I was stunned. Dwayne and I had papered the hallway in pink rose-garland stripes, popular in 1990. Now I was stripping off the cheesy vinyl-based pattern to get ready for the new part of the house, not a master suite but a daughter suite, the bathroom with two sinks. My threadbare flannel pajamas were pink striped with sad roses washed to blur.
“Just saying, Mommy,” Rosette said, hopping down off the bathroom counter. “It looks pretty funny.”
Mike thoughtfully built a narrow laundry room that became my refuge—cool black and white tile, the place where I made phone calls because no one wanted to come in there while I folded socks. My brother, Jeff, and his friends painted the bedrooms (one for Gaila, one shared by Delphine and Rosette) in three shades of lavender and three shades of yellow. My brother told them he made the ceilings lighter so it would look like the sky when they lay in their beds at night.
22
Love Strands
Riverside, California, 2000
To my daughters:
I knew my responsibilities. I was serious about your hair from day one.
All three of you remember Friday nights. When the other mothers from school or sports mentioned their evening plans—dinner, movies, concerts—I had an unwavering commitment that sounded like an excuse for refusal to date. Mine was not “I have to wash my hair.” It was “I have to do my girls’ hair.”
The cracked pleather loveseat, the three of you, damp heads springing with waist-length freshly conditioned spiral curls, or in summer, the front porch with wooden chairs.
In winter, we watched Disney movies. The mothers were all dead. The fathers all raised daughters. We discussed the dead mothers of Belle, Aurora, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. We talked about Grimm’s fairy tales and other folklore of Europe translated to Disney, and my own mother’s haunted forests in Switzerland, her mother dead, Heidi’s mother dead, Snow White’s evil stepmother and the woodsman who was meant to bring back a girl’s bloody heart.
I sprayed homemade detangler and combed through every section of hair, separating them with clips. Then I parted carefully and braided each head for the weekend, because we always had basketball and family events, when everyone would watch you three. “Here they come! The girls! Look at them! The Sims girls.”
In our family, and in black communities at large like ours, the care and maintenance of your hair meant more than just barrettes and ponytails; your hair reflected our pride and care and love. Neglected heads displayed for the public a serious lack of all three. We could pick out a child whose mother knew nothing about her hair, or didn’t care to learn, within a few seconds. Especially for mixed-race girls. It was everything.
Given my childhood, I was grateful for conditioner, an item my mother didn’t know existed. But it was expensive, and we used so much that I made my own mixture and shook it in a bottle: Frizz Ease and leave-in spray, almond oil and chamomile tea, and a base of Suave cherry-scented conditioner. That I could afford.
The years passed so quickly. We watched Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Family Matters. We moved on to Jane Austen films, She’s All That, Gilmore Girls, and Girlfriends. We saw every evocation of sisterhood available on noncable television. (We had no cable because the massive avocado tree next door blocked the power pole, and the drug dealers who lived there didn’t trim the branches. That lasted for ten years.)
Gaila, you were always first, as you were the oldest and your hair was the longest, dark brown waves that hung all the way to the base of your spine, lightened to copper at the ends in summer. Delphine, your hair true black, a dense cloud of ponytail that with moisturizing turned into, as you put it, a million slinkys. You wanted it tamed for basketball, combed flat and shiny at your forehead and braided tightly. Rosette, you were three, in the bathtub with your sisters, impatient to have hair as long as theirs, and I looked up and you were seven, and suddenly your hair was down your back, a shoal of dense curls that acquired shots of gold and bronze from the sun.
After long days of swim lessons and sports, I had to carefully tease out tangles of hair in the kitchen.
