Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 74

We shake our heads as if unsure of the answer. But we know. It's because they know what'll happen if we ever really do get free. They scared.

Ebbie say G.o.d must be a woman. That we was made in Her image, though she whispers it like she's afraid He may hear her talkin' about Him thataway. I tell her she's blasphemin'. Ebbie say she been blasphemed against all her life. That I been blasphemed against, too. Just because we womenfolk. She asked me to think over how many times someone spoke to me, to my womanness, with irreverence. Me. A sacred bein' like them stars, only Ebbie say more so 'cause I was fas.h.i.+oned in G.o.d's likeness. And me not ever knowin' it. I laugh at her, but that night when I creep back home and let myself in the screen door, real quiet so's not to wake Leonard, somethin' deep down in my belly tingles at the idea of G.o.d with Her nappy hair, coffee-and-cream skin, and lips thick as plums. Lookin' like me.

Ruthie craves a child of her own the same way I once ached to leave Grandville. So I tell her about when I was pregnant with Pontella, when she first fluttered. And the women who already had children-how they told me it would feel like I had a belly full of b.u.t.terflies. Only it wasn't like that at all. I'd felt b.u.t.terflies before; they came with the fear.

This was something else. More like dove wings, bringing me peace for the first time in my life. And for a while I thought I was having a bird, until I saw the coal-black coils of hair peeking out from between my thighs. When the midwife turned Pontella's head in order to sweep her mouth, seeing her face, that ancient face, I realized for the first time that a whole being had lived in me. The awe made it so I could barely breathe or move.

I could hardly hear the midwife telling me to push one more time, the shoulders. And me taking the deepest breath I could, so deep my chest burned, hunching my back and pus.h.i.+ng with all of my might. I felt in my soul more than in my body the ripping, like the ripping of the veil. Shaking, I fell backward onto the bed, my eyes rolled up into my head. It was like I'd fallen into the bluest of oceans, sinking, sinking into the warm, rus.h.i.+ng waters of life. I had fallen into myself. I had become the world, my womb the center of the universe. I had become one with G.o.d, one who knew what it meant to be creator. Life-giver.

That's how I know G.o.d is a woman.

Ebbie gives me permission. That's all, permission. Like someone sayin' it's all right to just be. And whatever all I was meant to be in the first place. Before they told me that girls couldn't chew gum or climb trees or wear jeans. That a woman's value counted on how well she fed her husband and children and the way she kept up her home. Before they told me a girlchild was what you wanted only after findin' out you couldn't have anythin' at all. I believed 'em, every one of those baldfaced lies. And them some powerful lies, too, anytime they can talk a person out of bein' what G.o.d made her to be. Talk a person right out of her soul. But Ebbie come along and tell me the truth of the matter. Truth always burn away anything that ain't like it.

Selfishly, I tell Ebbie that I could go on like this forever. As soon as I say it, I see somethin' in her eyes shrink from my words. At that moment, I know it's only a matter of time before she leaves again. I tell her how it gets harder for me to fit myself into a life that someone else created for me. Never understood that it wasn't even supposed to be thataway. And when I leave her, I'm scared and angry all at the same time. Scared to think of what I have to go back to if she ever leaves me, angry at the ones who made it so.

Tired of bein' treated like a fall hog.

Ruthie comes to me after two days, her eyes hidden, black ice cupped by purple moons. I look at her bruised face with both anger and guilt. Someone else's desecration making me feel responsible, and her ashamed of her womanhood, her vulnerability. She says Leonard beat her because she refused to cook and clean. I don't tell her he beat her because she stopped making him believe that he was the only reason she ever existed at all. Like the husbands of the maniacs, he knows that the young girl he married is already a memory.

When we go to leave the orchards that night, a chill invading the air, disturbing the illusion given by our Indian summer, I know I have to go. For a brief moment it's been enough to know that someone else is as I am. To find myself in someone else. So I won't have to feel so very alone. But I'm the one who made it that way, forcing my own nature on her and maybe even on Pontella if I were to stay.

I say it's getting too cold for us to meet. I promise I'll see her in the spring. I hold her close, inhale the nutty scent of wet earth from her hair, holding back the pain of unshed tears in my chest, knowing it will be the last time. Winter will come and I will settle in with the child I created, make memories of my own.

Ruthie talks about forever as if there really is such a thing. When even our future is already our past. But for a time our souls met, and danced, and soared. We were able to live like the maniacs, and we were comforted by that knowledge.

