DANDELION TEA
A flower taught me how to pray
But as I grew, that flower changed
She started flailing in the wind
Like golden petals scattering
—“Petals”
She called herself Dandelion—the hearty, bright-yellow wildflower with small tooth-shaped petals that gives the early signal that spring is near. After its flowering is finished, the petals dry and the head becomes a ball of lacy dust feathers carrying seeds. The legend goes that if you close your eyes, make a wish, and blow the feathery pieces into the air, your wish will scatter into the world and come true. The English sometimes call them Irish daisies. And the tea made from the root and leaves is widely believed to have healing benefits. But these wildflowers can also be a menace, poisoning precious flowers and growing grass—weeds to be uprooted and discarded.
When I was a little girl, my older sister seemed to live on the wind. She was always somewhere far away. Childhood memories of her exist in my mind as flashes of lightning and thunder. She was exciting but unpredictable—her torrential gusts always carried inevitable destruction with them.
The distances between my mother, my father, their first daughter, and myself are far reaching. Unlike her, growing up, I never spent any significant time as part of a whole interracial family. Most of my experiences were with one parent at a time—me with my mother, or me with my father. I have no recollection of them as a happily married couple. It is bizarre to me that they were even married, not just because of race, but how different they were as people. But before I was born, the Carey family consisted of a Black father, a white mother, and a mixed boy and girl. The four of them would walk down the street, and people would know. This rebel Carey quartet experienced the spectacular ignorance and wrath of a society woefully unprepared to receive or accept them; Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down the law banning interracial marriage in the United States, wouldn’t happen until three years after my mother and father’s marriage. As a result of the hostility from their community and country, Morgan and Alison were instructed by our parents to refer to them as “Mother” and “Father,” in the hope, I imagine, that the formality might elevate their status to respectable. My parents seemed to think that if neighbors or other onlookers heard their girl and boy say, “Good morning, Mother” or “Hello, Father,” they wouldn’t perceive them as disgusting.
Morgan and Alison were beautiful children and were very close when they were young. Alison had skin like creamy butterscotch pudding, with a head of thick, deep, dark curls and eyes to match. She was extremely intelligent and curious and she loved to learn. I was told she brought home good grades, got into good schools, and loved music too. But she lived firsthand the discomfort and animosity directed at her and her offbeat Black and white family. She saw their neighbors throw raw meat studded with broken glass to their dogs, and their family car blown up. She saw things inside the family too, things a child should never see and I will never know. I do know that what she experienced damaged and derailed her girlhood.
She was fully aware when the family unit unraveled and our parents turned on each other; she absorbed the full pain of a family coming undone. She also saw another daughter come into the clan, breaking the symmetry and changing her status as the only girl and youngest. I was the new little one. When my mother and father could no longer live together without emotionally torturing each other, they tore themselves apart to survive separately. The three of us children would be plagued by pain, resentment, and jealousy for a lifetime.
Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did. Our father was very strict with them. He was not harsh with me because three or four years old was the oldest I had been when we were all together. During one of their countless fights, I vaguely remember my mother yelling at him something like, “This one is mine! You will not beat this one.” I was her little one. She often said she “didn’t have the strength” to challenge my father’s aggression when my siblings were growing up.
I only have one memory of all of us having dinner together. It was a sort of “restorative dinner”—my parents trying one more time to see if we could pull it together and be a family. We were all sitting around the table, and I started singing.
My father said, “Children should be seen and not heard.”
The entertainer in me took that as a cue, so I got up from the dining table, walked the few feet to the living room area (which was in plain view and well within earshot), stood on top of the coffee table, and continued to sing at the top of my lungs. Alison and Morgan dropped their heads, ducking before the wrath of our father that they were certain would inevitably ricochet around the room. But my mother gave him a look, and he didn’t say anything. My sister and brother were flabbergasted. I was not hit, yelled at, punished, or even stopped. They would have never, ever dared defy our father. No wonder they hated me.
Needless to say, the dinner didn’t save us. Divorce was inevitable. My mother and father made the final decision to break up before all was broken. I remember I was taken to our neighbors’ house, and they gave me popcorn while my family was next door discussing the dismantling of the Careys. After several violent encounters
