Grandmothers
Some little girls, with plaits and blemishes, cook rice and jerk chicken as the heat crawls down their spine in the shack. They wipe tears of beach water and vulnerability from their walls of sacrifice. They eat dinner, wishing they had a TV or mum, or dad, to tell them things will get better: one day. They stroke photos of their mummies, gone to big cities. Mummies who send money every month to buy food and pay the rent.
Mummies who never call.
Mother I need, mother I need, mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain.[1]
Some little girls wear the pretty dresses their mummies send by mail. The dresses tarnished with the labor of ungrateful children, but because the first world’s demand for service workers draws mothers from a variety of developing countries often to care for other people’s children [2]their mummies go. Their mummies care for children that will one day forget them, but “if a man don’t work he can’t eat” and that goes for mummies too. So their mummies work hard, underpaid and poorly treated. Their mummies will be ill with resentment, just like some little girls sitting on the porch holding onto silhouettes of their mummies. The nostalgia is captured in the barrels sent back home, with the dresses, the food, the toiletries, and the shoes.
Some little girls never forget the shoes.
The doorbell rings and some little girls welcome familiar faces, drowning in Obsession by Calvin Klein. Damaged portals, who secretly stare at them through the window.
“Mah sista ain’t ‘ome,” some little girls say.
But these faces enter in any way. They know that there are some little girls who are unkempt, yet ripe, like the peaches they enjoy after work.
“I’ll wait fa she”, these faces reply, grinning.
Then, some little girls, naïve and unaware walk the malicious grins to the sofa, so that they can unbutton their bodies on land that’s never been touched. They forbid screaming, and take the loneliness of their victims and mold it into fear.
Some little girls lose their aspirations in the chapped of these lips and foreign anatomy. They bleed their youth as the faces say, “Tings will get betta. One dey.”
And as some little girls have had their virtues tainted, they will be more vacant than the past. They will try to force their miniature hands over the bruises, but they will be too ambitious in their reaching.
Some little girls tell stories of scents that won’t leave. Their sisters say, “Shut yuh mout!” then take belts to beat them out of their lies. They’re sent to their rooms, won’t talk for weeks, and then some little girls begin vomiting. They stop going to school. They confiscate their despair in unwanted pregnancies. Their babies are relinquished the arms of adults who say it’s “Do fuh do,” because some little girls were moving too fast. Too fast for being a decade plus one year. Some little girls will have more children and the children that make it to their arms will be left behind to be cultivated by the island. Some little girls will then roam aimlessly. Searching for themselves. Uncovering the blame. Un-hatching the guilt of what they couldn’t control.
Some little girl’s mummies will eventually save money for years in order to send for them. The little girls who stole their faces and their stories. Their mummies will then overpay a shitty lawyer to organize the paperwork. He will take his time. But their little girls will come. They will be seventeen, but they will look much older. The little girls will not take their children. They will wait alone at airports for the mummies they’ve only seen in infancy. Stern faces that reject them and their tragedies-left back home. Together they will walk methodically to Harlem rooms and create the dust on the walls. No one is breathing.
Some little girls have single mothers who personally know the continual pattern of rejection and counter rejection which is the consequence of knowing the process of migration, [where] families undergo profound transformations that are often complicated by extended periods of separation between loved ones[3]. This will cause these little girls to hunger for the seeds that bloomed from their womb. The little girls will tell their mummies to help them reunite with their children but their mummies will tell them, “Use’ maid ya bed, ya lie in it,” and then their mummies will retreat to their rooms where they will refuse to speak. Some little girls will label their mummies silence: apathy. The little girls will wash their ripen bodies in basins, in front of windows where men can stare. They will welcome the filth.
How could you leave your daughter? How could you hate your mother? What questions are valid?
Parents tend to expect their children to be grateful for their sacrifices but instead often find that their children are ambivalent about joining their parents in the migratory process. [4]Some little girls will become rebellious. They will despise America because of the ache. They will find it difficult to shake the feeling of abandonment. They will idolize the one night stand. They will misplace their accents on coffee tables in hotels and feel powerful. They will use foreign substances to help them to forget they exist. The nostalgia of islands that hurt them will be buried in pockets of see-through clothing and high heels.
