Our entire lives are about weaving. In the Swiss Alps, my mother sat while her hair was braided into two tails that dangled at the front of her blouse, tied off with ribbon, maybe one of the last things her own mother did before she was bedridden.
I remember wincing at the bathroom counter, my mother yanking the comb through my blond hair that reached the middle of my back, my mother whose hair was short and brown by then. My hair would be contained in two braids. I wonder if anyone touched her hair with patience after her mother died.
The braid my mother loved was züpfe, a loaf of bread whose dough was divided into three ropes and plaited, painted with egg yolk, and baked to puffed glossy brown, with a soft pale yellow center. It was special, for Sundays. Züpfe was our favorite word as children, because it means “braid” and that meant bread. My mother loved to braid dough, which was not the hair of children. She loved to give you and your sisters this bread, and you loved to say the word again and again, it was part of your Swissness, but my mother did not braid your hair. Even now, she does not touch people with tenderness or maintenance or casual gesture. She cannot.
I learned to braid hair in typing class. (I learned my perfect cursive handwriting, which people still comment on when I sign books, from the graffiti artists in my remedial math class.) I was a high school freshman. Our elderly white teacher hated us. It was 1975, and we were boisterous and poor, those of us in typing class. Our male compatriots were in shop—wood and metal and auto. We were in Home Economics and Typing. The social class divisions were strict.
I loved typing in a room full of girls who painted nails and did hair and sang, as the teacher ignored us. She really hated me, because I could type so quickly I should have received As, but I steadfastly refused to use my little fingers on the outside keys, so she steadfastly awarded me Cs. If I weren’t stubborn, I would be dead by now.
My friends and I finished typing our ridiculous meaningless sentences. Then they taught me to cornrow, to French-braid, and to be in the easy company of girls who didn’t mind touching hair and laughing. My hair was useful for experimentation. I sat next to Vicky Winn, who teased that any style she attempted on me fell out immediately. But she French-braided the hair around my face, a small improvement. Then she turned her back so I could practice on her. Vicky’s hair was exactly like yours, long thick shoals of black wave and curl. Soft and smelling of Afro Sheen. You have met her—one of my oldest friends. Her only son runs a salon, and flat-ironed Delphine’s hair for prom. Vicky’s hair remains thick, black, and wavy, her son styles her, and her smile remains unguarded. We know each other as women who lost our younger brothers to drugs. When we hug each other, we know the past in our bones.
The braid is among the most beautiful patterns in life, I thought that night after you called. I grew up with girls whose grandparents were from Mexico and New Mexico, whose hair was braided and arranged around their heads for folklórico dancing, twined with thick red and green and white ribbon for the hat dance at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe; African-American girls whose braids were fastened at the ends with pastel barrettes and glass beads; Japanese-American girls whose braids were glossy and so black they gleamed blue in the light. And my braids, like Heidi’s.
The day your dad and I got married, I braided my brother’s long hair for the wedding after he put on his tuxedo, something he’d never worn and hated passionately. He and I looked exactly alike. Center part, single weave down the middle of his back. Rosa, our Swiss grandmother, used to say sarcastically about us, “Which is the girl and which is the boy?”
Hair is keratin, as I always told you when you were little. A collection of dead cells. Hair and nails. The features by which women are judged are those which are not alive.
Your hair would have been a great joy to the ancestors you never knew.
A few days later, you called me again. You were crying like I haven’t heard you cry for a long time. You had just watched, during lunch hour at the computer on your desk, the Vice channel footage of the violence at Charlottesville, Virginia. You said to me, “I can’t believe this. They hate us so strongly they march and display their hatred and they’re all around me and I’m terrified. I feel like I can never go to the South again.”
I waited until you hung up to cry. This nation had broken your heart again. It had broken my heart again. The first and only time I ever took the three of you South was to Gulfport, Mississippi, to rebuild houses one year after Hurricane Katrina. You were only eleven, technically too young to go, but you sweated and hammered and painted and met women and daughters who looked like you, growing up in rural Mississippi, where Washington Thomas’s children survived and raised big families that built this country.
