As I grew up my teachers warned me to clean up my language, and my lovers became impatient with the things I said. Sugar and honey, my teachers reminded me when I sprinkled my sentences with the vinegar of my mama’s rage—as if I was supposed to want to draw flies. And, “Oh honey,” my girlfriends would whisper, “do you have to talk that way?” I did, I did indeed. I smiled them my mama’s smile and played for them my mama’s words while they tightened up and pulled back, seeing me for someone they had not imagined before. They didn’t shout, they hissed; and even when they got angry, their language never quite rose up out of them the way my mama’s rage would fly.
“Must you? Must you?” They begged me. And then, “For God’s sake!”
“Sweet Jesus!” I’d shout back but they didn’t know enough to laugh.
“Must you? Must you?”
Hiss, hiss.
“For God’s sake, do you have to end everything with ass? An anal obsession, that’s what you’ve got, a goddamn anal obsession!”
“I do, I do,” I told them, “and you don’t even know how to say Goddamn. A woman who says Goddamn as soft as you do isn’t worth the price of a meal of shit!”
Coarse, crude, rude words, and ruder gestures—Mama knew them all. You Assfucker, Get out of my Yard, to the cop who came to take the furniture. Shitsucking Bastard! To the man who put his hand under her skirt. Jesus shit a brick, every day of her life. Though she slapped me when I used them, my mama taught me the power of nasty words. Say Goddamn. Say anything but begin it with Jesus and end it with shit. Add that laugh, the one that disguises your broken heart. Oh, never show your broken heart! Make them think you don’t have one instead.
“If people are going to kick you, don’t just lie there. Shout back at them.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Language then, and tone, and cadence. Make me mad, and I’ll curse you to the seventh generation in my mama’s voice. But you have to work to get me mad. I measure my anger against my mama’s rages and her insistence that most people aren’t even worth your time. “We are another people. Our like isn’t seen on the earth that often,” my mama told me, and I knew what she meant. I know the value of the hard asses of this world. And I am my mama’s daughter—tougher than kudzu, meaner than all the ass-kicking, bad-assed, cold-assed, saggy-assed fuckers I have ever known. But it’s true that sometimes I talk that way just to remember my mother, the survivor, the endurer, but the one who could not always keep quiet about it.
We are just like her, my sister and I. That March when my sister called, I thought for a moment it was my mama’s voice. The accent was right, and the language—the slow drag of matter-of-fact words and thoughts, but the beaten-down quality wasn’t Mama, couldn’t have been. For a moment I felt as if my hands were gripping old and tender flesh, the skin gone thin from age and wear, my granny’s hands, perhaps, on the day she had stared out at her grandsons and laughed lightly, insisting I take a good look at them. “See, see how the blood thins out.” She spit to the side and clamped a hand down on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her hand, that hand as strong as heavy cord rolled back on itself, my bare shoulder under her hand and the muscles there rising like bubbles in cold milk. I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins.
My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me.
“They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...”
“Jesus shit.”
“Yeah.”
Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.”
Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself.
“Never want what you cannot have,” she’d always told me. It was her rule for survival, and she grabbed hold of it again. She turned her head away from what she could not change and started adjusting herself to her new status. She was going to have to figure out how to sew herself up one of those breast forms so she could wear a bra. “Damn things probably cost a fortune,” she told me when I came to sit beside her. I nodded slowly. I didn’t let her see how afraid I was, or how uncertain, or even how angry. I showed her my pride in her courage and my faith in her strength. But underneath I wanted her to be angry, too. “I’ll make do,” she whispered, showing me nothing, and I just nodded.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” I told her.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” she told me. The pretense was sometimes the only thing we had to give each other.
When it’s your mama and it’s an accomplished fact, you can’t talk politics into her bleeding. You can’t quote from last month’s article about how a partial mastectomy is just as effective. You can’t talk about patriarchy or class or confrontation strategies. I made jokes on the telephone, wrote letters full of healthy recipes and vitamin therapies. I pretended for her sake and my own that nothing was going to happen, that cancer is an everyday occurrence (and it is) and death is not part of the scenario.
Push it down. Don’t show it. Don’t tell anybody what is really going on. My mama makes do when the whole world cries out for things to stop, to fall apart, just once for all of us to let our anger show. My mama clamps her teeth, laughs her bitter laugh, and does whatever she thinks she has to do with no help, thank you, from people who only want to see her wanting something she can’t have anyway.