If it is true that children develop into secure adults within the context of stable parental [5]relationships then some little girls are doomed. They will only search the faces of men in crowds and wonder who fathered them. They will curse the name of their mummies and trace their steps back to the small mass of land that birthed them. They will fall apart, exposed and broken. They will hide their contempt for their own flesh while hating their mummies and repeating: “Faddas don’t love little girls woo were r*ped,” and then they remember to forget this story.
Early attachment theorists would generally predict that the attachment with the mother or primary caretaker is of particular significance. Again, this Western model may be overemphasizing the pathogenic potential of ruptures in the parent-child dyad[6]. Or is it?
Some little girls face difficulties due to language barriers, stigmatization and ridicule[7], and so they find floors to mop when no offices will hire them. Some little girls who were left behind suffer from depressions [and] low self-esteem. [8]They will mop the floors belonging to health clinics where they will seek therapy for their promiscuity. They will learn to write down questions about why their mummies don’t love them and wonder where are their faddas?
Some little girls will cry for the children they left back home. The two sons they never call and the daughter they never mention. They will simply cook on the weekends and shop at The GAP. They find best friends who they can confide in. Best friends who convince them to show signs they have utilized their womb. Some little girls eventually send for their children. It is their children who will make them grandmothers.
***
Mothers
I am ashamed. I wash my hands after each atrocity. My mother left me and I erase her name each time I write it. Letter by letter I disregard our knowing each other. History couldn’t acknowledge our coexistence, in the womb, in the shack before she left me with her neighbor. I am beginning a new chapter. I am the offspring of a mother whose mother left her to be discovered by damaged hands. In return she left me and now I am spilling my broken onto generations of women and anguish. There are avocados trees growing in my back yard. I carve the slippery fruit into small patches of earth. I slip their spines onto crackers and devour my past.
I open the mailbox and retrieve an envelope. It is my birthday, and each year my mum sends $25. I buy candies that stick to the roof of my mouth. The sugar makes me a woman. The men stare. They take the caps off their Mount Gay bottles and their lips shrivel like raisins. As I play with my dolls, one man says, “Ya dollie needs a mon.” I don’t know much about the hands that touched me or the fact that they were the same hands that touched my mother, I just know, no one is listening. I begin to live my mother’s truths.
Mother I need, mother I need, mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain.[9]
I am pregnant again. I already have two daughters. None of my children’s birth certificates bear a father’s name. The nurses at the hospital call me “fast ass,” and had I not been:“Outdayso whining up and letting loose,” I could have been attending my first day of another year at secondary. I take the baby in my arms and the pain intensifies. He is heavy and needy. He grabs my breasts. He takes all I’ve got left.
I am his mother and so naturally I leave.
85% of the youth…were separated from one or both parents during the process of migration[10], so why do I feel so alone? I take my two daughters to meet my mother at the airport and she is with her friend. My appearance mocks a woman. I never mention my son who’s three months the day. I grab her friend for a hug while my mother stares at me in confusion. I was three months when she left for America. She doesn’t understand why I didn’t recognize her.
When migrants leave to find work abroad, they often seek to improve the well-being of their family and provide better opportunities for their children over the long run[11]. My mother worked hard. I came here because she insisted I would have a better life. I’m not her. I don’t want to be a nurse. She came home and gave me an application for a position at her job and, in secret, I tore it into pieces. She owed me the courtesy of taking care of my daughters. It was her fault those men touched me. She left me in harm’s way. She never called. She sent those cards and those barrels and then a letter saying I was coming to America. Nothing in between. Work? When will I have time to breathe? I have been working on the laps of men since I was seven. Maybe America did have a lot of opportunities for me. Maybe I could have done better. But I was dead inside.
How was a dead woman supposed to come to life in America?
Left behind children face numerous adverse effects of parental migration including…a lack of motivation. Health concerns may arise, including drug use and undermined or deteriorating health[12]…and so, it’s Harlem. It’s the 80’s. Violent nostalgia journeys with me.
I drown out the sounds of my daughters just as my mother asks, “Wuh part you gine?”
