“Good morning, lovely!” she says, blowing on the steam. I ask if she feels like tackling the paths on foot—her golf cart is broken, so walking is our only option. She smiles, nods, and goes into her room to change.
There’s a steep hill at the foot of the property you have to climb to reach the paths we’re after. As soon as we approach the hill I attack the pavement, pumping my arms aggressively, digging into each stride. I want this to be a workout. I want to sweat, to plow through it. I even want to beat my own sixty-three-year-old mother to the top of the hill. (Yes, I’m that competitive.) If it had been up to me, we would have kept up that pace—going all out on our nature walk—but when my mother eventually makes her way to the top of the hill, she’s panting. “Can we slow down, please?” she breathes, putting both hands on her waist.
“Oh, right—sure, Mama,” I mutter, marching in place to keep my heart rate up.
We cross the main street, cutting into the next subdivision, and then look for signs pointing us in the right direction. Following the arrows, we take a sharp left down the side lawn of a neighbor’s house. The pebbled path behind the house’s back garden marks our entryway. Immediately upon crossing over into the wooded area, the feel changes—from suburban sprawl with pretty houses and two-car garages to something more natural. More beautiful.
But on our first day out, I’m really not interested in beauty. I’m annoyed. My body is tense, my jaw is clenched. Silence is the one thing I want to hold on to. I keep my head down, my posture leaning forward. Left, right, left, right, left, right. Commanding the sweat to form. Even in the middle of this walk, where there’s all the time in the world to chat, to catch up—to explain the reason for my frantic late-night phone call to my mother, my last-minute flight to get here—I’m saying, without saying, that I don’t want to engage, or talk—or even take it all in. I just want to sweat.
But Mama is persistent, in her way. “Well, isn’t that a nice house? Don’t we just love that house?” she muses as we pass a ranch-style house with a wraparound veranda. She insists on breaking my pace, slowing me down to pause, or stop, for a little while, just to notice what’s happening all around us.
No, I think. We do not love that house. But we must stop and discuss that house anyway.
“Yes, Mama—the peach awning does remind me of a Caribbean sunset.” “No, Mama, I did not know the Robinsons sold the house to the new owners.” “No, Mama, I don’t remember you telling me that the new husband works for Delta.”
When you talk to someone Southern, they don’t just give you a quick brief on a person, they give you the whole history—the entire family tree. She tells me everything that’s happening or has ever happened in this ranch house—much more information than I would ever want to know.
“And anyway, enough about that. How is your friend Dara, Jodie? Is she still with that man she was with in college? Remember she had that great jacket with the shoulders?”
My mother never gets grumpy. She’s never not in the mood to chat. And this irritates me. The last thing I want right now is conversation. But she keeps talking—talking about her friends, about strangers, about the nature—the beauty—around us. I concentrate on my breathing instead, on the movement of my feet. My mind, my heart, they can’t handle much more. I tune Mama out and keep on, hearing the soft crunch of her footsteps next to me.
On the second day, we wake up and meet at the door. In silence, we make the trek up the paved hill just outside the property, cross the main road, look for the pebbled path. Mama’s rhythm is similar to the trees’—she moves but she is rooted, she feels no need to rush.
This time, instead of letting her struggle behind me, I slow down so we can fall in step. She’s meeting me where I am—granting me this walk without her commentary—so I return the favor, meeting her at her pace. There’s no sense in continuing the push and pull between us. I might as well give in.
At Mama’s step, the environment comes into focus. I see chipmunks scurry up tree trunks and red birds perch on branches; the grass and dirt feel soft beneath my feet. The scent of gardenia, sweet and musky, starts to fill me up in the spaces where I feel hollow. Once in a while a few teenagers whiz by in their golf carts, forcing us to jump to the side of the road. We use this as an opportunity to tie our shoelaces. Bent close to the earth, I see plump, sandy worms wiggling through the dirt. The ground is teeming with them.
Each day the walks extend a bit more than the day before. We keep moving without much talk. We take new back roads and get lost. And then we double back and retrace our steps as best we can, using intuition and each other to navigate our way back home. We don’t ever move fast, and the effort in the slowness feels good. My heart is awake. My body is tingling. And the sweat on my skin is clean. Clean like rain, like moss, like dew. I realize it’s the most pure and unburdened I’ve felt in months, maybe even years.
The walks make my body feel that it can be strong again. That it can be useful and capable again.
Thinking about the baby I thought I was going to have, I allow the sorrow to take leave for a while. It slips out from around my heart and escapes through my skin, through my sweat.
I forget about the fierceness and confusion that Penelope has brought on. Instead, I loosen my grip. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel the world bearing down on me.
Something in me begins to swell and open up.
* * *
—
After our morning sojourns, back at the house Mama pours water for us both and puts the pot on the stove to make grits. She measures and mixes, and it feels a little like witchcraft—this nourishing elixir made with water, grains, butter, salt, and pepper.
As she cooks, I think about the time we’ve lost. So many years have divided us since the days when I would watch her cooking in her underwear, shaking chicken in a brown paper bag.
