1
At the left edge of a field of ombré blue flies a rough-legged hawk, talons extended, the dark brown tips of its tail and wings unfurled, mouth open mid-key. This is the cover of my book Smith Blue. I loved the image from the first moment I saw it. I love the hawk’s unapologetic hunger and vigor. That hunger, those talons, were nothing for which the hawk needed permission. For the cover of a book about surviving—thriving, even—in a time of global and domestic strife, Dudley Edmonson’s photo of a hawk in the midst of graceful predation is perfect.
Dudley lives in Duluth. The summer my daughter turned four, my family spent a few days in northern Minnesota, aiming to take a break from the routine patterns of our lives. On our final day in the state, the three of us, plus our friend Sean Hill, drove to meet Dudley at a restaurant on the shore of Lake Superior.
As much as I liked Dudley’s art, it was clear that day that my husband and Sean loved Dudley even more. The three men grew loud and large over our lunch together. They all sounded blacker to me in each other’s company than they usually tended to sound. Which means that they sounded comfortable and happy in their bodies, that they cracked jokes in a particular kind of way about particular kinds of things, that they laughed upon receiving these jokes as well as on delivering them, that they danced a little when they walked. This is not to say all black people are good and constant dancers. It is to say that these three men were happy and light, that there was—as I have often heard said about others, but I have not often been able to say about my husband or these two friends—a spring in their steps.
There is a joke I have heard more than once that there are only five black birders in the country. Two of them are Sean and Dudley. Another, Drew Lanham, is also my friend. Which is to say that I am, according to lore, personally acquainted with 60 percent of the nation’s black birders. And at our lunch that day, we nearly had a quorum. This would be shocking if my life weren’t filled with statistics that put me in company with others who are also virtually alone.
The three men spent lunch comparing notes about living in America in black bodies that were regularly confused with the bodies of other black men. Funny at first, the stories of being mistaken for a birder half a foot taller with completely different hair. But they soon became less funny. What a menace, to live in bodies that might be anybody’s, that are so frequently assumed to be corrupt. To be followed through stores by security. To be stopped and frisked as they walked to their offices. To be both erased and singled out. Their storytelling was a performance of one-upmanship. This story was worse than that story, was worse than the story one of them had just told, and always—this was the crux of the celebration, that it had not yet come to this—there was another story, much worse, that at any given moment the survivors might be left behind to tell.
After lunch, Dudley took us to one of the bluffs surrounding Lake Superior. “It was there and gone before I even saw it,” he said, crouching in the spot where he’d captured our rough-legged hawk. He’d snapped the picture, but hadn’t taken aim. Dudley is a masterful photographer. I am not writing this to underplay his skills. That is one of the things that keep me up at night: worrying that I’ll make difficult work sound easy.
His camera, Dudley said, just happened to be pointing the right way at the right time.
2
IN THE HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN story, it is the loss of her voice that does in the little mermaid. In Disney’s reinvention, a sea witch draws song from Ariel’s body as if her voice were a melodically manifest soul. But in the original tale, the sorceress cuts out the unnamed mermaid’s tongue and throws it into a pot, the boiling contents of which sound “like the weeping of a crocodile.” To lose her tail—which, among mermaids, “is considered so beautiful,” but which “is thought on earth to be quite ugly”—Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid needs also to be rendered dumb. Disney maintains this element of the story, apparently conceding to the fact that fitting into the human world is a difficulty beyond words.
After she loses her voice in order to gain human legs, every step Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid takes is plagued by shooting pain, as if she were walking on knives. She’ll dance anyway. She’ll brave long hikes with her beloved prince—the man for whom she has determined to endure all this. Pain is a cost the little mermaid accepts for the privilege of surviving in the human world. Though, of course, she does not survive as a human. She dissolves into foam and air by the story’s end.
My daughter, now five, has fallen in love with the little mermaid. Not Hans Christian Andersen’s unnamed girl. Not even the Disney mermaid. I can still control what Callie watches, so she hasn’t seen the Disney film with its sixteen-year-old heroine who saturated the culture’s consciousness around 1989—when I was also a girl of sixteen.
What my daughter loves is the idea of a girl with a tail. Despite my attempts to keep from her both the fairy tale and the Disney movie—because I find one so sad and the other too easy—Callie has experienced enough versions of the mermaid’s story to know she loves the idea of breathing underwater. She is drawn to how different mermaids’ lives seem from her own. How enchanted. She likes the prospect of making a seemingly inaccessible place into her home.
Callie understands the mermaid she calls Ariel to be a fluid figure who can grow a tail or lose it on a whim. Who could blame her for coveting such transformational power? Her hero can go anywhere she wants to go. She can breathe anywhere she needs to breathe.
When I took Callie to Disneyland just after her fifth birthday, Ariel stood in a ball gown in her grotto and gave my girl a warm hug. Callie has no idea how much I paid for that privilege. Later, in the Electrical Parade, Ariel floated down Main Street waving to the crowd, tail flipping in the air. “See,” Callie told me, “I told you mermaids were real.” She is still young enough to believe in the impossible.