It's not until spring I learn Ebbie has left me and Pontella. Left before I could tell her she gave me back my seed. Now I walk through my life like one who goes by a familiar place that has been torn to rubble, one who can't quite remember what once stood.

I feel the months slide by and I watch my skin stretch taut over the swell of promise. I could almost pretend like this never happened at all, except for the movement in my belly, like dove wings, remindin' me of my nights with Ebbie and what it felt like to be really free, pullin' me from Leonard's side each night. I sleep beneath maples cast in shadows, lettin' tears fall warm and without excuse. Folks talk so, but to Leonard's face they tell him it's my bein' pregnant. That I'll return to normal once I have the baby. While every night I lie on a bed of gra.s.s-covered earth, fall into a sleep filled with dreams more real than this world, where I am a fish the color of rainbows, a bird that soars to the depths of the ocean. They say when a woman is full with life, she dreams strange dreams.

Fire: An Origin Tale.

BY FAITH ADIELE.

I'm nearly sixteen years old before I learn the true story of my birth. It is the spring of 1979, fifteen months before snowcapped Mount Saint Helens will wake up a few hundred miles away and create a new country; seventeen years after my teenage mother lay down on the floor of her father's house and contemplated suicide. I can picture her in 1962 with her apple cheeks and light brown ponytail, lying flat against the gray carpet, looking too brunette to be Scandinavian and much younger than her nineteen years. She might have been wearing a sleeveless blue cotton smock, the patch pockets stuffed with half-used tissues, and a mannish pair of black gla.s.ses. Those droopy blue eyes of hers, so deceptively sleepy, would have been wide open for once. Seventeen years later, except the short bowl haircut swirled with cowlicks, she looks exactly the same.

Time has stopped in the living room of our tiny house. It's as if my mother's silence, has cast a spell that descends over us like the ash when Mount Saint Helens erupts, turning cars and flowerbeds silver. We will have to wear surgical masks outside, just like at the Annual Portland Rose Festival to the south, thousands of spectators and beauty queens waving to each other from behind white paper cones. But for now, my mother contemplates the ceiling, and the cats on the roof fall asleep, whiskered chins upturned in the shade of the honeysuckle vine.

Bound by the spill of her silence, no one on Gregory Avenue moves. Next door, Mr. Graham turns to stone in the midst of his prized hybrid teas and floribunda. Across the street, Tommy the Plumber stalls, tattoos motionless in the hairy forests of his arms and legs and chest. At the end of the street, the boys on the high school wrestling team-state champions for three years straight-slump, drooling, onto gym mats, while next door at my mother's junior high, three kids smoking joints topple over on the football field.

The entire town of Sunnyside, Was.h.i.+ngton-where according to the Chamber of Commerce, the sun s.h.i.+nes 360 days a year-holds its breath. At the feedlot near the sign welcoming visitors to SUNNYSIDE-HOME OF ASTRONANT BONNIE DUNBAR, the milk-faced Herefords and polled Angus stand vacant-eyed and slack-jawed, just like when the volcano blows. In the tiny business district, the Rotarians and Kiwanis and Elks and Eagles stop singing in mid-song; the neon warrior on the awning of the Safari Lounge watches his spear and s.h.i.+eld blink and fizzle out; and the Golden Pheasant Chinese restaurant actually closes.

The blond kids up on Harrison Hill drift in their blue swimming pools, while Mexican workers doze on ladders in the sooty fruit orchards, their burlap bags slipping to the ground. Nothing much was happening to start with at the big Catholic and Mormon and Episcopalian and Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian churches, but in the tiny new churches that are continually forming and separating at any time of day-so many that Sunnyside is in the Guinness Book of World Records-the congregations begin to snore in their folding chairs.

This hush, while I wait for my mother to call the true tale of my origins up from hibernation, carries out of town, past Old Doc Querin's big animal practice, past the huge Dutch dairies with their tin-roofed barns, past fields strung high and beaded with hops. It wafts along the restricted road to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which did the plutonium finis.h.i.+ng for the bombs dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki, and where people say that strange, new insects breed in the chalky limestone. It floats by the Moore farm with its collapsing barn and twelve kids, the Kludas farm with its narrow lambing shed and single giant son, and my grandparents' farm wedged in between. For once the woodp.e.c.k.e.r attacking their trees is quiet, enjoying the bright pink blossoms on the th.o.r.n.y Hawthorn, the heart-shaped leaves of the Catalpa, the drooping Weeping Willow. The silence winds along the irrigation ditch to the asparagus fields at the tiny airport, the same fields where my mother walked barefoot in 1962, the soil damp between her toes, and considered killing herself and her unborn child.

