LEROY

Had it ever struck me as odd that my mom, whom I called Mom or Mommy, should have referred to her own mother with such formality, as Mother, or that I should call my grandmother that, too? Mother? No matter that Mother was more likely than not to drop the r and more than a few s’s from most anything she said, she was invariably known as Mother to all thirteen of her children and all thirty or more of her grandchildren. I’d hardly thought to wonder why my mom, the eldest of a whole passel of Deep South farm kids, would have decided to call her Mother instead of Mom or Mama or even Muh, which is what our second cousins in Sacramento called my great-aunt Cora (we referred to that entire wing of the family as Muh ’n ’em). It did strike me as odd that I called my grandmother, whom I barely knew, something that sat so close to home—Mother—but I did. It was what everyone did.

My first fleshed-out memory of Mother comes from a two-week visit to Leroy, Alabama, that Mom and I took the summer after first grade. My brothers and sisters stayed home. They were in junior high and high school and even college by that point and had other things to do. Not to mention that it wasn’t a simple matter of hopping in the car and driving, as the whole family had done in the years before I was born, when Dad was stationed in Texas or even as far north as New Hampshire. No, flying the seven of us out from California would have cost a fortune, so Mom and I made the trip by ourselves. I’d been to Alabama just one time before that I could remember, when I was three. But everything from that first visit is crowded out by the silent, gentle presence of my grandfather Daddy Herbert, who bought me crayons and comic books after I’d gashed my face trying to shave with his razor. It’s a recollection tinted a pale pink from the drapes of the room where I convalesced.

The details of this summer, though, remain indelible. It had been my first time on an airplane. The stewardess gave me a set of pilot’s wings and a pack of playing cards. At dinnertime, I ate a little square ramekin of lasagna and drank orange juice made watery and cold with squares of ice. It felt exotic, as if we had genuinely lifted off from our lives on the ground. Perhaps for that reason I had known to be quiet, to speak in the hushed tones of wonder or transgression. I stayed up late. My eyes were open for all of a Farrah Fawcett movie, and when it was over, I curled onto my mom’s lap and finally slept.

When I woke up, we were there, and then we were in a car, on the road to Mother’s house.

I’d been expecting the deep country, with pitch-black skies and insomniac owls, the kind of place that would have meant a leap through time back to the world my mother sometimes reminisced about, with its outhouses and smokehouses, its miles and miles of the cotton Daddy Herbert paid her and her siblings pennies a bushel to pick. Someone—was it my mother or her sister Evelyn?—used to laze at the ends of rows, daydreaming, letting the others take up her slack. At night they’d all sit down to a big country supper, with Daddy Herbert at the head of the table, proud of his army of boys and girls and of the land he’d worked hard to buy.

I’d expected to find a past like that still going about its business, flush with the present. Instead, there were Datsuns and Cadillacs parked on the streets and billboards and sprawling modern supermarkets that seemed to stand a whole world away from the version of Alabama my mother’s stories had sketched in my mind’s eye.

Once we pulled off the two-lane main road, we rolled onto a carpet of dense clay. There were tall oaks and pines on either side and houses that sat some distance from one another. A red clapboard house with white trim stood upon stilts; bits of daylight that had pierced through the trees and shrubs shone out from under it. We took a turn onto a smaller road—or was it, by then, a path?—which gave way to pebbly gravel. A bell of recognition chimed inside me when I saw Mother’s house, a brick one-story that sat alongside a barn, a pond, and dense woods. Perhaps because I’d seen it in so many old photos of my grandparents standing together like a dark version of American Gothic and of my aunts and uncles, still just children, playing barefoot in the dirt.