The space between my mom and me is the same space I now see rising up between Georgia and me—and I hate it. I hate the way it makes me afraid of time moving forward, and the unavoidable separation that occurs between people.
I think—or maybe I hope—that people sometimes drift apart because we all need to find our own individual way. But there’s also something else at work between my daughter and me, a built-in distance that comes along with city living and modern life. A life in which kids spend more time outside the house than at home with family. A life in which a subway ride can take a teen halfway across the world—or so it seems. I worry about Georgia’s friends. I don’t know these new friends the way I did the ones from her grade school days, the ones who’d sit in our kitchen and laugh at my jokes for hours. These friends don’t come over as often, and when they do they go directly to her room and shut the door, whispering under their breath. “We can always call an Uber if your mom doesn’t want to drive us.” These kids are more like adults than I’m comfortable with.
So on this trip I hold Georgia closer, tighter, keeping a constant eye on her. I don’t want to make the same mistake my parents did of assuming. Assuming that all was fine with me, that I needed less than Ramona, that I could handle everything on my own. I now know, two times over, what happens when one child in a family demands something so urgent that it takes up all the attention, requiring everything else to be put on hold: tasks, chores, laundry—people, too.
Ramona was urgent, just as Penelope has been. Everything else in my life has been shelved as blurred pictures in my periphery. But now I’m seeing clearly, facing the consequences of what happens when you hold tight to one thing and let the rest slip away.
* * *
—
Georgia never wakes up early enough to join Mama and me on our walks. When she does eventually make her way to the kitchen after we get back, the three of us—daughter, mother, and grandmother—gather around the oval wooden table to eat, and I notice the walls between us. In fact, I’m sure we all notice t
hem. Teenage Georgia is brooding. She takes a seat in the chair closest to the bay window, leaning over her grits, chin in hand, and complains about the homework I asked her to finish three days ago. I sit at the head of the table absently cracking my knuckles, quietly making my way through the depression that’s crept up on me. And through all of this, my sixtysomething mother is calm. She’s cleared her own hurdles at this point in her life, especially the ones that look like teenage melodrama and grown-woman weariness. She finds her way to the opposite end of the table, where she can take us in. I think she’s content just to have us both there in her kitchen.
We sit and eat together just as Ramona and I used to do when we were little girls spending summers with Grandma Gloria in Atlanta. Grandma wasn’t the best cook—her meals usually consisted of a hodgepodge of whatever she had around: a can of tomato soup, a bit of turkey, grits, and always a warm biscuit. But it wasn’t the food that mattered, or even the presentation of it. It was about the company—the proximity to one another, sitting side by side, and the way time hovered above us, suspended.
Grandma Gloria’s home always meant sunshine and warmth, and an easy, slow-paced love for me. The house she lived in years ago, when I was a kid, was surrounded by hundred-year-old trees and bordered with cobblestone walkways, and it had a little turtle pond just off the front yard. Entering the house at the start of each summer was like being greeted by an old friend. I often walked from room to room, returning to hidden spots and favorite corners to take in their secrets anew.
Our daily ritual began at the kitchen table—we’d gather there in the mornings while a procession of friends and relatives drifted in and out of the house well into most afternoons. Mother-Dear and Sissy, Aunt Gigi and my cousin Vicky were always the first to greet us at the start of our stay. They promised to take us shopping, marveled over how long our legs had gotten and how grown and city-sophisticated we were. They wrapped their strong arms around us and laughed loudly at our Northern ways. When I was very little, I thought my grandmother must have sent out formal invitations to family members announcing our visit (it was that much of a to-do), but I soon discovered that all meals were treated that way. Each one was an opportunity for communing, a chance to come together and discuss the day.
Our lives revolved around the table—no one ever ate alone. And this house—the one we’re in now, the one my mother still lives in after Grandma Gloria passed away—is no exception. For generations we’ve gathered at the table by habit, to socialize, even when we’re not eating. The table is a place to connect with one another.
There are just three of us women here now—Georgia, Mama, and me. And even with the spaces between us, this trilogy makes sense to me in this moment. Three generations of women. No wild boys running around arguing. No cell phones buzzing to announce meetings. No deadlines looming. No big, ominous questions filling up my head. If nothing else, here in this stillness, I know who I am.
We may not like it sometimes, and it may not be fair. But we are women. We are Black. And we have the South running through our veins. There are no questions about identity here at this table. In this moment. Right now, who we are is easy. Easy is how I feel when I go back down south and sit among my women. With them I feel comfortable—being a woman who is Black and Southern at her core.
* * *
—
In the afternoons I make my way to the sitting room, where I’m surrounded by all the mighty women in our family, both the living and those who have long since passed. On the walls, on top of cabinets, and crammed inside drawers are striking pictures of the Blackwell women in tarnished frames and time-worn albums, along with old portrait photos and warped Polaroids. Photos of Mama Mabel, Great-Grandmother Lurline, Grandma Gloria, Aunt Gigi, Aunt Lurma, and Ramona, the baby sister my mother lost in that terrible car crash, the daughter my grandmother grieved for.