"I need the form that shows you have custody of me," I repeat, in case my mother didn't hear me. A permission slip for a study program in Mexico rests on the sofa cus.h.i.+on between us.

A few minutes ago, when I announced that the study program required the signatures of both parents-unless one can prove sole custody-my mother grunted, setting the spell. Now her eyes contemplate the ceiling, blue specks beneath a field of gently waving cowlicks.

I wait. It is 1979, my soph.o.m.ore year of high school, the moment for which I have been raised. From our monthly United Nations Day dinners where my mother and I dress in makes.h.i.+ft rebosas and saris and das.h.i.+kis and make optimistic stabs at crepes and piroshki and kimchee from the Time Life international cookbooks series, to the home curriculum she designs for me from her college anthropology textbooks, to our misp.r.o.nounced mutterings over the kinara ("Umoja means 'unity' . . .") and the Haggadah ("We were slaves of Pharaoh . . .") and the shahda ("There is no G.o.d but G.o.d . . ."), my mother has been preparing me for this. It is to be my first trip out of North America-the escape from Sunnyside she never quite managed herself. The only thing standing in the way is my father's signature.

"I'll get the custody agreement." I offer, holding out a pen. Program enrollment to Mexico is on a first comefirst served basis. "Where is it?"

Anything having to do with my father, who lives overseas, is a bit of a mystery. He and my mother divorced when I was still a baby, and in time she returned to her hometown and he to his. His photograph-a college man with close-cropped curls, thick gla.s.ses matching hers, and a green wool overcoat-hangs above my bed. Occasionally I write to him, and his affectionate replies drag themselves in months later. I know what he looks like and I know his handwriting. I know that he loves me very much. I just can't remember ever having seen him.

If I think about this, I'm a bit bewildered. I believe that, no matter how young I was when he left, I should remember my father. At least the sharp bouquet of Lux soap, the scratch of green wool against my cheek, the rich ba.s.s of his full-throated laugh, the lush Rs of his accent. He is, after all, the only one in the family like me. The only one who is black.

Being black matters. It was the reason for the trouble. Though my mother's story is spa.r.s.e, always the same information presented in the exact same words, she has always been forthcoming about the trouble. For years I've watched her bee-stung lips twist into tight shapes as she describes how my grandfather demanded that she stop seeing my father, a Nigerian graduate student. How, when she refused, he forced her to transfer to another college hundreds of miles away.

It was 1961, a moment of firsts. My father was the first in his family to come to the West; my mother was the first in her family of Scandinavian immigrants to go to college. "I was wild about it," she confesses, eyes gleaming. "All those books-I thought I had died and gone to heaven!" Her freshman year she met my father, and they became the first interracial couple on campus. This among ten thousand college students.

After my mother was sent away, my parents met in secret and were married at the Seattle courthouse one Sat.u.r.day. "I wore a pale green princess-style dress with matching jacket like Jackie Kennedy might have worn-only much cheaper," she says, smile firmly in place, "and your grandfather immediately disowned me." Without his support, she was forced to drop out of college and banned from ever going home or seeing her mother and brother.

The newlyweds were broke. The apartment swelled with international students who were also broke and who stopped by for dinners of vegetable curry and groundnut stew. I remember being poor-a chalky taste like scorched kidney beans-and I remember the stew, my mother's wooden spoon swirling peanut b.u.t.ter into tomato sauce-a vivid, oily spiral of red and brown. I remember murmured discussions about Cuba and Vietnam lasting late into the night, backed by Bob Dylan's whine or smooth African Highlife on the hi-fi. I remember the scent of vanilla drifting from the coffee table and the squish of warm wax between my fingertips as I caught candle drips before being chased off to bed. I don't remember my father.

After politics, my parents' great loves were movies and dancing. I know little else. But if we are riding the bus and pa.s.s a former hangout of theirs, or if I come across a photograph of one of their friends, my mother dusts off a memory and presents it to me. "Your poppie used to like this place," she might say, or "That girl was dating a West African too, and once we double-dated." She chooses these anecdotes carefully, sparingly, as if we are still poor.