Most white women didn’t know about this kitchen, the dense hair prone to snarls at the nape of the neck. Most white women I knew expressed shock that I spent that many hours on your hair. My friend Holly used to laugh, “I don’t even think I technically washed my kids’ hair until they were four.” Her children had wispy blond feathers that she just rubbed with a damp washcloth. “Mine won’t let me touch her head,” someone said on the playground, and I studied her daughter’s straight red hair tousled into nests that actually looked as if birds could live there. “I just run my fingers through and stick a barrette on there,” another told me, her daughter’s thin brown strands pasted flat with water. “What a waste of time for you.”
It was never a waste of time. It was the truest part of my existence as a mother. I believed women who didn’t get to do this missed out on hours of touching and talking and closeness. Lots of women had much better hairstyles than mine, meaning they had actual hairstyles, because once I was done with three beauty queens of curl, all I ever did with my own hair was stick my wet head out the window of the Mercury Villager van on the way to work—seven miles of blow-drying. Sometimes my hair dried while I walked Rosette to preschool. I’d use the curling iron for five minutes, and my hair looked, inexplicably, exactly as it had when I was a high school junior.
Motherhood was my excuse, because I believed it dangerous to care too much about my own hair and clothes. We had seen the stepfathers of some other daughters. We’d seen destruction and dissembling of family, we’d seen shouting and violence and another divorce. Your father and I were friends again after the first terrible year. My inattention to style was practical, but also purposeful and avoidant. I wanted no man to disrupt our Little Women, our Sense and Sensibility, our Gilmore Girls, though you three girls had much more impressive hair than anyone in those stories.
On schoolday mornings while we styled—buns, ponytails, braids—we went over spelling words, talked strategies for playground bullies, and chose something for preschool share day. Those were hours I would never trade with other mothers.
There had been serious code in Alberta’s living room about my first coming child, in the place where I’d spent years watching women braid hair and apply Jheri curl lotion and make lemon cake and talk forever. They used to tease me about the perm I’d gotten in the 1980s. Margaret Chandler said, “One thing I hate in this world is a white woman who won’t learn to do her kids’ hair. With the combination of Dwayne’s and yours, girl, they’re gonna have a lot. Don’t let it get all nappy, and don’t let it get all dry, and don’t ever think it doesn’t matter. ’Cause it does.”
Twenty-two years ago, when I was pregnant with Rosette, I won an award for a novel and went to a ceremony in Washington, D.C., wearing a batik dress with an empire waist. (I can’t believe you wear that dress now, Rosette.) I met a woman there whose mother was German and father was black. Her mother had refused to style her hair at all, and a black female relative finally rescued the girl and took her to a salon. This woman, at fifty, told me about the hours required to remove the knots and tangles, the anger of the black relatives and the stylist. Her voice was still raw with hurt and rejection.
I never regretted our Friday nights. Your friends had their own bedrooms; you three had one small room. Your friends had their own televisions; we had the one twenty-five-inch set in the living room. They had separate lives and we did everything together.
We talked about Steve Urkel, watched figure skating, My Fair Lady, and all the bride movies. We talked about marriage and divorce and rich and poor and black and white and all the things in between all those things. We talked a lot about navigating the middle of everything, while I was parting down the middle and then dividing the strands and securing the ends with glittery elastic.
The whole of America did your hair. By high school, my friend Nicole came to straighten Delphine’s curls, heating the metal comb on the
stove burner while we talked in code and laughed. (She’s from the Bronx, so sarcastically hilarious that I laughed until I cried; you three were as fascinated as when Sula makes Nel laugh until she has to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t have survived without that laughter.)
But the day I remember best was outside, in summer. Gaila, you were eleven, Delphine was nine, and Rosette, you were five. You all had swim classes at the city college pool. Summer always kicked my ass. None of you wanted to wear the ugly swim caps which, stuffed with the loose masses of your hair, you felt resembled alien heads from a sci-fi movie. (You caustically described white girls who did not wear swim caps, but tossed their hair in the water and then tossed the water around the pool.) I braided each head, tucked two thick braids secured with bobby pins inside the caps, and prayed.
