Homesick (25 page)

At long last, I realized: the key to it all was Mama.

After I started my own family, when I began looking southward again and thinking about writing this book, I thought it was a simple urge I was following—to come home again, to regain contact with a simpler way of life, to foster a real connection between my young children and my older, wiser parents.

Then Mama passed away, and for a moment the world she left behind felt impossible to sustain. My creative outlet was gone. The survival of my family was under threat. My Daddy was on his own. And I had lost my rock of comfort and support.

Only then did it begin to come into focus, just what a deep and complex legacy Mama had left for me. There was nothing simple about it.

It’s one of the hardest things we can do, to come to know our parents. We grow up watching them through the wrong end of a telescope; we think we’re watching all there is to see of them, but the image we see is limited, finite, and heartbreakingly remote. We can never know them the way they were as children, for instance, or as courting lovers. We never know just exactly what went on after we were sleeping at night; we can only assume that they argued about money or family, and hope that now and then they slipped outside to kiss on the porch.

But if we’re lucky, we have friends and relatives who find the right time to show us the view through their telescopes. They share their memories, and when they do—again, if we’re lucky—a new, more three-dimensional picture can begin to emerge.

I have my own store of memories of Mama. Most of what I’ve told about here comes from among them. But there’s more to tell, and much of it may be—for me, anyway—far more important.

First of all, she was a gifted woman, possessed of intelligence, keen perception, unshakable character, and an appetite for hard work. But Annie Kate lived in a time and place that gave her few options for self-fulfillment. She grew up poor and I think secretly ashamed of it, married and had four children in almost as many years. And she learned early how to steel herself against life’s disappointments. I think now of what her childhood must have been like—those Depression times Uncle Joe recalls so vividly—and I realize she must have been like a flowering plant in rocky soil, that could survive but never bloom.

In Daddy, Mama married a man who was handsome and strong, and a good provider. But he was difficult, too—demanding and not always able to give in return. Still, she loved him, and was committed to him and to the children they had together. These were the cards she was dealt in life, and she did with them what she could.

Though I wasn’t aware of it when I was a child, I think that many of the people around her recognized the sacrifices my mother made in raising us. She made a kind of faith out of denying herself, as if even a well-deserved pleasure were a sinful indulgence. Once, I remember—I was maybe nine or ten years old—we all went with Daddy to buy Mama a beautiful mink stole as a gift. She knew the joy it gave him to buy it for her, and I know that on some level she loved having it. But in the end my mama just couldn’t allow herself something like that. She took it back to the store as soon as the moment had passed.

And they weren’t strictly sacrifices of disposable income or creature comfort that she avoided. When I was young, my mother helped my father keep the books for his engineering office. Aunt Nancy remembers her as a woman whose potential was obvious, but underutilized. “She only had a high school education,” Nancy says, “but she was very shrewd in business. This was before computers; everything was written longhand. She mastered it all. And nothing got by her—did she
ever
know who owed what, when, and where! If she’d had the opportunity she could have run a Fortune 500 company.”

Later, though, as computers entered the workplace, Nancy watched as the march of technology seemed to outpace Mama’s self-assurance. “She didn’t believe in herself enough, didn’t have a lot of confidence in her abilities. With any kind of schooling, education—if at some stage in her life someone had taken the time to talk her through these new machines, had showed her what she was intimidated by, she could have mastered anything. But by that time all she’d say was, ‘I can’t learn all this, Nancy. I’m too old.’ “ (It was the same refrain when we urged her to cut out the cigarettes that would eventually kill her: “I’m too old to quit.”)

And so Mama stuck to what she knew. She worked, and worried, and developed a kind of defensive shell around herself that wasn’t always easy to penetrate. She always refused to pity herself, which is why she hated sentimentality: if she had started down that road, she might not have been able to find her way back. Besides, self-pity is a sign of weakness, and she had passed her whole life fighting to stave off weakness.

Mama protected us, and gave us all her native strength. But here is the hardest truth: It wasn’t given to her to
nurture
us, to help us recognize our dreams and chase them. As much as she took care of her children, sheltered us, and provided for us, she’d never been given the tools young people need to foster their own potential, and so she was unable to pass them on to us. She never knew how to set us on the right path, only how to guard and hold us close. And I have lived my life running from, and returning to, her all-encompassing embrace.