I tune her out too. I become content with the high and lows of freedom and each time I dream, I wonder what it would be like to fly. I walk down Manhattan Ave., Lenox, 7th Ave. I keep going. Sometimes I am in Philadelphia. Sometimes I don’t know where I am. Listen to my darkness, my half-eclipsed notes. Mistake them for the sound of a lonely woman wailing as she roams the hills[13].
I am making my own decisions and although memories of my birth still haunt me, I am in control. I drink, I smoke, I laugh I dance, I possess authority. The reggae tunes nurture me. The dancehalls become my refuge. I disregard my youth falling away like the buildings on Morningside Ave.
I let the men have me. I make believe I know myself and what I want. But the men know about these lies. They threaten my future with their fists. Some use words. Words that hit like suns. They burn and break the glass within me.
I love to see men coming out of holes: manholes and sewer drains and train tunnels, or down the poles of firehouses, the gong going crazy, a dozen heroes in the making[14], it is these men who break my heart. These are the men who remind me that I was never fathered. Alas, I live to desire them more. Perhaps it’s their fragility I love: that moment when they’re caught in no man’s land, plummeting through the dark [15]and I am the frantic vessel that is desperate to taste them.
I place a cigarette to my lips, make sure my skirt is flying on the shoulder of my knees, and I tell them to take me away. These men will take me. They will give me their poison and I will be grateful to have had the protection of walls of clay, disguised as arms. I don’t regret any of it. The only regret is that I waited longer than a breath to scatter the sun’s reflection with my body [16]and because of it I couldn’t drown. I tried. Believe me, I tried.
I remember my children when they are taller than me. Children who see me as: “wufless” and foolish. The boy left to grow with the avocado trees and the two girls living a borough away. I run for my daughters. They’re full of trauma. I cook pork and guilt for breakfast and call them fat. I marry their enemy. I tell them to protect their silence and fold in the corners of their room. I don’t know how to ask questions. Did you miss me? Did you cry? How did my leaving make you feel? I do not know how to say sorry. I avoid my daughters pain.
Each night I scream in my bedroom. Blood trickling out of my nose. Sometimes my face on the sides of his shoes. Sometimes my lips broken, flesh oozing out of their form. This is love. If he didn’t love me he wouldn’t care enough to hurt me. I am his world. I will make sure he doesn’t touch my daughters. I will remind them to lock their door when they hear the noise. They tell me to leave. But he rescued me from the streets. He protected me from my mother’s rejection. He desired me when all the world tainted my youth. I can handle his fists and fits of anger. I must try harder not to make him angry.
Love is a tiny basement apartment on Beach Ave in the Bronx where I take my girls. My lover follows. My large thighs shrink. The doctors say I’m dying. I tell my daughters I should have come sooner. They stare; blank canvases drawn into the air. I scribble madness about gold rings and pocket change into my will. I take medicine and prepare for death. Each star I count gets smaller. My lover leaves for prison. He takes his fists and my voice. He builds a life without me. My daughters speak and now they’re angry. They’ve become women who will not allow me to die. I live in their rage and learn to accept it.
I am a hurricane. I began as a conflicting tropical storm. My air is sinking. The torture of being exploited has caused me to rise. I am hot. My winds begin to circle. I destroy my children’s lullabies and I do this in a hurry. I turn houses into debris. I do not fear concrete, it roars from my belly. The skies listen to me. The people run. Nothing stands in my way. I am potent. My voice will not quiver. But inside I melt. I contradict my beginning. I cry in my singing. If only I can get to the end I could show the world a rainbow. If only they could see the inside. If only they could see my peace.
I find a girl the height of a small wail living in our spare room. She looks the way I did when I was fifteen full of pulp and pepper. She spends all day up in the room measuring her thighs.[17]
I am her mother.
***
Daughters
You remember everything, although you pretend to lose the memories, like the dollar bills that fell down the sewer on your way to the store to buy your mum some loosies. Your family has also lost their tongue, so they keep their dialects stored in rooms of shame. You know where the keys are hoarded, but what is the use of opening the doors? Sometimes it is important for the tongue to be tamed. Sometimes it is important for the language to be lost.
You have learned from young that you can’t trust your mum. It’s not the ten years that she was gone or her picking her pervert husband over you, but it’s that she can’t look you in the eyes. My mother blinked back tears and spread her palms across his shoulder blades like wings of a plane. [18]You cannot love a woman who loves a man more than the seeds that bloomed from her heartache.
