A HOME IN THE WORLD

School days, I’d wake up to eggs and toast, and after my mother had tied my hair in one or two or three ribboned pigtails, I’d walk the few blocks up Cement Hill Road with Benji and Bryan, neighbor boys in my second-grade class at Amy Blanc Elementary School. I was proud to be setting out on my own, but occasional rumors of far-off kidnappings—children who had been lured into strange cars and never seen again—made me cautious. “Walk straight to school,” my parents would tell me. “Stay together and don’t go off with anyone, no matter what they say.” Once, when a city worker spreading a fresh layer of asphalt onto the pavement whistled in my direction, I challenged Benji and Bryan to an impromptu race, just in case the man was scheming to abduct us. I was jittery and out of breath when we made it to the playground but also relieved, as if a tremendous threat had been cleverly averted. It wasn’t until I sat down at my desk that I realized the man had merely been trying to alert me to a bookmark that had fallen from my open schoolbag.

While I was at school, my mother taught basic reading, math, and a class called Life Skills to men and women at the local adult school two miles away in the old part of town. It was the first job I’d ever known her to have, and the idea of her as somebody else’s teacher rendered her inscrutable, someone who no longer fit easily within the cage of my mind. She had held down a job teaching grade school years before I was born, but I only ever thought of her as mine, ours, snug in the center of our home, cooking for us, loving us, keeping us clothed and fed. It’s not that I thought she was incapable of more; I’d just assumed that the world was of interest to her only when it crossed into our private sphere, a view that had likely been shaped by my own seven-year-old sense of what mattered most. Still, if Mom had been a teacher once upon a time, it meant that she had belonged to more than just us. It meant that she had held sway over classrooms of boys and girls, captivating them or leaving them feeling restless and bored. It meant that she had caused them to smile or struggle or groan at the prospect of some new challenge and that she was expert enough to sit over their work with a red pen, filling the margins with her praise and censure.

The very next thing that entered my mind, when I thought of her like this, was a feeling of alarm. Alarm mixed with the most futile kind of retroactive fear. What if the boys and girls all those years ago hadn’t liked her? What if they’d called her names behind her back or defied her outright? I longed to protect my mother from whatever pranks and fits those kids had been capable of, but of course I was too late, and so it was a relief when my thoughts returned to the present. At least in the here and now, I’d be able to see for myself if she was happy or sad, proud or harried. My mind was also eased by the fact that her students this time around were grown-ups. A grown-up would never misbehave the way a kid would.

I tried to imagine my mother standing at the head of a classroom on her first day, writing her name—Mrs. Smith—on the blackboard as a way of saying, Let’s begin, to the roomful of new faces. I envisioned her walking up and down the aisles of desks, making sure that each head was properly bowed over the task at hand. Of course she was a lovely teacher, gentle, kind, and playful just beneath the surface. I never knew exactly how to imagine her adult students then, those men and women hungry for reading and math, eager to grow and to change. I see them now as nervous but trying to seem merely hardened. I see them as men and women who were poor, wanting to stand up finally to their own past resignations and defeats, to get out from under the fact that they’d never been taught to claim a genuine space for themselves or envision a big enough goal. I can see them now in a way I couldn’t then, and still I wonder how they saw her. Did she put them off, the way she’d put that woman named Maggie off, as impossibly upright? Or was there someone in whom she inspired devotion, someone for whom the sound of her voice or the smell of her perfume was all it took to make a problem go away?

Working gave my mom new stories to tell. She said that when her students didn’t want to do the assignment, they leaned back in their seats, sucked their teeth, and said, “Mrs. Smith, I ain’t stud’n you.” During a mock job interview, a student named Ray had prefaced his response to the question “Tell me a little bit about yourself” by saying, “Well, I was recently locked up for a few years.” Mom would come home grinning about one of her students almost every night. Some of them sounded like children in adult bodies. But there was tenderness in her voice when she talked about them, too. I suspect she knew that her job at its most fundamental was really about mothering those people whose place in life was tenuous, people like Ray, who had started to believe the voices telling them that they were no more than the sum of their failings. That’s not the most important thing about you, Ray, I could imagine Mom saying, once the laughter in the classroom had died down.

In the afternoons when Mom was teaching, I was fetched from school by a spry white lady named Mrs. Kureitza, who pulled up in an old blue Cadillac and drove me to her shipshape trailer in a retirement “village” in the middle of town. I wasn’t sure where my mother had found Mrs. Kureitza. Maybe she bought her Mary Kay products from the same lady my mom used. That would have made sense, judging from the way Mrs. Kureitza was so tucked in and teased, with an alert expression that had partly been penciled in. She was skinny and wore close-fitting double-knit pants. She’d give me a plate of saltines spread with peanut butter, or a bowl of Jell-O, and I’d breeze through my homework at the coffee table in her living room. At the same hour every day, she and I would walk to her son’s house so she could make his bed and put a chocolate mint on his pillow while he was at his job. Once or twice, she was dropped in on by one of her boyfriends, old men who visited for just a few minutes at a time, never staying, wearing shirtsleeves or cardigans and calling her Louise.

