In the Country of Women

by Susan Straight

  I was further stunned.

  I went outside to look at the palm tree in our front yard, whose stair steps of gray dessicated bark I had climbed when I was five, everyone shouting at me to get down. I knew a version of us, of the girls and women here, that was not in the essay. Debbie Martinez, Deborah Adams, Deb Clyde. Girls descended from Mexican and black families arrived in the 1920s, and white families arrived from Arkansas after the Korean War. Our mothers and grandmothers remember their pasts.

  I wanted to write about us.

  Your father and I took our first journey three days after we were married in the oldest black church in Riverside, Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal, founded in 1875. (The afternoon of our wedding, we were driven around the city lake in another Cadillac, belonging to our friend Newcat, a car with a broken horn, so that your uncle General III stood in the open sunroof, his arms spread wide, shouting to people, Honk, honk, goddamnit, these two fools just got married!) We drove across the country from California to Massachusetts, in a Honda Civic—a truly tiny car back then, in 1983, and your father was six feet four inches and 195 pounds, so it was no joke sleeping in the front seats at rest stops.

  In Amherst, we found a mattress and some furniture on the street and lived in a studio apartment while I learned to be a writer and your father worked nights in a correctional facility. But we met James Baldwin, my teacher and mentor. His driver, Rico, and his secretary, Skip, were tall black men who wanted to play basketball with your father. So everyone came to dinner in our bleak front room with two card tables we’d borrowed, the gray linoleum scrubbed, and the tiny red television my brother had won by selling newspaper subscriptions when he was twelve, which he’d given me for Christmas seven years earlier.

  James Baldwin said the apartment reminded him of old days in Harlem. He walked the floor slowly holding a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label, leaning toward my small blue typewriter on the windowsill, reading the handwritten note I had taped to the glass:

  With the rhythm it takes to dance through

  what we have to live through

  you can dance underwater and not get wet.

  He turned to me, his voice precise and resonant as ever but with the wonder he always allowed himself (I already knew that was who I wanted to be—someone endlessly willing to look at something new and feel continuous wonder), and said, “That’s the most extraordinarily profound thing I’ve read in a long time. Who wrote this?”

  George Clinton, we told him. On our ancient black boombox kept on the windowsill, too, we played a cassette tape of “Aqua Boogie” for James Baldwin, the song whose refrain kept me going in the cold snowy nights when I missed oranges and friends and pepper trees. We told him about home. He said to me, “This is remarkable. This is what you must write about. Your lives.”

  I was twenty-two then. But I wasn’t ready.

  Now mourning and love shape this memoir. Our elders are dying, and our young people, too. Your great-aunts, your aunts, and your cousins. Our country feels as if it has gathered itself at a cliff and is studying the long scree of loose rock, deciding whether to slide down and descend completely again into open hatred. This is a different memoir than the one I thought I would write when you three girls were small, when you were Our Little Women, and this was our Orchard House, though our orchards were orange trees.

  You three daughters have left us, your father and me, and many of the women we loved are gone as well, so we are here with our kin in the city where we were born, still sitting under the trees in the searing heat near the big grill where entire slabs of ribs smoke for hours, and then we women chop them into single bones with hatchet and ax so the kids can hold one curve of glistening meat and hear again about how their great-grandfather General II didn’t want to eat squirrel ever again after Oklahoma.

  All of American history is in your bones. In your skin and hair and brains and in your blood. Your kin family numbers five hundred or more. When your cousin Corion died last year, at twenty, our grief was depthless. He was a skateboarder, walking home, having just passed the driveway where our family’s heart has gathered for fifty years, and so I see him walking still. At his funeral, I read this poem, by Linda Hogan, Chickasaw poet of Oklahoma and Colorado, two places where our stories originate. It seems the right way to begin:

  Dwayne Sims, Skip (“I’m the secretary”), James Baldwin, Rico (“I’m the driver”), at Baldwin’s rented house in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1984

  Tonight, I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of the stars in the sky. Listening to what speaks in the blood. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

  And thousands of miles, by foot and boat and train.

