by Cat Cora
Not long after the Chinese food incident, on a Saturday morning, Blake hopped out of bed and said she was going to cook us a big breakfast, but first needed to run to the store. It was seven thirty, early for a Saturday. I was only half awake when she left. I went back to sleep, and when my eyes clicked open at nine, and there was no smell of coffee brewing or bacon sizzling in the pan, or the rich, mouthwatering scent of eggs over easy in butter, or any noise in the apartment at all, I thought enough.
I wonder if Blake was so brazen because however betrayed I claimed to feel, I never did anything about it. Or maybe it was because we had only one car. My Fiat was in the shop that week. I had no means to come after her. I threw on some sweats and asked Natalie, a friend who was sleeping on the couch while between apartments, whether I could borrow the keys to her VW. We were chummy and generous in the way of college students, and she tossed me the keys without asking why or when I would be back. I roared over to Julie’s apartment and sure enough, Blake’s car was parked in the driveway.
I’d allowed my boss at the fitness center in Jackson to talk me into resigning because I was gay. I’d swallowed Blake’s lies about her cheating and her cheap Chinese food. I was flunking algebra for the third time because I couldn’t bring myself to keep asking, again and again, how to solve for x. But when I saw Blake’s car, something fierce emerged in me.
I threw the door open and walked right in without knocking. They were in the kitchen, both wearing long T-shirts, the kind that double as nightgowns. Julie was sitting at her little kitchen table and Blake was standing, holding a cup of coffee. They looked as cozy as you please. The satiated just-been-fucked glow on their faces vanished when they saw me blow in like a Mississippi tornado.
“You”—I pointed my finger at Julie—“can have her. I’m done.”
And with that I turned on my heel and left.
And this time I really was done. I drove back to the apartment and called my parents. “I need you guys to come down here now and help me move. Come as soon as possible. I’m leaving Blake and moving out today.”
My mom said, “Hallelujah!” I could hear her, my dad, and Grandmom Alma doing the happy dance on the other end of the line. They made the ninety-mile trip in under an hour and a half. By this time Alma was in her eighties and was no stranger to the drama of human existence. As we were moving my cartons into the U-Haul, Blake came home and turned on the waterworks, begging me to stay. “Better back off,” said Alma. “We’re moving her out of here today whether you like it or not.”
The saga continued for another year or so. Blake would follow me to class, crying and begging in front of students bustling around campus. She would show up at my apartment in the middle of the night and bang on the door. Once I had to call the police. This being a southern story, there was an incident with a handgun, a small revolver that she carried in her purse. One hot Saturday afternoon I was studying at my kitchen table and received a call from Natalie, the friend who’d let me borrow her car to drive to Julie’s that fateful day, and who now roomed with Blake. Natalie said Blake had been waving a pistol around and threatening to do herself in. I dropped everything and sped over, and as Natalie and I were standing in her living room, we heard a shot fired upstairs. Without thinking about whether Blake might shoot me, I flew up the steps three at a time to find Blake in her bedroom blubbering that I didn’t love her anymore, and what was she going to do? She’d shot the light fixture, which had apparently satisfied her appetite for gun violence. She handed the gun over to me. After I sat her down and made sure she was all right, I got the hell out of there.
I dropped her revolver into my purse and forgot about it. A week later Natalie and I and a few guys she knew decided a bar crawl was in order. It may have been after exams. We drank at home, then hopped into the car and sped down the dark highway in search of a great bar someone knew down in Purvis, or maybe Lumberton. The radio was cranked, windows rolled down, we were hollering and singing into the night. Then, the red and blues started flashing behind us. We weren’t especially panic stricken, not at first. Your average Mississippi cop was unmoved in the face of an open beer. Usually they’d sidle over to the window and say, “I’ll just take that beer from you and give you this ticket. Now don’t let me catch you again and get on home.”
