In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
alive.
The women might have wanted to return home. But they couldn’t. They were not Odysseus, with rowers and soldiers, returning after conquer and plunder. These women had to travel to new worlds—pioneers and explorers, mythic as goddesses of war and love and intellect—because the old world was trying to kill them, starve them, or bury them alive.
Our women were not in history class, or film, or the literature of “the canon.” Our women survived the men who survived the cannons of war, and those were hard men. We hung out with hard men. Weak men. Good men. We married them. We got the babies. The violence. The guns. More babies. The laundry. The pots. Dancing. Pigs. The barter—sex and beds and sheets. The chickens. The bread.
We kept the nation alive.
The women who came before you, my daughters, were legends. Their flights lasted decades, treks that covered America, after they arrived here from the continents of Africa and Europe and married into the indigenous peoples of this continent. They crossed countless rivers. They were, like Odysseus, imprisoned and seduced and threatened with death. They slept with lotus-eaters and escaped monsters like the Cyclops and Charybdis, and sometimes they battled other women who were Sirens or who tried to steal their children.
Because they always had their children on the boat, and even other women’s children for whom they had become responsible. Odysseus survived everything to return to his wife and son, but he didn’t have little kids on his boat. Though he kept losing his soldiers, he started out with a damn army, and instead your female ancestors had endless brigades of foolish and jealous men trying to stop them.
These women had murder and marrow on their minds. They shed blood for us.
Fine, who was your father’s great-grandmother, utterly alone after her enslaved mother died when she was six or seven. No sailors on her ship, no gods to capture winds in a leather pouch and deliver them to her for speed when she fled the violence of Reconstruction in Tennessee.
Daisy, your father’s grandmother, a lovely trickster who kept secret the identities of the men who fathered her four daughters—even, as they say, taking their names to her grave. A woman with a smile so incandescent she was threatened with death if she took her face away from her first husband. Her single captain was Aint Dear, a fierce goddess of retribution herself after they fled Mississippi.
Ruby, my paternal grandmother, her hopeful travels in a Model A Ford with a battalion of five sisters, from Illinois to Colorado and then marriage to someone she fled again and again—the sisters her aid, the husband her love and her enemy, until the Rocky Mountains claimed her.
Rosa, my mother’s stepmother, a woman from a Grimm’s fairy tale, a stern and tireless general who with no assistance kept my feckless grandfather and his children alive by leading them to Fontana, California.
The promised land. All the women ended up in Calafia, a mythical island ruled by a warrior queen, whose inhabitants were black women. It is said our state was named for her.
The Odyssey was an epic poem meant to be declaimed aloud to people assembled for hearing the tale of harrowing travels home, for loyalty and love. We heard our stories spoken cautiously, or whispered. Here are the women. The origin bodies for thousands of Americans, including you, my daughters.
My mother gave me my first book when I was three. I read the Greek and Roman myths when I was five, in D’Aulaire’s wonderful illustrated anthology, because a kindergarten teacher was kind to me and let me sit in the corner with books. I was mesmerized by the pantheon of gods and goddesses, memorized their powers, fascinated by The Odyssey, by the monster Scylla and the beautiful Sirens. I imagined myself running like Diana the Huntress when I was attacked by boys or men, actually prepared perfect scathing rebukes, like Athena, who sprang from her father’s head fully formed and intellectually whole. My father was gone, and my mother was working, but I sprang from the pages of books fully formed, though I was so small and thin and ugly I was often invisible, except for when I was hunted as a girl and young woman, as so many of us were then, and I had to use what I’d learned in books to escape.
Sometimes the women in our family didn’t escape.
The women crossed thousands of miles of hardship so that when I was fourteen and your father was fifteen, he could walk one mile from his house to the end of my street—no one had cars, no one had any money for a date, we met only in parks—where he bounced a basketball in the playground of my elementary school. I walked there to meet him. We sat on the wooden bench against the chain-link fence that separated the playground from the railroad tracks twenty feet away. His shirt: white waffle-weave long underwear with the sleeves cut off for a tank top. I remember the smell of freshly laundered cotton and Hai Karate even now. My shirt: a halter top I’d sewn from two red bandannas, from a pattern I found in Seventeen magazine. We talked for a long time in the darkness, played a few games of H-O-R-S-E (I wondered why it was always horse and never something more entertaining, like platypus or elephant or anaconda), and returned to the splintery bench. We kissed for the first time.
His arms were the color of palm bark—brown with a glossy red underneath—and his fingers so long and elegant that when he put my palm against his, my whole hand barely came to the middle knuckles. My arms should have been pale, but this was 1975—some girls rubbed Johnson’s baby oil onto their skin and lay at the beach or beside pools to get brown. I had the baby oil—but no beach or pool. I mowed lawns and lay in the bed of my dad’s truck while he drove us to the desert.
Your father pointed to the dark brown dot on the skin below my collarbone. “What’s that?” he said quietly.
Was I supposed to say mole? Mole sounded terrible. A blind animal nosing out of the earth. I was so nearsighted I could barely see the playground, because I’d left my glasses at home. “Beauty mark?” I said.
He laughed. “That’s if you paint it on your face.”
“Who says?”
“All my aunts.”
I remember too the smell of sulfur in the rocks along the railroad tracks, and the pepper trees nearby with their spicy pink berries.
Thousands of miles of migration—from slave ships arrived to America, from boats leaving Europe after World War II, from indigenous peoples, hardened ranchwomen, and fierce mothers. The women moved ever west, fled men, met new men, made silent narrow-eyed decisions in the darkness, got on buses and in cars and walked for miles to survive. West until there was no more west.
We were born here, to more dreamers of the golden dream, the ones you never hear about. We moved through the streets of southern California, still with no money, but we had more than those women did when they were girls. We shared one burrito four ways, we rode eight to a car in a Dodge Dart or crowded the bed of a Ford pickup, we partied in the orange groves or in a field by the towering cement Lily Cup, where our friends’ parents worked at the plant making paper cups that Americans used to hold at the water cooler.
More than a year later, your father finally picked me up in the Batmobile, a 1961 Cadillac with vintage paint oxidized brown as faded coffee grounds, with huge fins as if sharks would chaperone us down the street. The sound was like a freight train. Sitting in the passenger seat, I saw a dark stain along the inside of the door. It was cold, and I asked your father to roll up the window, but he didn’t want me to see the spiderweb cracks around the bullet hole in the glass. Some guy had been leaning against the car window when he was shot. The stains were reminders of his blood. General Sims II, your grandfather, had bought the car from under a pepper tree where it had sat since the murder, covered in California dust. Your father drove me a mile and a half, to General and Alberta’s house, and in the driveway Alberta held out her hand and said, Come and make you a plate, and my life changed.
That is how you, our three daughters, became California girls. Via the Batmobile. You are the apex of the dream, the future of America, and nearly every day of my life I imagine the women watching you, hoping they—the ancestors—won’t be forgotten.
In the country of women, we have maps and threads of kin some people find hard to believe. The women could