The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  As she lay dying, Tee wrote a will specifying exactly how she wanted to be sent off. Tee instructed all gathered on the banks of Bayou Lafourche to say the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be. Anybody who wanted to give a eulogy could have two minutes, no more. Wendell and Ron get five minutes each. Then sprinkle her ashes in the bayou, and sing “Going Home.”

  And that’s exactly what we did. At her funeral mass, when it came my turn to say a few words, I spoke about my mother’s touch. So many times when I was growing up, Tee would rub my back. It made me feel so good, so loved, so cherished. In her final days, I said, when she was suffering so terribly, I hoped that my hands rubbing her back brought her a measure of the comfort that she gave so selflessly to me as a boy.

  It turned out that the Church accepts cremation, but it insists that the ashes be interred in an urn, in the earth, as if you were burying a body in a coffin. If Tee had known that, she likely would not have gone against the Church. All I had to go on, though, was her will. O Lord, forgive me, but I am going to honor my mother’s wishes, I prayed.

  When we held the funeral mass, the priest asked, “Now, where are you going to inter the body?”

  “Out in the country,” I answered. Well, what would you have said?

  A small gathering of family stood in the front yard of the old Edwards home in College Point, across a country highway from Bayou Lafourche. We were uncomfortable; we weren’t sure what to do. After brief prayers, we walked across the road to the water’s edge, where Ron and I climbed into a canoe I keep out in the country. Ron held the red vase containing her ashes close as I paddled to the middle of the bayou. The family stood on the bank singing “Going Home,” just as Tee had asked them to.

  Ron passed the vase to me, and I upended it, releasing my mother’s earthly remains into the still, murky water. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought. There was such a sense of finality in that gesture. I hoped that she was there to see it; we had given her exactly what she wanted. It was the last thing that I could do for my mother: fulfill her wishes to be back home. Bayou Lafourche was her whole world: family, love, childhood, all of her memories were anchored in this rural patch of Assumption Parish, and on that stretch of Bayou Lafourche.

  My father stood on the bank, wailing. My nieces cried as they sang. And then it was over.

  I hope you’re happy, Tee. I did what you wanted me to do. I’m going to miss you dearly.

  My father and I visit that spot whenever he wants to go to the country. At night, he prays: “Lord, I hope you don’t hold this against me, but I want you to take me so I can be cremated and be in that bayou again with her, and walk into the sunset.”

  That first winter without Tee was hard. She was always on my mind. On good days, I felt like she was watching over me. On bad days, I felt like a motherless child.

  She made her presence known in a strange and wonderful way one evening a few months after her passing. I was at the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony in Santa Monica when Ava DuVernay approached me. Ava is an African American film director who was a 2012 Sundance Film Festival sensation, and who earlier that night won the John Cassavetes Award for the best independent film made for less than $500,000. She told me that, on the morning of the first Obama inauguration, she found herself talking to two ladies from south Louisiana. One of them said, “Oh, my son is an actor. There he is over there, Wendell Pierce.”

  “Wendell, I spent those six hours of that morning with your mother and aunt,” Ava told me that night. “You mother is so proud of you.”

  “Thank you for telling me that,” I said. “We lost her last fall.”

  “Oh, my.”

  From that connection, and our shared happy memory of being with Tee at the inauguration, Ava later cast me to portray the Reverend Hosea Williams in her film Selma, which tells the story of the march that changed America. Reverend Williams, along with civil rights organizer John Lewis, led the six-hundred-strong march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and was severely beaten by police in the Bloody Sunday attack—a scene from history reenacted in the film.

  There is a long, winding, but unbroken trail leading from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the U.S. Capitol, where a black man took the oath of office as President of the United States. The path from the inauguration to Tee’s son standing on that historic Selma bridge in front of Ava’s cameras was shorter and more direct, but for me, a serendipitous blessing that blurred the lines between art and life.

  That is the tangible part of her legacy. There are moments when I literally feel like an extension of my mother, living out everything that she taught me and shared with me. When I accomplish something today, I feel that I’m doing it for her, and that she is doing it through me. She was working on me till the day she died, and when she left, it was as if she gave me her blessing: There, Wendell. There, son, everything you are, and everything you are doing, is my gift to you.

  Now that I’m caring for Daddy in the final years of his life, I feel him giving me more of himself in the time he has left. It’s a painful transition for both of us, knowing that his days are short. But no matter how contentious things may have been between us at times, I feel his presence with me and in me.

  I came to see that his hostility was simply his attempt to protect me from the possibility of artistic failure. In 1988, when I made my Broadway debut in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, I took Daddy and Tee to the opening night party at the World Trade Center. It had been only seven years since I left New Orleans to pursue my acting dream, and now I was an actor on the most prestigious stage in the world.

  “Daddy,” I said, “you remember when you wouldn’t take me to those auditions? I want you to remember this night, too.”

  “Oh yes, son,” he said. “I’m so proud of you.”

  He was. I’m sure of it. It means the world to have my father be proud of me. The pride I have in being the son of a man with the strength, integrity, and steadfastness of Amos Edward Pierce, Jr., is boundless. In all I do in this life, I hope to honor the name that is his legacy to me.