But this particular officer pulled the driver out of the car, and without any cordial chitchat handcuffed him and tossed him into the back of his patrol car. Natalie and I were in the backseat clinging to each other, drunk and sobbing. “We’re going to jail! Some crazy backwater jail where we’re going to get raped and murdered.” We were scared, but it wasn’t until I remembered the pistol in my purse that I saw spots before my eyes and felt my internal organs clench with fear.
The cop found the gun and took us all back to the station. I was sobering up quick and thought with horror of how my parents and Grandmom would react. They would be disappointed, sad, and pissed, and not necessarily in that order. I thought about their utter devotion to me, their commitment to helping me get through school, the way they dropped everything and probably broke a few speed limits themselves racing down to Hattiesburg to help me move. They really didn’t deserve this.
I was handcuffed, fingerprinted, and booked for carrying a concealed weapon. I explained that the reason I had the gun was that I’d taken it away from a friend who’d threatened to kill herself. I offered to show them how I didn’t even know how to shoot the thing. I said I was happy and relieved that they had confiscated it. I was smart enough to keep saying a friend and not my girlfriend. I would probably still be in jail had I dropped that bomb on those good old boys.
They confiscated the pistol, issued me a fine, and released me.
Not long after that, I found out that I’d finally passed algebra.
seven
My mom kept a scrapbook for each of her kids, and on the inside of mine, written on the bottom left corner of the front cover in black permanent marker, it said: Born April 3, 1967. Adopted April 10, 1967. The large, clear hand proclaims there are no secrets here. My parents made a point of treating my adoption, and also the adoption of my brother Mike, as if they were the most normal family events.
Then as now, adoption is closed in Mississippi, but when I turned twenty-one I was given the chance to find my birth mother. I’d wondered about her, of course, but at that moment all I really knew was that I came from good, healthy stock. A few years earlier, when I was around eighteen, I became curious about my health history. I can’t remember why I was so curious, other than I was beginning to understand that I didn’t share my parents’ DNA, but had the DNA of other people who might be wandering the earth with some inheritable syndrome or disease that I should know about. I’d asked my parents, and they said all they knew was that the Mississippi Children’s Home had given me a clean bill of health before my adoption was finalized.
What I didn’t know was that my question inspired my mom to contact the Children’s Home. She learned that my birth mother called the home every year around my birthday, hoping to be in touch with me. My mom then wrote my birth mother a letter, telling her in general terms about my upbringing, how she was a nurse and my father was a teacher, and how I was a good student and fine athlete. Not strictly true, but my mom was generally proud of me. My birth mother wrote right back and said she was married with two kids, and that whenever I was ready she would love to meet me. It turned out that she was also a registered nurse, just like Mom.
On the night of my birthday dinner we stuffed ourselves with kota kapama and Alma’s cheesecake. It being my birthday, I went for that second slice. I remember my mom going from room to room opening windows, letting in the smell of spring. The dogwoods were blooming, as well as the saucer magnolias with their fragrance of overripe citrus.
She returned from the other room with a stack of letters. “Cathy,” she said, “when you had those questions about your birth mom awhile back we contacted her. I kept a copy of what I wrote, and here’s what she wrot
e back. Also, we thought you should know that she called and wanted to meet you when you turned eighteen, but we felt it was too soon.”
“Too soon? I was eighteen! A legal adult.” I felt a swirl of conflicting emotions at the thought of meeting the woman who gave birth to me, but my kneejerk response was to get het up and offended. I was irked that Mom and Dad contacted her and hadn’t told me. “You were coping with a lot of serious issues then,” said my mom. “Adding another issue to the mix was the last thing you needed then. When she called asking again last week, we thought it was time. If you want to meet her it’s okay with us. We’re with you all the way.”
Along with the recent letters was a stack of envelopes. Every year on my birthday, Joanne—my birth mother—had written to the home, asking after me, and these were those letters. I took each one out of its white envelope and read it. The same handwriting, year after year, wondering the same thing: How was I doing? Was I healthy? Happy? Well loved? I was a little teary-eyed. I felt both stunned and special. All these letters. I marveled at her determination and suspected I inherited my penchant for stubborn loyalty from her, for which I suddenly felt unaccountably grateful.