Migration affects the physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being of migrants themselves, of the people at the place of origin left behind and of the people at the place of destination[19]. You do not remember the island and this time you aren’t trying to forget. But there are just too many other things to remember.
Your mum cooks jerked chicken in your Bronx apartment and you gulp down the meat and spices hurriedly: this is how you feel her love. You are here in America, stained by the horrors of little girls whose mothers came to America before them. Fatherless. The women before you are silent and accepting. Your mum plays Bob Marley and you fall asleep to the question: Is This Love? Is this love…is this love…is this love…Is this love that I’m feelin? Is this love…is this love…is this love…Is this love that I’m feelin? Wo-o-o-oah! Oh yes, I know…yes, I know..yes, I know now! Yes, I know…yes, I know…yes, I know now!
You never forget the first day of school and your mum holding your hand, shaking and the plate size pancakes that made your stomach full. You adjust your black polyester skirt- and its silver dime buttons against the side of a brand-new woman and let your mum’s hand go back to its place. You walk in leather shoes, sliding against your ankles and the itchy tights nailing the fresh silk of your thighs. You wave goodbye without looking her in the face. And then you meet your teacher, who could’ve been your mum. Her hands, sturdy and firm, take you to your seat and you sit and intellectually forget the bruises on your darling mother’s face.
You have been successful in not getting r*ped. This is an accomplishment and if you don’t do anything else in life, at least you have protected your vagina. Your mother is never home. She frequently visits her husband, six hours away. You never question why there is no father at home because her drug-addicted, depraved husband has traumatized you and the only memories you have of men is when they’re beating women. You will always hit first so that if a man ever bloodied your nose at least you got the first hit.
Your mum learns her husband will not be coming back. She is different. There are plenty men in the house. You are livid and distressed. You stay in your room to protect your virginity. It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality[20]. Your mum abuses you with her jaws. Her husband’s rage finds itself into your space. She hurls the vocabulary swords to carve your insecurity. You try to ignore it but you cannot build a wall around such a needy woman.
Mother I need, mother I need, mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain[21].
Your mum tells you that girls like you go to hell. Girls that won’t do what their mummies say. Girls who don’t want to be like their mums. Mummies that say: “Honor thy mother and father so that days will be long in the land!” But there are no fathers here and the mummies are unavailable. Mummies who never tell you that Black is beautiful. Mummies that tell you, the lighter the prettier. The slimmer, the more chance you will have in finding a husband. Mummies who are angered when you decide to let your hair grow naturally. Mummies who have tried to repress you in between your skin and, when they couldn’t, they abandoned you, again.
You try not to be like your mum, but once you get a man into your system, you inherit a proper condition of wanting more Black/Puerto Rican/Jamaican/African love. You leave your schedule open, for second chances. You tell yourself you are special and that one day someone will notice. But then, when dust collects in your corners and cob webs form on your insides, you know he isn’t coming back and you are just an old memory of something that never got a second chance. You settle for the fog that lingers after the rain.
Where are your beginnings?
You are Black, or maybe Brown. Your hair nappy. You’re youthful and poised; round nose, full lips and thighs as dense as a stack of twenty dollar bills. You sit on the stoop of a “new building” in the hood and read Baraka, Giovanni and sometimes Shakespeare. The older women pass and slip you a fist full of change, telling you to buy an Icee from the hairy man who doesn’t speak English. Then you grow up, and go “home” every weekend to wash your clothes and talk to your Black, or maybe Brown mum who calls you white. You tell her that Africa isn’t a state and the reason she doesn’t have wrinkles has nothing to do with placing limes on her eyes, but it’s the melanin in her skin. You tell her white is a color and not a language, so you can’t talk “white.” You tell her Bill Clinton was not the first Black president, and yes you crush on Ben Stiller. Your mum gives you a plate of Coo Coo and flying fish. You appreciate the corn meal and okra parachuting down your throat. The clothes are clean, so when you finish eating, you kiss your mum on her cheeks and tell her you’re leaving. She offers you a cigarette and questions your honesty when you tell her you quit. Then you notice her shameful tears slithering from the history of her eyes. She accuses you of ignorance, but you hold her anyway and avoid describing your alienation in a world where you were never Black or Brown, just a pariah. Not a Bajan or American, just a fatherless, baby mama without a home. You want to tell her the world never sang your song and the music you invented only lives inside of you, but you grab your laundry and kiss her reminding her you will be back next week. You get on the elevator, dig inside your purse and find your wallet, taking a fist full of change for the Black or maybe Brown kids that will be sitting on the stoop.
