From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  We were fortunate to be assigned chairs one row back from the shoreline, and then Zoela took off for the sea, periodically turning back to make sure I was following her.

  I set off behind her, trailing. When I reached her, we stood together in the shallow waters. I told her, “In my dreams, I will tell Babbo how absolutely beautiful and spectacular you are. You are the pearl of his beloved sea.”

  She splashed water into my face and asked, “Do you think he can see me?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Would he be proud of me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She smiled. My words seemed to ease her. I resisted an urge to take her little body in my arms and call on the gods to suspend time, help me hold on to the grace of that moment. Talking about her dad and making her smile at the same time was rare in our new life. I submerged my body. When I came up, the air felt new, warm.

  Around us were intergenerational families; bronzed, high-pitched children; flirtatious couples; duos and trios of friends from seemingly all over the world. They swam, they relaxed. They, too, were drawn to the sea. On the beach, North African and Bangladeshi immigrants walked among the throng of visitors selling their wares: towels, sunglasses, cell phone cases, swimsuit cover-ups, inflatable plastic dinghies in the shape of dolphins. A pair of Chinese women offered massages beachside. The world had closed ranks here. Our countries of origin and economics aside, we were all part of a seaside tableau. I thought of all the invaders, conquerors, quest seekers who had come to these shores over the centuries. I thought about the refugees coming from Syria, Libya, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa to Sicily each week. They were fleeing civil war, and the ensuing humanitarian crisis had brought people with many stories of unforgettable pain. It was the migration story of our time. Sicily was changing, but it always had.

  Zoela swam up to me. She locked her body around mine, her legs around my waist. “Mommy, why do you think there are no other brown people in Aliminusa?” Our surroundings were not lost on her, either.

  “Sweetheart, Aliminusa is a small town in a part of the world where people have not immigrated. It’s not like Los Angeles or big cities. For a long time, it has just been full of people who were born there, married there, and had kids there. Not a lot of outsiders.” I stopped myself before I descended further into a historical and geopolitical diatribe. I couldn’t even begin to address the refugee crisis with her. I didn’t know quite how to talk about the children, mothers, and fathers who were crossing the Mediterranean to get to the island on which we stood and the circumstances that also made this place a sea of tears.

  “But why aren’t there brown people like us?” she asked again, sea salt forming at her hairline.

  “Because people like us, black and brown people, did not originate in Europe. People like us were brought to Europe and throughout North America and even South America hundreds of years ago as slaves.” At once I saw myself as the overanswering daughter of people who had answered my own childhood questions with complex adult narratives. If we had been on shore, I probably would have started arcing out the slave route with lines in the sand.

  “But are we the only brown people they know?” She asked as if the question and its answer had just reached her consciousness at the same time.

  “Maybe. Yes. It’s likely, aside from the priest,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be the only brown girl.” I knew what she meant; being different, being the only one, standing out because of skin color was hard. I suspected it made her feel “other” or, worse yet, less than. She certainly wouldn’t be the first black or brown girl who at some point hadn’t wanted to move through the world in a different packaging. Hell, untold numbers of books have been written and award-winning documentaries made delving into the psychological complexities surrounding identity and race for little black girls in predominantly white environments. And although we weren’t in the United States, I knew I had to triage any psychological damage that might be festering. I knew I had to do what black mothers have been doing for centuries: remind my daughter that she is valuable and beautiful in a world that often says otherwise.

  “Being brown is beautiful.” I spun her in the water, brought her face close to mine. “Baby, a part of the gift of travel is going places where people are not exactly like you. Life would be boring if we never did that. And one day, I imagine you’ll travel to many places. Not everyone will be like you, but you will have fun and learn about all kinds of new things.”

  I concluded the conversation with the reassurance of a kiss. It seemed enough in that moment. Then she reached for the locket with Saro’s picture that I still wore around my neck.