The next morning, while my dad was getting ready to leave for work and my mom was scrambling up some eggs, I told her I wanted to call my birth mother. Right that minute. She slid the eggs onto a plate, picked up the phone, and made the call. A week later my parents, Grandmom, and I were on our way to the Mississippi Children’s Home to meet Joanne. I was so eager to lay eyes on the woman who’d given me life.
A social worker greeted us in the waiting area. She put my mom, dad, and Alma in one room and me in another. There, the social worker and I waited for my birth mother. I believe I would have been more nervous if it hadn’t been so surreal. I had a mother and father whom I loved beyond measure, and yet now I would have another mother, one whose DNA I shared. The door opened and Joanne walked in, and we fell into each other’s arms. The Coras were tall people—Dad is six feet and my mom is five eight. I’m five two, and Joanne was petite like me. I looked so much like her. She had fine, dark features and small hands that I recognized. The nail beds, the tapering fingers, all like mine. Years later, after we’d spent some time together, we would marvel at all the mannerisms we shared, the way we gestured when we talked and the way we laughed.
We hugged until it got awkward, then both laughed and blotted the tears from our eyes.
The social worker sat on a metal chair off to the side. She was there to help facilitate the conversation, but her services were unnecessary. We talked easily, and Joanne had twenty-plus years’ worth of things to tell me.
Joanne was fifteen when she went to a concert with a friend and fell hard for the drummer in one of the bands. His name was Knox, and he was twenty, an older man. He had long hair that hung over one eye. When she wound up pregnant, his daddy told her daddy that marrying her was out of the question, that it would ruin his life. It was 1966, and her options were to have an illegal abortion, to have the baby and keep it, or to have the baby and put it up for adoption. She knew a girl who’d snuck away to New York for an abortion, but her parents were God-fearing Mississippi Christians and no way no how was this ever going to happen.
She was packed off to a foster home before she was even showing. Her foster parents were an old couple and business was so good they built an addition onto the back of their house specifically to house their foster children. The old man liked to wander back and look through the bathroom window and watch her while she bathed. When she told her parents about this, they sent her to the unwed mothers’ home in New Orleans. The first day she was there she was on the trolley by herself and a man exposed himself to her; she was immediately whisked off to the Florence Crittenton Home, where she met girls from California and New York. She liked her roommate, a teacher from up north who had her baby only a few days before I was born.
Joanne told me that she had the option not to see me, and even though she knew it would bring her heartbreak she had to hold me, count my fingers and toes, and look into my eyes. She passed me over to the Mississippi Children’s Home, and then she went home herself, to Greenwood. She was sixteen.
Still, a month later she took the bus back to Jackson, then a taxi to the Children’s Home. She marched in, shaking with the nerve of what she was about to do, and asked to have me back. She thought that if she walked in the door of her parents’ house with a babe in arms, they would glimpse their own flesh and blood and experience a change of heart. But she was too late; I had already been placed with Spiro and Virginia Lee Cora.
She didn’t believe them. “You’re lying!” she screamed. “I know she’s back there. Let me see her. Let me have her back.” She was hysterical. No one could calm her down. The woman at the front desk called Joanne’s dad. Joanne’s mom had reported her missing earlier in the day, and had had a pretty good idea where she was headed.
“Every year on your birthday I would call the Children’s Home and ask whether you were okay. They couldn’t tell me anything other than that you were alive. Once I sent a doll, but I’m not sure whether you ever got it. I’ve spent a lifetime looking for you. I knew that if I glimpsed you in another woman’s arms or in a stroller, or playing with a bunch of kids at the park, or even later, hanging out at the mall, that I would absolutely recognize you.”