I was born at Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton, in 1963. I don't know why Spokane, which is hundreds of miles from Seattle. I do know that my mother enjoyed being pregnant: sleepy, swollen, with a ready-made excuse to spend entire days reading. I can see her seventeen years ago, propped against the sofa bed of their tiny apartment, stacks of history textbooks and news magazines and dime-store mysteries covering every inch of the linoleum.

"Tell me again what the nurses said when they saw me for the first time," I demand.

She laughs, dog-earing a page of The Guerrilla-And How to Fight Him and settling my head in her lap. On this last point she is always eloquent. The nurses had never seen a mixed baby before, she recounts, slim fingers working my curls. "They fussed over you for days. Everyone did. For years strangers stopped us in the street and gave you presents-pieces of candy, s.h.i.+ny dimes-old men who looked like they had nothing to give."

Despite the sun s.h.i.+ning from my face, my parents divorced soon after, and my father returned to West Africa. We haven't seen him since.

Before we could afford to buy the Norse legends and African folktales that peopled my childhood, my mother wrote stories set in mythic African lands and ill.u.s.trated them with her own watercolor paintings of wise queens and beautiful warrior princesses in pastel tunics. Every morning and evening she read aloud to me, creating different voices for each character. Sometimes, if she was tired from teaching, she lost a voice, and I would bolt upright, protesting. "That's not the right voice!"

"No?" she would say, blinking rapidly as she does when she's trying to think. "Was it higher?" She would try again. "Dear Prince Amalu-"

My eyes would widen in horror.

"Lower? Ahem, Dear Prince-"

"No!" I'd wail, hands trembling like leaves.

"Okay, pause for a minute." She would lean forward and enact her usual ritual-a sip of tepid water masquerading as tea, a quick blow of her nose, the unwrapping of a half-sucked cough drop, and the popping it into her mouth.

Throughout all this, I would squirm. How could she take so long? How could she have forgotten this character who'd been living with us for days?

"Okay, let's see." She'd clear her throat and begin anew.

Not until she recaptured the correct voice-or invented a new one close enough to placate me-could I resume my curl in her lap, accept the narrative. Her own tale, however, she delivered in a detached, matter-of-fact tone.

"Who was at your wedding?" I'd ask periodically, hungry for the details of my origins. Some of my father's African cla.s.smates? What about her college roommate, the one who borrowed her nicest outfit, a sophisticated black c.o.c.ktail dress with tiny b.u.t.tons, and never returned it, despite my mother's increasingly bitter letters?

"Oh, no one really," she'd answer, glancing up from Report from a Chinese Village. "Just a pal of your poppie's and his girlfriend. I can't even remember their names."

I don't understand it. For years she labored to create the definitive family history, spending hours hunched over an old manual typewriter, clacking out family names and places and dates. She drew floor plans of childhood houses she remembered her mother and aunt describing. She pored over alb.u.ms and sc.r.a.pbooks and boxes of photographs. As with her anecdotes about my father, she was reductionist, a perfectionist. She chose photographs the same way she chose her memories-only the most representative and best preserved. History in her hands was finite. I wonder why major family events like my grandparents' wedding got a single photograph in the alb.u.m. Did she have only one, or was it her rigid aesthetic taste?

The spring of 1979, the year before Mount Saint Helens decides to wake from her 123-year slumber, the self my mother has kept dormant these seventeen years creeps out of the past. The last time the mountain blew was 1857, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court decided that blacks were not citizens. And like the pressure now building beneath our feet, the Dred Scott case weakened the fault line between the Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders, four years later exploding into civil war.

Mount Saint Helens' very first outburst was the stuff of legends, an origin tale that also pitted brother against brother. According to the Klickitat, who call her Tah-one-lat-cha ("Fire Mountain"), and the Puyallup, who call her Loowitlatka or Loowit ("Lady of Fire"), and the Yakima, our local tribe, the mountain was a lovely, white-clad maiden with whom both sons of the Creator fell in love. They battled each other for her, causing the sun to darken and the earth to tremble. As they hurled molten rock back and forth, entire forests and villages disappeared in flames. Angered, the Creator turned one son into Mount Adams, the other into Mount Hood, and Loowit into the symmetrically beautiful Mount Saint Helens, perennially encased in ice and snow.