  She rubbed it as though she were making a wish. “Can I have gelato before dinner?”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved that we had stepped back from the conversation before I had to answer the question that I suspected was underneath the question: Do I belong here?

  It was a question I had spent the better part of two decades trying to answer—to strangers, to the world, to myself. The question could be traced in a straight line back to my first trip to Sicily with Saro. But I had learned that identity is prismatic, that belonging requires claiming.

  Later, after a dinner of grilled swordfish drizzled with a blood orange reduction on a bed of arugula, an ancient pairing of sea and fire, we walked from the restaurant along the seawall. I thought about Stromboli and our trip there last summer. Zoela was looking out onto the water as well. She turned to me.

  “I want to know what is out there . . . Where does it end? . . . How does the water stay on the planet if it is a circle but also a flat line? Gravity, but still.” Her forehead was tensed in a fixed gaze.

  It was the kind of rapid-fire, big-picture questioning that made me proud to see my tuition dollars at work.

  “Sweetheart, those are the essential questions that prompted human exploration of the natural world,” I told her. She looked back at me as if she got about 70 percent of what I was saying. “You have to want to know first, before you can take a journey.”

  “Well, I want to know!” she exclaimed. Sicily was having an additional impact, beyond just family connection.

  As she said it, I considered my own journey. Some part of me desired to know what would become of me. That was keeping me going. Grief exhausted me, but it also made me want to live. It made me appreciate the brevity of life. I wanted to be around. I wanted to know how things would turn out for Zoela, the extraordinary human being who called me her mammina—little mother. I wanted to hear the voice of the woman she would become as she remembered the Mass in the tiny Sicilian church with the African priest and how worried she had been for him because “it is hard to be a priest if you are still learning Italian.” I wanted to know if she would remember that she had sung the word “Hallelujah” right alongside Nonna when the priest had said her father’s name during Mass. I wanted to be there to remind her one day—perhaps in some early spring or perhaps on a gloomy afternoon as fall turned into winter—a day when she would need to be reminded of who she was. I wanted to be there to see the recognition in her eyes when I recounted that story. I wanted to be there to share the details of her life, because I carried her story. I wanted to eat dinner in my daughter’s kitchen, lick the sauce from the spoon, and taste the influence of her father’s hand. I wanted to read a letter she might write to me from some place in the world I had never seen. I wanted to run my finger over the stamp and picture her there in my mind’s eye. I wanted to know whom she might choose to love. I wanted to greet her at a train station and have her ask me gleefully, “What took you so long?” She would take my hand, make me laugh, as we exited out into a busy street of a busy city and she’d hail a cab and I would hear her voice keeping time to the meter as we traveled along. I wanted to know what my hands would look like at eighty-five, what shoes I might like to wear, if I will prefer straps to laces, if orange will still be a favorite color. I kept going because I wanted to know how one puts
one’s life together again, making up the bits and remnants into a new whole. I wanted to lose myself many times and find my way again. I wanted to know even more ways to carry love forward in the tiniest of gestures, how to see love in the smallest of things. I wanted to someday stand on a stage and thank Saro, my best beloved, without whom life would be a lesser, blander thing. I wanted to see the sand in the Berber mountains once again. I wanted to pick mulberries, eating till I felt drunk with the joy of what nature gives so freely, so completely. I wanted to hold another person’s hand when he or she dies, for that is such a great honor. I wanted to know what will become of the people, places, and things that have meant something to me. I wanted to learn something new from someone I have yet to meet. And I wanted to be able to know that I could see unspeakable pain and know that it, too, would change me but not undo me. I wanted to journey to beyond where my eye can see and greet the self who carried me forward to get there.

  * * *

  The next morning, Nonna lit the fire and cooked arancini—rice balls with mozzarella at the center. As she made them, she told me the story of Saro’s birth. I didn’t know exactly what prompted it. But I had enough experience to respect that memory comes unbidden and it has to make its rounds to completion.

