Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Despite the sun shining from my face, my parents divorced soon after, and my father returned to West Africa. We haven't seen him since.

  Before we could afford to buy the Norse legends and African folktales that peopled my childhood, my mother wrote stories set in mythic African lands and illustrated them with her own watercolor paintings of wise queens and beautiful warrior princesses in pastel tunics. Every morning and evening she read aloud to me, creating different voices for each character. Sometimes, if she was tired from teaching, she lost a voice, and I would bolt upright, protesting. “That's not the right voice!”

  “No?” she would say, blinking rapidly as she does when she's trying to think. “Was it higher?” She would try again. “Dear Prince Amalu—”

  My eyes would widen in horror.

  “Lower? Ahem, Dear Prince—”

  “No!” I'd wail, hands trembling like leaves.

  “Okay, pause for a minute.” She would lean forward and enact her usual ritual—a sip of tepid water masquerading as tea, a quick blow of her nose, the unwrapping of a half-sucked cough drop, and the popping it into her mouth.

  Throughout all this, I would squirm. How could she take so long? How could she have forgotten this character who'd been living with us for days?

  “Okay, let's see.” She'd clear her throat and begin anew.

  Not until she recaptured the correct voice—or invented a new one close enough to placate me—could I resume my curl in her lap, accept the narrative. Her own tale, however, she delivered in a detached, matter-of-fact tone.

  “Who was at your wedding?” I'd ask periodically, hungry for the details of my origins. Some of my father's African classmates? What about her college roommate, the one who borrowed her nicest outfit, a sophisticated black cocktail dress with tiny buttons, and never returned it, despite my mother's increasingly bitter letters?

  “Oh, no one really,” she'd answer, glancing up from Report from a Chinese Village. “Just a pal of your poppie's and his girlfriend. I can't even remember their names.”

  I don't understand it. For years she labored to create the definitive family history, spending hours hunched over an old manual typewriter, clacking out family names and places and dates. She drew floor plans of childhood houses she remembered her mother and aunt describing. She pored over albums and scrapbooks and boxes of photographs. As with her anecdotes about my father, she was reductionist, a perfectionist. She chose photographs the same way she chose her memories—only the most representative and best preserved. History in her hands was finite. I wonder why major family events like my grandparents' wedding got a single photograph in the album. Did she have only one, or was it her rigid aesthetic taste?

  The spring of 1979, the year before Mount Saint Helens decides to wake from her 123-year slumber, the self my mother has kept dormant these seventeen years creeps out of the past. The last time the mountain blew was 1857, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court decided that blacks were not citizens. And like the pressure now building beneath our feet, the Dred Scott case weakened the fault line between the Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders, four years later exploding into civil war.

  Mount Saint Helens' very first outburst was the stuff of legends, an origin tale that also pitted brother against brother. According to the Klickitat, who call her Tah-one-lat-cha (“Fire Mountain”), and the Puyallup, who call her Loowitlatka or Loowit (“Lady of Fire”), and the Yakima, our local tribe, the mountain was a lovely, white-clad maiden with whom both sons of the Creator fell in love. They battled each other for her, causing the sun to darken and the earth to tremble. As they hurled molten rock back and forth, entire forests and villages disappeared in flames. Angered, the Creator turned one son into Mount Adams, the other into Mount Hood, and Loowit into the symmetrically beautiful Mount Saint Helens, perennially encased in ice and snow.

  For three months in 1980, prior to the eruption, the ground beneath her will tremble—ten thousand quakes in seven weeks. A crater will yawn in her mouth, growing at a rate of six feet per day. Though geologists and biologists recognize the signs, they will ignore them. When at last Loowit succumbs to the pressure, the avalanche preceding the blast will splash water 850 feet high, temperatures will reach 1,000 degrees, and 500 million cubic yards of rock will be released in one of the largest volcanic explosions in North American history. The entire mountaintop will slide into the Toutle River Valley.

