In the picture I’m dressed entirely in white: white dress with puffed sleeves, white bonnet with white lace around the brim, white tights and white polished high-tops, the kind all babies wore. It must be an Easter picture, you think, because what parent would dress a toddler in white more than once a year? But it can’t be Easter. My grandmother, who’s holding me in her lap on the porch steps, and my great-grandmother beside her, each with a halo of white hair that matches my frothy bonnet, are wearing dark dresses. And no farm woman in Alabama would be caught dead wearing navy blue on the day of the Resurrection.
The picture’s off-center; there’s room for my mother beside my great-grandmother, but Mama is perched on the next step up, smiling behind us, a little out of focus from the shift in depth of field. She’s hiding because my brother will be born in April, and she always hid from cameras when she was pregnant.
Never mind that birth and death were entirely unremarkable in the world of that photo. Every chicken she ate with dumplings was one whose neck her grandmother had wrung. Every Christmas ham was once a piglet in her yard. All the babies in that county were born in their parents’ beds and too often died there as well. The cemetery is full of tiny graves whose headstones are carved with terrible phrases: “Many fond hopes lie buried here.” “Another jewel for the Maker’s crown.”
My grandmother’s third child was born too soon, so early he had no name. She never told anyone else about him, but she told me, years later, when I could not stop weeping after my own miscarriages: “I had him in the chamber pot on the floor next to the bed,” she said. “Nights I cried for a long time after that. Days I went to work like always.”