Epilogue

In the winter of 2002, I heard, for the first time in my thirty-three years of being my mother’s daughter, the story about how she was fired from her job as a salesgirl at a Boston bridal shop because she rented to a black customer. My father mentioned it to me while he was stacking wood or some such thing during one of my annual autumn visits home, and I had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh, didn’t she ever tell you about that?” No, she had never told me about that, I replied. “Well, I’ll let her tell you, then. Ask her about it.” That night during our ritual cocktail hour in front of a bright, serene fire in the living room, I asked her about it.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, the cubes in her vodka and grapefruit juice clinking faintly against the glass and glaze of the fire.

“I can’t believe you never told me this story. Why didn’t you ever tell me this story?”

“I guess I thought I had,” my mom said ingenuously, taking a sip of her drink.

“Please, tell me the story.”

It was shortly after my parents had gotten married, she said. My mother was pregnant with my older brother, and my father was finishing a joint MFA at Tufts and the Museum School. They lived in a small apartment by the Fens in Boston.

In her words: “I was barely pregnant with Sean at the time I took the job at a prestigious bridal shop in Boston. Every couple of days we were given salesmanship lessons by the manager, who told us that the mother buys the dress, so to concentrate on her. Besides wedding dresses, the shop rented beautiful fancy cocktail dresses. I was told by one of the staff not to rent these party dresses to blacks, ‘Negroes’ then, because they ruined them.

“A black woman came into the shop one day, and as I filled out the paperwork for the rental, a coworker pulled me into the back room and hissed at me, ‘You know that’s not our policy!’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not my policy.’ And I went back out and rented the gown.

“A week later, I was let go—fired, ostensibly, for day-dreaming and reading when there were no customers in the store. But I knew that it was because of the incident with the black woman. I was very upset and came home and told your father. I had wanted to tell the people at the shop that I knew the true reason why they’d let me go, but I was too emotional to be effective. Your father took up the banner for me and went down there, insisted on seeing the manager, and told them all what he and I thought of their policies and outrageous prejudice. It was a great vindication for me, and I was grateful for your father’s ability to clearly articulate the situation, and to do what I couldn’t do at the time.”

My mother spoke this story into the orange-rose flames of the fire, sitting in the creaky, dark warmth of the eighteenth-century Colonial house where I grew up. It did not appear that the bridal shop incident had necessarily made her more or less attuned to black culture or the horror of racism. Neither did it seem to confirm any long-held suspicions or politics she might have held. At the time, she had not even given birth to her first child, let alone had any notion whatsoever that she would end up adopting a black child as her third. In her retelling of it, the incident sounded certainly like an unfortunate experience, but one that otherwise merely reflected how badly people could behave, and how universally limited they could be. And she had never made it a point to tell me. Not even in an effort to counter the many attacks I launched her way as an adolescent.

When I was a teenager, especially after I’d returned from a visit with my birth mother, I would often shout at my mother in angry outbursts of judgment and dissatisfaction, complaining about her not being strong enough, strict enough, independent enough, interested enough, financially secure enough, and, worst of all, for being so selfish as not to have given any serious thought to how hard it might be for a black child to grow up in rural New Hampshire. “We thought the world was changing,” she used to say with a sadness too deep for tears. And I’d retort, “Yeah, well, ever hear of Martin Luther King, Jr.? He thought the world was changing, too. Look where that got him!” We would go around and around—I expressing my vitriolic need to hold her accountable and she offering bruised, yielding explanations—until finally I would turn my back and stomp off in a huff, leaving my mother feeling frustrated and hurt.

She never begrudged me that horrendous behavior, and it pains me deeply to think back on those arguments now, because my mother really did think the world was changing. And maybe it was. But it wasn’t her responsibility to see that it did. My mother’s responsibility was to love me, to love all of her children equally, and to create and nurture her family in a way that felt best to her. She fulfilled that responsibility. She also always encouraged me to express myself, to believe in myself, and to value my freedom. And when I was a very young child and she couldn’t find any brown dolls at the store, she sewed a beautiful doll for me out of soft coffee-colored cloth, with black braided thread for hair. I named that doll Esmerelda, and I still have her. She lives with my parents and is always there waiting for me when I go home to visit. She sits patiently atop the familiar worn comforter on my bed—well loved, brave, brown, and on her own.

I dedicated my third book, Sugar in the Raw, a collection of interviews with young black girls in America (1997), to my father, who “introduced me to journal writing and bade me never to forsake it,” and to my mother, who “raised a black girlchild in America on sheer conviction and fierce motherlove.” My birth mother’s response to that inscription was, “I think we both wish that were true.” My mother’s relatively benign style of parenting, one that she would firmly argue was not benign at all but, rather, “active in peace and love,” never rated very high with my birth mother, who, conversely, always demonstrated what love she had for me primarily through a guerillastyle authority and control. Ironically, she often behaved much in the way of the stereotypically perceived black mother who will snake her neck to the left and right, point her finger, and tell you what’s what, and who won’t hesitate to march her ass down to the school if someone messes with her child—“Don’t make me go down there!”

It’s impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like had I been raised by my mother alone, without the influence of my birth mother, or kept and raised by my birth mother without the influence of my mother. But in terms of my racial identity, and my very personal sense of black consciousness, I think that in many ways they may both have struggled as much as I did. Today, my mom would say that my blackness was and is secondary to the unique individual she raised and loves; my birth mother would probably maintain that I am, as I have always been to her mind, culturally white and cosmetically black.

Throughout my life, nobody has been able to affirm my blackness as I have for myself, and what that blackness means to me has taken shape through the voices, anecdotes, and experiences you have just read in this book.