Even the most gifted, compassionate, progressive person cannot easily overcome being completely rejected by their mother. To have the love of a mother is too primal a need. Whatever soft place my mother might have had to land was hardened like concrete by her own mother’s ignorant, fearful family and upbringing. Even her marriage to my father and the births of three beautiful children couldn’t fully heal the deep wound of maternal rejection—nothing can. I also doubt loving a Black man and having mixed children is the cure-all for generations of belief steeped in white superiority, and my mother and her family were steeped down to the white of their bones.
I’ve often wondered why my mother defied her mother, family, and heritage by marrying my father. What was her full motivation? Was it all in the name of unconditional love? It was never “we belong together” between them. She never reminisced to me about their romance, nor was there any physical evidence of it: no photos, no poems, no letters, no trace of a great love. (Well, there were three children.) Maybe my mother wanted to keep her history and memories of my father private, though I can’t help but wonder if her marriage wasn’t, in part, a rebellion against her mother. Did she do it for the attention, the drama of it all? More than once over the decades, I’ve heard my mother order her coffee “Black, like my men.” She’s often done it in front of me and one of her young Black grandsons—awkward.
To be honest, I don’t know if my mother ever wanted to get married and have children so young. I could understand her wanting to create a safety net, a new family of her own, and to continue blazing trails, leaving her backward home and family behind. But what I couldn’t understand was her abandoning her promising singing career to do so. From very early on I decided that I didn’t want the same fate; I couldn’t have a man or an unplanned pregnancy take me off my path. Witnessing my mother’s and my sister’s detours was a sad and stinging warning. Watching their dreams go up in flames burned a cautionary tale into my mind.
In 1977, my mother recorded an album she titled To Start Again. But by that time, she’d already had a troubled interracial marriage, three kids, a divorce, and one child still living with her, me. Did she think a record company would suddenly discover her? This is one of many miscalculations that as a child I observed my mother make and placed in a file labeled “What Not to Do.”
Time rolled by after my parents’ divorce, and eventually my grandmother allowed my mother to visit her with her granddaughter—but only her youngest granddaughter. I was a twelve-year-old little girl and didn’t quite understand why she only invited me. Looking back, I suspect it was because I was blond-ish and very fair for a mixed kid. I didn’t raise much suspicion to the culturally untrained eye. I was too young to know how my mother and her mother interacted with each other, and I never knew what happened between them at that point: Was there an apology from Pat’s mother for disowning her daughter and withholding family from her? Did she reckon with her racism? Was there forgiveness? I don’t know. What I do remember is that she was stiff and formal. She had stark white hair that she wore neatly away from her face with one big wave in the front. On her stern face she wore black cat-eyed glasses. Her house was not warm, and there was no smell to the place. I recall her coming into the quiet, sterile bedroom where I slept while I was there, after my mother had put me to bed. She sat on the side of the bed in the dark and, in a whisper, taught me the Lord’s Prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Matthew 6:11–12
That’s all I remember of that visit to see my grandmother. In an unusual twist of fate, she died on my mother’s birthday, February 15. After that, oddly enough, my mother pretty much sainted her. As an adult, my mother was never a practicing Catholic, but for many years she went to light a candle for her mother on that date. Strange how death can make people forgive those who trespassed against them and their children.
For most of my early childhood it was just my mother and me. We moved constantly. After an exhaustive search, she found us a place by the water. She wanted to be in a more peaceful setting where she could take long walks with the dog and go down the road to the beach. The two of us moved into what she referred to as a “quaint cottage” but I later learned the entire neighborhood called it “the shack.” I found the neighbors’ description to be more accurate.
It was a small, rickety structure covered in a wavy faux-brick siding that had buckled under the elements. Inside, a layer of dank sadness seeped through the floorboards and walls, which were covered with cheap “imitation of wood” paneling that was paired with filthy flea-ridden carpeting. No matter the time of day, it was always dark inside. Prior to us moving in, the place had been abandoned and had become a hangout where teenagers would smoke, drink, and mess around. It was set off of a rough, unpaved driveway of rubble and stones and faced a big white Victorian house, which made it look like something the big house had belched out. It was marked, and so were we. My mother and I were the eccentric lady and her little girl who lived in “the shack.” How … quaint.
The first chapter of Marilyn Monroe’s autobiography, My Story, is entitled “How I Rescued a White Piano.” In