When Mom took the adult school students on field trips, she was reminded of their numerous anxieties (“I just got out of the Big House”; “I brought an extra pair of underpants with me, just in case”), and they got to see her as a person in the world, someone who negotiated with strangers and moved smoothly through public space. Was it a mother they saw in the way she nudged them along, cautioning them here, cajoling them there, or was she simply their teacher, the figure in charge, a woman who existed for a few hours a day and then disappeared from thought? I wonder now if the hours when she was Mrs. Smith were a kind of respite for her, a chance to lapse from the figure her children required her to be and become someone who, like every teacher, exists just for her students, one at a time and in a different way for each, and then slips out of grasp into a place where a student’s imagination cannot reach.

One rainy December afternoon before Christmas vacation—the kind of day that means winter in California, when the air is cool and the sky sits wet and gray and close to the ground—my teacher showed us how to make paper snowflakes. We were given scissors, construction paper, crayons, glitter, and glue and urged to make any kind of design we wanted. I was sitting on the classroom floor with my supplies around me. I made round snowflakes and square ones, snowflakes in bold vivid colors and others in austere white. I even made a garland of mini-snowflakes by folding the sheet as if I were making paper dolls. Gradually, I found myself losing interest in the art project and thumbing through a tiny Hello Kitty notebook I’d persuaded my mother to buy me from the neighborhood stationery store. On one of the first pages, Conrad and Michael, who were two grades apart in high school, had made a list of the teachers I should seek out once I was their age. Several more years would have to pass before I could take their advice, but it seemed key to the kind of future I wanted to be moving toward, so I guarded the list carefully.

Mr. Potosnak: Chemistry

Mr. Brodkey or Mr. Sumner: U.S. History

Mr. Lederer: English

Ms. Nacey: Trig (“What’s trig?” “A kind of math.”)

At the top of the next blank page, I wrote 1980. Under that, I wrote my full name:

Tracy Kathleen Smith

Soon, I mused, people all over the world would be living in a new decade. I looked at the zero, the fresh, round, empty hole of it, and I imagined that every life, lived every day, everywhere, would go into filling up that space. Farmers, politicians, babies all the way in Africa, the boys and girls in my class, people I’d never ever meet—all of us would do our share to mark the coming decade. It was a knowledge populated, in my mind, by the faces on the nightly news: Americans and our leaders but also refugees and hostages, boys and girls looking hungrily at the camera, unbothered by the flies buzzing at their mouths and eyes. It was a view of the world, a world I’d be a part of. I’d live in 1980, and my presence would matter. The things I’d do every day would matter, not because of who I was but rather that I was.

My classmates were busy with their scissors. Our teacher, Mrs. Alexander, had already begun to hang our finished snowflakes up in the windows and along the classroom walls. Along all the neighborhood streets, Christmas lights and holiday figures would soon begin flickering on. A family named the Hurleys kept a sleigh with Santa and reindeer up on their rooftop all year long. It had been lit up in the morning when I’d passed it on my way to school and would stay that way until at least Valentine’s Day, glinting in the sun and the dark of night alike, as if Mrs. Hurley (the one, it was rumored, who oversaw the decorations) was trying to flag down passing aircrafts or satellites. I wondered if leaving those lights on and letting them transmit their message of Here I am! into the distance gave Mrs. Hurley the same feeling of anticipation I experienced in the months that followed, every time I wrote 1980 at the top of a page. An anticipation punctuated by silence, by my watching and participating in what was at hand but often with a sense that there was something further off that mattered more, something I’d one day reach and recognize. Here I am! Was it the same phrase that popped into my mother’s head when she was guiding her students from one place or idea to the next? A phrase that blared out like a promise but that also marked whoever uttered it as a target, someone susceptible to whomever and whatever was listening.

At the adult school, Mom made friends with another teacher, a woman named Nella. Nella was tall and sturdy, the kind of big woman other people describe as statuesque but who refers to herself as fat. She had one of those musical laughs that told you she could really sing. I knew my mother envied that voice; she was always lamenting that she couldn’t carry a tune. When Nella came over to our house, she and Mom would laugh about the things their students said and about the other teachers at school, some of whom seemed to be merely hapless; others, from what I now remember, were more cynically checked out, tired of trying. When Nella and Mom were not laughing, sometimes their voices dropped down to a whisper, and they looked very serious sitting there together on the blue chairs in the living room, leaning in toward a topic that might have escaped if they didn’t keep it corralled between them. Sometimes, I would walk into the room to find their eyes shut and hands clasped in prayer.