Rosette Sims, Los Angeles, California, 2018 (Photograph by Vanessa Feder-Johnson)
The other cannot win. You dried your eyes, you were shaking. You were in the office, your braids fresh, taking calls from actors and agents, casting television shows with women who are black, mixed, Asian-American, Mexican-American. With men who are Haitian-American, Nigerian-born, Iraqi, and Chicano.
That you worked then for Disney was not lost on me, every day when I walked past the old armoire holding our single television, the shelf holding DVDs of your childhood: Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Snow White.
I see you in Colombia, visiting the town of Palenque, learning to drum with descendants of West Africa. You told me the enslaved women in Palenque braided the routes to freedom in their cornrows. I see you at your desk; I see you move the braids out of the way so you can write something down. I see Alberta watching you, and Daisy Carter, and Fine. You raise your eyebrows at something someone says, and your ancestors, those beautiful women, they bite their lips at the perfect arrangement of tiny hairs that fly across your brow.
38
Ancestry
Riverside and Santa Barbara, California; Ibadan, Nigeria, 2018
It was the last week of college for Delphine, and she’d been working two museum jobs and finishing finals, so she almost didn’t go to the party. But she and her friends did. She was bored, about to leave when someone tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to dance. She turned and gave him the icy murderous glare we all hated—and for which I had to take partial credit, as I used a similar look for years. But I used my arctic glare only on people who threatened me and my girls, strangers or idiot men. Delphine was beautiful, and I was not. She frequently used her Sahara staredown.
“I don’t dance to YG,” she said, enunciating with evil clarity. (YG is an especially—well, nonromantic rapper. We may leave it at that.)
He was brave, this stranger from a different university. He asked for her number, and inexplicably, she gave it to him. He had a melodious Nigerian accent, played soccer for Caltech, was a mechanical engineering major also graduating that year. The kind of man she’d never dated before.
For their first anniversary, she framed a YG CD and hung it on the wall of his apartment.
“Ayooluwakunmi Oluwafemi Jeje,” Delphine said to her father in August 2016, as we walked around the park at the end of my block.
“I gotta say all that?” Dwayne said, hitting the ground with the walking stick I keep for him, for these excursions when one or more of the girls comes home to visit, and they walk every day. (We have a sturdy former broom handle and a sawed-off pool cue.) Delphine and I rolled our eyes. He pounded that broom handle polished smooth by his hand with each step.
“Kunmi,” she said. “You can call him Kunmi.”
“And his name means something?” Dwayne said.
“His first name means ‘I’m Full of God’s Joy.’ His middle name means ‘God Loves Me.’” She hadn’t told him yet that Kunmi’s family had given her a name, too. Oluwamayokun, which means “God Has Topped Off Our Joy.”
I can’t think of a kinder name for future in-laws to bestow upon someone.
The Jeje family lives in Ibadan, Nigeria. Kunmi came to California in 2009, to attend Ca
ltech; then he worked for Oracle. After two years, he went to Stanford, for his master’s degree in computer science. Delphine was working at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
This walk, and many more, were how we were letting Dwayne do all his thinking, because for all these years, he and the uncles had been suspicious, downright hostile, and purposefully terrifying to prospective suitors for the girls.
(Still told in our house: Delphine was headed to prom with a quarterback, and Dwayne sat in one of my chairs and said, “You have her back by midnight, young man, or I’ll hunt you down like a dog in heat.” We told him that was inaccurate, that the female dog was the one in heat, but he remained unmoved, and then mentioned his gun collection. That led Rosette and me to discuss with Dwayne how Ted Nugent uses the phrase wrongly, as well, while Delphine left with the quarterback.)
Delphine told her father that Kunmi was Yoruba, Christian, and about his family’s house in Ibadan, Nigeria’s largest city by surface area, third-largest by population, with more than three million people. His father’s ancestral village is Erinjiyan Ekiti. Kunmi has more grandparents, aunts, and uncles than a Sims. That’s impressive.