3
IN THE YEARS BEFORE HER DEATH, my maternal grandmother told me the story of her family’s flight from Shreveport to Summerville, Louisiana. My great-grandfather—who owned his own sheet metal shop in that left-behind town; who could read and write and figure, and who understood his worth; who was fair enough to pass for some type of person other than a Negro; whose wife, a woman who could not pass for anything but a Negro, welcomed black and white local children into her home to teach them the civilizing art of piano-playing—entered his business one morning and found his young cousin dead on a worktable. A note pinned to the body warned my great-grandfather to get out of town by nightfall lest he be killed as well.
The surviving family piled into a wagon with nothing but what the wagon could hold. “Imagine that,” my grandmother said, repeatedly, in the last years of her life. She didn’t talk much about the new shop or the new town. In the years before she died, it was that wagon my grandmother talked about—loaded with what things her family could haul—and that life plucked from her family’s line.
Most black American families I know have a story of some branch brutally severed from their family tree. The only remarkable thing about my grandmother’s story is that she had to reach as far back as 1917 to encounter such a trauma. But pain is an immortal humor, lasting in a body far longer than pleasure. Again and again my grandmother asked me, as if I might, one visit, provide some satisfactory answer: “What would make a person do that to a body?” We might be playing with the baby, Grandmother’s namesake. We might be sitting in the nursing home’s courtyard, enjoying the light of the springtime sun. Once, we were in the communal dining room, surrounded by the dying old white Iowans with whom my grandparents spent their final years. She looked around, as if startled to find herself among strangers, and whispered the story of her family’s flight as if it were a story that I—that moment, for my very survival—needed to hear.
Grandmother’s voice shook when she recited this story. Not from age, but from a hard-driven grief that spoke through muscle to bone. This must be what they mean by visceral terror. My grandmother repeated her story because she could not help but remember. She was there. She walked into the shop and saw her cousin. (She never used his name.) She climbed into the wagon and rode through the dust. She felt her father’s fear-born defiance and caution. She saw her pregnant mother, several siblings, packed up and driven off before the last of the light. She was there, you understand, and she had to tell me. Though she would likely have been too young at the time to remember the incident. This, too, is possible. Hers was the small body inside her mother’s body. She might not yet have even been conceived. This is how history eclipses all reality. My grandmother, who could not help but relive this trauma, was also as far away from everything I am writing as you and as me.
4
WHEN SHE WAS FIFTEEN, my mother kept watch over her own grandmother’s body. She was the eldest granddaughter, and deathwatch was her duty. She sat alone overnight in the dead woman’s parlor. The coffin open before her.
My mother couldn’t fathom raising children who didn’t know about the fundamental trappings of death. These were, to her, part of what it meant to be alive. But she raised us in a manicured region of Southern California that tried to repudiate the existence of death. One story my mother tells is that she was driving with me down the 405 freeway near our home when we passed a hearse. I was four or five, the age my daughter is now. “What’s that funny-looking car?” I asked. And because she feared for my ignorance, and because she knew what we needed to learn, mother began sending my sister and me to Chicago each summer.
There, we accompanied my grandparents on hospital visits and to funerals. We also went to weddings, and choir practice, and meetings of the women’s Bible study guild. In short, we were fully involved in the life of the body of Original Providence Baptist Church.
Well after noon on those summer Sundays, if there was no luncheon planned down in the church’s gym, my grandfather, the head pastor of Original Providence, would remove his clerical collar and drive a few blocks for a bucket of Church’s fried chicken. We ate in his large pastoral study, on the second floor of the old stone church. My grandmother didn’t cook well, and I think my grandparents, who loved language to an immoderate measure, enjoyed the pun-rich pleasure of relying on Church’s after their long days at church. When we were done—let me correct that: Grandmother always said, “People are finished, cakes are done”—when the long days had finished, we drove from the West Side back through the city and around the lake to my grandparents’ brick home in a South Shore neighborhood known as Pill Hill.
The Church’s chicken was necessary on those long days, because my grandmother was diabetic. She always carried Brach’s candy discs and kept small cartons of Tropicana in the pastoral study’s fridge, but she needed regular meals. By the time she died, the pads of her fingers were so thick from recurring blood glucose tests that she had to cycle through them to give each a break. I’d watch her fold the skin and subcutaneous fat around her midsection so she could inject her insulin. “Ouch!” she’d sing, sweet as a stylish woman admitting how terribly her high heels pinched. I witnessed this ritual more often—I remember this more clearly—than hearing my grandmother, the preacher’s wife, pray.
When my doctor told me that the loss of muscle function I was experiencing on one side of my face was a result of one or more lesions in my brain, he also told me that the typical protocol for treating multiple sclerosis was via an injection, and I cried. I didn’t understand what it meant to have MS—I still don’t understand what it means to have MS—but I understood what it meant to have to hurt yourself regularly in order to stay alive. My grandmother had diabetes. My aunt has diabetes. My mother has diabetes. Many cousins have diabetes. I have lived my life with the specter of diabetes. I understand how it works on a body. In my family, it is less a question of if than it is when the diagnosis will come. “I’ve spent my whole life wrestling my weight to delay the onset of diabetes,” I sobbed to the doctor, “because I didn’t want to have to stick a needle in myself.” This sounds petulant when I write it, but I was not pouting. I had tried to stave off one of the worst things I knew, and a bad thing I’d never thought about had happened instead.