Unlike many of the friends we’d collected in Fairfield, Aunt Nella, as I learned to call her, was black. If a thing was funny because of how it related to blacks—if it reveled in the music of what James Baldwin called “Black English,” or underscored what W. E. B. DuBois described as our “double consciousness” (terms I didn’t learn for many more years but that made an immediate, familiar sense once I did)—Nella was one of the few friends who could join in, knowing exactly what our laughter was built of. And if it hurt or felt wrong for a similar reason, she felt saddened or angry just like us.

Once, Nella had shown up at our door with two long bricks of pasteurized, processed government cheese.

“There’s no way I can eat through all of this,” she’d said, bubbling over with that operatic laughter on her way to our kitchen. She and my mother had chuckled themselves silly about the off-brand Velveeta, which Nella had gotten from a friend, who’d gotten it from another friend, who’d learned it could be collected, “no questions asked, out behind the post office.”

Nella had two kids, and they lived across the railroad tracks from us, in a house I visited just once or twice, a neat small house on an old street, with trees that’d had time to grow tall and stout in the front yards. Her daughter, Lisa, was a high school student close in age to my brothers. She didn’t come around much. The few times I’d met her, she had been quiet, with a big openmouthed smile that appeared sometimes in place of laughter. Nella’s son, Anthony, was in kindergarten at a different school and often came with his mother when she paid us visits. Other times, she’d drop him off on his own—but not just to play with me. I suspected that our mothers wanted him to get to know my brothers and dad because Anthony’s father was gone. He wasn’t dead; if he’d been dead, they’d have said he had passed on. I understood gone to mean that Anthony’s dad should have been there with Nella and the kids but that he wasn’t, that he’d chosen to leave, and that his leaving, rather than being something Nella had accepted and let go of worrying over, was a constant ache or irk. Sometimes when my mom and Nella were talking in hushed voices about a he who had done something hurtful or unthinking, I gathered they were talking about Anthony’s dad.

Watching them together, it became clear that Aunt Nella allowed my mother to relax and revel in the presence of a thing called Home. Home started with the South, as a way of eating and talking and reminiscing, but it stretched out into more, too. Home was a different geographic place for Nella, whose people didn’t come from Alabama like Mom’s did. I wasn’t quite sure where she was from, but wherever it was, my mother gave that place back to her, too. Home was a place and time that my mom and Nella and generations like theirs had lived in quite happily, even as they were defending themselves against its famous snares. Home was bliss, but it was also a thing they’d had to weather and withstand. If Home was a mood, it was like being caught up in joy and consternation at once, the kind of feeling that makes you glad for what you once had and glad, also, to have left it all behind.

I’d known for a long time that there was also something painful at the very root of Home. To me, that pain was best summed up by the bevy of things the South had done to people of my parents’ generation: the civil rights activists hosed down by police, the young black men and women sitting stone-faced at all-white lunch counters or behind jailhouse bars. Whenever my parents made reference to what things were like when they were my age, even benign things, the images that rose up in my mind, just out of frame, were the fire hoses and the lunch counters. My heart clenched in my chest to think about it, and my way of dealing with that sadness and anger and shame was to steer shy of talking about it altogether, to close my eyes to things that glared too brightly to look at head-on. But Anthony and Aunt Nella brought me into contact with feelings that defied silence. When Anthony and I were riding around on our bikes or spread out on the family room floor folding origami paper into cootie catchers, I felt like he and I were part of something just as real as all the things that very subtly relegated us to their margins. It reminded me of a TV show called Gettin’ to Know Me, the only show I’d ever seen that focused on a black girl—and not only on her, but on her parents and little brother and grandparents as well. It took her entire world into consideration instead of making her a satellite to more prominent white characters. In every episode, the girl, who would have been just a little older than me, with neat braids or bushy loose ponytails, learned about black history from her grandmother, Mama Violet. I liked that the show told me that certain things were not unusual, things most of my friends would have found odd or in need of explanation, like calling your grandmother Mama, or living in a house full of handed-down quilts, or having your scalp greased and hair braided by someone who sat telling stories about black life back in the old days.

The girl on Gettin’ to Know Me never clammed up when she felt herself getting close to the pain of Home. She knew which questions to ask. She was brave, strong in her sense of what that heavy history added up to—at least she was scripted to be. She didn’t even seem to feel the faintest glimmer of discomfort when Mama Violet told her about how this home remedy or that quilt pattern had been passed down from slave times. I liked her because she stood as proof that girls like us were central to certain stories. Riding around the neighborhood with Anthony, sitting across the table from him at lunch, or playing in the next room while our mothers went on about their jobs, helped to counteract the quiet negation of California, a place with low, bare hills and a history as blank and clear as the sky on a sunny day.

