1952

SUSAN STRAIGHT

My mother-in-law, Alberta Marie Morris, was brought to California when she was three, after an odyssey that remains a family mystery. Her mother, Daisy Belle Morris, fled Mississippi as a teenager, after her own mother was killed. Daisy, whose radiant smile is replicated in Alberta’s grin, had four daughters, anywhere from Arkansas to Oklahoma to Texas to New Mexico, until she finally arrived at her uncle’s home in Calexico, California. Cousins remember that Alberta was already two or three then, but when she finally got a birth certificate, in her fifties, it read that she was born in the Golden State. Alberta and her three sisters were raised to work hard, laundering white shirts for businessmen and helping bake and deliver sweet potato pies famous in Riverside, California, all after school. The sisters were legendary for their beauty, and countless men tried to court them—but were held off by Daisy’s own aunt, the fearsome Aint Dear, who timed their walks home from school, who asked sixteen-year-old suitors, “When you gonna cut some cake?” (The suitor who told me this was eighty by then and marveled that he had no idea why cake was involved.)

Those four girls had to be married young, for respectability and survival. Alberta fell in love, during her senior year of high school, with General Roscoe Conklin Sims Jr., a handsome Marine who danced with her at a party. In this snapshot, she is leaving for their wedding, standing in front of her mother Daisy’s house, beside her fiancé’s sister Loretta, who is only fifteen. Alberta is eighteen, ducking her head, perhaps laughing at something. She had graduated from high school two days earlier, in June 1952. Look at her shy smile, her regal bearing. She lived a few blocks from her mother’s house, had her first child the following year, had seven children in total. My husband was her third son. Alberta taught me everything I know about being a mother—and a large print of this photo is in my living room. She lived a big life, all within three square miles, and yet there are hundreds of descendants from this woman, who, in this photograph, is so young, looking down at the slice of earth that is her mother’s yard. She died too soon, at sixty-one, my husband having just whispered into her ear that I was pregnant with my third daughter, whose eyebrows and smile and dimple replicate Alberta’s, so that she is here in the world now.