In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
to rattle at my knees.
By the time I was thirteen, books were my addiction, as powerful as the alcohol, Marlboros, and marijuana joints my friends and the neighborhood boys held in their hands. Kids were drinking Everclear and Olde English. I partook of the Marlboros and beer. I was afraid of everything else. I spent my time under the pepper tree branches, and in the vacant lots where parties were held (think Dazed and Confused, but with way more black and Chicano teenagers, and additions of Con Funk Shun, Parliament, and Tierra). But even at the moment when the police helicopters came, or my friends fell off their platforms, lit embers floating in darkness like constellations of red and gold, I was waiting to be somewhere else. Reading a novel.
Back in 1965, my stepfather bought the laundromat next to the market where my mother had spent her quarter on my first book. For the next ten years, we kids swept the floors of landed clouds of lint, restocked the little boxes of detergent. I watched the people move about, descendants of Okies and slaves and braceros and Japanese strawberry farmers. These were the parents of my friends. We drank in vacant lots, Boone’s Farm strawberry wine in Lily Tulip cups, near the Lily Tulip plant with its actual giant concrete cup. (The world’s largest paper cup!) Then we married each other, and our children are American babies, despite what some people think.
A few times a year now, I walk near the old Lily Tulip Cup, the towering cement painted white and blue, near the last orange groves. As a child in the laundromat, I must have known my life would be about language, and place, because I saw people’s baskets full of stories, the way their hands moved when they held up a shirt, their eyes narrowed with private legends of the man or baby or mother to whom it belonged.
But every night, I walk along the Santa Ana River, and up into the steep small foothills along the riverbed. From the rocky slopes, I can see my whole life. That is not an odyssey. I am the woman who left briefly and then came back right away, who has never left home since.
Looking west, I can see Mission Boulevard, the street that leads to the house where I was born, and the lights of the laundromat, in the small place called Rubidoux. That place was rancho land taken from the Cahuilla peoples by the Spanish Californios, and sold to Louis Robidoux, a French-born fur trapper who married a young Spanish woman. Dwayne’s cousins still live near the river in a family compound built by Henderson “Gato” Butts in the 1920s, after he left Oklahoma.
Looking north, I see the Cajon Pass, which everyone in our family navigated when they came to California. My grandmother Ruby and my father, only seven, came down the pass in a bus, down onto Route 66, where all roads led away from her husband: San Bernardino, Ontario, and Echo Park. Dwayne’s great-grandmother Fine, born just after the Civil War, sent all her grandchildren across that same desert and down the same pass to Los Angeles.
Turning east, I see my childhood neighborhood and Dwayne’s, the old tract homes from the 1960s. The avenue I drive every single day to work, that passes the street of Dwayne’s parents, General and Alberta Sims, and the driveway where I learned to be a good human, and the houses of all my relatives and friends.
Turning the last quarter, looking south only half a mile, I see my own house, where I’ve lived for thirty years this spring, where I’ve raised three daughters. In historical photos, acres of citrus and walnut groves covered the land for miles, broken only by a few farmhouses. Mine is one of those. A bungalow with green shingles and burgundy window frames, once solitary in the trees, but now anchoring the corner of my block. A house that my eldest daughter’s friends told me I could not paint a different color, because they wouldn’t be able to find their way to the place where they could always be sure of food and a couch on which to sleep, and the right book to take with them in the morning.
My house—which I made into the home from Robert Frost’s poem: “When you go there, they have to take you in.”
I learned that from my marriage family, from Alberta and General Sims.
Every night, I stand there for a moment with my dog, the brittlebush quivering in the wind, thinking that all those years, no matter which way I looked, I was never alone.
The women who brought us here were utterly alone. Sometimes they had only what they held inside to call company. Even as children, they had no one but themselves.
Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876
She was
called Fine when she was orphaned. Then her name changed for each man in her life, for seventy years. She became Fin Hofford, Viney Rollins, Fannie Rollins, Tinnie Kemp, Fanny Kemp, and finally, in letters carved onto her headstone in a historic black cemetery outside Tulsa, Oklahoma:
BELOVED GRANDMOTHER
FINEY KEMP
1874–1952
nothing but
a new possession to the white people who took her from the former slave cabin in the countryside northwest of Nashville, where she was born maybe in 1869, only four years after the Civil War ended, according to an 1870 U.S. Census document, or maybe in 1874, according to information written on an application for social security just before her death.
It doesn’t matter. By the time she was five or six, Fine was a child bereft. Adrift.
Like countless children during Reconstruction, a violent maelstrom of greed and revenge and ruined land, Fine moved through the world alone. Small wanderers were everywhere along the roadsides, among the trees, in the edges of the yards.
Bereft of all love and care. Bereaved is what we feel when someone dies. Bereft is when we are left without anything.
Henry Ely, her father, had been “run off by the law,” Fine told her grandchildren, said to have made his way to Texas. Shortly afterward, her mother, Catherine, died in the place where she and her own sister had been enslaved for their entire lives. Fine was the youngest of five children. Imagine the children in the cabin doorway, watching wagons enter the yard to take them away.
Fine told the story of her life to her daughters and her grandchildren in Oklahoma and California; as her grandchildren became our elders, they recounted the details at family gatherings, and now the last surviving grandson of Fine, our beloved uncle John Prexy Sims, is eighty-two years old and tells her story to our own children.
“They took her by herself,” he said. “Her mother was dead and her father was gone. There was no one to contest the white people who came and picked the little ones out like puppies. The family that took her called her Fine simply because she looked strong and healthy.” She never saw her family again.
John said, “Her father was a Cherokee man, and he was in love with two sisters who were slaves. They were so beautiful he couldn’t pick one. So he loved them both.”
Family legend: Catherine and her sister lived together in one slave dwelling. Henry Ely was a free man, not allowed onto the plantation, so he dug a tunnel from the forest at the boundary of the land and under the fence. He planned the tunnel to open up into the dirt floor of the cabin of the sisters. (Like a fairy tale of a prince and two princesses—the fairy tales we were all told of captive women and a man whose love might rescue them. But this was 1850s Tennessee.)
Free men of color were often killed or forced out of the area by slaveowners or vigilantes. New laws made the very presence of men like Henry illegal. If Henry was Cherokee, his life was endangered by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Jackson wanted the west, and Tennessee was then part of the west. Manifest Destiny—painted landscapes with white angels wearing white garments hovered over the wagon trains of white settlers as they crossed the Appalachian