  Two hundred miles away in Sunnyside, we will sit openmouthed before the television, watching thick white smoke curdle like brain matter against a blackened crater. We will hear the stunned cries of journalists and rescue workers. “It doesn't even look like the same country!” someone shouts into a radio. “I can't find any landmarks. It doesn't look like anyplace I've ever been before.”

  The Lady of Fire will forge an entirely new country. Before the explosion, Sunnyside is so dry that when it rains, school closes. When Loowit blows, the largest landslide in recorded history will level 230 square miles of forest in three minutes, wiping out entire populations of elk, deer, bear, and coyote. Glistening Spirit Lake, where my cousin Heidi and I crest through snow thaw, will become a bowl of mud, as will the Columbia River, going from a depth of forty feet to thirteen and stranding four dozen freighters in the process. The silvery ash will drift in a fifteen-mile-high column all the way here to southeast Washington. By noon, ash will be falling in Idaho. In two weeks, it will circle the globe. After that, rain in Sunnyside becomes normal and school is never canceled.

  The spring before our geography irrevocably changes, my mother breaks the spell that holds us to the living room sofa. “Well,” she says, rubbing her temple with the same hand that now holds the permission slip to Mexico, “can you keep a secret?” She half-grins.

  I bite the insides of my mouth to keep from smiling back. This must be big, bigger even than my first trip abroad. I nod, as chill as mountain runoff. “Sure.”

  “Well . . .” she begins, tilting her head to the side and looking a bit like me when caught rifling her drawers for old photographs and letters. “I can't prove sole custody because”—she pauses—“your father and I were never divorced.” She gives me an amused, expectant look.

  After a minute I ask, “What do you mean—did Dad die?” Even as I say it, I suspect it can't be the explanation. My father writes to me, after all. And though I haven't heard from him in five years, as we learned following his three-year silence during the Nigerian civil war, as we will learn a mere three weeks after Loowit blows when horsetail rushes and fireweed pop up through the still-smoldering ash, followed by a scurry of pocket gophers and ground squirrels, rebirth is always possible.

  My mother shakes her head, and unbidden, The Question arises from childhood memory, where it dozes fitful, ever near. I can feel it rumble through my stomach, force its way into my head as clearly as if I am on the playground, surrounded by a crowd of children who have just seen my mother's white skin for the first time and won't stop asking. “Is that your real mom?”

  “Uh-huh” is my reply, rushing to head off the inevitable barrage of questions. I shut down my mind and chant my answer like a nursery rhyme: “My father is black. He's darker than me. My mother is white. Black and white together make brown.” I present my arm for inspection. “See?”

  Sometimes the scowls relax, the play resumes. There is frequently one who doubts. “Nuh-uh,” he or she insists, balled hands against Toughskin-clad hips, as if this were high noon at the O.K. Kiddie Corral. “She can't be your real mom.” Pale eyes squint through potential holes in my story. Then, the drawled challenge: “Where's your real mom?”

  Suddenly it's The Big Country, and I'm Gregory Peck, Eastern navy captain turned rancher, raised to reason. I flail, repeating my claim to my mother, tender-footed and at a loss out here in the Western territories. Only a grown-up can save me. But when they arrive, it's often clear that the parents have no more idea than their offspring how I could possibly be my mother's child. Herding my challenger a
way, they glance back over their shoulders, as if the question of my origins is somehow unspeakable.

  When I'm lucky, my mother herself appears, cowlicks crackling and baby cheeks aflame as she marches, all five-feet-two of her, up to full-grown men and jeering teenagers. “Do you have something to say to my daughter?” she roars, loud as any natural phenomenon. She stands on tiptoe and jabs a finger in their faces. They could be big as Burl Ives, Gregory Peck's Big Country nemesis, or belligerent as Chuck Conners, his rotten son; she doesn't care.

  Kids “too young to know any better” get hugged. “Hey, hey,” she says, kneeling on the asphalt, dimpled arms firmly encircling her captive. “What's going on here?”

  By now Gregory Peck and Chuck Conners are both wailing, snot streaking our faces. Through my tears I watch her pink cheeks, her mouth working close to the kid's ear. I never hear what she says, other than her prerelease signal—“Okay?”—more statement than query.