Five, ten, twenty years—my mama has had cancer for twenty years. “That doctor, the one in Tampa in ’71, the one told me I was gonna die, that sucker choked himself on a turkey bone. People that said what a sad thing it was—me having cancer, and surely meant to die—hell, those people been run over by pickups and dropped down dead with one thing and another, while me, I just go on. It’s something, an’t it?”
It’s something. Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me. After the hysterectomy, the first mastectomy, another five years later, her teeth that were easier to give up than to keep, the little toes that calcified from too many years working waitress in bad shoes, hair and fingernails that drop off after every bout of chemotherapy, my mama is less and less the mountain, more and more the cave—the empty place from which things have been removed.
“With what they’ve taken off me, off Granny, and your Aunt Grace—shit, you could almost make another person.”
A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me—every part of us that can be taken has been.
“Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?”
When Mama talked, I listened. I believed it was the truth she was telling me. I watched her face as much as I listened to her words. She had a way of dropping her head and covering her bad teeth with her palm. I�
�d say, “Don’t do that.” And she’d laugh at how serious I was. When she laughed with me, that shadow, so gray under her eyes, lightened, and I felt for a moment—powerful, important, never so important as when I could make her laugh.
I wanted to grow up to do the poor-kid-done-good thing, the Elvis Presley/Ritchie Valens movie, to buy my mama her own house, put a key in her hand and say, “It’s yours—from here to there and everything in between, these walls, that door, that gate, these locks. You don’t ever have to let anyone in that you don’t want. You can lay in the sun if you want to or walk out naked in the moonlight if you take the mood. And if you want to go into town to mess around, we can go do it together.”
I did not want to be my mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was. I wanted that dream. I’ve never stopped wanting it.
The day I left home my stepfather disappeared. I scoured him out of my life, exorcising every movement or phrase in which I recognized his touch. All he left behind was a voice on a telephone line, a voice that sometimes answered when I called home. But Mama grew into my body like an extra layer of warm protective fat, closing me around. My muscles hug my bones in just the way hers do, and when I turn my face, I have that same bulldog angry glare I was always ashamed to see on her. But my legs are strong, and I do not stoop the way she does; I did not work waitress for thirty years, and my first lover taught me the importance of buying good shoes. I’ve got Mama’s habit of dropping my head, her quick angers, and that same belly-gutted scar she was so careful to hide. But nothing marks me so much her daughter as my hands—the way they are aging, the veins coming up through skin already thin. I tell myself they are beautiful as they recreate my mama’s flesh in mine.
My lovers laugh at me and say, “Every tenth word with you is Mama. Mama said. Mama used to say. My mama didn’t raise no fool.”
I widen my mouth around my drawl and show my mama’s lost teeth in my smile.
Watching my mama I learned some lessons too well. Never show that you care, Mama taught me, and never want something you cannot have. Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. In time I understood my mama to be a kind of Zen Baptist—rooting desire out of her own heart as ruthlessly as any mountaintop ascetic. The lessons Mama taught me and the lessons of Buddha were not a matter of degree, but of despair. My mama’s philosophy was bitter and thin. She didn’t give a damn if she was ever born again, she just didn’t want to be born again poor and wanting.
I am my mama’s daughter, her shadow on the earth, the blood thinned down a little so that I am not as powerful as she, as immune to want and desire. I am not a mountain or a cave, a force of nature or a power on the earth, but I have her talent for not seeing what I cannot stand to face. I make sure that I do not want what I do not think I can have, and I keep clearly in mind what it is I cannot have. I roll in the night all the stories I never told her, cannot tell her still—her voice in my brain echoing love and despair and grief and rage. When, in the night, she hears me call her name, it is not really me she hears, it is the me I constructed for her—the one who does not need her too much, the one whose heart is not too tender, whose insides are iron and silver, whose dreams are cold ice and slate—who needs nothing, nothing. I keep in mind the image of a closed door, Mama weeping on the other side. She could not rescue me. I cannot rescue her. Sometimes I cannot even reach across the wall that separates us.
On my stepfather’s birthday I make coffee and bake bread pudding with bourbon sauce. I invite friends over, tell outrageous stories, and use horrible words. I scratch my scars and hug my lover, thinking about Mama twelve states away. My accent comes back and my weight settles down lower, until the ache in my spine is steady and hot. I remember Mama sitting at the kitchen table in the early morning, tears in her eyes, lying to me and my sister, promising us that the time would come when she would leave him—that as soon as we were older, as soon as there was a little more money put by and things were a little easier—she would go.
