It comes time to address things with my mother. She is seventy-seven: still strong but more tired now, still very self-reliant and so frustrated when needy. And still beautiful.
In my kitchen one day, I speak to her pointedly with the voice of a woman no longer afraid to confront her past, her accuser, her accused. “How could you choose to live in Verona? How dare you chide me for not having Black friends when you raised me in an all-white town?”
She looks at me and begins to cry. She doesn’t try to say my experience wasn’t what it was. She tries to reach out to me but I back away and throw my hands in the air.
“He said white boys will be your friends but will never date you,” I thunder. “Then why the hell did we live there?” She starts to explain what Daddy was thinking. “It was his truth from the life he’d lived.”
“I’m not interested in making this right for Daddy! This was me. My adolescence. If Daddy believed it was okay to plunk me down in an all-white town where ‘no boy would date me,’ he was wrong. What did that even mean? That I didn’t deserve to date? That I didn’t deserve to be loved?” I yell this at my mother who, with Daddy gone for more than twenty years, is the only parent I can make listen.
She says she knew it would be a problem for me to grow up without Black people around and wishes she could have stood up to Daddy on that choice. Tears stream down her face and through these tears she says she understands and that she is sorry.
“You can’t understand.”
She has never walked will never walk in these fucked-up mixed-race American shoes my mother says she does but she cannot understand.
But I believe that she wants to. All I can do is walk toward her and hug her and tell her I know she did the best she could to raise a Black daughter. Because she did.
Being a mother myself, I finally know this. I’ll be given hell to pay myself one day from Sawyer or Avery or both.