For three months in 1980, prior to the eruption, the ground beneath her will tremble-ten thousand quakes in seven weeks. A crater will yawn in her mouth, growing at a rate of six feet per day. Though geologists and biologists recognize the signs, they will ignore them. When at last Loowit succ.u.mbs to the pressure, the avalanche preceding the blast will splash water 850 feet high, temperatures will reach 1,000 degrees, and 500 million cubic yards of rock will be released in one of the largest volcanic explosions in North American history. The entire mountaintop will slide into the Toutle River Valley.

Two hundred miles away in Sunnyside, we will sit openmouthed before the television, watching thick white smoke curdle like brain matter against a blackened crater. We will hear the stunned cries of journalists and rescue workers. "It doesn't even look like the same country!" someone shouts into a radio. "I can't find any landmarks. It doesn't look like anyplace I've ever been before."

The Lady of Fire will forge an entirely new country. Before the explosion, Sunnyside is so dry that when it rains, school closes. When Loowit blows, the largest landslide in recorded history will level 230 square miles of forest in three minutes, wiping out entire populations of elk, deer, bear, and coyote. Glistening Spirit Lake, where my cousin Heidi and I crest through snow thaw, will become a bowl of mud, as will the Columbia River, going from a depth of forty feet to thirteen and stranding four dozen freighters in the process. The silvery ash will drift in a fifteen-mile-high column all the way here to southeast Was.h.i.+ngton. By noon, ash will be falling in Idaho. In two weeks, it will circle the globe. After that, rain in Sunnyside becomes normal and school is never canceled.

The spring before our geography irrevocably changes, my mother breaks the spell that holds us to the living room sofa. "Well," she says, rubbing her temple with the same hand that now holds the permission slip to Mexico, "can you keep a secret?" She half-grins.

I bite the insides of my mouth to keep from smiling back. This must be big, bigger even than my first trip abroad. I nod, as chill as mountain runoff. "Sure."

"Well . . ." she begins, tilting her head to the side and looking a bit like me when caught rifling her drawers for old photographs and letters. "I can't prove sole custody because"-she pauses-"your father and I were never divorced." She gives me an amused, expectant look.

After a minute I ask, "What do you mean-did Dad die?" Even as I say it, I suspect it can't be the explanation. My father writes to me, after all. And though I haven't heard from him in five years, as we learned following his three-year silence during the Nigerian civil war, as we will learn a mere three weeks after Loowit blows when horsetail rushes and fireweed pop up through the still-smoldering ash, followed by a scurry of pocket gophers and ground squirrels, rebirth is always possible.

My mother shakes her head, and unbidden, The Question arises from childhood memory, where it dozes fitful, ever near. I can feel it rumble through my stomach, force its way into my head as clearly as if I am on the playground, surrounded by a crowd of children who have just seen my mother's white skin for the first time and won't stop asking. "Is that your real mom?"

"Uh-huh" is my reply, rus.h.i.+ng to head off the inevitable barrage of questions. I shut down my mind and chant my answer like a nursery rhyme: "My father is black. He's darker than me. My mother is white. Black and white together make brown." I present my arm for inspection. "See?"

Sometimes the scowls relax, the play resumes. There is frequently one who doubts. "Nuh-uh," he or she insists, balled hands against Toughskin-clad hips, as if this were high noon at the O.K. Kiddie Corral. "She can't be your real mom." Pale eyes squint through potential holes in my story. Then, the drawled challenge: "Where's your real mom?"

Suddenly it's The Big Country, and I'm Gregory Peck, Eastern navy captain turned rancher, raised to reason. I flail, repeating my claim to my mother, tender-footed and at a loss out here in the Western territories. Only a grown-up can save me. But when they arrive, it's often clear that the parents have no more idea than their offspring how I could possibly be my mother's child. Herding my challenger away, they glance back over their shoulders, as if the question of my origins is somehow unspeakable.

When I'm lucky, my mother herself appears, cowlicks crackling and baby cheeks aflame as she marches, all five-feet-two of her, up to full-grown men and jeering teenagers. "Do you have something to say to my daughter?" she roars, loud as any natural phenomenon. She stands on tiptoe and jabs a finger in their faces. They could be big as Burl Ives, Gregory Peck's Big Country nemesis, or belligerent as Chuck Conners, his rotten son; she doesn't care.

Kids "too young to know any better" get hugged. "Hey, hey," she says, kneeling on the asphalt, dimpled arms firmly encircling her captive. "What's going on here?"