  TEE HAD BEEN GONE just over a year as I approached my fiftieth birthday. I was still grieving hard. Her death was without a doubt the most profound experience I had ever gone through. I had buried my brother, and I had rebuilt our family home after Katrina annihilated it and our neighborhood. But nothing was as devastating to me as losing Tee.

  She was such a force of life that trying to understand that she was no longer here in the flesh was difficult to grasp. How could she die? It made no sense. Since the day I kissed her good-bye as they took her body out of our family home, I had been haunted by a vision in which my arms are outstretched, trying to grasp her spirit, anything I could hold on to.

  Grief. There is no way around it. You think you can’t go on, but, like Vladimir and Estragon, you go on.

  As my half-century mark loomed, all I could think about was Tee. If I could have anything in the world for my birthday, I thought, it would be to spend one moment with her again.

  I remembered her devotion to the Blessed Mother—that is, to the Virgin Mary. Tee prayed the rosary all the time and was so well known for it that she was often asked to lead the rosary at Catholic funerals. When I was a boy, she would take my brothers and me during Lent into Daddy’s home office, kneel down with us, and pray the rosary.

  I have always gone to mass, though not every Sunday. I cannot imagine not having the Church in my life, though I am not nearly as devout as my mother. I came from such a strong black Catholic world in New Orleans that I did not realize until I went to school in New York City that there are so few of us in America. It is impossible for me to separate being Catholic from being an African American and a New Orleanian. Wherever I am in the world, when I see a stranger make the sign of the cross, all my sense memories from childhood come rushing back. Me too! I think. We are connected.

  The sign of the cross, and the rituals
and sacred objects of Catholicism, are tangible things that connect us with God and each other. You can see them, hear them, smell them, feel them, and taste them on your tongue at the climax of every mass. This is how I connect religion to art: not in the sense that art provides moral and theological instruction (though it might), but rather in that it is a kind of sacrament that induces within you an experience of transcendence, of connection with the eternal, and of unity with all humanity.

  Despite all of the disagreements I have with the Church, it is the way I come to God. My friends ask me why I like confession. The answer is because that priest connects me to Jesus. It goes all the way back to the Apostles, who laid their hands on the head of a man who laid his hands on the head of a man who, in an unbroken succession of ordinations, arcing over two thousand years, laid his hands on the head of the man on the other side of the screen in the confessional. Whether you believe Jesus was divine or not, when you talk to that priest, you are talking to the man who talked to the man who talked to the man who talked to Jesus. That is powerful to me.

  Catholic spirituality has always taught that we don’t approach the all-holy God directly, but through mediators. God chose to become a man, Jesus Christ, so that we, in our imperfection, could know Him. In the same way, Catholics believe that we can relate to God as He manifests through creation: through the sacraments, certainly, but also through beautiful art, through the majesty of nature, through feasting at the table, through works of mercy, and through acts of love.

  The early Christians developed a strong devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, because they saw in her a way to relate to her son. Catholics are sometimes accused of worshiping Mary, but that’s not true. She was the mother of God, but she was not God. We think of her, though, as a tender mother and a portal to an encounter with the living God. Many Catholics over the centuries have struggled to relate to God the awesome Judge, but they have seen in Mary a more gentle and approachable aspect of the divine. For some, God may seem far away and hard to get to, but the Blessed Mother, she’s like your own mama.

  It’s like that with Tee and me. I have never had the strong faith she had, but I saw it in her, and felt it radiate from her. Tee made faith real. I may agonize over what I believe about God, and He may seem foreign to me sometimes, but Tee, I knew her. I loved her. I am a child of God, but I am also a child of Tee. God manifested Himself to me through her love, through her sweet voice, through her luminous face, through her tender caress and abiding care for me.

  Tee knew God and loved Him with all her heart. I know Tee and love her, and her memory, with all of mine. Therefore, in the emotional logic of Catholicism, I love God through my mother, and I have faith that she is with Him now, interceding with Him for Daddy, Ron, and me. Death cannot separate us from the love of Tee, or of God. That chain will not be broken.

  As I’ve said, my birthday happens to be December 8, the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Tee used to point to me and joke, “That’s my little immaculate conception.”

  And so, the thought occurred to me that for my fiftieth birthday, I should seek out the devotion Tee had to the Blessed Mother. I am not an especially pious man, but I was devoted to my mother as my mother was devoted to Mary. If I connected the two, I might have a little piece of my mother again.

  I thought of the places in the world I could go on pilgrimage. There was Lourdes, where the Virgin appeared in the 1800s to the French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous and showed her a healing spring where there have been miracle cures. There was Mexico City, where the Virgin came to the Indian convert Juan Diego and left behind a miraculous cloak with her image, which can be seen today in the cathedral. She is venerated there as Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  And then I recalled a 1950s movie I had seen as a child, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. It was a fictional retelling of the Virgin’s appearance to three shepherd children in Fátima, a Portuguese village some seventy miles north of Lisbon, in 1917. I had forgotten everything I knew about the apparition, but I remembered those children, and Our Lady.