The little house was my only respite from the blaring midday heat—humid, and relentless. Compared with the hot, dry afternoons and cool, breezy nights I was used to, Alabama weather seemed almost predatory. Inside, the place smelled of things I had trouble identifying: cooking gas, pork fat, tobacco juice, and cane syrup. Three generations lived there: Mother; her mother, Mama Lela, who, at nearly eighty, was smiling and chatty, chewing her snuff and spitting the dark sappy liquid into a Folger’s coffee can; and Dinah, my mom’s youngest sister, who was the same age as my sister Jean. (I could never get my mind around the fact that my mother and her mother had been pregnant at the same time, like sisters.) Within hours of our arrival, Dinah had taught me to plant my feet shoulder width apart and swing my hips back and forth while a forty-five of the disco hit “Le Freak” played over and over on the turntable. We danced together all morning, Dinah laughing and me reveling in the song’s assurance that I was not so far from home—after all, it wasn’t impossible to imagine my siblings listening to the same song just then on our stereo in California. “Le Freak” might have served as an anchor, a touchstone emboldening me to let go of some of my apprehension of that foreign place, had the record not melted onto the turntable the very next afternoon when the curtains were left open in hot sun.

As excited as I had been in the weeks leading up to our trip—I’m going on an airplane! I’m going to my grandmother’s house!—Mother remained inscrutable to me, nothing like the kindhearted lady in my mom’s stories, the one who turned out big fluffy cakes and sat laughing beside a lively, jocular Daddy Herbert. For one thing, my grandfather was gone. He died of a stroke the year I was four. Without him at her side, Mother seemed stern, watchful, almost feral. I felt scolded by her small staring eyes and the hardscrabble set of her mouth. Furthermore, the path of communication leading from her to me was a zigzag guaranteeing that anything set upon it would lose momentum, rolling to a standstill just shy of my feet. She’d ask, “Does that little gal want some water?” leaving my mom to look at me with an expression meant to reiterate the question, which I would then answer meekly, watching as it was repeated for Mother at an audible decibel level. When Mother did speak to me directly (often calling me by the name of my younger cousin Stacy), my ensuing silence—a result of confusion about her accent or her funny words for things—would prompt my mom to repeat it for me. It was like being stuck in a relentless game of telephone.

My brothers and sisters grew up spending summers in Leroy, playing with a cadre of cousins; running around under the feet of Daddy Herbert and a younger, more easygoing Mother; racing up to the general store with the shiny coins they’d been given for sweeping the porch or folding laundry. But just when it should have been my turn for all that, the Mother everyone remembered seemed to disappear. Nobody said where she had gone or why she had left.

I admired the fact that my mom could stay afloat in this place that had me utterly confused, seeming as it did to rely upon a different language and currency. In her childhood home, Mom was herself and something more. She knew how to hold her own with Mother, how to put on an apron and become one of the women of the house, how to be silent without feeling chastised by the wordlessness of whole long segments of the day, even how to fetch Mama Lela her coffee can without wrinkling her nose at the dark funk of tobacco spittle. But that place—which had everything to do with the woman who’d made me (hadn’t it?) and yet seemingly nothing to do with any version of me that I could recognize or even imagine—left me locked out, stuck to my knees in mud.

The two weeks were sweltering and long. When Mama Lela and my mom sat quilting together or when Mom rode with Mother to pay one of the old folks a visit, I’d nurse thoughts of what it would feel like if I could magically wake up and speak the language of this place—if I could move around in this kitchen, emptying a cup of this and a teaspoon of that into a shiny mixing bowl; if I could manage to coax a laugh or even a smile out of Mother; if Dinah’s record were still around to catch the two of us up in its never-ending disco fantasy. I even sometimes imagined what I would sound like if I could borrow Dinah’s voice for the remainder of my visit. She had a slight stammer—it didn’t seem to cause her any embarrassment, and I quickly came to associate it with her sense of dominion, of authentic, uncontestable belonging not just to Alabama but to this big family stretching back for generations—and even that became emblematic of something I wanted. Other times, I fell into a deep longing for our real life, Mom’s and mine, but not even crawling into bed beside her at night or folding myself in her arms during the day could make me feel less out of place here, less of a stranger.