  The stranger's son or daughter nods, Toughskins tensed to flee and yet surely relieved, too, to have the unexplainable explained by someone so certain of right and wrong.

  At times even I wonder about my origins. For all her efforts to create our definitive history, there are no photographs of my parents' wedding in the family album, none of my mother pregnant, and none of me as a newborn. There is a lone snapshot of me taken before the age of seven months: a blurry infant in light blue, teetering on a bed I do not recognize. I see little resemblance to the buttery-colored baby my mother claimed I had been, the newborn whose sloping forehead and masses of wavy hair looked “just like a Mayan or Egyptian princess.” Whenever I demand proof of this previous incarnation, she explains wistfully that they could not afford a camera. By the time they got one, my forehead had rounded out and my hair tightened into curls. But that was fine, too, according to her.

  Back rigid against the sofa, I now unfurl The Question onto my tongue. Though I am nearly sixteen, it drags in my throat. “So . . . I'm adopted?”

  My mother whips her head from side to side. “No, no, no. I'm just saying that your poppie and I were never married.” A faint smile lurks around the corners of her mouth.

  Not married! My best friend Cheryl will undoubtedly add this to her list of why my mother and I are going to Everlasting Hellfire—first being my refusal to accept Jesus as my personal savior and second my inability to get my mother to vote Republican. I can see her now asking her youth group to take a break from playing rock records backward in the church basement in attempt to detect messages from Satan, so that they can spend an afternoon praying for my bastard soul.

  I grin, mildly titillated by my parents' unconventionality. Here at last are the romance and drama of my origins. I sit back, eager to hear the rest.

  My mother explains that the last time she saw my father was June 1962, his final secret visit to Seattle, during which they broke up. A few months later, she discovered she was pregnant. They made some gestures toward reconciliation, but my father was on his way to the East Coast for his doctorate and they soon realized it wouldn't work.

  When my grandfather found out, he was furious, insisting that my mother get an abortion. She refused. That was the real reason he disowned her. The reason she had dropped to the living room floor after wandering barefoot in the asparagus fields. The reason I had been born in Spokane.

  My mother cocks a brow and takes me by surprise: “That's where the home for unwed mothers was.” She winces a bit, waits.

  The home for unwed mothers? In a good origin tale, miraculous babes are found beneath garden leaves, nestled on riverbanks, even in the womb of a she-wolf, rarely in state-run institutions reeking of cabbage and shame. My mouth drops, and it occurs to me that she is making this whole thing sound easier than it was. This version may be more truthful, but it's still a story. Perhaps my mother's decision to have a mixed-race child alone was not a carefree slap in the face of convention after all. Perhaps—I try this idea on for the first time—she was not in control of her fate.

  The image of my self-sufficient mother being hustled out of town in the middle of the night to give birth at some secret institution hundreds of miles from home is so foreign that I feel my mind withering. My scope of my questions shrinks to meet it. “How did you get pregnant?”

  She confesses that she had been intentionally careless. “I think I knew we were breaking up,” she confides, “and subconsciously I wanted a baby.”

  “What about Saint Elizabeth's?” Was Saint Elizabeth's a lie? And what of the nurses who vied to hold me, who had never seen such well-defined features in a newborn, such heavily lashed eyes, such a full rosebud mouth? Who had really been there as I took my first breath?

  My mother assures me that both the nurses and Saint Elizabeth's were real. The only difference is that I had been born in the home's maternity ward. Saint Elizabeth's Hospital sent nurses and doctors to the home to oversee the deliveries. Together the two institutions collaborated on a procedure of secrecy. Saint Elizabeth's staff signed my birth certificate and registered my arrival with the hospital so that no record of my true birthplace would exist.

