her. She saw a certain resemblance between herself and this woman: they were both homely but spirited, like Doris Day. It was clear to my mother that, like her, this woman would be capable of withstanding my father’s tantrums, his compulsive childishness, and his compulsive lying. I think the resemblance my mother saw between herself and my father’s new girlfriend shattered any claim to originality that she had. In the end, I think my mother’s long and public illness was the only thing she experienced as an accomplishment, as something separate from her roles as mother, lover, Negress. And it was.
Certain facts about my mother’s religious, cultural, culinary, sexual, and literary interests: She attended Sunday services at St. George’s Episcopal Church, a Gothic structure in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, surrounded by brownstones, vacant lots, and children. The congregation was largely West Indian, and was judgmental of my mother because she had chosen not to marry my father, while she did choose to have his children. Many of the women in that congregation had had children out of wedlock as well, but they judged my mother just the same, because she wasn’t bitter about not being married. At St. George’s, my mother sometimes sang, in her sweet, reedy voice, “I Surrender All,” her favorite hymn.
My mother wanted to be different from her own mother, who had always been a bitter woman, but she avoided contradicting my grandmother when she said things like “Don’t play in the sun. You are black enough”—which is what my grandmother said to me once. My mother attempted to separate herself from her parents and siblings by being “nice,” which they weren’t. An early memory of this: My mother’s family sitting in a chartered bus as it rained outside during a family picnic; my mother, alone, in the rain, cleaning up the mess as my great-aunt said, “Marie is one of God’s own,” and my heart breaking as the bus rocked with derisive laughter.
She loved the foods of her country: sous, blood pudding, coconut bread, cou-cou. She enjoyed her own mother most when her mother prepared those foods for her on special occasions: birthdays, Christmas, wakes. She herself was a mediocre cook who pretended to be better at it than she was by preparing elaborate meals from French cookbooks. I learned to cook in reaction to the meals she prepared.
She was in love with my father until she died; they spoke every day on the telephone. They amused and angered each other. She called him Cyp, which was short for Cyprian, his given name. When he said her name, Marie, he said it in a thick Bajan accent, so that the “a” was very flat. In his mouth, her name sounded like this: “Ma-ree.”
My mother was bright and had a high-school education, but she saw clearly that her passport to the world was restricted. Over the years, in Brooklyn, she worked as a housekeeper, as a hairdresser in a beauty salon, and as a teacher’s assistant in a nursery school. My mother told one story about being a servant among the Jews when she was a young woman and new to America. With other women her age, she would go to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and wait on a particular street corner for people—mostly Jews—to drive by in their big cars, from which they would look out to see which of the women seemed healthy and clean enough to do day work in their homes. “We called ourselves Daily Woikers,” my mother said, in a Yiddish-American accent, laughing.
She called the hair salon where she worked “the shop.” It was frequented by Negresses. I went there after school. At the shop, my mother wore a white smock. She straightened hair and rubbed bergamot into women’s scalps. She listened to women talk all day. After a while, their problems became pretty general to her. People complained, no matter what; she learned that for some people complaining was a way of being. After a while, she didn’t respond to her customers’ problems; she knew that they didn’t really want a solution. The more my mother heard, the more impersonal she became in her support and encouragement of everyone. She addressed most of those women as “honey,” because, after a while, she couldn’t remember their names.
We lived, for many years, in a two-story brownstone with a narrow stairway, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The Schwartzes, the elderly Jewish couple who owned the building, lived below us. Sometimes my brother and I would watch television with the Schwartzes. I marvelled at the orderliness of Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz’s home, the strange smells, and the candles that they burned on Friday nights. I loved them. I wanted to be a Jew. I told Mrs. Schwartz that I wanted to be a Jew, but how? One day, when I was with my mother, Mrs. Schwartz stopped her on that narrow stairway to tell her that I wanted to be a Jew. I was ten. My mother looked at me. She told Mrs. Schwartz that I wanted to be a writer. Shortly afterward, Mrs. Schwartz gave me a gift. It was a typewriter that had belonged to her son, the Doctor.
My mother was not ambitious for her children, but she was supportive of their ambitions. After I decided to be a writer, my mother gave me writing tablets at Christmas; she also gave me books to read that she bought at the Liberation Bookshop, on Nostrand Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The books were almost always novels or collections of poems, and were almost always written by women. She gave me Alice Childress’s “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich,” and “Maud Martha,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” by Betty Smith. I felt just like the heroine, Francie, who dreams of being a writer and longs to see the world but can’t imagine how she’s ever going to get out of Brooklyn to do so.
My mother spent many hours alone with me, in the dark, in her bedroom, listening to me lie. Somehow, she knew that most writers became writers after having spent their childhood lying. Or perhaps she didn’t know that at all. But she was extremely tolerant of my lies. And she was not impatient with my pretensions. When, at thirteen or fourteen, I began wearing a silk ascot to school, and took to writing by the light of a kerosene lamp like my then hero, Horace Greeley, the famous nineteenth-century journalist, she didn’t say a word.