That afternoon Gaila came home from a weekend birthday party where she would have been the only one with a cap. She swam for hours, let her hair dry, and swam again. For two days. By the time she got back home, she was crying. Her waist-length hair was barely touching her shoulders. She had dreaded up big-time.
I wanted to cry, too, examining the mass of fused hair. But I tried to joke around. “Okay,” I said, “so I like dreadlocks, and if you ever decide to dread up, that’s cool. But most people have multiple dreads, sweetie. We’ve just got one here. A ten-inch-wide, horizontal one.”
Delphine, you actually ran across the street for help. Emergency. Juli, your fairy godmother for seven years when she lived in the house with the river-rock porch pillars, ran back with you. You idolized Juli, five feet ten, her wild red-brown curls to her waist, an environmental geologist trained in the military, a woman who loved to sew for you and comb your hair but who also said frequently to guys whose behavior was unacceptable, “In the army I learned how to kill a man with my bare hands. Do you want me to demonstrate?”
She spent many evenings with us. She had also been, in high school, the only white girl on her native Texas track team. In the bus and on the sidelines, she learned to comb and braid extremely well. She loved you all, and my porch, with passion.
It took us two hours to work almond oil/chamomile tea/creamy conditioner mix into Gaila’s freshly washed, damp hair, then separate the curls with a rattail comb. Gaila teared up at the process and the pulling of the tender skin at her kitchen. Delphine held her hand, and Rosette sang her songs. The whole time, even after Juli’s wrists got tired and she fetched iced tea and I combed, we talked and you three listened. Juli and I discussed the ethics of her workmate Tiffany, who had dumped another guy but kept his multicarat engagement ring. Then Juli, who had just finished reading a history of Henry VIII and his six wives, told you girls tales of the nuptials, their true political and social and romantic intentions, and some murderous ends. We had time to cover it all, instructive female history, contemporary and medieval. You were spellbound. I pulled yet another section of hair loose and combed it through, and Juli began to braid Gaila’s hair from the other side, adding gold fasteners she’d bought especially for an occasion like this. Delphine said thoughtfully, “So if you were a woman back then, you were sick, pregnant, dead, or in a tower. Right?”
Susan, Delphine, Rosette, and Gaila, in Washington, D.C., 1999 (Photograph courtesy of Tod Masinter, Westways)
“I’m sure glad I’m alive now,” Gaila said, wincing.
Rosette said, “But I love princesses!”
I can see it now. Juli took another drink of iced tea. Rosette’s hand was on my leg, Gaila’s shoulders companionable against my knees, and Delphine’s breath on my neck. My fingers wove and wove, and I knew what was braided into each minute we spent there.
23
Crosses and Missions
California, 1998, 2000, 2004
Three dusty California missions sat near my desk for years. One has corrugated cardboard for a roof, one has sturdy plywood painted red, and one had magenta-tinted lasagna tiles until the rats in the garage got to them. That mission is gone now.
For three springs, we roamed the state, learning about life and darkness and hidden history. It was not expected. It changed me as much as it changed my daughters.
Every fourth-grade child in a California public elementary school must construct a mission. I’m talking about our famous California missions, strung as if on a flung rosary chain throughout much of the state. During that spring, students take field trips to missions, study the California history they were given, and then replicate a mission of their choice. The week that they stagger through the playground carrying their buildings used to be one of my favorites.
I made a mission with my dad, John Watson, in 1969. In our garage, he mixed plaster of Paris with me for the whitewashed adobe walls, and then helped me fashion a vineyard with twigs. I went to the foothills to find lichen and moss to place on the plywood base, sprinkling with water from the 7 Up bottle we used for ironing. But it was the field trip to San Gabriel Arcángel that began my desire to drive the state every year, to touch history and feel its grandeur and poverty and injustices.