As Mama’s eldest daughter, I see now that much of her repressed longing and ambition was displaced onto me. And in turn I came to fulfill a certain unstated role in the family, one that’s common among firstborn children and among my family in particular. It’s the role Mama’s mother, Annie Raye, played, carrying the weight of her family on that dislocated hip every day for decades. It’s a role Mama knew, too, stepping in for her own mother, straightening her brothers’ ties as she sent them off to the dance. (One wonders if she ever went herself.) And it’s a streak she might even have recognized in my father—the boy who dropped what he was doing every afternoon at 4:30 to make sure his mother was still alive.

The loss of Mama proved it to me: I come from a people who put their family above all else, for better and for worse. And with Mama gone, I’m stepping into the shoes she left me.

Jenna sent me an e-mail not long after Mama died, and it says a lot about the inner pain and defiance our mother lived with. “I remember thinking that her being on morphine in those last days allowed us to say anything we wanted to about her death and our love for her,” my sister wrote. “It allowed us to cry next to her, because she couldn’t have handled it otherwise. It allowed us to tell her what we needed to tell her before we let her go. She heard all of us, and you know, she finally did cry. Sela, it was perfect.”

I’m glad for the window of honesty with Mama that the pain medication gave us. But it grieves me to realize how long she’d kept those curtains drawn. We were, of course, a close-knit family; I know Mama’s whole life was invested in us kids. Yet there’s a level on which I never knew my mother as well as I wish I did. I remember once, in my childhood, watching her talking and joking with Aunt Sarah’s son, Tommy—and thinking, “Why can’t she talk to us that way?” It may be that Mama just took her parental responsibility too deeply to heart, and never felt able to let her guard down with us. Or it may be that she just didn’t know herself well enough to share herself.

As I’ve come to see all this about Mama, I think I’ve begun to understand more about my relationship with the land where I was raised. My friend Rina, who was raised in Israel after losing her mother in the Holocaust, gave me an insight into where some of my abiding love for Mississippi might have come from. “Like any child, I needed nurturing. But I didn’t have a mother to give me that,” she said. “I’m very attached to the land—not so much the people, but the land. I love how it looks, how it smells, how the earth feels. So I started to think of my country, Israel, as my mother. That saved me.”

I know what she means. Everything I feel about the South contains echoes of the way I feel about my family: love, pride, protectiveness, that instinct to share and preserve and defend. I want my children to breathe in the Meridian I knew, while they’re still young enough to have it imprinted on their minds. I want them to know what their own mama’s world was like when she was their age, in every way—from its physical contours and pace of life, to the taste of the air, to the ways of the older generation.

Thirty years ago I moved away from Meridian, because things I needed to make me happy couldn’t be found there. Now I come back, because so many of the things I need to make me happy can’t be found anywhere else.

I’m not talking seriously about moving back full-time—not yet, anyway. I’m aware enough to know I still need the excitement and freedom Los Angeles has to offer me. I also love the transporting creative outlet of my work—something Daddy foresaw for me when Mama couldn’t. But if I can find a way to bring the warmth and tradition and rootedness of Meridian back into my life permanently, I will. I’m as tenacious as Mama in some ways; I’ve spent the past ten years working on a solution to this dilemma. In so doing, I have made a collage of my life—a work in progress, its pieces ragged and not always smoothly joined, but whose whole contains some kind of beauty.

And I’ll admit that every so often I have to stop myself and stave off the temptation to think it’ll be easy to reestablish a life in Meridian, to carve out a second hometown for my family. After all, the things I value when I go back home—the natural kindness and respect, the social graces, the web of close friendships among married couples and families—weren’t bought and paid for. These things were built over many years of shared history and well-tended community. For a good long time, I may appear the prodigal daughter to some in this world. But I come bearing respect, and a good heart, and in places where I’m not known as family, I hope I’ll be at least a welcome guest.

10

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My southbound train journey is just about complete. I sit back and watch the desert scroll by through the window, and fall into a grateful sleep. When I wake up I can feel it’s fifteen degrees warmer; the sight of Spanish moss greets my opened eyes, and I know we’re in the South again. My sister, Jenna, will be there to collect me at the train station in New Orleans. And then I’ll truly be headed home.