  I see the women moving about in the darkness, not because I was in that darkness with them, but because the air was dim or dust around us when the stories were told. The people who spoke to me looked off into the distance, or out a car window, their voices low and rough talking about the night or day when life was altered in a moment. Many stories had a beautiful woman, a murder or tragic death; many had a terrible man.

  One afternoon, sitting by the living room fire, our knees inches apart, her crimson lipstick gleaming, winged eyebrows drawn together and then rising in surprise, my mother-in-law, Alberta, waited for me to hand her Gaila—my first daughter, finally fallen asleep with milk on her lips. Then Alberta spoke softly about Sunflower County, Mississippi.

  Other days, under the eucalyptus trees shedding their creamy beige bark around us, their leaves like silver sickles, our cousins and uncles would hold paper plates of barbecued meat on their laps, speaking of Denton, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  In the dry-grass-scented night of the Colorado prairie, in a tiny house moved from a ghost town fifty years earlier to Nunn, a town going ghost now, five elderly cousins of my grandmother told me for the first time about a country dance.

  On a November evening, my mother crying, the wooden clock from Switzerland clacking implacably above us, the clock from the tiny village in the Alps where she was raised, like Heidi, where when she was nine, her mother died, just like Heidi’s, and my mother told me she went down in the night to see her mother’s body in the living room, and now her life was ruined here in Glen Avon, California.

  When I went outside the next day, the chain-link fences were white with feathers heaped onto the wires like insanely monstrous snowflakes, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing, and I tried to figure out how someone would lay a dead woman on a table. I was three years old, and felt as if not just me but our entire street could be lifted up and moved to a different world by that wind, which always blew west, into my face, so that I had to close my eyes.

  I

  1

  Little House in the Thistles

  Glen Avon, California, 1963

  Here in the land of tumbleweeds so immense and fiercely mobile, a windstorm in November sent so many skeletal balls of thorn blowing across the fields that the small house where my mother and I lived was buried in brown. It was a valley of granite boulders and turkey ranches. Tumbleweeds six and eight feet across packed in drifts around the windows, which were coated with dust from the famous Santa Ana winds. “It was like a snowstorm,” my mother told me years later. “I couldn’t even open the door.”

  My mother, Gabrielle Gertrude Leu Straight Watson, grew up in the Swiss Alps, in a chalet built in the 1800s, the wood nearly black with age, the balconies carved with floral designs, and in winter the snow reached the roof. She told me stories of skiing to school, the beauty of glittering icicles, drifts of sparkling white crystals nearly blinding in the sun. But when her mother died and her father remarried, he took them to Canada, a place about which she told me no stories except these: she worked in the fields, her stepmother, Rosa, tried to marry her off at fifteen to a pig farmer, and my mother ran away.

  My
father, Richard Dean Straight, grew up in the Colorado Rockies, in rough wooden ranch outfits built in the 1800s, the wood nearly black with age, but no balconies or flowers, just corrals filled with cattle and sheep, and his feet damaged by frostbite, his memory damaged by terror. His mother, Ruby, left his father again and again, but always returned. My father went from Colorado to California, from remote ranch to the city of Los Angeles, and back to the mountains. He was born for leaving, as the cowboy songs go, but when he left my mother and me, he didn’t go wandering on a horse back to the ranch. He never came back for more than five minutes at the curb, once a month, while I climbed into his Mustang and went to his house for two days. Never longer than that.

  It’s stunning to gather the stories now and see the parallels in their lives, my parents, and to think they spoke about twelve words to each other in the last fifty years.

  In November 1963, I was three years old. The tumbleweeds were everywhere. My mother was crying, and I was trying to climb up onto her lap, but there was no lap because she was eight months pregnant, so I sat near her feet. The Santa Ana winds blew incessantly and dust filtered through the cracks around the windows until a golden sparkle of haze moved on the floor in the light from the streetlamp.