5
IN THE SOUTHEAST, trees are thick with a Southern brand of sorrow. In the Northeast, forests interrupt my sight lines. I lived on the East Coast for eleven years, and I could never fully relax. I thought the panic attacks I suffered when I wandered into the hills near the Cumberland Gap Trail had solely to do with my concern—irrational, perhaps, but irrefutable—that every rustling leaf would reveal a Confederate ghost. It was some years before I learned about epigenetics: memory retention through inherited genome. I didn’t yet understand the body—or the body’s DNA—as a historical ledger. In fact, we are only now beginning to understand the implications of epigenetics. I do know that the experiences of the people whose bodies went into making my body must live in me—their lives shadowing my life, like ghosts.
I prefer hiking in the West to hiking in the East.
I’m not saying there are no ghosts in California. Ray and I once hiked with the baby up a slope that for more than three thousand years hosted some of the largest trees on Earth. The mother trees have been logged, but rings of younger trees—some call them fairy rings—circle the sites where those giants once reigned.
Fairy rings can measure as much as fifty feet in diameter, a circle of new growth over a hundred years old. We tried to show the baby how big one mother tree must have been, but she picked up a small rock and threw it away. Then she picked up another rock and threw it, also, away. She was two and a half. Everything around her was older and taller and larger than she. The horrible violence we had visited on this landscape—and the ways that the landscape corrected the trauma—were of no consequence to my little girl.
Our family circled the huddle of second-growth trees. Callie picked up a pebble and threw it, some distance, away.
6
SOMETIMES, WHEN I AM WORKING on moving words around a page, doing exactly what I most love, I think of my grandmothers, their husbands, their parents, and their parents as well. Every one of my grandparents had at least a college education. All of my mother’s grandparents had college educations, and three of her grandparents had master’s degrees, too. My father’s mother earned her RN in 1929. Because she was black and a woman and could not attend nursing school in her home state, she traveled from Illinois to New York for the privilege. My mother’s mother died with a doctorate. My mother’s father died with two doctoral degrees, the first of which he completed at Columbia University because none of his of own state’s institutions would admit a black man. When my mother told her father she wanted to study art in college, her father insisted she obtain a practical degree instead. (She majored in political science and minored in history.) When I say I feel guilty when I could be writing and I am not writing, it is with this background in the foreground. If I am wasting time, it is not my time alone I have squandered. I don’t feel selfish when I focus my attention on writing because, when I am writing well, I am never writing my story alone.
I am conscious always of these disparate, powerful influences—though they might bind my story together, they also might tear me apart.
When I am writing, it is always about history. What else could I be writing about? History is the synthesis of our lives.
7
AN ISSUE OF Ebony magazine published after Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration expresses concerns over what the election of this new president would mean for black Americans: “When Ronald Reagan was swept into the White House by a landslide vote, no one was more affected than the many Blacks who were brought into the government by the administration of Jimmy Carter, a president who had set an all-time record for the number of top government jobs awarded to Blacks and the number of [black] guests invited to White House functions. Blacks supported Carter almost 90 percent but Reagan won.” Such an enactment of estrangement, to live in a country where the vote of 90 percent of your community has no practical effect.
I was the only person in my second-grade class who voted for Jimmy Carter. April Lewis, the other black girl in the class, did not participate in our grade’s mock election. She was a Jehovah’s Witness, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, because their law is of a higher order, are not encouraged to vote.
I knew this about April and the Jehovah’s Witnesses not because April and I were close—we were not close—but because April’s grandmother, Mrs. Lewis, welcomed me home every afternoon when I returned from school, so that I would not have to be alone.
Mrs. Lewis was our babysitter and housekeeper. She was from someplace in the South like Oklahoma—a part of the South that was still Southern, but seemed to me less deeply so—and she cooked the only fried chicken and lima beans I have ever truly loved. Her beans were buttery and so delicious that, even in those years when “lima beans” were words children used to mean “torture,” I ate two or three servings every time Mrs. Lewis spooned them onto my plate.
On school nights when my parents worked late, or on weekends when they went off to black-tie galas for the Urban League or the Links, Inc., Mrs. Lewis fed us and made sure we were tucked safely into bed. I loved Mrs. Lewis. I loved the kind of clean she kept our kitchen, family room, living room. I loved her in a way that was as deeply complicated and uncomplicated as constructs of social class and race. I loved Mrs. Lewis like the grandmother she was, despite all the evidence to prove we were not from the same family. What we relate to and whom, I learned in those years, stems from connections—and divisions—that are often heedless of blood. By blood, I mean both kinship and the stuff that flows from our wounds.
Connecting with one group often requires separation from others. One of the ways that Reagan won the 1980 election was by activating a strong base of a certain type of voter. He kicked off his campaign by giving a speech at the Neshoba County Fair, a site just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Nearby, just sixteen years before Reagan’s speech, the young Freedom Riders James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. Reagan apologists remind us that plenty of candidates held major campaign events at the Neshoba County Fair, which reminds me that plenty of candidates are unconcerned with the traumas recalled by the site.
