In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
Fracture and derision and assault, sharp and revived.
I was born here, and I am still here, and I didn’t leave, which doesn’t feel very heroic. You three have laughed at me for looking out the kitchen window of our house toward the hospital where I was born, where your father was born, where you were born. My daily life is a five-mile radius of memory and work and family. You three daughters know this in your genes: You love only orange-blossom honey, because you grew up with that scent and those flowers, that fruit and those bees. You long for Santa Ana winds and sunflowers, tumbleweeds and the laughter of people eating at long unfolded tables in a driveway. We bury descendants of the women, and we serve funeral repasts in church halls built by some of California’s black pioneers. The women in our family are everything: African-American, Mexican-American, Cherokee and Creek, Swiss, Irish and English, French and Filipino, Samoan and Haitian. Some of their heritage remains a mystery.
I was not beautiful, and I never went anywhere. But I’m the writer. When I was seventeen, and left for college in Los Angeles, one of my first class assignments was a Xeroxed copy of Joan Didion’s famed essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I read it three times, actually breathless. Her sentences were lapidary and precise. She dissected the place where we live with lovely caustic prose: “This is the country where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers’ school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
I was stunned.
She was writing about us, except for the Dial-A-Devotion. (I never knew anyone who did that.) My mother and all three of my aunts had been “divorcees.” One aunt had been married three times. One was recently divided from a Fontana Hell’s Angel biker. My stepmother was divorced when she met my father; she was now his third wife. My friends—black and white and Japanese-American and Mexican-American—were named Kimberly and Sherry and Debbie. We lived amid the citrus groves described in the essay, with low walls built of riverbed stone.
I went home that weekend, passing through the places Didion’s essay made famous: Ontario, Fontana, and Rialto. Finally I got to Riverside, and in my mother’s kitchen, standing at the Formica counter I had spent half my life scrubbing, I tried to explain the piece to my mother. She was distracted, cooking, not interested until I read part of a paragraph out loud, wherein the cheating wife pushes a burning Volkswagen that contains her unconscious husband into a lemon grove. My mother looked up at me then, and said, “That was Lucille Miller. Your aunt Beverly lived across the street from that woman when it happened. She always said Lucille was going to kill someone.”
I was further stunned.
I went outside to look at the palm tree in our front yard, whose stair steps of gray dessicated bark I had climbed when I was five, everyone shouting at me to get down. I knew a version of us, of the girls and women here, that was not in the essay. Debbie Martinez, Deborah Adams, Deb Clyde. Girls descended from Mexican and black families arrived in the 1920s, and white families arrived from Arkansas after the Korean War. Our mothers and grandmothers remember their pasts.
I wanted to write about us.
Your father and I took our first journey three days after we were married in the oldest black church in Riverside, Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal, founded in 1875. (The afternoon of our wedding, we were driven around the city lake in another Cadillac, belonging to our friend Newcat, a car with a broken horn, so that your uncle General III stood in the open sunroof, his arms spread wide, shouting to people, Honk, honk, goddamnit, these two fools just got married!) We drove across the country from California to Massachusetts, in a Honda Civic—a truly tiny car back then, in 1983, and your father was six feet four inches and 195 pounds, so it was no joke sleeping in the front seats at rest stops.
In Amherst, we found a mattress and some furniture on the street and lived in a studio apartment while I learned to be a writer and your father worked nights in a correctional facility. But we met James Baldwin, my teacher and mentor. His driver, Rico, and his secretary, Skip, were tall black men who wanted to play basketball with your father. So everyone came to dinner in our bleak front room with two card tables we’d borrowed, the gray linoleum scrubbed, and the tiny red television my brother had won by selling newspaper subscriptions when he was twelve, which he’d given me for Christmas seven years earlier.
James Baldwin said the apartment reminded him of old days in Harlem. He walked the floor slowly holding a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label, leaning toward my small blue typewriter on the windowsill, reading the handwritten note I had taped to the glass:
With the rhythm it takes to dance through
what we have to live through
you can dance underwater and not get wet.
He turned to me, his voice precise and resonant as ever but with the wonder he always allowed himself (I already knew that was who I wanted to be—someone endlessly willing to look at something new and feel continuous wonder), and said, “That’s the most extraordinarily profound thing I’ve read in a long time. Who wrote this?”
George Clinton, we told him. On our ancient black boombox kept on the windowsill, too, we played a cassette tape of “Aqua Boogie” for James Baldwin, the song whose refrain kept me going in the cold snowy nights when I missed oranges and friends and pepper trees. We told him about home. He said to me, “This is remarkable. This is what you must write about. Your lives.”
I was twenty-two then. But I wasn’t ready.
Now mourning and love shape this memoir. Our elders are dying, and our young people, too. Your great-aunts, your aunts, and your cousins. Our country feels as if it has gathered itself at a cliff and is studying the long scree of loose rock, deciding whether to slide down and descend completely again into open hatred. This is a different memoir than the one I thought I would write when you three girls were small, when you were Our Little Women, and this was our Orchard House, though our orchards were orange trees.
You three daughters have left us, your father and me, and many of the women we loved are gone as well, so we are here with our kin in the city where we were born, still sitting under the trees in the searing heat near the big grill where entire slabs of ribs smoke for hours, and then we women chop them into single bones with hatchet and ax so the kids can hold one curve of glistening meat and hear again about how their great-grandfather General II didn’t want to eat squirrel ever again after Oklahoma.
All of American history is in your bones. In your skin and hair and brains and in your blood. Your kin family numbers five hundred or more. When your cousin Corion died last year, at twenty, our grief was depthless. He was a skateboarder, walking home, having just passed the driveway where our family’s heart has gathered for fifty years, and so I see him walking still. At his funeral, I read this poem, by Linda Hogan, Chickasaw poet of Oklahoma and Colorado, two places where our stories originate. It seems the right way to begin:
Dwayne Sims, Skip (“I’m the secretary”), James Baldwin, Rico (“I’m the driver”), at Baldwin’s rented house in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1984
Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky. Listening to what speaks in the blood. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
And thousands of miles, by foot and boat and train.
I see the women moving about in the darkness, not because I was in that darkness with them, but because the air was dim or dust around us when the stories were