You’re told you shouldn’t feel. Feeling makes you weak. You curl inside yourself and feel the pangs of holding it all in. You’ve given birth. You stand at the kitchen window and cry to the brick wall on the opposite side of the glass and ask yourself: “Little girl, what has ruined you?”
Don’t cry. Don’t scream. Don’t get angry. You’re wrinkling your shirt. Have a nice day; don’t miss the bus. Have lunch, with salmon and rice and strength. No yelling. No calling. Spend the night alone. Don’t talk too much. Give all you got; get nothing back and forth through seasons and holidays. I get it now. Don’t smirk. Don’t breathe. Don’t be sad, or happy. Just exist. Don’t tell anyone. Hold it in. Wait. Don’t be you. Fall in between statistical hysteria. Eat until overstuffed. Watch TV. Go to bed. Raise children. Don’t feel or know anything. Get dressed. Don’t wrinkle your shirt. Give them a kiss; accept their betrayal and lies ‘cuz life lies in between realities. Comb your hair. Wash the dishes. Buy groceries. Hate vegetables and bastards from hotels. Don’t cry. Don’t scream. Love your mother and father. Miss your sister. Feed your children, kiss their cheeks and remind them of God and Africa. Wear red lipstick. Don’t cry. Don’t scream and remember, don’t wrinkle your shirt.
Remember if you are not perfect enough today, you can always try again tomorrow.
The television flickers past a commercial that claims to know your beginnings. You enter the website into your smart phone and order the kit that will carry your saliva to the lab. Weeks pass and then you get the email connecting you to the island. The connection stirs nostalgic sorrows.
You think you know everything, like how the earth was formed and how Adam and Eve coexisted, flanked by each other’s feral delights. They had it all. You think you know whose hands will touch you, where you will break, or which poem will bring you back to order. You know nothing. Only that tomorrow will be different and you dyed your hair last week, and that your savage needs are preventing you from wholeness. You know about the struggles that dispelled you from the garden, and that things keep happening this way, and that you are somehow believing you know more than others, especially when it comes to being rescued. But now you’re caught with your favorite dress on and God is wondering why you are not dying the way you were born; naked and hungry, unearthing poems and hostilities.
You keep touching your broken…but these are not human hands.
Mother I need, mother I need, mother I need your blackness now as the august earth needs rain.[22]
Work Cited
[1][21] [22] Lorde, Audre. From the House of Yemanja. Black Unicorn. W.W. Norton & Company: New York (1978): 6. [2] [3] [4] [5][6][7][10][19] Todorova, Carola Suárez-Gruzco Irina LG, J. Louie, and C. Suárez-Orozco. “Making Up for Lost Time: The Experience of Separation and Reunification Among Immigrant Families.” The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader. New York: Routledge (2005): 179-196. [8] Baker, Caroline, M. Elings-Pels and M. Reis. The Impact of Migration on Children in the Caribbean. UNICEF Office for Barbados and Eastern Caribbean No. 4 (2009): 1-14. [9][17][18] Lorde, Audre. From the House of Yemanja. Black Unicorn. W.W. Norton & Company: New York (1978): 6. [11] [12] Yanovich, Liza. Children Left Behind: The Impact of Labor Migration on Moldova and Ukraine. Migration Information. [13][16] Jones, Saeed. Prelude to Bruise. Coffee House Press: Minneapolis (2014): 5, 23. [14] [15] Alavarez, Julia. The Woman I Kept to Myself. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, (2004): 61.[20] Baldwin, James. Everybody’s Protest Novel. Notes of a Native Son. The Beacon Press: Boston (1955):13-23.
************
Are you a Black woman writer? We’re looking for short stories and personal essays to feature on our digital and print platforms. Click HERE to find out how to submit.