On the campaign trail, Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—acts that the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner helped to propel. In his Neshoba County Fair speech, Reagan spoke to the crowd about his support of “states’ rights,” a coinage designed to attract a pro-segregationist audience.
While running for governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan vowed to help eradicate the Rumford Act, legislation passed in 1963 that banned discrimination with regard to financial transactions related to housing. In his opposition of the Act, Reagan said, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” The Rumford Act was supported by the California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, but Reagan continued to oppose it until the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 rendered his efforts irrelevant. Perhaps his defeat on this front was part of why he believed that legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was “humiliating to the South.” When he spoke about the South and the rights of an individual in such cases, Reagan was not speaking about individuals like my great-grandparents, my grandparents, Mrs. Lewis, my parents, or me. Even at seven years old, making sense of the political climate around me, I understood the rhetoric of exclusion.
My parents were not quiet about their thoughts on Reagan. They discussed politics over dinner, talked back to NPR and the television news. Before I was born, I learned, while my father earned his master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins University, my parents lived in Baltimore. Mother looked for an apartment when they arrived, calling in response to a listing, hearing there was a lovely unit available, and arriving in her black body to discover the unit had just been rented to someone else. Or that there never was a unit available, my mother must have had the wrong address. Or that the landlord had changed her mind about renting the apartment after all. My parents sued the city of Baltimore for housing discrimination. But they were young, my father was completing his medical training, and they didn’t have the money or time to see the case through. They left Baltimore—couldn’t get out quickly enough, my mother says—lived for a few years in Colorado, then moved to California, where Governor Reagan had worked hard to reverse legislation aimed at reducing housing discrimination.
When people ask what it was like to grow up black in Irvine, California, in the seventies and eighties, I tell them the story of being the only person in my class to cast a vote for Jimmy Carter. The rest of my class, the rest of my county, the rest of my country—they all voted for the other candidate in a landslide. A candidate to whom—I must have understood this even as a child—my family’s voice, our pain, meant little.
It was just a mock election, the second-grade teachers said. It didn’t really matter.
8
IT WAS IN THE FALL OF 2013, a few months after I relocated my family to Colorado, that half of my face stopped moving.
I didn’t have Bell’s palsy, my Internet research told me, because the part of my face I couldn’t control was pulled upward, not downward. My cheek did not droop. Rather, it was plumped up. One eye was nearly closed as a result of the up-pull on that cheek. To balance the look, I went through my days with a forced expression of joy. I was newly acquainting myself with my colleagues and students, the parents of my daughter’s new classmates, my neighbors, and I smiled all day and all night. I didn’t feel like engaging this new community in speculation about what might be happening to my body, so I smiled through classes. I smiled through meetings. I smiled at day-care pickup and at the new grocery store.
Some facts are depressing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know. My new town had about 156,000 people, 1.2 percent of whom were defined by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quick Facts sheet as “Black or African American alone.” By this, they meant people who did not identify as multiracial. But in my case, the phrase seemed painfully accurate. As a black faculty member of my department, I was alone. I was alone as a black female faculty member of the College of Liberal Arts at my new university. The only one. I was—this fact is astonishing every time I encounter it—virtually alone as a black faculty member of the entire university. Of 1,045 tenured and nontenured professors employed that year, only eleven of us were black. And it wasn’t like I could go someplace else and find things radically different. In the entire United States I was one of fewer than fifteen African American female full professors teaching in my field. The number was actually twelve, but I liked to say “fewer than fifteen” in the hopes that I might have neglected to count someone. I kept track of these facts because they confirmed what I already knew. I was as inconceivable as any mermaid, making a place for myself in my new home.
One of the prime symptoms of multiple sclerosis is extreme and sustained exhaustion. Neural damage affects the nerves’ myelin sheath and hinders the nerves’ abilities to send messages between the brain and the body. I am, in this way, always at risk of being disconnected from myself. Researchers presume that compensating for this disruption is a large part of what causes the chronic fatigue experienced by MS patients.
It took a while to find a clinic that would accept me as a new patient. While I waited for an appointment with a doctor, and when I wasn’t knocked out from sheer exhaustion, I made myself smile.
9
DUDLEY AND HIS WIFE, Nancy, were going to lead us partway to scenic Two Harbors the day my family went with Sean Hill to Duluth, but a few miles up the road, they switched on their indicator and we pulled off at a lakeside turnout. Dudley hopped out of his car and ran back to tell us that they’d had so much fun with us they’d decided to change their plans so they could come hear the poetry reading Sean was scheduled to deliver later that afternoon. “It’s not often,” he said, “we get to hang out with people we have so much in common with.”
We decided to park the cars, and then we scrabbled down an embankment. Callie touched the water of a lake so large it could flood both North and South America in a foot of water. I held on to her, a little afraid of the basin that holds 10 percent of all the world’s fresh surface water. The pebbles and rocks Callie threw created tiny ripples. We watched them awhile, and then climbed into our cars to see more of Duluth.
What seeing more of Duluth included was visiting the site of a lynching.
“You wrote about a lynching that happened in your hometown,” Dudley told Sean after the reading. “I want to take you up the street to show you the memorial to a lynching that happened here.” We are all telling the same story. When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember. As with writing about the corruption of the body. As with writing about the landscapes of our world.