  “He had the mark of a strawberry where his hairline gave way to his forehead. Com’era bello. L’ho baciato ogni giorno.—How beautiful it was. I kissed it every day.”

  She was uncharacteristically open and forthcoming. I sat silent. Whatever would come next needed to be said.

  “He had a birthmark, the stain of coffee, on his butt, the right cheek,” she continued, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand before getting back to mixing the rice balls.

  Suddenly I remembered part of the man I loved, a detail I had forgotten. His birthmark. I had loved that birthmark on his ass. How had I already forgotten that?

  She told me how when she was pregnant, in the last stages, it was voting day in town. She had gone with Giuseppe to vote, and someone had offered her a coffee as they waited in line.

  “I was too ashamed to take a coffee in public. Back then decent women didn’t do that. Only men drank espresso in public. I wanted it, but I refused and I sat down. I leaned on my right side for comfort.” She pointed to her right hip. “That’s how he got the birthmark.”

  Saro had been marked by her unrequited desire for coffee.

  She told me all this while adding mint to peas that looked fresh from the fields. Then she was done talking, and she returned to the repetition of small domestic things that made the big world outside seem somehow petty with endless ambition. A world that held little interest for her, except in the ways it affected her family, the price of bread, or a tax increase on television services.

  Then she switched gears. “Tomorrow morning you’re going to see the attorney.”

  I thought I had heard her wrong. “Attorney? What attorney?”

  “I am giving this house to you and Zoela. Franca will take you to sign all the papers.”

  I was standing at the landing of the staircase, star-crossed lovers on the TV next to me making a stilted but soap-operatic declaration of their love for each other. I turned back to Nonna, who was still in the kitchen, still processing what I thought I had heard. “What did you say?”

  “The house. It’s yours. I want you to have it. It would have been Saro’s, and now it is yours.”

  TERRA VOSTRA

  The arid Sicilian countryside rolled by as we drove to the notaio—notary—three towns away. I sat in the back, silent and hot. Cosimo flipped through radio stations. Franca was quiet. On my lap were all the pertinent documents: my passports (American and Italian), marriage license translated and stamped, Saro’s death certificate, his passport with a stamp from the Italian government declaring him deceased. If Italian bureaucracy maddened me, Sicilian bureaucrats could bring me to the point of tears. I had learned that the law required that this sort of land transfer must happen within one year of the death. However, because I lived in another country and hadn’t known that, we were four months past the official cutoff date. To my knowledge, we’d have to plead our case, outlining the extenuating circumstances to the notary, who functions as a probate attorney. I wondered how we would handle the logistics, what I needed to say or not say to move the process along. As I looked out on the hills, I decided it would be best to say nothing. I may have been becoming a Sicilian landowner, but I was far from home, way outside my sphere of knowledge about how any of this worked.

  Franca, however, was a veritable master at surmounting bureau-cratic intricacies and the cultural nuances they necessitate. She knew when to push, when to deflect, how to defer, exactly the moment to pay respect, lie, or exaggerate, if needed, to move the whole thing along. Cosimo acted as her wingman. Years earlier, I had seen him stand just behind her opposite an official’s desk, arms crossed, waiting to pounce with a brisk “Scusi” if the official used the wrong tone or pushed back where not warranted. They were a dynamic duo, alternating good cop/bad cop when the situation called.

  Saro always said that his sister had a quiet but fierce stubborn streak. When they were children, if a family decision was made that she didn’t like, she had the capacity to batten down the hatch and prepare for the long haul. She could easily (and seemingly effortlessly) go three weeks without uttering a single word to anyone in the house. Her protests had become another character in the house. Her silent streaks with her father were infamous. Saro had often chided her about that when they were adults, the way only a sibling can. They’d laughed about it, and she had reminded him that his response to family difficulties had been to leave. “What do you remember from up there in Florence?” she’d ask. I suspected that she’d gotten the residual emotional fallout of two parents who didn’t understand where they had gone wrong, why their son was so hell bent on being different from them. Whereas Saro had set himself free in far-flung places, Franca had rooted down deeper. The daughter. The quiet one. The one who lived in the same square kilometer she had been born into. Now she sat in front of me, doing the work of family, helping her brother’s widow once again.