One day, Mama Lela said something peculiar, something I couldn’t quite understand. It made her laugh, and when I seemed confused, she said another thing that didn’t make sense, and she laughed at that, too. Later, when I asked my mom what Mama Lela had meant, she told me that sometimes when people get to be very old they experience something called senility, which makes them do and say things that don’t always make sense. Mom didn’t say that Mama Lela was senile, only that older people sometimes brush up against senility from time to time, like it was a wall of wet paint. “Some folks call it the Second Childhood,” Mom had said, and those words, in a single flash, made me trust Mama Lela. I felt comfortable around her, even when she said cryptic things that made her giggle to herself. It meant that from time to time she was a child, just like me.

I stayed indoors most days, sitting on the floor or reading in one of the chairs by the record player. I imagined my cousins playing in the woods on their visits to this place, but the woods were yet another unknown for me, so dark and alive. I worried that a wolf or a bear would find me there and carry me away. Even when Mom and Mother went out visiting or shopping, I stayed inside with Mama Lela, not bothering to decipher too much of what she said. I was afraid. Not for me but for my mom out there on those country roads. I can see very clearly now what my fear was built of, but I couldn’t have put it into words easily then. Partly, I was afraid of the kinds of dangers I sensed must be lurking out there. The wolves and the bears that lived in my mind’s woods, yes, but what I really feared were the dangers that had to do with people. I was afraid of having my mom pulled out of the car by an old country sheriff, the kind I’d seen in movies, who would call her gal instead of ma’am, and who’d tell her to git along, warning her not to go looking for trouble. The kinds of human harm that sat just outside of the frame of those stories of the long-ago days down south, just beyond the edges of Daddy Herbert’s woods, just around the wrong bend. The terrible threats to people like us, threats of violence and scorn. Things people did to people they didn’t view as people. Murders. Lynchings. Even just a few words spat out with the right kind of force. It’s what the history I already knew had convinced me that our chapter of the past was built on, and what I tried to keep separate, for my own protection, from my view of my parents as children of the South, what I made an effort to avoid all reminder of, even if it forced me to steer clear of whole regions of the past for fear of catching a passing glimpse. Was all of that gone, along with the smokehouses and the acres of cotton, or had I just been lucky enough this trip to avoid it?

I was afraid of something else, too. Mother was sixty, and she still worked a little, cleaning for a family I surmised must have been white. The kids, one of them was named Butch, called her by her first name (or a version of it: Ma-gree, probably from Marguerite, which wasn’t exactly her name but was close enough, he and his parents must have reckoned). She cleaned for them and looked after the kids, which I figured made her their servant. If Mother were to visit them and bring my mother along with her, I was afraid it would make my mother into a servant, too, in their eyes. I didn’t want that, didn’t want anyone to think they could send her chasing after their children or tidying up their mess. I was scared, whenever she left, of this threat and the other, and in the long, still afternoons while she was out (afternoons that were dark, because the curtains were always drawn just as the day was getting hottest), I sat trying to play patiently beside Mama Lela, who rocked in her chair beside me, laughing and spitting into her Folger’s can and talking to someone who may or may not have been me.

Because I never asked, I did not know if my mom knew how to steer completely clear of those kinds of dangers, if there was a woman inside the woman I knew who spoke the language of racial deference, or if she was, instead, fearless of standing her ground and staring down her opponent. I didn’t even know if the word opponent set up the right way of thinking about it; was the South really, after all, just a simple matter of wrong versus right? I did know that my mom knew how to speak with the elderly black men and women who came out onto their porches to greet us or who asked us in for glasses of water or iced tea. She called them sir and ma’am, and she offered to attend to them, even in their own homes, fetching them pillows for their backs or stools for their feet. Being beside her when she was like that, I could make out a version of her young self, but I also saw how that respect for her elders was alive in the mom I knew at home in California, the one who took me with her on visits to the convalescent home, where we chatted with old ladies whose children were busy with other things.