By now Gregory Peck and Chuck Conners are both wailing, snot streaking our faces. Through my tears I watch her pink cheeks, her mouth working close to the kid's ear. I never hear what she says, other than her prerelease signal-"Okay?"-more statement than query.

The stranger's son or daughter nods, Toughskins tensed to flee and yet surely relieved, too, to have the unexplainable explained by someone so certain of right and wrong.

At times even I wonder about my origins. For all her efforts to create our definitive history, there are no photographs of my parents' wedding in the family alb.u.m, none of my mother pregnant, and none of me as a newborn. There is a lone snapshot of me taken before the age of seven months: a blurry infant in light blue, teetering on a bed I do not recognize. I see little resemblance to the b.u.t.tery-colored baby my mother claimed I had been, the newborn whose sloping forehead and ma.s.ses of wavy hair looked "just like a Mayan or Egyptian princess." Whenever I demand proof of this previous incarnation, she explains wistfully that they could not afford a camera. By the time they got one, my forehead had rounded out and my hair tightened into curls. But that was fine, too, according to her.

Back rigid against the sofa, I now unfurl The Question onto my tongue. Though I am nearly sixteen, it drags in my throat. "So . . . I'm adopted?"

My mother whips her head from side to side. "No, no, no. I'm just saying that your poppie and I were never married." A faint smile lurks around the corners of her mouth.

Not married! My best friend Cheryl will undoubtedly add this to her list of why my mother and I are going to Everlasting h.e.l.lfire-first being my refusal to accept Jesus as my personal savior and second my inability to get my mother to vote Republican. I can see her now asking her youth group to take a break from playing rock records backward in the church bas.e.m.e.nt in attempt to detect messages from Satan, so that they can spend an afternoon praying for my b.a.s.t.a.r.d soul.

I grin, mildly t.i.tillated by my parents' unconventionality. Here at last are the romance and drama of my origins. I sit back, eager to hear the rest.

My mother explains that the last time she saw my father was June 1962, his final secret visit to Seattle, during which they broke up. A few months later, she discovered she was pregnant. They made some gestures toward reconciliation, but my father was on his way to the East Coast for his doctorate and they soon realized it wouldn't work.

When my grandfather found out, he was furious, insisting that my mother get an abortion. She refused. That was the real reason he disowned her. The reason she had dropped to the living room floor after wandering barefoot in the asparagus fields. The reason I had been born in Spokane.

My mother c.o.c.ks a brow and takes me by surprise: "That's where the home for unwed mothers was." She winces a bit, waits.

The home for unwed mothers? In a good origin tale, miraculous babes are found beneath garden leaves, nestled on riverbanks, even in the womb of a she-wolf, rarely in state-run inst.i.tutions reeking of cabbage and shame. My mouth drops, and it occurs to me that she is making this whole thing sound easier than it was. This version may be more truthful, but it's still a story. Perhaps my mother's decision to have a mixed-race child alone was not a carefree slap in the face of convention after all. Perhaps-I try this idea on for the first time-she was not in control of her fate.

The image of my self-sufficient mother being hustled out of town in the middle of the night to give birth at some secret inst.i.tution hundreds of miles from home is so foreign that I feel my mind withering. My scope of my questions shrinks to meet it. "How did you get pregnant?"

She confesses that she had been intentionally careless. "I think I knew we were breaking up," she confides, "and subconsciously I wanted a baby."

"What about Saint Elizabeth's?" Was Saint Elizabeth's a lie? And what of the nurses who vied to hold me, who had never seen such well-defined features in a newborn, such heavily lashed eyes, such a full rosebud mouth? Who had really been there as I took my first breath?

My mother a.s.sures me that both the nurses and Saint Elizabeth's were real. The only difference is that I had been born in the home's maternity ward. Saint Elizabeth's Hospital sent nurses and doctors to the home to oversee the deliveries. Together the two inst.i.tutions collaborated on a procedure of secrecy. Saint Elizabeth's staff signed my birth certificate and registered my arrival with the hospital so that no record of my true birthplace would exist.

I hear this, and the mother I believe I know slips out of focus. I squint at her, as I might have squinted at myself on the playground, had I advanced such a tale. "What about your wedding outfit?" I have such a vivid image of the pale green suit and corsage that I've constructed a photograph of my mother the bride-pouty mouth, slim hand in a white glove, lacy sprig of baby's breath against a soft lapel. My father as groom is the same bespectacled graduate student who stares out from my bedroom wall. I imagine separate portraits hanging over my bed, almost touching in their cheap gilt frames. Until now I had not noticed never imagining my parents together in the same scene.