Dwayne listened. We walked. Delphine and her sisters had talked about taking DNA tests. I’d been working on this book, and we talked about what I found on Ancestry.com. Sims and Hardiman and Triboulet and Straight. Very little on Daisy Carter’s ancestors. Nothing beyond the two names Fine had listed when she applied for a social security card when she was sixty-five, in Tulsa. Father—Henry Ealy. No birthplace listed. Mother—Catheran. Born in Murfence Bur, Tennessee.
“So you really like this young man?” Dwayne said, rolling his eyes. Then he said, “I wonder what they’d think about that. Nigeria. The ones that came over.”
The ancestors.
We talked about everyone that day, walking near the Santa Ana River where he and I had once heard the pig, across the water from where we’d fed Floyd’s pigs, walking below Mount Rubidoux where we’d walked for thirty years, where we made Rosette hike up the steep trail when she was seven to prepare her for Switzerland. We were within sight of the former landfill, now closed, where Dwayne was the human tarpaulin holding down the heap of palm fronds and eucalyptus branches in his dad’s truck.
We talked about the DNA test. What if Delphine was part Yoruba? Part West African? Where was Catherine’s mother from? Catherine, Fine’s mother, died in 1879, so she might have been born around 1835 or 1840, which meant Catherine’s mother might have come from the African continent. What about Catheran’s Cherokee lover? Would DNA show Delphine as part Swiss, or just European? Were the Sims and Hardiman and Rawlings white men—overseers and slaveowners—really Irish, as family stories said? Who was the unknown father of Alberta?
But a year passed, and it was December 2017. We lost Loretta Preston, the youngest daughter of Callie. Delphine had modeled herself after her great-aunt Loretta. (She had written that Loretta was the imperious opposite of the stereotype assigned in early American history to women who looked like her and Aunt Loretta: the “tragic mulatto,” the light skin, the light bright, the high yellow, the woman whose looks canceled out every other feature of her life.)
Loretta, who had worried I could not cook.
Since Dwayne and I lived in Massachusetts that first year of our marriage, and survived on pinto beans and rice, I had not been immediately tested. But it wasn’t long after we moved back home that I knew I had to come up with a side dish. All the women had one. Sister made peach cobbler like no one else. Loretta did collard greens. No one really did rice. I don’t remember which gathering was the one where I tried, in desperation, a variation of Hoppin’ John, a traditional good-luck dish, and dirty rice, with the only ingredients I had at home for a New Year’s Day gathering.
I browned hot red-pepper sausage with garlic, then added Mahatma saffron-yellow rice, black-eyed peas, and plenty of seasoning and black pepper. I have made it now for thirty-five years. It is called Your Rice. As in the cousins asking, “You fixin’ to bring Your Rice? You don’t bring it, Joe Killer and Eddie will be mad.”
It was one of the most joyful accidents of my life. For our family events, I make my rice about ten times a year, enough to serve fifty people. Teri Andrews makes fried chicken and peach cobbler with her mother’s expertise, and lime-green Jell-O cake; Margaret Chandler makes potato salad; Shirley makes macaroni and cheese; Carolanne, Myrtle’s daughter, makes tamale pie and her own salsa; Christine Sims Stuckey makes corn salad, and her daughter E’chea makes barbecued beans. Our side dishes do not vary. They belong to us.
These were the dishes we made for the repast of Loretta Preston. She was seventy-eight years old. The memorial was at Tillman’s, the historic black funeral home on Park Avenue and Tenth Street, still within our six-block radius. We lingered in front of a tiny wood-frame house across the street, with a railing porch and peaked roof. Callie Sims lived here when she came to Riverside; the women gathered that day had all lived there with Callie—Teri and Karen, Loretta and her only daughter, Nygia.
The elegy on Loretta’s funeral program: “Elegant and Chic with a side of Sass. Well put together but will kick your ass.” Delphine had written a piece for the memorial; shaking slightly, she read it aloud: “You always knew you were fine. I’ve waited a long time for my cheekbones to end up like yours but alas the greatest cheeks I’ve ever known have now left us . . . You threw shade before I even knew what it was. You always commanded your space and held it with such ferocity.”
