by Danzy Senna
At night in the blankness of the motel rooms—with my mother’s body beside me, tranquilized with some sleeping pills she had brought along—our situation hit me the hardest. It was then that I allowed myself to wonder where Cole was at that moment, what sky she slept under, if she too was waking with her face wet and salty, a pain throbbing in the center of her palms, and the feeling that she had been kidnapped. I would wonder deep into the night, until before I knew it, morning was creeping through the motel curtains in stages, revealing the anonymous signs and empty strip of road in the distance. I made up for those lost nights during the day, when I would doze in the car, waking only occasionally to look out on the blurring world with a dull, groggy interest.
I knew only what my mother chose to tell me in those rare breakings of her silence: that the FBI was after us. Each morning we scoured the newspapers, searching for a picture of my mother under the word “WANTED.” She seemed miffed that the papers had failed to report on her fugitive status. She believed they were trying to dupe her. “It’s bullshit. Cointelpro is clearly in cahoots with the media. I’ve seen this before.” She said the FBI kept secrets from the public, and their war against people like her was one of them.
She said little else in our endless drives in the car, instead busying herself by fiddling with the radio station, zipping back and forth between news commentators. She had answered my questions with only perplexed stares, as if I were speaking in tongues.
So now, in the light of the Maine diner, I was relieved to hear her chattering away to me with her old buoyancy, even if her solution did strike me as odd.
The FBI would be looking for a white woman on the lam with her black child. But the fact that I could pass, she explained, with my straight hair, pale skin, my general phenotypic resemblance to the Caucasoid race, would throw them off our trail. The two bodies that had made her stand out in a crowd—made her more than just another white woman—were gone; now it was just the two of us. My body was the key to our going incognito.
With her new copper hair—she flipped her locks—and me simply relabeled as white, no one would ever suspect the truth. We’d be scot-free, she told me, a couple of new people overnight.
She seemed at that moment like her crooked self, the wild woman we had left back in Boston, the one who stole Snickers bars and played “I’m Not Your Mother” in an African mask. Cole would have left the table right then and there, sucking her teeth and rolling her eyes. Mum, could you keep it down? I mean, shit, you’re embarrassing me. But I just nodded and took a gulp of my tea.
Her theory made sense. And besides, it seemed like a temporary thing right then, just another one of her games to get us out of a bind.
She continued: “Your name. We’ve got to think of a new name for you. Any suggestions, Birdaloo?”
But she didn’t wait for my answer. Instead she slapped her knee and hooted, “Jesse! That’s it! It’s a dynamite name. The name of a fierce woman, my great-grandmother, you know, the suffragette. That ‘Birdie’ business was always too cutesy for my tastes. Jesse has a lot more dignity. And you should be fairly used to answering to it. I mean, I did call you Jesse for a long time. If it hadn’t been for that Patrice Lumumba fixation of your father’s, you’d have an ordinary name by now.”
We spent the rest of breakfast trying to figure out a nom de guerre for her. Most of the ones we thought of were indulgent, and even as we said them we knew they wouldn’t work. There were a series of “dyke names,” as my mother put it—Toni, Bobbi, Pat, Jordy—as well as more predictable revolutionary-on-the-run names—Grushenka (as in Lenin’s comrade), Tanya (as in Che’s sweetheart), Sojo (as in Ms. Sojourner Truth). There were also the “trailer park names” that she thought fun for their white-trash flavor—Donna, Candy, Flo. But none of them seemed good enough for her to keep.
I was the one to find the name we eventually kept. I found it while my mother went up to pay the bill and left me to scour the newspaper for mentions of her. I saw nothing in the front or metro sections, and flipped to the wedding announcements. It was a face that jumped out at me. She was blond, and looked the way my mother might have looked if she had more control over her appetite, if she had never met my father, if she had stayed in Cambridge, gone to Radcliffe, married a doctor. The woman was smiling, and hugging her husband in front of some body of water. He was dark, with thick eyebrows and a Roman nose.
Her name was Sheila Dorsett, and she worked as an admissions officer at Wellesley, the women’s college.
I showed the article to my mother when she came back from paying the bill, and she read it with a tight, resigned scowl. She flashed me a smile. “Nice work, Sherlock. Just call me Sheila.”
We stared at each other across the linoleum for a while, her chewing her toast slowly, me chewing my hair. She looked different already, in those few seconds as Sheila. She looked sensible, the kind of mother I had seen before on television but never known. The kind who lived in the suburbs of Boston and drove their kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons and painted still-life portraits on weekday afternoons. She looked mild.
She pushed her plate away, the food only half-eaten, and said, “Now for the last names. That’s a little trickier. We’re gonna need to use our imaginations. You know, make up a history for you.” She wiped the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “You’ve got a lot of choices, babe. You can be anything. Puerto Rican, Sicilian, Pakistani, Greek. I mean, anything, really.” Then she paused. A slow smile filled her face.