We walked up a hill and looked toward the corner of First Street and Second Avenue. From a streetlight there, ninety-four years and fourteen days earlier, hung the mutilated bodies of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. For the sculptures erected to memorialize the three, artist Carla Stetson used young local men as models.
This is where I am supposed to tell you the story behind the lynching of Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie, but there really isn’t any reason for it. Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie were black bodies in the wrong place at the wrong time—which could be any place in this country, at any time.
Roustabout is one of the words used to describe Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie, which meant they worked for the John Robinson Circus as cooks and physical laborers. Consider outlandish: people—originally black people—who come from other places and bring with them “outlandish” ways of moving through the world. Consider hippie: in the Senegambian language known as Wolof, “hippi”—from which we get the terms hip, hippie, and hipster—means to open one’s eyes. And also to be sold downriver: a phrase that originally referred to the sale of enslaved human beings to more treacherous destinations along the Mississippi River basin. Words with derogatory shading—like roustabout—are often words that were associated with black bodies as they moved through America.
These particular roustabouts happened to be working in a circus that visited Duluth. On June 15, 1920, a mob of white men—some say more than a thousand, while others say as many as ten thousand—wanted them dead. The three men were being held in jail, supposedly for their protection. “The people who were outside were saying, ‘Just give us somebody,’ and that first somebody was a young man named Isaac McGhie,” says Michael Fedo, author of the book The Lynchings in Duluth.
The last sentence on the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial reads, “This memorial is dedicated to the memories of the murdered here and everywhere.” Our little party spent a good deal of time walking around the monument. It fills a whole corner of the block and features quotations by people like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Euripides. “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple,” Oscar Wilde. “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing,” Albert Einstein. Siddhartha Guatama: “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. You are the one getting burned.” Over the top of the monument scrolls a quote from Edmund Burke: “An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent.” The quotations are familiar. If not in their particulars, at least in their ilk. Written against the damage we do to others and ourselves. The only new language is the description of the final hours of the lives of Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie.
I pointed my camera catty-corner across the street to the site where McGhie, Jackson, and Clayton were killed. (I keep using their names because I don’t want to let myself be part of the men’s erasure.) Duluth has maintained its brick streets in this section of town, but in places, as in the intersection of First Street and Second Avenue, there are tarred spots to patch potholes. My photo also reveals a crack in the sidewalk leading toward Second Avenue. The harsh climate in Duluth takes its toll.
In the image, the streetlight on that particular corner was attached to an arm from which hung a number of signs. The first sign read FIRST ST. The second was gray with a white P in a blue circle. PUBLIC PARKING, it read. A white arrow indicated which direction to proceed. The final sign, closest to the traffic light—which was red in my photo—was black-and-white. It read ONE WAY. An arrow pointed in the direction of the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial. Sometimes it is easy to draw meaning from the arbitrary order of things.
Ray’s arms are long, and so it was he who captured a photograph of all of us in front of the monument. My four-year-old daughter, three of my favorite black men, Nancy, and me.
10
FACTORS THAT HAVE BEEN PROVEN not to cause multiple sclerosis: environmental allergies, living with a dog, aspartame, physical trauma.
A history of smoking may predispose a person to developing MS. A diagnosis of migraine, which I also have, is coincident in one-third of patients diagnosed with MS. Exposure to heavy metals does not predispose a person to developing MS. There is no word yet on why one person may and another may not develop MS. Factors that are coincident are not necessarily causal.
Disease progression for relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (the version of the disease with which I have been diagnosed) varies, but “is characterized by clearly defined attacks of new or increasing neurologic symptoms.” This is what the National Multiple Sclerosis Society website tells me. A close friend, whose mother died from MS last month, tells me it is a horrible way to die. But the National Multiple Sclerosis Society website tells me that people don’t actually die from MS. They die from complications caused by MS. The loss of the ability to swallow. Infections caused by the inability to clear the bladder. Falls caused by the inability to control spasticity. And while we are living, which is also while we are dying, neuropathy may provoke the sensation of walking on stilettos—by which I mean the feeling of walking on knives.
The second identified manifestation of my multiple sclerosis initially presented itself well before I was diagnosed with the disease. This is what it is like for many of us. We search through our personal histories to discover all the instances when damage to our nervous systems might have occurred.
In the last months of my pregnancy and after my daughter’s difficult delivery, I had to hold banisters to walk safely down stairs. This was, I assumed, because of the baby. My feet grew half a size, my bras were radically different, essentially everything I’d come to know about myself over thirty-seven years had changed. But my optometrist assured me that my eyesight should return to normal eventually. By normal, she meant I would eventually go back to seeing the world the way I saw things before I became a mother. This has not yet transpired.
Everyone in my family wears glasses. I thought the challenges with my vision were an extension of my family’s reality. I resigned myself to living with compromised depth perception. At the end of a day, I’d stall on the BART platform—adjusting my computer bag while commuters scurried down to the exit—because stepping onto crowded escalators filled me with a tumbling fear.
During the inaugural celebration for her husband’s second term, I watched Michelle Obama walk down the Capitol steps wearing knee-high black suede boots with kitten heels. I’d be afraid of falling, I thought in awe. This wasn’t a political statement.