The repast—traditional meal served after a funeral service—was a block away, at Twelfth and Park. Orange Valley Lodge #13 was built by David Stokes with the help of his uncle, Robert Stokes, Riverside’s first free black resident. Robert Stokes, a tall, powerful man, came to California from Georgia in 1870, bought land and raised pigs where the historic downtown Fox Theater stands. He was the first black policeman in Riverside County. The building was constructed in 1910; our relatives and friends hold parties, dances, and funeral repasts there still today.
I have a photograph of Orange Valley Lodge #13 from 1912; the palm tree in the sidewalk is about two feet tall. Delphine took a photograph of us, the women, after we served the food for Loretta; the palm trees are probably seventy feet tall.
We are true California. True America.
General III carried in my rice. For the first time, I had made it with something new. In my kitchen now is a plastic water bottle filled with a spice mix for meat—hot but with a different tingling from what we are accustomed to. A handwritten label: Suya Pepper. Kunmi’s mother, Olubukola Jeje, had carried the bottle from Ibadan when she came for his Stanford graduation. We spent three days together. She handed it to me with care. It is my newest treasured inheritance.
“You put something different in the rice,” the Sims cousins said, at the repast. “Damn, it tastes good.”
My eyes burned with tears. Loretta had been so worried that I couldn’t cook. She would have loved to meet Bukola Jeje. This was the best I could do.
Delphine and Kunmi were married in April 2018, at the courthouse in Santa Barbara, California. My daughters would hate it if this book ended with a wedding, having made vicious commentary for years about American movies center on marriage and fantasy, as well as the idea that we as women are complete only when married. This wedding was small, and very Sims transcendentalist. It was impossible for Kunmi’s family to come from Nigeria; he had his best friends, two couples who are Nigerian, Cameroonian, Iranian-Nigerian, and Vietnamese-American. Delphine had Dwayne, Gaila and her partner Andre, Rosette, and me. The morning before the ceremony, Delphine and I cut hundreds of flowers from my Riverside garden—Queen Anne’s lace, Spanish and French and English lavender, and tiny pink Cécile Brünner roses from a bush maybe eighty years old, the blossoms smelling of lemon pepper. We carried the blooms in an orange plastic bucket from Home Depot. I made candleholders from glass yogurt jars that I handpainted with her favorite wisteria vines, tiny brushstrokes of lavender, f
ine tendrils of green. I learned to paint this way in Switzerland. I wrote in calligraphy with a silver pen the names of my daughter and her husband on the glass.
Lisa Sims Bennett, Teri Andrews, Karen Lark, Lynette Richardson, Nygia Preston, Susan Straight, Christine Sims Stuckey, at repast for Loretta Preston, Orange Valley Lodge #13, Riverside, California, 2017
On her hip, Delphine has a tattoo that she got knowing full well I couldn’t object. In beautiful cursive script, it reads Sang Mêle. Mixed blood. I have been writing about people of mixed race for her whole life. For her wedding, Delphine wore her hair natural, as she has for years. Her millions of black slinkys, as she put it when she was small, are now threaded with some silver—the DNA of her father. Her freckles—the DNA of her grandfather General II. Her “bagavond” constancy of travel—the DNA of her grandfather John Watson.
From me? Maybe the love of cicadas and flowers and all the blue.
Down her spine, she has a long single stalk of delphinium tattooed in lavender blossoms, which rose from the deep V-back of the wedding dress. Kunmi wore a midnight-blue suit brought by his sister earlier from Ibadan. They stood before the court clerk, who read the vows. Then I stood beside the clerk and Dwayne, and read the two Bible verses sent to me by Kunmi’s parents, to bless the union.
The ceremony was live-streamed to Nigeria by the two groomsmen. The Jeje family was assembled to watch the wedding. We faced the camera to celebrate with them.
In the Country of Women Page 27