“And, of course, you could always be Jewish. What do you think?”
It was a strange feeling to be such a blank slate. It reminded me of the games Cole and I used to play with that trunk of costumes, but now I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling. I shrugged, “I don’t know. Italian, maybe? I like spaghetti—”
She cut me off: “Jewish is better, I think.”
I sneered. “Does that mean I have to eat gefilte fish?” Whenever we had gone shopping with our mother, Cole and I had always gawked at the jars of gefilte fish in the supermarket. They had looked to us like some kind of scientific brain experiment gone awry.
She ignored my question. And I could see the decision had been made already, in that moment. Those other options—Puerto Rican, Sicilian, Pakistani, Greek—floated away, untapped resources.
As we sat over our plates of cooling breakfast, my mother schooled me on my Jewish self.
She explained that I was the daughter of an esteemed classics professor and so-called genius named David Goldman.
“He’s this incredibly brilliant professor of classics. Like my dad was.” She paused, stirring her grayish tea and looking out into the equally gray light that quilted the forest outside. “That way, I’ll really know what to say when they ask me details about your dad’s scholarship. I mean, my father practically raised me on ancient history.” She began to rattle on about things I knew nothing about: Sapphic meter, the influence of Plato on Heidegger. I zoned out and tried to imagine this guy who would be my dad. I kept coming up with a lighter-skinned version of my own father, seated in his office beside a mountain of books.
She looked away just then, her expression turning downward to something more melancholy, her eyes turning a murkier shade of blue. She got that look when she was reminded of her own dead father. It seemed she was paying homage to him in the form of this Jewish intellectual.
After a moment of reflection, she was back with a gust of energy, forcing herself to look forward, into the crystal ball of our future. “Okay, picture this,” she said. “David was funny as hell with a mop of curly black hair, an afro, the way Jews have sometimes, and he was pretty much an athiest even though he wanted you to know your history, your heritage. For him, Judaism was more like a cultural thing.” She leaned across the table and ruffled my hair. “I’ll call you my little meshugga one. As a term of affection, you know?”
So that morning at the Wellington Diner in Maine, surrounded by the thick smoky scent of pine trees and the broad flesh of
country women, I was knighted a half-Jewish girl named Jesse Goldman, with a white mama named Sheila—and the world was our pearl. While my mother read the rest of Sheila’s story, I made my way to the ladies’ room in the back of the restaurant. I glanced at the men eating their breakfasts at the counter—crew cuts, plaid flannel shirts, red rugged faces, thick fingers—and thought of my father, hunched over his plate at Bob the Chef’s, talking over my head about Brazil while he barely touched his grits and bacon.
from caucasia,
with love
For four dusty years we ran between motel and commune.
We ran away from the trouble my mother had left behind on the steps of a Columbus Avenue brownstone. Away from the rubble of revolutionary basements, fisted picks, Nkrumah dreams, and into the underneath—into the world of women without names, without pasts, without documents. Women who didn’t exist. Women who had been discarded by the radicals they once loved. And so—bruised, disillusioned, erased from the history books—they found one another.
We ran as if we knew what we were running from, knew what we were running toward. And sometimes it seemed that there was indeed a blueprint—that the zigzag chaos of our route was itself a plan, a ruse to keep them from following our trail. But most of the time our trail of auto exhaust and littered fast-food wrappers seemed completely haphazard. My mother would pull our rumpled, coffee-stained map of the Northeast out of the glove compartment, spread it across a picnic table, and close her eyes as she let her finger glide slowly across the map as if it were our Ouija board.
We stayed longest at a place called Aurora, a women’s commune in upstate New York. And we stayed there so long only because my mother found “Sapphic bliss,” as she put it, with an Australian woman named Bernadette who rode a Harley. We were at Aurora for nearly a year, long enough for my mother to break Bernadette’s heart. But most places we left after a few months. My mother considered it unsafe to stay anywhere for too long, and so I got used to the constant motion. I remembered those years mostly in fragments, a montage of unconnected images which I would begin to make sense of only later: a drunk Navy kid trying to break into our motel room one night, and my mother scaring him away with a karate kick to his groin; speculums soaking in a sink at Aurora; a huddle of thunder-thighed women sharing a group hug; and always, the blurring world beyond our windshield, glimpsed only in passing.
It was easy to forget that we were, as my mother put it, a part of something bigger. She said there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of others like us, fugitives of noble causes. She also said there was a community of radicals who considered her a heroine and would help her at the drop of a hat. But for safety reasons, she explained, we had to remain isolated from our allies. I can remember only one meeting with members of this network, and it came early on in our flight. A tall white man called Mike met us at a diner one night in Poughkeepsie, where he handed us a thick brown envelope containing materials for our new identities. From then on we had been alone in the wilderness.