Only a few years earlier, Gaylon, a friend of hers, spied a picture of the new crop of Gayfer Girls on the department store wall near customer service. Thinking she recognized me, she called Joanne, who rushed over to see for herself. “I knew it was you,” she told me. “I didn’t even need to see your birthmark.” I smiled at that old southern saying, which means I know you so well I would recognize you anywhere.
I felt dizzy trying to absorb the reality of this—that while I’d been going about my business growing from child to teen to young adult, the woman who’d given birth to me was looking into the faces of all the girls she came upon on the street, seeing if it was me, her daughter.
After our reunion, Joanne and I saw each other a lot. We met for lunch, and sometimes she came to dinner at our home on Swan Lake Drive. Once she invited me to drive up to the small town of Belzoni, in the Delta, to the house where my birth father, Knox, lived. Belzoni, population two thousand, give or take, is famous for its farm-raised catfish and is home of the World Catfish Festival, held every year in April. I thought of Knox only as Joanne’s baby daddy. He hadn’t taken responsibility for having created a child. I couldn’t think of him as my birth father. I knew exactly who my daddy was, and it wasn’t this guy.
Knox didn’t live there anymore. After college he’d moved to the Caribbean, where he started a charter boat business. Still, she wanted me to see where he grew up. She was hoping we could meet; she at least wanted me to clap eyes on him.
When we arrived, his mother was outside mowing the lawn in shorts and a sleeveless plaid shirt.
“Who’re you?” his mother asked.
“Joanne. Knox’s daughter Cathy is in the car.”
The woman just stared, didn’t say a word.
“She would at least like to see a picture of her daddy,” said Joanne.
The woman dropped the mower handle and went into the house. She came back with a single snapshot and said, “When you get through leave it on the porch. Then please leave.”
I watched her in disbelief. Was this a joke? Joanne’s family had been eager and happy to get to know me and embrace me as one of their own. How could this woman not appreciate that I was her son’s flesh and blood, her flesh and blood? I stared at her, this old country woman who looked to be about a hundred, perched on her skinny legs, a cigarette stuck on her lip, and I thought, You are as mean as a snake.
As far as I know, her son still lives in the Caribbean. Through an old high school friend, Joanne discovered that he eventually married and had two children, a boy and a girl, now college aged, my half siblings. He apparently knows about me, and knows I know about him, but there it rests.
My parents encouraged me to spend as much time with Joanne as I wished. Now that I’m a mother myself, I often wonder how much discipline this required, and the strength and selflessness it must have taken for them to let go. They were confident and had complete faith in the love I had for them, and they for me, and in our bond, so that I could build a relationship with Joanne. It’s a testament to the grace and courage of my parents.
I could tell my mom worried a bit that Joanne, eager to catch up on all those lost years, might overwhelm me with her need to develop a relationship. Joanne was keen not just on spending time together but on drawing me into the life of her mother and sisters.
One day my mom sat me down and said, “Honey, if you don’t want to get this involved you can blame us, just say, ‘I don’t think my parents would care for me to do that.’ ” I wanted to get to know her, but it was complicated to try to negotiate the emotional terrain. I needed time to adjust. This had the potential to be a deep, important relationship, but I was only twenty-one. I didn’t even know myself.
When my twenty-second birthday rolled around, my parents invited Joanne and her family to the party. Taki and Maria came. Before the party I sat my parents down on the couch and said, “Look, Joanne may be my birth mom, but y’all are my parents.” I loved having Joanne in my life, but I wanted to be sure my mom and dad knew I had room in my heart for them all.
This wasn’t just a Hallmark sentiment. Joanne and my parents seemed to understand intuitively that the best way to show their love and support for their daughter was to form a united front. This was progressive thinking twenty-five years ago. The notion that I would not just find and grow to love my birth mother, but that she and my parents would form a relationship, was extraordinary. I like to think of it as kismet. Both Joanne and my mom were nurses. My mom’s birthday is September 14, and Joanne’s is September 18.