  Fátima it was, then. On impulse I bought a plane ticket to Lisbon and booked a hotel. “Are you sure you want to do this?” my friends asked. “It’s your fiftieth birthday. We could have a great time here.”

  Nope. I was going to spend this birthday with Tee, in Fátima. I was hoping for a spiritual experience. To be honest, I was hoping to see my mother one more time.

  I did no research in advance; I was going on instinct. When I checked into my Lisbon hotel on a Friday, I told the concierge that I knew there was a church in this town called Fátima, and asked if he could book a car and driver for that Sunday, December 8. I thought it was a nice touch that my birthday was on a Sunday that year.

  I had a couple of days to bide my time in Lisbon, waiting for Sunday. This was my first time in Portugal, and I wanted to do something classically Portuguese. On Saturday night, I found a great restaurant where they featured a woman singing fado, a mournful style of music marked by aching melancholy and saudade, the Portuguese word for longing. Fado, in other words, is the Portuguese blues. I went into the Bairro Alto, a neighborhood that has been there since the fifteenth century, and settled in at a table at O Faia, an intimate, cavelike restaurant.

  The lights dimmed and a singer appeared. When she opened her mouth and began her song, I knew at once that I was in the right place. I had never heard anything so beautiful, so painful, so filled with yearning. Her fado expressed so exquisitely what I was feeling in those days: my grief over my mother, my longing to see her again, my hope that she was at peace, and the bittersweetness of reaching a milestone in my life but without my beloved Tee at my side.

  It felt, in that moment, like the fado singer was channeling all the sorrow in the world and turning it into a work of art so beautiful and pure and true that it was difficult to bear without going to pieces. So I went to pieces. All alone, on the other side of the world, in a restaurant surrounded by strangers speaking a language not my own, I wept. The singer struck the rock of my heart with the staff of her song, and a torrent of emotion surged through the breach.

  I’m not the only brokenhearted person who has ever been alone in a Lisbon fado restaurant and come undone. People gave me my space. The waiter discreetly and respectfully removed my plates between courses. I had my head bowed and was crying. It was as if the staff at the restaurant was saying, without words, Welcome to Lisbon. We understand, brother.

  There were four singers that night, and the best came last. Her name was Anita Guerreiro, and she was like a vision from another era. She was in her seventies, but had raven-black hair, pulled tight in a bun. In her black dress and shawl, she had a haunting, forlorn look. Hers was the face of unconquerable dignity, refusing to bow to life’s defeats. She sang like a dark angel, with a voice that seemed to encompass every imaginable sorrow, lift it high, and transfigure it through the power of her artistry.

  The singer opened up a channel in my imagination and I began to talk silently to my mother. I thanked her for my life, for all she taught me, for giving me the inner strength to survive within my demanding profession. To never lose my dignity and the willingness to fight for it. To strive to be the best actor I can, and the fiercest fighter for justice. To savor relationships, especially within the family, and always to love the simple things in life. To be a man of vision, and to search for a stronger faith.

  It was as if she were sitting across the table from me, and I was having the conversation with her that I wanted to have during those last days of her life but was too afraid to have. It was so clear to me what she would have said had she been with me in that restaurant in the flesh. Tee was a woman who lived her life with complete clarity. What she believed was what she was. That was plain to me now.

  By the end of that night, I could not wait to get to Fátima the next morning.

  I HAD NO IDEA what to expect in Fátima. I had a romantic notion
that I would walk out into the field, just as the shepherd children had, and my own blessed mother would appear to me. My driver parked the car and directed me to what had once been the field of the apparition, but what was now a vast plaza anchored by a huge basilica in honor of the Virgin.

  To my shock, there were at least 150,000 people on the plaza that gorgeous December day. They had all come because that year the Feast of the Immaculate Conception fell on a Sunday. This meant that they would see the statue of Our Lady of Fátima carried from inside the basilica in procession through the crowd—a parade that normally happens only on October 13, the anniversary of the final apparition and miracle.

  As I stood in the crowd of the faithful, I was moved by their devotion. It was palpable. All my life I have struggled with my faith, so much so that I took “Thomas” as my confirmation name. I hoped that like the questioning Apostle, my doubt would one day find satisfaction and be dispelled. It had not happened yet.

  When I was young, I worried about the eternal fates of my best friends, Carlton and Jay. Carlton was Baptist; Jay was Lutheran. They were not communicants of what the Nicene Creed we recited at mass each week called “one holy catholic and apostolic Church.”

  “When I go to heaven, I can’t play with Carlton and Jay?” I said to my mother.

  “Oh no, that’s not true,” she said. Still, that’s where I started challenging what the Church taught.

  It’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s just that I struggle with doctrine. I connected with God through the love of my parents, whose belief was so unshakable. When I left home, no matter where I was in the world, I could go to mass on Sunday morning and hear the Gospel read, and know that was the same Gospel Daddy and Tee were hearing back in New Orleans. I could call them on Sunday night and talk about the Gospel reading. The church, and the experience of Sunday mass, was the manifest connection I had with my parents so far away. That’s what kept me going for so long.