KATHLEEN

In the first strange and strangely free months of life on campus, I didn’t make much mention of my mother’s cancer. Either I had convinced myself that it really was gone, because the polyps that contained it had been cut out by the doctor, or I was afraid that introducing her to my friends by way of such a story would make that the only story about my family—and me. On the occasions that I did speak of the cancer, I was careful to lean toward the past tense, emphasizing the fact that she was fine, that the surgery was a success and there was now nothing to fear. This was partly because that’s what my mother, in her weekly phone call, was eager to have me believe—she used the word eradicated, which seemed to ride on the wind of a massive exhalation, the kind preceding a statement like “That was a close call”—and partly because I was afraid of considering the situation from any other vantage point. But I think it also had to do with wanting to preempt the look on anyone’s face—a mix of condolence and abject pity, as if they’d just learned that I grew up a foundling—that arose whenever I said, “My mother was diagnosed with cancer.”

Whenever someone managed to look me in the eye and say “I’m sorry” in the way people did once they learned that malignant tissues had been removed from my mother’s body, it frightened me more than the idea of cancer itself, which by the winter was moving around freely in my mind like old shrapnel, lying dormant for whole long stretches before jostling up against something that registered an alarm. At those times, my mother became a specimen, someone beholden to the whims of a near stranger’s polite curiosity. If the person was familiar with illnesses of that sort, then I’d have to field a set of follow-up questions that made me feel like a kid in a spelling bee: What kind of cancer is it? What stage is she? How is she responding to the chemo? Has she been given a prognosis? And if it was someone who didn’t know what to do with such a pronouncement, his expression—a mix of fear or discomfort bordering on distaste, as if I had just sneezed in his face—seemed to flatten my mother out and pull her away from me, like the heroine at a drive-in movie.

Naming what was happening had a way of making it irrevocably real and making my mother into someone I was suddenly aware I had only barely known.

What could I tell anyone about her? Not just about how she’d taken care of me or what I felt like in her company but about where she came from and who she’d been long before me. Throughout my growing up, she’d entertained me with stories of farm life. One afternoon when she taught me how to cook a chicken, she’d reminisced that, at my age, she would have been told to go wring the bird’s neck and pluck its feathers before dressing it for roasting. When I helped her roll out biscuit dough and cut it into circles using the mouth of a coffee cup, she’d sometimes remind me that she had learned to do the same task when she had been a mere five or six years old, standing on a chair by the kitchen stove. There were always bits of her childhood popping into our day-to-day life together, but her past remained an assortment of disjointed parts. I’d backed away from so much out of fear of what it might force me to accept, namely that along with these quaint or colorful facts of country life came a darker portrait, of struggle and injustice.

Dread of such narratives—stories like the one about the great-uncle way back when, the one who’d been killed for the money in his pockets—caused me to stifle the very questions that could have afforded a more continuous view of my mother’s story and the story of her—of our—people. My mind, in its eagerness not to know too much, had managed to focus on all the wrong details: how disgusting it must have been to lift the bird up by the head and swing its body around in the air or how surprising that a five-year-old could learn to measure ingredients to the correct proportions. What my squeamishness had cost me was beginning to feel a bit like my birthright.

I knew that my mother had also been a “gifted child,” graduating from high school and leaving home for college at age sixteen. When I was honest about my own motivation for excelling in high school—leaving home and situating myself in a world of my own choosing—I couldn’t help but imagine her feeling the same way as a girl, looking out the kitchen window in Alabama and thinking of what it would be like to cast herself in a different kind of life. Growing up, hadn’t she leapt at the chance to spend her summers with her grandmother in the city of Mobile? And didn’t the story go that she had long ago changed her name from Kathleen to Kathryn mainly out of annoyance at the way southern mouths seemed to add an extra lazy syllable every time they addressed her? Maybe she thought of that Kath-a-leen as the kind of girl she wanted to leave behind—someone without enough taste, enough poise, someone forever stuck on those red-dirt country roads, not going anywhere quickly enough for Kathryn’s liking. How changed my mother managed to become, how possessed of a quiet refinement, pointing herself toward a future not even she could have named. And how selfless and heroic her own mother seemed to me then, as I thought about her in this other light—Mother, with all her wits and young fire still about her; Mother, with her stock-steady wide-legged stance and her gaggle of younger children at her heels; Mother who had given my mom a dozen siblings out of the fierce desire to save her from the lonely plight of an only child—letting her daughter come to her own conclusions about the world, conclusions that ultimately led her farther and farther from home.

I imagined Mom arriving at college with the big green steamer trunk that sat for so many years in the garage of our family house in California. It probably contained five dresses and three pearlbutton cardigans, a single quilt, two sets of towels, and photos of her sisters perched on stools and smiling kittenishly into the camera. In addition to a Bible, which Mother had probably inscribed with my mother’s name, there must also have been other books, which she’d eventually found space for in the room she rented near Alabama State College for Negroes.