I think about her sitting there now, waiting for him to wake up and want his coffee, for the day to start moving around her, things to get so busy she won’t have to think. Sometimes, I hate my mama. Sometimes, I hate myself. I see myself in her, and her in me. I see us too clearly sometimes, all the little betrayals that cannot be forgotten or changed.
When Mama calls, I wait a little before speaking.
“Mama,” I say, “I knew you would call.”
Gospel Song
At nine, I knew exactly who and what I wanted to be. Early every Sunday morning I got up to watch The Sunrise Gospel Hour and practice my secret ambition. More than anything in the world I wanted to be a gospel singer—a little girl in a white fringe vest with silver and gold crosses embroidered on the back. I wanted gray-headed ladies to cry when they saw my pink cheeks. I wanted people to moan when they heard the throb in my voice when I sang of the miracle in my life. I wanted a miracle in my life. I wanted to be a gospel singer and be loved by the whole wide world.
All that summer, while Mama was off at work, I haunted the White Horse Cafe over on the highway. They had three Teresa Brewer songs on the jukebox, and the truckers loved Teresa as much as I did. I’d sit out under the jalousie windows and hum along with her, imagining myself crooning with a raw and desperate voice. Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I’d make promises to God. If only He’d let it happen! I knew I’d probably turn to whiskey and rock ’n’ roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His Name and bought my mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.
Jesus, make me a gospel singer, I prayed, while Teresa sang of what might have been God, and then again might have been some black-eyed man. Make me, oh make me! But Jesus must have been busy with Teresa ’cause my voice went high and shrill every time I got excited, and cracked and went hoarse if I tried to croon. The preacher at Bushy Creek Baptist wouldn’t even let me stand near the choir to turn the pages of a hymnal. Without a voice like Teresa’s or June Carter’s, I couldn’t sing gospel. I could just listen to it and watch the gray-headed ladies cry. It was an injustice I could not understand or forgive. It left me with a wild aching hunger in my heart and a deep resentment I hid from everyone but God.
My friend Shannon Pearl had the same glint of hunger in her watery pink eyes. An albino, perennially six inches shorter than me, Shannon had white skin, white hair, pale eyes, and fine blue blood vessels showing against the ivory of her scalp. Blue threads under the linen, her mama was always saying. Sometimes, Shannon seemed strangely beautiful to me, as she surely was to her mother. Sometimes, but not often. Not often at all. But every chance she could get, Mrs. Pearl would sit her daughter between her knees and purr over that gossamer hair and puffy pale skin.
“My little angel,” Mrs. Pearl would croon, and my stomach would push up against my heart.
It was a lesson in the power of love. Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction. There had to be something wrong with me I was sure, the way I went from awe to disgust where Shannon was concerned. When Shannon sat between her mama’s legs or chewed licorice strings her daddy held out for her, I purely hated her. But when other people would look at her hatefully or the boys up at Lee Highway would call her “Lard Eyes,” I felt a fierce and protective love for her as if she were more my sister than Reese. I felt as if I belonged to her in a funny kind of way, as if her “affliction” put me deeply in her debt. It was a mystery, I guessed, a sign of grace like my Catholic Aunt Maybelle was always talking about.
I met Shannon Pearl on the first Monday of school the year I entered the third grade. She got on the bus two sto
ps after Reese and me, walking stolidly past a dozen hooting boys and another dozen flushed and whispering girls. As she made her way up the aisle, I watched each boy slide to the end of his seat to block her sitting with him and every girl flinch away as if whatever Shannon had might be catching. In the seat ahead of us Danny Powell leaned far over into the aisle and began to make retching noises.
“Cootie Train! Cootie Train!” somebody yelled as the bus lurched into motion and Shannon still hadn’t found a seat.
I watched her face—impassive, contemptuous, and stubborn. Sweat was showing on her dress but nothing showed in her face except for the eyes. There was fire in those pink eyes, a deep fire I recognized, banked and raging. Before I knew it I was on my feet and leaning forward to catch her arm. I pulled her into our row without a word. Reese stared at me like I was crazy, but Shannon settled herself and started cleaning her bottle-glass lenses as if nothing at all was happening.
I glared at Danny Powell’s open mouth until he turned away from us. Reese pulled a strand of her lank blond hair into her mouth and pretended she was sitting alone. Slowly, the boys sitting near us turned their heads and began to mutter to each other. There was one soft “Cootie Bitch” hissed in my direction, but no yelling. Nobody knew exactly why I had taken a shine to Shannon, but everyone at Greenville Elementary knew me and my family—particularly my matched sets of cousins, big unruly boys who would just as soon toss a boy as a penny against the school walls if they heard of an insult against any of us.
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