  I hear this, and the mother I believe I know slips out of focus. I squint at her, as I might have squinted at myself on the playground, had I advanced such a tale. “What about your wedding outfit?” I have such a vivid image of the pale green suit and corsage that I've constructed a photograph of my mother the bride—pouty mouth, slim hand in a white glove, lacy sprig of baby's breath against a soft lapel. My father as groom is the same bespectacled graduate student who stares out from my bedroom wall. I imagine separate portraits hanging over my bed, almost touching in their cheap gilt frames. Until now I had not noticed never imagining my parents together in the same scene.

  She laughs and tugs the loose curls at the back of my neck. Yes, the green suit was a real suit, a detail recalled from one of my father's visits.

  My mother then teaches me how to lie: “It's always best to stay as close to the truth as possible,” she says, as if she has not just spent sixteen years drilling the importance of honesty into me. I have been trained to return extra change to the penny, to raise my hand to confess wrongdoing, to resist the pressure of peers and authority figures alike.

  She grimaces and gives her head a rueful shake. “I'm not a very good liar,” she confesses. “I have such a poor memory.”

  I will later discover that my mother's poor memory spans most of my parents' break-up and the entire duration of her pregnancy. This is partly because her family kept her hidden like an insane aunt in the attic. No verbal or photographic record exists of her experience. Her recollection is a series of brief vignettes, fading into a broader, cloudy background like the constant rotation of a camera lens seeking focus.

  And what she does remember is difficult to verify. “If you keep telling the same lies over and over,” she warns me, “after a while you forget the truth.”

  My mother does not remember telling her parents she was pregnant. “But I remember roaming barefoot at dusk through the asparagus fields and contemplating suicide. Your grandfather was threatening to toss me into the street if I didn't get an abortion, and of course I didn't have any money of my own and neither did your poppie. He was the eldest of eleven and had been supporting himself on meager teaching fellowships for years.” It was at this point that my nineteen-year-old mother fell to the floor of her father's house and resolved not to get up until she had decided once and for all what to do.

  In 1979 as we sit on the sofa together, she gazes out the picture window at the spellbound landscape and recalls one of the few images that has stayed with her: a yellow farmhouse in a knot of trees, uncharacteristically empty. Her parents and brother had gone to town. My mother, who has always preferred solitude to companionship, had extended her arms and muddy feet as if making snow angels. The textured gray carpet had felt solid beneath her, the design swirling between her fingers. She'd stared up at the ceiling with its glitter flecks and reminded herself that she could be ju
st as stubborn as her father.

  She was lying on the floor of white, rural, Christian, soon-to-be-middle-class, pre–Roe v. Wade America. “And I had four options: illegal abortion, marriage, adoption, or death.” She did not want a backstreet abortion and she did not want to marry my father. She rolled on her side, feeling the scratch of the carpet against her cheek.

  Now her voice is light. “That left two options: have the baby and give it up for adoption, or kill us both.”

  Adoption wouldn't solve the problem of being destitute and having to drop out of college. Besides, in some secret recess of her mind she wished she could somehow keep the baby. “I worried, who would adopt a mixed-race baby?”

  That left suicide.

  Even at sixteen I know that my mother is not the kind of woman who considers suicide. For sixteen years she has been fierce, hugging tolerance into strangers' intolerant children, creating pastel-clad African queens to talk to me. Besides, there are simply too many books to read.

  What nearly toppled my mother as she teetered on the edge of suicide was the fact that she wouldn't be able to finish college. College. The collective dream of her immigrant, just-leaving-working-class family—the collective dream of her entire dusty town, really. Her escape from life on the farm, from the World's Record for Most Churches Per Capita, Small Town Division, from 360 days of sun. Her release from a country where fathers packed their daughters away for life or married them off to sweaty farmboys at the end of a shotgun or paid strangers to fish around inside them with a rusting coat hanger.

  As soon as my mother hefted death in one hand and thunked its roundness with her knuckle, everything fell into place. “It was all so simple.” She shrugs, the mother I know returned to join us on the sofa. “The situation was not about suicide or shame or having no options. Money was the only thing holding me back from what I truly wanted—from college, from keeping the baby.” Money and her father, wielding it like a weapon against her. “Money, nothing more.”