The few stories I knew about my mother’s time as an undergraduate were like the bits of advice I’d been handed before leaving home; they rattled around from time to time making themselves heard, but mostly they just sat there gathering dust. There was the one about the young man in the library who had been so enamored of her legs that he’d asked her to marry him each and every time he caught sight of her. And the female professor she’d once accompanied to a conference whose sense of simple elegance had forever impressed her: “She brought just one skirt, a jacket, two blouses, and a sweater, and she never wore the same outfit twice,” Mom recollected whenever she helped me pack for any kind of trip.

Freshman year, I tried to hold on to the image of my mother as a young woman hugging a stack of books to her chest, smiling over her shoulder at that boy from the library. It must have felt good, being noticed, having a whole four years ahead of her like a blank script. I tried to imagine what she vowed, in those first days or months on her own, to become. I thought of it as I stood before my own dorm-room mirror, sizing myself up, and as I walked across Mass Ave. in traffic, feeling for the first time that I was part of a real place, a place with history. But it was hard to hold on to the thought of my mother before she was my mother. I’d get a glimpse of it, just briefly, and then the knowledge of her as my mother would barge in and refuse to leave. Did Mother—who would only have been in her thirties at the time—struggle with a version of the same thing? When I could see past the tired, angry old woman Mother had become, I sometimes pictured her trying to envision her daughter in that new life. Did Mother smile or frown at the idea of Kathleen refashioning herself into Kathryn, someone other than a country girl from Leroy? Was this fuzziness, this coming in and out of view, anything like what my mom felt in 1990 trying to envision me?

In the fall of 1952, when my mother was entering with her class, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil rights activist and a cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would have been finishing his master’s degree on that same campus. “Were you a part of the Civil Rights Movement?” I remember asking her when I was in Ms. Dyer’s third-grade class.

Her eyes smiled a little when she answered, as if her mind had gone back to the exhilaration of that time. I could recognize the pride—and something else, something more private—enveloping her. “I went to Dr. King’s trials,” she said. “And after Rosa Parks’s arrest, I went to her trial. I was a part of the Montgomery bus boycott. We all were. We carpooled and walked for a whole year instead of riding on the segregated buses.”

And I tried to hold on to the image of her walking along the wide, sun-blasted sidewalks of Montgomery, a place I could only envision in black and white, like an old newsreel. I always saw her with a Sunday hat and a handbag dangling from the crook of her arm, walking with her back straight and her head held high as bus after empty bus rolled past. Even if she was only part of a crowd, a throng of students whose names or actions would never rise to the surface of that written history, how intensely alive must she have felt, and how like a pioneer, to be among those making a claim for a different kind of existence. And how unprepared, how timid and afraid. How could it have been any other way for a country girl of sixteen in a world where so much was at stake?

I arrived in Cambridge eager for small freedoms. I wanted to go out at night. I wanted to be able to wander the streets of a city, to disappear into bookstores and movie theaters. I wanted to be able to drink alcohol and kiss boys. My young mother must have wanted some of those things, too, but her drive must also have been for something larger and less private. She must have left home at least in part so that she could stand alongside the other members of her generation and take action in the ways her parents had probably warned her against. Arriving, for her, must have felt not only like one of the first inklings of her own personal independence but also, and perhaps more emphatically, like the first euphoric indicators of a new era in public history.

Did she feel as free—and at times as alone—as I sometimes did during that first autumn on my own, striving to carve out my space in a world where it seemed that so little of what I’d spent my short life learning and believing actually mattered? And was there a sense of conflict for her, as there was for me, in breaking free from the place and people who had raised her? A sense of guilt in choosing the new life as preferable to the old? Because my mother had done it—had laid down the old life like a too-small garment and stepped eagerly into each layer of the new—I told myself I wasn’t completely defying her when, one by one, I let my own wishes and desires replace the values she sought to instill in me. But if I really felt that way, why didn’t I ever tell her so?

Sometimes it did feel like she must have heard me as I thought, must have been there with me even if only in minuscule tokens: the lace she’d tatted onto the edges of my towels, or the whiff of Jean Patou’s “Joy” (the bottle belonged to her; she’d said yes when I asked, completely ignorant of its extravagance, if I could pack it among my things) that I sometimes wore to class on the insides of my wrists, never smelling completely like myself when I did. I wasn’t quite my mother then, either; maybe I was the idea of her younger self, the one I sometimes tried to reach with my thoughts, the one who would surely have wanted to live in that delicate exhalation of jasmine and new grass and, deeper under the surface, a living kind of heat. Like a young woman’s wish, if such a thing could be weighted to the skin.