There’s something unreal about the time we spent on the run. Soft. Unfulfilled. Dreamlike. Something about the unseen, the undocumented, the off-the-record that still feels unmentionable. But I’ll mention those years enough to say this: On the road and in the women’s commune, the lie of our false identities seemed irrelevant, because there was no world to witness them. The people we encountered seemed—like us—to be in a perpetual state of reinvention. We all were fictive imaginings of our former selves, a fact that somehow neutralized the lies, made it all a game of make-believe. In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete—a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption. And for me, there was comfort in that state of incompletion, a sense that as long as we kept moving, we could go back to what we had left behind.
At first we lived off the money my grandmother had handed over that strange, tense morning at the house on Fayerweather Street. When that ran out, we lived off a savings bond my mother had cashed in, and the proceeds from the family silverware. My mother had sold the silverware sometime in the weeks before we fled Boston—“a valuable piece of Boston history,” the man at the shop had told her, greedily eyeing the well-known initials engraved in the spoon handle—and the money it earned us was enough to last us a few months on the road. When that dwindled, my mother had worked like any other single mother, odd jobs—secretarial, factory—but mostly tutoring “special children”—dyslexic, retarded, or simply bad-natured. The same sort she had tutored in Boston. It didn’t matter which town, there always seemed to be a problem child with a desperate mother willing to pay for a miracle worker. And it was true, something about my mother’s mixture of roughness and eccentricity seemed to be the perfect combination for these children who had struggled to read or sit still or simply exist. She was kind to them in her own belting way, without ever being squeamish, and her method seemed to work, allowing her to support and feed her own child. She avoided the problem of references by going to meet the mothers directly and, during the interviews, charming the childern into submission. She told them her references had been lost, but by that point they already trusted her. She was white, she was clearly educated, and most important, the children seemed to be tamed by her very presence.
When my mother wasn’t busy teaching those disturbed and delayed children, she taught me. Home-schooling was nothing new for me. Nkrumah had been my only year of real school in the outside world. Now I was back at the place where I had started: my mother’s strange tutelage. She promised me that when I entered school again, I’d be at least two years ahead of other children. I wasn’t certain.
Her lessons hadn’t involved textbooks or equations. Instead, they consisted of her line of questioning—barked at me across a kitchen or restaurant table—about the latest books I had read. She was right that I was better read than most kids my age. At her bidding, I had read the Brontës, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the Russians—Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Before bed she would read aloud to me the poems of Emily Dickenson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay. I did exercises that my mother had taken from the back of Elements of Style, and was tested on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. My mother swore that I’d be the first child raised and educated free of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.
She was great when it came to right-brain teaching, but her math lessons were shoddy, and she usually rushed through them. She seemed bored by them and said I needed to know enough only to balance a checkbook. She put a bit more energy into science class, but I later learned just how primitive those lessons were. One day, when we passed a can of rotting trash and I asked where maggots came from, she said they were made of garbage and that I was witnessing the origins of life. I believed everything my mother told me, including her pseudo-scientific theories on spontaneous generation, which had been dis-proven more than a century before.
I believed her even when she swore that after four years of silence, my father would return Cole to us, as he had promised he would. She claimed he knew whom to contact when he returned—a friend of the underground who could then track us down. I wasn’t allowed to know who this friend was, for my own safety. And, my mother said, we had to stay footloose and fancy free until they returned. The jig wasn’t up, the jig wouldn’t be up, until we all were back together. When they returned, we could return, she told me. Our bodies would land just at the moment the Brasil Air 747 hit the ground, and only then could our lives go back to normal.
Our names—Jesse and Sheila Goldman—were the only things about us that remained constant. To keep those names was a breach of safety, of course. But my mother said Goldman was the name my father and Cole would know to look for. We had to keep the names for their sakes. But our bodies disguised us. While I grew into a lanky twelve-year-old, my mother shrank. She told me she had lost the weight out of grieving for Cole. And maybe that wa
s true. But sometimes I wondered if it were more intentional than that, just another piece of her disguise, to go along with the auburn hair and horn-rimmed glasses and the new name. Whatever the case, it did the trick. She was unrecognizable.
My mother had never been particularly religious before, but I guess something changed when she became Sheila. She read about all the religions of the world with a vigor that she once had reserved for politics. Her own family had no faith in anything. Wasps were like that, my mother said. But my mother threw herself into religion. She dabbled in all of them: Buddhism, Hinduism, Jewish mysticism, even Islam. She practiced what she liked about them, and discarded what she didn’t—which was almost everything. According to her, all religions are fundamentally the same. “Everything that rises must converge, sweetie,” she explained. This left her inventing some independent mantra, which she howled alone in the mornings whether on the front porch at Aurora or in a motel bathroom, seated cross-legged on the floor beside the toilet. Although the actual meanings of the words she uttered were mysteries to me—they sounded like some bastardized Elemeno—I understood they were supposed to reach my sister in Brazil. She told me that she believed in something bigger than herself, but there was some emptiness to those morning howls that made me wonder if she really had any faith at all.