Why was it so much easier to call out to the future than the past? I still couldn’t bring myself to actually talk with my parents about what it must have meant to grow up in an age of racial violence. Any time the conversation crept close to that reality, I shut down. Yet my view of 1980 was peopled with victims and refugees, with emblems of struggle I had gleaned from the nightly news. I can still see the children who seemed to watch me in those daydreams. They were tired, expressionless. Once, watching a TV telethon with me in her trailer after school, Mrs. Kureitza caught sight of one of those children’s faces, and she looked at me and said, “Why do black people always have such white-white teeth?” Those faces hadn’t made her feel a part of the wider world at all but more like a spectator, someone on safari, it seemed to me, watching from the kind of distance that facilitates judgment or fear. It didn’t stop me from liking her or from thinking of her as an ally or a friend, but it did remind me that simply because of who we were, she and I had been equipped to see certain things differently.

Sometimes, the faces in my 1980 were old and white, just like Mrs. Kureitza’s, which is to say that, one way or another, I knew them. They were familiar faces, but in my mind they were yelling for change, for some wrong to be undone. Where did that image come from, and why did I view it as something to anticipate with a hungry alacrity? I sometimes sat in my classroom just drifting from one image of this kind to another, telling myself that the world was a place I would get to one day, and that when I was there, my presence would mean something. It was a promise I felt comfortable making to myself, a promise that must have had to do with what I could see that Mrs. Kureitza couldn’t. It’s not that our teeth are any whiter, just that our skin is a whole lot blacker.

I never thought to wonder what my mother spent her in-between times dreaming about. I had no way of knowing then, as I do now, that when a woman delivers her children to a safe place, even for just a few hours, a part of her becomes free in a way that a child cannot understand, reverting in an almost physical way to the person she was before she had children, as if she is testing to determine whether that person is still there. Who was my mother with her students gathered around her? Who was she with her back to them, writing on the chalkboard at the front of the room? Who was she in her boots and winter clothes, with her makeup and jewelry that might have been chosen to say to the world what Mrs. Hurley’s Christmas lights said night after night and day after day to the stars and the clouds alike? Here I am! Here I am!

“Has anything changed in Tracy’s home life?” Mrs. Alexander finally asked my mother over the phone one evening toward the spring of that school year, adding that I’d been acting quiet and far-off for some time. My teacher had no way of knowing what was going on in my thoughts, no way of determining what my dreamy silence was a symptom of. Had she asked me about it, I doubt I’d have known how to say much more than, “I’m fine,” which wouldn’t have been a lie, but neither would it have done much to assuage her fears. So she did what teachers must do when their concern is piqued, just as my mother, on the receiving end of that question, did what parents must do in those kinds of situations. She worried. She dwelled upon the worst imaginable scenarios: Had anyone tried to hurt me? Was there anything I needed to tell her, anything at all, no matter what someone else might have warned me not to say, and no matter how hard it might be to put into words? My mother conjured a flood of dark possibilities from what was once merely a trickle of working-mom guilt. If damage has been done, she told herself, it was done because I was elsewhere, otherwise occupied. If her absence had been the cause of the problem, then her presence, she determined, would be its solution. Mom sometimes told her version of the story when I was older: “When Tracy’s teacher called to ask if anything was wrong, I realized that my being at work every afternoon was affecting her. So I quit.” In her view, the story was proof that some things matter more than others, that parents must make sacrifices to keep their children safe and happy.

Because I was never asked to weigh in on the topic, I never got the chance to bring into language what I had actually been feeling in the weeks before the new decade had arrived. I never told my mother or anyone else how the faces that had appeared in my mind brought with them the certainty that I, too, belonged to what contained them—and that I wanted it that way. I certainly didn’t want to be like Mrs. Kureitza, watching from an innocuous distance, a tourist snapping pictures and making jokes. I wanted to be there on the ground, waiting to be caught up—by history? agony?—and claimed.

The last time Mom collected me from her house, Mrs. Kureitza said goodbye, adding that I should stay in touch. After that, it was Mom waiting for me outside the school every day.

“What happened to your job?” I finally asked, once it had sunk in that she was no longer gone in the afternoons, no longer telling us stories at night about Ray and his cohort.

“It wasn’t important,” she said. She said it like she meant it, like it was simple fact, but it was a statement resonant with silence. Not the fearful kind I knew but another sort that strikes me now as brave, that calls out to loss, or disappointment, or sacrifice, and without hesitating says, Here I am!