As a single mother, I turned the mission project into something that lasted for months. Each child picked three missions to visit, so she could decide on the one with the architecture and landscaping she wanted to build, and the history she wanted to report. Getting out the map of California was the first thrill. Gaila chose San Juan Bautista, San Borromeo Carmel, and La Purisima.
During spring break of 1998, we loaded up the van and headed north on 101. The April rain-fed grasses were lush, the oaks looked like dark green parachutes landing on the distant hills. (Our constant soundtrack was the Spice Girls, if you need a timeline.)
San Juan Bautista was a lovely small town, and the mission was beautifully preserved. The square form appealed to Gaila. She took notes, drew sketches, and we admired the garden. Then we wandered to the rear of the property and saw the faint remains of the original Camino Real.
The four of us found a dirt path and we walked on that trail. We imagined how hard the journeys must have been, even with the beauty of wild mustard in clouds of yellow all around us. Entering the mission grounds again, we saw the cemetery. The headstones carried only the names of the Spanish. No indigenous people were there.
We spent the night near Hollister. The girls were quiet. And the next day, we walked a dirt road in an agricultural area, where women picked blackberries in a field, the vines stretching forever down wire supports; at the field’s edge, in the shade of huge cottonwoods, were small children and a few babies on blankets. They were alone.
Gaila had seen this before, when she was very small, camping with her father and me. She had said then, “Those kids are brown. Like me.”
Now she bit her lips. The girls had seen people in fields of strawberries, lettuce, and peppers, all along the highway north. They had many classmates born in Mexico, or whose parents had come from Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador. We talked about how Americans ignored where their food came from, and who harvested it, about the Spanish words all around us and the ironies of anti-immigration politics.
Two days later, outside Lompoc, north of Santa Barbara, we saw La Purisima. That mission was more isolated, standing not in a pretty town like Carmel or San Juan Capistrano, or in a city like San Diego or San Francisco. The buildings were isolated on a windswept plain. The walls were rosy buff, and the chapel stark, with a wooden altar and cross. In the soldiers’ quarters were small rope beds. We halted at the infirmary, where many native people had died of smallpox in that dark cube of a room. There were iron bars on the windows, and a guide told us offhandedly that on many nights, indigenous girls had to sleep in the infirmary to keep them safe from harm. From soldiers, we knew. We shivered.
Walking just outside the mission boundaries, Delphine saw small crosses in a barren field. Simple wooden crosses. No names. Indigenous people had been buried there—not inside the cemetery. All their work and death, all in the name of religion, and their bodies not honored on the land taken away from them.
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sp; Delphine’s face changed. She said, “This is where I would be buried.”
She knew the history of Fine, of her grandfather and his family. Cherokee, African, Irish, English. She was right.
The romance of bougainvillea shading plaster walls, gilt decorations in ornate chapels, the red tile roofs and celebrated mission culture, faded as we stood there. We got back into the van changed. We talked about our family heritage as immigrants, enslaved people, military veterans and female survivors. From then on, we saw our landscapes—the walls of tumbleweeds lining chain-link fences in winter near Glen Avon, where people had been Dust Bowl migrants; Floyd’s pigs and why he loved them; the street near our house called Wong Way after the original neighborhood of Chinese men who owned laundries and shops—shaded with a patina of history.
Our California past was being erased quickly and thoroughly by housing development and freeways and shopping malls. But I was lucky enough to have three kids who loved to drive and stop to look around with me, to find beach glass and iridescent fig beetles and even a fossil now and then.
Gaila constructed her San Juan Bautista with the help of my dad, John Watson, and my neighbor Juli’s husband, Jason. They sawed a plywood roof, Gaila mixed plaster of Paris, and then she painstakingly collected gravel from my garden paths to glue together stone walls. Two years later, Juli helped us make Delphine’s San Juan Capistrano (with accessories found at a wedding shop—tiny white doves perched on the lasagna roof tiles to represent the famed swallows). But we talked all the time about the thousands of people who had died in these places.
In the Country of Women Page 17