  My mother had brought few things from Switzerland. She was allowed one small trunk on the boat to Canada. How she came into possession of the wooden clock, I don’t know. But three things she had are now mine: a black lacquered bowl painted with Swiss wildflowers, one pair of silver scissors she used to cut our fingernails, and a strange little folder of cloth into whose pages are inserted sewing needles of all sizes. I was taught to sew, knit, crochet, and embroider when I was seven.

  My mother had spent her childhood darning socks for her father and brothers, and knitting new ones. She taught me to knit in the way that her mother had taught her: I sat across from her, holding the heavy loop of yarn as it came from the store, and she pulled the yarn to make a large ball. Now and then she wove yarn tightly around pieces of Brach’s hard candy, which could be bought cheaply by the pound, butterscotches and peppermints and oblong toffees, all in bright cellophane or foil. She wrapped yarn so fast her hands were nearly invisible, and the strands covered the candy like a sped-up cartoon.

  Then I sat in a chair and knitted, the ball of yarn at my feet—exactly as she had. My head was bent, my hair was in a braid, and I was required not to touch the ball of yarn, even when I saw a flash of foil or yellow cellophane. The piece of candy had to fall out onto the floor, after I had knitted enough to remove those strands of yarn. I was always glad when the cats batted the damn ball and the candy fell out early.

  She told me she hated the darning of socks. I knew I didn’t have to learn to darn because we lived in a place where it was over 100 degrees for weeks at a time, and my siblings and I went barefoot until our feet were so dark and callused we were proud to not require shoes to walk on glass and thorns.

  She had made it all the way to southern California to get a job, get married, buy a small house, plant roses, and have a baby. Me.

  She worked as a teller at Household Finance Savings and Loan in Riverside. One day in 1955, a man came in to apply for a $50 loan. He was on strike from Boeing Aircraft, living in his car for the moment, and recently divorced, he said. Why she agreed to go out with him is an enduring mystery to me. Richard Straight. Why she married him is even more confusing. But he was handsome.

  They lived in a tiny wooden bungalow behind a larger house on Tyrolite Street in Glen Avon, an unincorporated community people called Okietown. My mother was very good at saving money. After four years, they bought her dream house, an eight-hundred-square-foot stucco cottage off Pyrite Street. The new freeway and poultry ranches and granite quarries to the north; to the east, the Santa Ana River. My mother still had her job. But my father had met another woman, and he was gone.

  Now she was abandoned. On the west side of the river, fifty miles from Los Angeles, we lived in an area where white people had arrived from dust bowl farms, Mexican people from Michoacan and Zacatecas, black people from Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Japanese-American strawberry farmers and Spanish-Mexican native Californians had been there for decades. My mother was the only one from Europe.

  We had oatmeal and a can of beans. I recall the oatmeal, but in a vague way. My mother says we had a conversation on the third day of oatmeal. My mother: “I told you to eat the oatmeal, and you said you wouldn’t. I slapped you so hard the oatmeal flew off the high chair. You said, ‘You can hit me again but I won’t eat it.’”

  She shook her head. “You only wanted your book.”

  I had one book. I knew all the words. I wanted another book.

  All my life, my mother had told me two versions of how she taught me to read in a single weekend, when I was three. The first: My father was gone, she had to go to work, and she didn’t want me to bother the babysitter by talking (I’d been dropped on my head once by an inebriated caretaker), so she taught me to read and sit quietly in the corner. Believable. The second: She didn’t think American kindergarten accepted children unless they could already read, and she was eager for me to go to school and not pay for babysitting. Also plausible.

  But I asked her again in 2017, laying out the two stories. For the first time, she said with some bemusement: “No—you taught yourself to read. I read you the first book, maybe three times, and then you knew the whole thing and you wanted another one. We were so poor, but you just wanted a book, and I went to Stater Bros. [the local grocery] and spent my last quarter to buy one of those little books with the gold at the edges.”