I used to page through these old photographs as a child, looking at the grown women who shared my name, my nose, my lips, and I’d imagine what it would be like to step into their skin and be them. I wondered if I could see my own future by looking through their eyes.
My women: Mama, standing far left; Grandmother Gloria standing in the middle; Aunt Lurma standing far right; and Great-Grandmother Lurline, seated.
The poet Rilke wrote,
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
It’s true. Nothing exists until you see it. It’s hard to be something you’ve never seen before, for me at least. I’ve always done better with a visual guide. The photos of my women told me so many stories. I learned womanhood, femaleness, feminism, through them. Just from their pictures. Preserved in time, they were composed, but not complacent. And they were fierce.
Poring over the same photos now I try to remember, hoping they will serve as my trigger to tap into what’s perhaps always been there, buried deep—my mojo, my own special well of magic. I look into their faces, asking them to remind me how to dig deep and push forward at the same time. I also ask them to help me remember the ways in which we care for and strengthen ourselves, so we can weather whatever tries to tear us down. Whatever tries to test us.
My grandmother, for one, was tested many times. From the many conversations I had with Grandma Gloria cuddled up in her bed over the years, I knew she transformed sadness and fear into empowerment. She made it through the Jim Crow South, the death of her firstborn, five marriages, one master’s degree, one Ph.D., and more than a dozen arrests for her civil rights work, with prayer, journaling, and her beloved books. She was a busy woman, with a million people who counted on her, but she was never too busy to stop and notice. She found moments, or moments found her, and she would write down her thoughts wherever she was. Notating in the pages of her books and journals how she saw the world. I think writing and reading, for her, were a way to push back—to challenge herself to see the world in the widest sense possible, despite whatever narrow reality was in front of her.
My aunt Lurma became a passionate practitioner of transformation, too—willing her fear and anxiety into calm to cope with the challenges that any working mom, married or not, is often plagued with. Those anxieties manifested in unsettling dreams in which she’d be extremely late picking up her son from nursery school and have to run frantically down some street or highway, often barefoot, many miles from where she needed to be. Lurma learned to fight for control of those nightmares, casting out negative thoughts with affirmations, often pasting little sayings all over her house: “I am love.” “My feet are kept in the perfect path.” “God is within me and for me.” She made a practice of smiling to get through the anxiety.
Meditation and mantras were my mother’s methods of pushing the sadness away, too. While it’s always frustrated me that she’s never taken a different approach—never lashed out or yelled or hurled her problems away—there is something undeniable about going inward: It often reveals both the problem and the answer. Meditation tells us that life can change when you shift your perspective. It allows us to be both powerful and peaceful in the same moment.
Belief in the power of the self, that comes from Mama.
As I was growing up, whenever our house got too tense—when Dad got too bossy, or Ramona got too difficult—Mom turned to meditation. She found a quiet chair, closed her eyes, and tuned out the noise. She visualized light beams, or ocean waves, or calming reverberations, and she focused all of her energy on them. Sometimes she paid attention to her breath for an hour. Sometimes she paid attention to her muscles, flexing and then relaxing different parts of her body for as long as she could.
My body needs that attention right now.
Mama would meditate every day, and whenever we saw her, eyes closed as she sat in her chair
, we knew we were not to bother her. If we got too loud, she’d raise an eyebrow or open one eyelid and shoot us a sharp glance, and we’d know, then, that by no means should we continue whatever it was we were doing. As hard as it was for us, we understood that she was taking her time. And that time was not to be disturbed—it was for her, and if she didn’t get it, we would be the worse for wear. So Ramona and I found something else to do for an hour. And after her hour was up, she returned to us renewed.
It’s time to do for myself what Mama did for herself all those years.
When we got older, before we went to bed, Mama would teach us to relax our bodies and focus on our breathing. Deep breaths in, long and slow breaths out. Over and over again. We’d start at the top of our head, acknowledging every area on the body, and work our way down to our toes—clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing—so that we could understand the difference between tense and relaxed. Mama put us to sleep like this many nights when we were kids. Meditating us into a deep calm.
Gloria, Mama, Lurma—all the women in my line—I think about them now. I think perhaps we are only as strong as those who teach us; only as capable as the tools we learn to employ. Maybe we are only as committed as the time we spend in meditation and prayer. Only as prolific with our spoken words as we are in our silence.
“Nurture the roots, Jodie,” I heard my grandmother say, our hair-brushing ritual on my mind. “If you don’t nurture the roots, nothing will grow.”
Every night in her room, Grandma untied her dark hair and led Ramona and me in the exercise. We would sit on the edge of her bed in our nightgowns while she leaned against her headboard, facing us. “Start at your scalp, and brush in long, gentle strokes,” she’d say as she placed her fingers over mine, guiding my brush. “Hold it this way. You have to nurture the roots.” Together, we’d slowly make our way from brushstroke one to one hundred. By the last few strokes, my arms were weak, but I understood the lesson.
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