She laughs and tugs the loose curls at the back of my neck. Yes, the green suit was a real suit, a detail recalled from one of my father's visits.

My mother then teaches me how to lie: "It's always best to stay as close to the truth as possible," she says, as if she has not just spent sixteen years drilling the importance of honesty into me. I have been trained to return extra change to the penny, to raise my hand to confess wrongdoing, to resist the pressure of peers and authority figures alike.

She grimaces and gives her head a rueful shake. "I'm not a very good liar," she confesses. "I have such a poor memory."

I will later discover that my mother's poor memory spans most of my parents' break-up and the entire duration of her pregnancy. This is partly because her family kept her hidden like an insane aunt in the attic. No verbal or photographic record exists of her experience. Her recollection is a series of brief vignettes, fading into a broader, cloudy background like the constant rotation of a camera lens seeking focus.

And what she does remember is difficult to verify. "If you keep telling the same lies over and over," she warns me, "after a while you forget the truth."

My mother does not remember telling her parents she was pregnant. "But I remember roaming barefoot at dusk through the asparagus fields and contemplating suicide. Your grandfather was threatening to toss me into the street if I didn't get an abortion, and of course I didn't have any money of my own and neither did your poppie. He was the eldest of eleven and had been supporting himself on meager teaching fellows.h.i.+ps for years." It was at this point that my nineteen-year-old mother fell to the floor of her father's house and resolved not to get up until she had decided once and for all what to do.

In 1979 as we sit on the sofa together, she gazes out the picture window at the spellbound landscape and recalls one of the few images that has stayed with her: a yellow farmhouse in a knot of trees, uncharacteristically empty. Her parents and brother had gone to town. My mother, who has always preferred solitude to companions.h.i.+p, had extended her arms and muddy feet as if making snow angels. The textured gray carpet had felt solid beneath her, the design swirling between her fingers. She'd stared up at the ceiling with its glitter flecks and reminded herself that she could be just as stubborn as her father.

She was lying on the floor of white, rural, Christian, soon-to-be-middle-cla.s.s, preRoe v. Wade America. "And I had four options: illegal abortion, marriage, adoption, or death." She did not want a backstreet abortion and she did not want to marry my father. She rolled on her side, feeling the scratch of the carpet against her cheek.

Now her voice is light. "That left two options: have the baby and give it up for adoption, or kill us both."

Adoption wouldn't solve the problem of being dest.i.tute and having to drop out of college. Besides, in some secret recess of her mind she wished she could somehow keep the baby. "I worried, who would adopt a mixed-race baby?"

That left suicide.

Even at sixteen I know that my mother is not the kind of woman who considers suicide. For sixteen years she has been fierce, hugging tolerance into strangers' intolerant children, creating pastel-clad African queens to talk to me. Besides, there are simply too many books to read.

What nearly toppled my mother as she teetered on the edge of suicide was the fact that she wouldn't be able to finish college. College. The collective dream of her immigrant, just-leaving-working-cla.s.s family-the collective dream of her entire dusty town, really. Her escape from life on the farm, from the World's Record for Most Churches Per Capita, Small Town Division, from 360 days of sun. Her release from a country where fathers packed their daughters away for life or married them off to sweaty farmboys at the end of a shotgun or paid strangers to fish around inside them with a rusting coat hanger.

As soon as my mother hefted death in one hand and thunked its roundness with her knuckle, everything fell into place. "It was all so simple." She shrugs, the mother I know returned to join us on the sofa. "The situation was not about suicide or shame or having no options. Money was the only thing holding me back from what I truly wanted-from college, from keeping the baby." Money and her father, wielding it like a weapon against her. "Money, nothing more."

And so she set herself free. "Let him disown me, I thought," she says, flipping her hands palms up. The ground as she got up off the floor of her father's house was solid beneath her feet. She would act without her father, without a husband, without anyone's approval. "I decided to have the baby, you."

Her voice drops, tender as a spring seedling. And it hits me, the message in my name. Despite fighting with my father and the entire town of Sunnyside over their staunch Christianity, despite claiming not to know why she chose the name-regardless of what she can or cannot remember-the evidence is there. It is the photograph she couldn't afford upon my arrival, the decision she made from her four options, the gift she prayed for-Faith.