My mother loved “Crime and Punishment.” She read it over and over again while locked in the bathroom. Her second-favorite novel was Paule Marshall’s “Brown Girl, Brownstones,” the story, in part, of a Brooklyn girl named Selina who is of Bajan descent. My mother passed this book on to me, and I read it eleven times. I was eleven years old. I read the author’s biography on the book flap, and looked her name up in the Manhattan telephone directory. When Paule Marshall answered the telephone, I told her, in a rush, how much my mother loved her novel, and that we did not live very far from where Selina had grown up. Paule Marshall was surprised and pleased; she made her son pick up the extension and listen in. Later, when I told my mother what I had done, she looked at me in amazement. She knew that I had telephoned Paule Marshall for both of us.
My brother and I didn’t like Barbados. In the summers, we were sent there, with packages of clothes and food as gifts, but we preferred to imagine the island through my mother’s memories of it. In 1979, when I was seventeen, I read a story by a writer from the West Indies. In the story, “Wingless,” by Jamaica Kincaid, I read this description of the Caribbean Sea and its surroundings: “The sea, the shimmering pink-colored sand, the swimmers with hats, two people walking arm in arm, talking in each other’s faces, dots of water landing on noses, the sea spray on ankles, on overdeveloped calves, the blue, the green, the black, so deep, so smooth, a great and swift undercurrent, glassy, the white wavelets.” This story changed everything for me. After reading it, I read it aloud to my mother, and when I finished she said, “Exactly.”
As a pubescent Negress, I spent a great deal of time in thrall to the sister who was eleven years older than I was; she continued to live at home for years after our other sisters had left. She was the only college student I knew. She created a world in her bedroom that resonated with style and intellectual possibility. She was beautiful: she had long legs and a long neck and shoulder-length black hair that she wore in a chignon. She wore straight skirts and cardigans and flats. She had many lovers, which later prompted one of our other sisters to say, “She’s so nasty. Like a dog.” In her room, we danced to Dionne Warwick singing “Don’t make me over,” as my sister began getting dressed for the evening. When she asked for my advice on what to wear, I knew she was pleased with me. Sometimes, in a sudden fit of pique, she would demand to know what I was anyway, hanging around a girl’s bedroom.
As I grew up, it became increasingly clear that one of the reasons for my sister’s occasional sharp annoyance with me was this: she wanted to be able to see herself in contrast to me. All the women in my family wanted me to become a black male for the same reason: they wanted to define themselves against me. I tried to please them, because I adored them. I thought that being an auntie man was a fair compromise, but it wasn’t.
When I was thirteen, I went to a party given by one of my mother’s relatives. I didn’t know why my mother did not attend the party until I returned home and told her about it. We were standing in the kitchen, and I told her how I had met a man there who had asked after her. I described him: bald head, a square figure, deep-dark skin. I met him on the stoop of the house where the party was. I remembered everything about the meeting, and spoke of it excitedly. I didn’t tell my mother about the man’s charm, and my attraction to his charm. Nor did I describe the orange sun setting behind his large brown head; rubbing my moist hands against the stoop’s bumpy concrete; admiring his graceful saunter as he walked away. My mother’s face became hard when I mentioned his first name, Eldred. She would not look at me when she said, “That was the man I was married to. That was my husband.” The air was still between us; it became a wall. I knew I was a Negress because of the jealousy I felt at her having rejected someone I wanted. I glanced at my mother; her face, her body, told me that she had been where I wanted to be long before I began imagining it. We stood in the kitchen for quite some time. I saw myself in my mother’s eyes: a teen-age girl, insecure, jealous, and vengeful.
Like my sister, I grew up to lie with first one man and then another, or, more accurately, to bend over one man and then another in parked cars that lined the piers on the West Side Highway. Until the end, I avoided recounting these facts to my mother. I avoided explaining the impetus that propelled me to leave her home in Brooklyn for the piers on the West Side Highway. I avoided explaining that I had been motivated by the same desire and romantic greed that had propelled her to move from Barbados to New York. I avoided explaining that when I sat in parked cars with one man and then another, I felt closer to her experience of the world than I ever did in her actual presence. I avoided mentioning that the men I seduced were almost always white, and that, with my mouth tentatively poised over another man’s mouth, I sometimes thought, I am not my mother; this is my story. I sometimes fantasized, If she knew I was performing this act, this gesture, she would perhaps die, releasing me to live fully in the moment. I never told her how I met other Negresses like myself, the boy children of women who had emigrated to New York from islands like Jamaica, Cuba, Antigua, Anguilla, Barbados, Barbuda. And we never mentioned to one another how, when we left those cars and bars in our soiled bluejeans, and after the long subway ride home to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx, we were met at the kitchen door by our mirror image—Mom, a Negress, who rarely recounted anything at all about her life.
My mother died in Barbados, our ancestral home. Before she left New York for the last time, I did not visit her; this was only one of many leave-takings, and we could not bear to say goodbye. Neither did she say goodbye to her sister, who was to return to Barbados later, after my mother’s death. “I knew she wouldn’t come back to New York, I knew she would die here,” my aunt told me when I went there to see where my mother had died. My visit meant nothing to my aunt. She is unsentimental—a family trait. She said several things when I went to visit her in her ugly house surrounded by coconut trees on a pitiful plot of land. She said, “Your mother was so angry at the end.” She asked, “When did you know you were going to be an auntie man?” She asked, “When will you write a story about me?” And I did not ask myself, “Am I not a Negress, too? Will I ever be capable of writing a story about any of us?” In that ugly house in Barbados as the trade winds blew, my aunt was telling me that I would. ♦
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