  I was so taken aback by the abiding love shown by this unexpected gift that my heart broke open, tender and raw with a mixture of gratitude, stupor, joy, even a tinge of an inexplicable feeling that came close to guilt. The latter feeling surprised me. Do I deserve this? My mind raced all night. The echo of Nonna’s words, “It would have been Saro’s,” lingered. There was a restless tension between my longing and wanting to belong and a deep sense of how bittersweet it was. Then, when I felt exhausted by the odd collision of competing feeling and mind churning, my heart would pop free with gratitude once again.

  Still, I had wondered the whole night before about Franca and her kids. How would they feel about me getting the land? She and Nonna had definitely discussed this, because Franca was designated as the intermediary, the one taking me to the lawyer’s office that afternoon. Thus, I guessed, it was okay with her. It was no secret that the taxes Italy levied on homeowners with second properties were debilitating for many in rural Sicily where unemployment reached upwards to 50 percent for young people. Leaving the house to Franca would someday make her a second-home owner. To my basic understanding of Italian tax law, that could possibly be more of a burden than a gift to her, especially if she needed to support her daughters into adulthood with her already precarious work. In my name, it might be easier. The taxes would be minimal for me compared to what I paid in California. Still, a tax work-around didn’t really seem to be the reason for the gift. Perhaps this had been Nonna’s plan all along? The wedding gift her son had never gotten.

  Before I left the house, Nonna had been outside hanging out laundry. Inside, I saw where she had laid one of her widow’s black skirts on the table with a needle and thread. She would be mending it while I was away handling the land transfer. When she crossed through the front door, momentarily balancing herself in the doorjamb, she began speaking as if in midthoug
ht: “If the land doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to no one.”

  “Grazie,” I had responded. I felt tears coming on. She didn’t like morning tears.

  “If we start now, we won’t stop. The day is long.”

  Then she put magnifying glasses on top of her regular glasses and sat down to work.

  As Franca, Cosimo, and I continued downward on the winding road, passing abandoned farmhouses and the little-used Cerda train station, I realized I hadn’t called my parents to tell them the news. I hadn’t told my sister. It had happened so fast, so unexpectedly, I had been too overcome by the turn of events. I needed time before I knew how I felt about it all, before I could feel in any way celebratory. At that moment, it was bittersweet. Saro and I had often dreamed about owning a house in the Sicilian countryside, surrounded by an orchard of olive trees. Now the possibility of that was happening without him.

  With the house also came responsibility. Will I be able to afford it in the future? Who will help maintain it? Will I even want to keep coming back once Zoela is grown? All that felt hard to explain to my family all at once. Still, I knew they’d appreciate the significance of landownership. Since slavery and Reconstruction, landownership had been the way my family (on both sides) had charted their progress, wrestled with the past, and stayed connected with one another. Now it was my turn to stay connected, albeit in an unexpected place. As Cosimo slowed the car to a near stop behind a moving tractor carrying large bales of wheat, I contemplated what family land meant to me.

  By the time my maternal grandmother was a teenager in an area of rural East Texas between the black post-Reconstruction settlements of Piney and Nigton, her family had acquired several hundred acres of timberland. They had farmed it and labored on it. The land had come to them bit by bit, in minor acquisitions. It was low-lying and difficult to farm but affordable to people born the children of slaves, without education. Whites with an eye to ownership looked to the areas with better farming land surrounding Nigton, leaving a small community of blacks, like my family, to quietly begin buying some of the land on which their ancestors had been enslaved. They had eked out a living in a territory surrounded by Klansmen, somehow surviving in a social system committed to Jim Crow.