The underlying issue, finally diagnosed in the summer of 2013, is called diplopia. I have difficulty correcting vertical disjunctions. One world, seen through one eye, is always a little bit on top of the other, and my eyes and brain exhaust themselves making sense of these discrepancies.
It was two more years before a new eye doctor suggested that the condition might be linked to my recently diagnosed MS. Diplopia turns out to be a relatively common secondary condition that manifests when MS lesions develop where several of my lesions have left scars.
Multiple sclerosis is not heritable, but having someone in your immediate family with MS does increase the likelihood of developing MS. Nobody in my immediate family has MS. Now I am the link between the disease and any person—I worry about my daughter—who is implicated by my medical history. I asked my neurologist if he knew why I might have developed MS, and he said that no one has a clear answer for these kinds of things.
Being of African, or Asian, or Native American descent may mean you are at lower risk of developing MS, but that didn’t help me. Being a woman instead of a man may change the way my body will suffer. But it may have no bearing at all. Reduced vitamin D levels may predispose a person to developing MS. Living in a temperate climate may increase the risk of developing MS. Living in the Northern Hemisphere in the years after puberty may predispose a person to developing MS. In other words, growing into adulthood in America may predispose a person to this chronic disease.
Some people go years without knowing they have MS—as I did. Some people have MS and pass through life in such a manner that you would not know they have the disease—as I basically do. Sometimes the brain works around neural damage, so that a body seems to behave just as it did before any damage occurred—as my body seems to be doing. I can’t assume it will always be this way for me. Living, now, in this body, I have to grow used to the possibility of the worst outcome manifesting at any time. For the time being, what I do is swallow a tasteless pill twice a day. Sometimes radical self-care can be as painless as that. I have come to understand MS as a fact of my life, like my race, my gender, the fact I’m Callie’s mother: something fundamental that both does and does not change anything—everything—about the way I move through the world.
11
I’VE HAD TO LEARN about all kinds of things that may or may not help the survival of living beings in general and my family in particular. For instance, some 85 to 95 percent of people are sensitive to urushiol—the reactive agent in western poison oak. It is thought that bathing in hot water can increase the severity of a systemic reaction to urushiol, but that washing with cold water and one of a number of specialized soaps can avert the onset of a systemic response. If all else fails, a person may mitigate the power of the oil by rubbing exposed skin with uncompromised dirt.
Western poison oak was not much of a problem when it was first identified in 1830 by the same David Douglas who identified a prominent western tree now called the Douglas fir. But western poison oak thrives on disruption, so the Gold Rush and the silver rush and the timber rush and the housing development rush that made California the California that we now know facilitated the spread of Toxicodendron diversilobum. When you hike in California, as I enjoy doing, you should be mindful of western poison oak.
“Don’t touch that,” I told Ray and Callie, pointing out the red-tinged, three-leafed menace. Along the trails in the hills near our old Oakland apartment, western poison oak grew thick. Ray wanted to know why poison oak is tinged red, and I said the same was often true with poison ivy; that I didn’t know if it was true for poison sumac; that those were the three plants in the continental United States that we typically worry about in terms of topical poison; that I didn’t actually know where poison sumac grew, but that we could look it up when we arrived home; that you’ll usually break out in an uncomfortable rash if you are sensitive to and touch poison oak; that repeated exposure can make reactions worse; but that I knew people who ate honey sourced from poison oak to reduce their histaminic reactions. We were walking toward the car, nearly at the end of the trail. This was one of the last hikes we would take in these hills before we moved to Colorado and I’d have to learn a whole new set of things to warn my family about.
“So that’s poison oak?” asked Ray. But it wasn’t. Blackberry bushes, I said, often look like poison oak, and the two plants frequently grow near each other. I told him what a good mimic poison oak was, blending in with the plants around it. The diversilobum part of the plant’s binomial had to do with the many guises it could take—sometimes a shrub, sometimes a vine, sometimes a ground cover, sometimes like a tree. Sometimes three-leafed, sometimes as many as five or seven leaves on a stem. The leaves of Toxicodendron diversilobum might appear lobed, scalloped, or toothed, I said. Their colors shifted. Their size.
High levels of phosphorus, calcium, and sulfur make poison oak leaves a desirable food source for black-tailed deer. Black bears, muskrats, and pocket mice also eat the leaves and stems, while scores of California’s birds rely on its seeds and berries. Sparrows use it for shelter from hawks, the California towhee and the endangered least Bell’s vireo build nests in its cover, and the western pond turtle seeks shelter in patches of poison oak when the rivers flood. The California landscape would be quite different—its diversity likely radically depleted—without western poison oak. Beetles, hairstreak butterflies, native and European honeybees, crane flies, cellophane bees, mining bees, and moths pollinate the plant. The plant helps ecosystems recover after disruptions like fires, hosting larvae and small creatures all the while. Poison oak is beloved among most every living thing (except humans), but it was probably safest, I told my husband, to avoid touching anything he suspected might do him harm.
Several strides ahead, Callie turned to face us, her hands full of toxic leaves. “This, Mama? Don’t touch this?”
I stopped, unsure if I could protect her. Or if I was already too late.