One evening Mom and Mother came home with bags of groceries, fixings for a big meal and a fresh cake or two. My uncle Slade was on his way home from college for a visit, and we were going to sit up and listen to his stories. I was excited. My mother told me her brother was “crazy,” but she said it in a way I knew meant he was funny, a jokester, like other of my uncles, someone who could rouse everyone to laughter. Slade, who was near Dinah in age, maybe a bit older, maybe a bit younger, was going to be successful; everyone knew it and said it and spoke about him with unfettered pride. I thought of him as someone I’d like, someone like my brothers, for whom I felt a similar admiration.

Slade was small, only about as tall as my mom. He had a big, strong voice and my mom’s broad smile. That night after dinner, sitting on the couch that would unfold into his bed for the night, he’d told story after story about his life at school, stories about growing up in Leroy, stories I didn’t understand but that I laughed at anyway, just glad for the chance to lean back into my mother’s arms full of ease and mirth. His stories triggered other stories, too, even ones that were about his brothers and sisters who weren’t there with us. It was as if this small group of siblings coming together—three of thirteen—had brought the whole family into being, just like Jesus said in the Bible, Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.

In one story, the schools had recently been integrated, and the black school that my aunts and uncles and mom had attended quite happily was disbanded. The teachers who knew them because they lived side by side as neighbors or even family were shuffled to other places, and the children were bused off to schools where for the first time they’d be learning alongside whites. It had meant buying one pair of shoes for each of the school-aged children, kids used to running around outdoors in bare feet, no matter the weather. Once, my uncle Carl made the mistake of leaving his oxfords on the heater overnight, and when he woke up in the morning, the rubber soles had melted. (I pictured them warped and liquidy, just like what had happened to Dinah’s record of “Le Freak.”) He’d had to squeeze his feet into a Sunday pair belonging to his sister Willa.

Uncle Slade remembered how, much later, after most of my aunts and some of my uncles had moved up North to New York, his brother Samuel had been threatened by an acquaintance. It probably had to do with money, but whatever the cause, my aunt Gladys caught wind of it and tried to set things straight for her brother by getting her hands on a pair of brass knuckles and showing up at the man’s door wielding them.

Stories that, in another context, could have been viewed as sad or dangerous were occasions for joy on that night. And it was true that they somehow brought the rest of the family, even Daddy Herbert, back together.

“I saw me a pretty lady,” Uncle Slade said once my eyes started growing heavy. He was mimicking a comedian on the circuit down in Louisiana, where he was in college. “I saw me a pretty lady,” he continued, “and I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna give that pretty lady a rose, and then I’m gonna sock it to her.’ ” It made no sense to me, but the music of it, the way those last four words kicked up in volume and dipped down in pitch, once again picked us all up and whisked us into laughter. My mom said it, too, later that night in reference to another story, “So why don’t you go on and sock it to her?” And we’d laughed again. My laughter was built upon visceral bliss; I still had no idea what the joke meant or why it was funny. It just caught me up in the glee everybody else’s understanding had tipped them into. It felt good to be awake and accompanied at this hour, an hour when I might otherwise have been lying in bed struggling to relax into sleep. I tried my hand at using the phrase, too, though I got mixed up along the way and said “chuck it” instead of “sock it,” and I suppose the error of what I’d said was funny in its own way, and it got everyone laughing all over again.

It was late when our laughter died down, after midnight, though the sky had been pitch-dark with just the pinprick light of stars for hours. Waiting for Mom to brush her teeth and prepare for bed, I studied the pattern on the quilt in our room, trying to take it in as if my own story were stitched into its blocks. And as I breathed in the smells of the place, still strange, though less so by then, it struck me. There was so much I would never understand, so much that would never belong to me, not really. There were even parts of my mother that I might never fully get a handle on—aspects that had come to life upon her return here and that would go dormant again once we were back in California—but wasn’t there a way to see all of that as a good thing, to take it as proof that we are, all of us, made up of near infinite facets? It wasn’t a calming thought, but at that very moment, happy from the evening, and with my mother all to myself again for the night, I wasn’t in need of assurances. Chuck it to me. We were one day closer to leaving, and I had one very small thing to carry away with me.