  I was so surprised.

  She’d bought me a Little Golden Book. Maybe Poky Little Puppy, she thought. Then President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, a public murder so graphic and visible on television, shocking to the nation. My mother sobbed and grieved in front of the small black-and-white television, and I lay on the floor listening.

  My mother had become an American citizen in November 1960 so that she could vote for John F. Kennedy in the presidential election. Before that, for five years, she had been an immigrant with a green card. “I wasn’t in any hurry to become a citizen,” she told me the other night. “Not until I saw John F. Kennedy.”

  “You didn’t vote for—” I blanked.

  She called to my stepfather, John—“Who was before Kennedy?”

  “Eisenhower,” he replied dryly.

  She waved her hand dismissively. “No,” she said to me. “I didn’t feel any reason to vote until President Kennedy. He was different.”

  She was pregnant with me, in late 1960, when she began the citizenship class at the Riverside courthouse. “You had to renounce your other citizenship, back then,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose my Swiss citizenship, but I really wanted to vote for him. It wasn’t hard at all, back then, to become a citizen,” she said. “We learned some history.”

  She had me in October. The following month, she said, “We went to the courthouse. Dad and me. We just happened to be there at the same time.”

  That dad was not my father, Richard Straight, whose name my mother never ever said aloud. That was John Paul Watson, my future stepfather, born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. They became citizens together, taking the oath in the same room.

  She was truly an American then, when she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy in a white skirt and blouse, her hair carefully risen in a Jackie Kennedy bubble.

  But by the night of November 23, 1963, she was on her own, two weeks overdue in her pregnancy. “I had taken the week off from work, because your brother was so late,” she told me. “But he didn’t come, and I couldn’t afford to take any more time off. I had no money. I was desperate. I was watching television, and there they were, he and Jackie, and then he was shot. It hurt me to the quick. I just cried and cried, I couldn’t stop crying.”

  I remember the crying, the black-and-white images going past my face, which I held close to the thick curved screen where
the static from the constant dry wind would shock me so hard I could feel it inside my nose.

  “I couldn’t stop crying, and your brother wouldn’t come. I went to see Grandma.”

  That was her stepmother—Rosa. I said, “Where was I? I didn’t go.”

  My mother frowned. “Where were you? I took you to the neighbors. I drove to Fontana and Grandma said the best thing when your baby is late is to walk. That’s all she told me. So I walked all around Fontana. I didn’t know what to do.”

  She went into labor and the following morning she had my brother. In 2017, telling me this story, she sat in her sixth house, each one a bit bigger than the last, but all within a ten-mile radius. I ladled out the chicken and rice I brought on many Sundays. “Then the TV was on in my hospital room, and I saw that man shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. Who was that man?” she called to my stepfather.

  “Jack Ruby,” he replied.

  She said to me, “I saw the whole thing. Over and over again. That was terrible, too.”

  The next day, Rosa drove her from the hospital with my brother, and dropped her off at the dream house. “She didn’t come inside. She said, ‘You made your bed. Now you must lie in it.’ That’s what she told me. Then she drove away.” My mother was quiet for a moment.

  I knew this part. I said, “The neighbor had left our door unlocked and the wind blew it open.”

  “I took him inside and there was dirt everywhere. I was so tired. And I had to get out the vacuum.”

  That door faced east, into the brunt of Santa Ana winds screaming down off the foothills. The door was wide open and the house full of dirt from the fields. My mother, though abandoned, had spent the last weeks feverishly knitting a new layette for the baby—soft yellow jacket and booties. She had a new bassinet. These were the things she cared about most, having spent all those years knitting thick woolen socks for her Swiss father and brothers, and now knitting fine booties for her son. The bassinet and its lining, the layette she’d left displayed there, for herself, if no one else—all of it was filthy, and the wind was hot as hell.