12
THAT NIGHT IN DULUTH, dinner turned into a lingering dessert. The restaurant closed around us. Callie fell asleep with her head in my lap.
Our family had to fly back to Colorado early the next day. In the front seat of the car, Sean and Ray kept up their conversation after we finally said goodbye to Dudley. The two-lane highway was dark. Callie and I tried to doze in the backseat’s blackness. Ray passed two sedans, pulling into the lead like a speed racer.
Lights and a siren filled our car.
When the Minnesota State Patrol officer approached the passenger-side window, he found two black men prepared for the worst. Sean’s hands were open and positioned on the dashboard. Ray’s arms were in the air, the wallet in his hand already open to his ID. Long before he met me, Ray attended police academy in California. There are over a thousand code violations you can come up with, he told me. If you want to pull someone over, he told me, you can always come up with a reason. He told me this when we were driving in our new town in Colorado and, for no apparent reason, he was pulled over. I asked, What were you doing wrong? This, he reminded me, is an irrelevant question.
“Uh, sir,” said the officer, clearly startled by the two black men in their positions of surrender, “you can put your hands down.”
Ray did so, but very slowly, handing his ID to the officer as part of the arc. The cop, after trying to strike a balance between reassuring him and scolding him for speeding, walked to the squad car and ran the license numbers to see if there were warrants in Ray’s name. Mosquitoes swarmed through the open window as the officer handed Ray his citation. I slowly covered my daughter’s exposed skin with a light sweater, trying not to alarm anyone with a sudden slap.
I’d been in Minnesota the year before to teach at the same writers’ conference that had brought my family to the state that summer. The day I flew in the first time, self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old black kid walking home from buying snacks. Our routine traffic stop happened just a week after Texas police shot and killed thirty-eight-year-old Jason Harrison, a black man. And one month earlier, Eric Garner, a black forty-three-year-old father of six, was choked to death by New York Police Department officers. It was six weeks before Ferguson police shot Michael Brown, and five months before Cleveland police shot and killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice while he played in a community recreation center. I made it clear to Callie that she should not, for the meantime, open her mouth to ask what was going on.
Nine months before we were pulled over, unarmed twenty-four-year-old Jonathan Ferrell endured and died from ten gunshot wounds when he approached police officers while seeking help after a car accident. Moses Wilson, one of the jurors who sought a murder conviction for the police officer who shot Ferrell, said after the trial, “It became not what he did, or what they did to him, but more, what he didn’t do, what he should have known what to do, so that the police would not either beat him silly or shoot him.” These are some of the reasons that Sean’s hands remained on the dashboard when we were pulled over.
Sandra Bland had not yet been killed after a routine traffic stop in Waller County, Texas, but in June 2012, the unarmed twenty-three-year-old Shantel Davis had been shot by police just after shouting, “I don’t want to be killed, don’t kill me!” In a month, Renisha McBride would be shot in the head when she knocked on a door seeking help after a car accident in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Racial profiling proved fatal again. I wish I could say that the night my family sat on the side of the road in Minnesota I couldn’t have imagined that two years later, just thirty minutes from the airport we would use to fly out of the state the next day, four-year-old Dee’Anna Reynolds would find herself trying to console her mother from the backseat of a car whose driver, Philando Castile, had just been shot and killed by a panicked police officer. But I worry about such horrors all the time. These incidents, those that happened before and those that would happen later—like the monument we’d visited earlier that afternoon—were not irrelevant to our behavior that evening.
The four of us had no voices as we pulled back onto the highway and drove north through the pitch-black night.
After a few miles, Ray laughed, breaking our silence. “One thing we can say for sure,” he said into the darkness, remembering the officer’s shocked expression when we rolled down the window and he took us all in. “That was not a case of driving while black.”
These are the jokes you make when you are always, at some level, afraid for your life.
13
“YOU’VE GOT TO READ this New Yorker article about inequality,” said a woman who shared a kitchen with me in April 2014.
“No. I don’t.”
“Oh, but you must,” said she.
“I already know about inequality,” I said.
We were both beneficiaries of enormous wealth and generosity, living on a billionaire’s 584-acre California ranch for a month while we wrote. Rolling hills, second-growth redwoods, a groundskeeper who cut back the poison oak. No other houses in sight.
I used to do this sort of thing all the time, but I’d married and had a child. This was the first time since my daughter’s birth that I’d been able to attend an artists’ retreat where I could focus on nothing but my own writing. I published four books between 2009 and 2011, but I’d taken on more teaching obligations in order to support my family, and I was nowhere near completing anything new. When I’d accepted the invitation to attend this residency, it was because I would be relatively close to our Oakland apartment. I figured I could drop everything and drive home if anyone needed me. I could live the life of an artist, I thought, but not at my family’s expense.
This artist residency was eight miles from my favorite beach—the beach I used to visit when I was a student at Stanford. After difficult days, my younger self would drive to that beach to walk among traces of sea foam. Once, while we were at the colony, several of the artists took a trip down to the water’s edge I knew and loved, but because I was away from home to work, not to cavort at the shoreline, during the rest of my residency I had to be satisfied with the view from our high point in the Coast Range. On clear days, I could see the point break.
Our benefactor’s wife, before she died of cancer, had been one of my most beloved professors. He visited the retreat’s common area one day, and he and I spoke of her with the measured fondness of people who knew more about a person than a eulogy will reveal. Our disparate histories merged for the time it took to recollect the dead woman’s life.
My fellow colony guests would get a chance to sit with him, but for a time I monopolized our host. When he was a boy of sixteen—a Jewish immigrant from Vienna—he’d written a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. “I need a scholarship,” he’d written. According to the portion of his narrative in which I was most deeply invested, the opportunity to attend an American university set him on the path to success.
My own grandfather—no less bold, though slightly older, having already graduated from Southern University with honors—had written his own letter to the president’s wife around the same time. He was about to leave Louisiana to attend Oberlin Seminary in Ohio, my grandfather had informed Mrs. Roosevelt. None of the scholarship-granting bodies to which he’d applied were willing to give money to a black student. This was 1939. He asked her, what was a young man interested in his own education to do?
Each year, Mrs. Roosevelt sent enough money to cover my grandfather’s education expenses, plus a little extra for an overcoat.
In his colony’s common area, I asked my host how frequently young men had written Mrs. Roosevelt with requests such as these. Until I’d read this other account—a proud point in many interviews—my mother’s father was the only such person I knew. I was excited to share my grandfather’s story with him, but my host was less pleased than I’d expected. “I thought I was the only one,” he said. He turned away from me, body posture suggesting he didn’t like the idea of my grandfather’s history overshadowing his own. He was an old man now, and for all those years I imagine he’d cherished the belief that Mrs. Roosevelt’s largesse had been for his benefit alone.
“It’s a fascinating article,” persisted the writer with whom I was sharing the colony’s kitchen. “The author, a Harvard economist, shows how inequality really does happen.”
“I’m so pleased,” I said, “to know a Harvard economist has an opportunity to demonstrate to New Yorker readers what I have always known.” We’d lived in a densely populated part of Northern California, fifty miles from the billionaire’s property; but when my husband finished his Ph.D. and still couldn’t find work for nearly half a decade, we had to leave the state.
“Oh, yes, of course.” She was chastened. “We’ve been talking about this for fifteen or twenty years.”
“Fifteen or twenty? Try four hundred, or more.”
“Oh,” she said, “aren’t you ironic.”
14
FIVE HOUSES INTO our Colorado real estate tour, my husband and I stepped into the house that became our home. I loved it on sight. When we brought our daughter to visit the house, she made gleeful snow angels on the living room carpet. Ray walked down the street to get a sense of the neighborhood, something he’d done at no other house on our tour. While I stood on the porch looking after him, an elderly white woman strolled by. I worried that she might call the owners and warn them that black people were looking at their property. But the sale went through without a hitch.
After several months, I realized that I loved our house because it could have been a sibling of the Irvine house I’d once called home. The house where Mrs. Lewis was waiting for me when I came in from school. The only house, despite all the houses in which I’ve slept, about which I still regularly dream. Moving into this new house, I realized, was a way to unite parts of myself that had existed independently all this time. It was, I now understand, a way to put around my family a structure that might help me to feel like I belonged to someplace safe.
On the stairwell that looks out over our new living room, I hung my favorite image of my family of origin. I am five, and I am positioned in the highest spot, one hand on my hip, balanced in the nook of a shaggy eucalyptus. I am wearing a confident smile, Afro puffs, and a white cotton sundress with thick straps, red piping, and appliquéd flowers. A thin red ribbon cinches my waist. Callie wore the dress—my mother saved it—to her third day of kindergarten, but the Colorado cold came on too fast for me to take the photograph I wanted, posed as in this 1977 family portrait. This time, Callie would be in my position and I would stand in my mother’s, which, so frequently now, is how my life looks to me—Callie’s life repeating my life, which repeats the lives before mine.
Around the second anniversary of our move, we watched a super moon undergo a total eclipse. I tried to understand what was happening well enough to articulate the process to Callie, who watched with our new neighbors in the cul-de-sac. The Earth, I explained, in its orbit around the sun, occasionally lines up in front of the moon as it orbits the Earth, blocking the moon’s direct access to sunlight. I could tell it was difficult for her to comprehend the causes and the effects of this overshadowing. Soon she would grow too autonomous for me to use her body for such lessons, but that night I placed her little hand behind my larger hand, then passed my other hand, acting as our world, between the two. Instead of sunlight reflected off the face of the moon, I showed her, we were seeing the Earth’s shadow and the glow of whatever light managed to make it around us.
A neighbor came out with a pair of binoculars, and each of us took a turn pointing them in the direction of the lunar event. Someone remarked on how much rounder the moon looked that night, its contours heightened by the eclipse. One of us said it looked like an actual sphere—meaning it looked more real at that moment than it normally does. In our shadow, the moon seemed like a hunk of rock in which we could believe. I mean the moon, which we knew was a quarter of a million miles away from the spot where we stood, and which was, therefore, too distant for us to truly take in, seemed closer, more tangible, at the height of the eclipse. From our vantage point down in the cul-de-sac, the moon appeared to be a rich and lovely brown.
We were seeing, when we looked at it this way, the power—and the limits—of a shadow.