by Fauna Hodel
“I didn’t look like a victim, I didn’t look like ‘Oh poor me! Why is this happening to me?’ That’s not where I was coming from. I was a lady, I spoke well. I was calm on the witness stand. I was special—special lucky me was going to be with him.
“The publicity was very bad for him; he would have probably liked to have me just disappear. And let me assure you that that’s what my father wanted to do to me, not because he hated me, but because he wanted the evidence suppressed. He was in such a terrible position. That’s why he wanted me to stay as ‘bad Tamar, the awful person, pathological liar.’
“Until this day, my mother, and aunts, and everyone think I made up this terrible lie and ruined everybody’s lives. So, they have another perspective and only see it from one side, and not see what really did happen.
“I was held in this holding cell and there was nobody to talk to. I didn’t get to go to school with the other kids. What I learned was that when I was allowed out with the other girls, I was told never to talk. There were, however, these real pretty black girls, real pretty. And when I talked with them, they didn’t think they were pretty. I had no idea what it was like to be poor, or black, or come from underprivileged homes. When I told them they were beautiful, they thought I was weird. I’d draw them.
“Why . . . why this fascination with pretty black girls?”
“Well, my hero, the head of my tribe, was Josh White. And he was black, of course!”
“Of course,” Fauna said. She still didn’t understand everything. With each sentence Tamar spoke, more questions kept popping into her head, but she didn’t know where to start, so she let it continue without interruption.
“When the court trial was over, the policeman and the policewoman who were investigators, and who pretended to be prospective adoptive parents, drove me to San Francisco. That was the end of it. They spent months questioning me and telling me that I had never known real love, and they were going to show me real love.
“I was transferred to San Francisco and saw my mother for the first time in many months. Outside of the newspaper reports, which I read daily, where she called me a ‘pathological liar,’ and something to the effect that I always made up stories, she didn’t know anything.
“Well, the story she was referring to was the cover story my father gave me when I first told her what was going on, to which he said, ‘Oh Dorothy, she’s saying the same thing about you.’ That’s what she was referring to, but she didn’t know that. So I guess during the trial she was afraid I was going to say that too!
“I was shocked at what my mother said. Nobody ever asked my mother, ‘Is this true?’—ever!
“When I found my mother, she treated me as if I did something very wrong, and she went out of her way to go to the Juvenile Hall to inform me that she had given away my savings bond and all the little things that I had. I didn’t understand why, but somehow I knew I had really done a terrible thing.
“Now they told me that since I didn’t commit a crime, they could transfer me to a half-way house for girls. Finally, my mother had to take me back. She didn’t want to, but she had to.”
“What about your father, where was he during all of this? He must have hated you!”
“No, I don’t think he hated me. It was only in the later years that I found him to be really cold, even though there was this strange scene that happened.
“When I was still being held in San Francisco, at the home for bad girls, my mother took me out one day and drove me to the hills near Sausalito. My father and I met, him in one car and me in another; but always in the presence of others. We didn’t say much. I was just thrilled to see my father. I loved him intensely. I didn’t understand why he didn’t rescue me because he could have told me to shut up, retract your statements. I would have done so. I wasn’t out to get him. I didn’t know how to lie. I didn’t know any better. It could have changed.
“So, when I arrived at home, I went to see my friend David. We used to make ravioli with his mother, before the trial, that is. I walked across the street to where he lived as he was fixing his car. I said ‘Hi’, and just as he was getting up to say hi, too, while I was crossing the street, his mother came running down the stairs saying, ‘You get away from my son, you whore! You whore!’ He got up and went away. That’s what shocked me—she was shocking enough, but him!
“So, later on, when I was going to the local delicatessen, I ran into Dave and he said, ‘I’m sorry about how I acted, but my mother read everything in the papers and magazines.’ He explained that he had to act like that. It was such a big scandal. His mother was having a fit. But then he said that someone wanted to meet me, his friend. And we’d meet at his apartment later that evening. But Dave never showed up, just his friend.
“I wasn’t used to drinking and he gave me some kind of sweet liqueur. He reminded me of a hood in an Italian gangster movie. He was older, about twenty-four. I began to drink this sweet liqueur. It was ghastly, but I drank it down like soda pop. I got drunk and I got raped. I didn’t get beaten-up raped. I was just too drunk to protest. And when I left I was so mad. I went home, and within a few weeks I knew I was pregnant. I never wanted to talk to this man again, so I didn’t go back to him for help or anything.
“You mean you got pregnant again?!” Fauna said as she sat back in her chair her eyes widened.
“Yes, and he’s your father, but don’t ask me who he is. I’ve forgotten his name, blocked it right out after the incident.”
Fauna was dumbfounded. She never thought much about who her real father was; just that he was black. Now she was learning how it all happened—how she happened—and somehow it still didn’t seem important.
Tamar continued, “I went to my mother and I said I was pregnant. She said, ‘Oh, no, I’m not going to help you. Look what you did to your father.’ So I’ve got this script going on in my head about this thing I did to my father. So she wouldn’t help me—and I had to take care of this on my own.
“I had been reaching for my roots. I identified with blacks by this time. So I went out in the black neighborhood looking for family. I hadn’t found too much family yet, but I did run across a man whose name was Happy Feet. He was an entertainer, singer, and hustler. He said that he knew someone who could help me out. But I had to have $60 for this lady to give me a ‘slippery elm’ treatment—whatever that was. But $60 was hard to come by, so I spent the next month going through all kinds of schemes to get this money, but it never happened. So finally, I was gone from my home for a few days trying to arrange this and my mother reported me as a runaway to my probation officer. Now, I heard that the police were searching for me, again.
“This really nice man who was a bartender at the Fillmore Hotel, Charles White, noticed that I was too young to be in there, and said that I looked like I was in trouble. We talked a little, and I told him the problem. He suggested that I go to his apartment and wait. He’d talk with me after work. He was very nice. We did talk and I told him everything. Then he said the police had come in looking for me at the Fillmore Hotel.
“Anyway he said I’d have to ask permission from the court to get married so that I would be legally on my own and have my baby, which is what I wanted to do. Because when you’re pregnant, that’s what you usually want to do. I was having phone conversations with my probation officer all this time, and she said that the court would have a heart attack at the idea of my asking a black man to be married, but they wrote him down as the father. That’s all they got out of the whole thing.
“Charles got me out of the hotel. It was a miracle, because they were in and out of the place, searching. It was pouring rain, and I had no umbrella, so he called a cab for me. Just as I was going out the front, the police were again at the desk asking questions, and I just walked past them.
“Some very nice people helped me go from place to place. I called my friend, Faith Petric Craig, who was very left wing. She was a matron at Juvenile Hall and we sang folk music together. She turned me on
to someone else, who turned me on to someone else and off I went again. And finally, I was at someone’s house and I was talking to the head of the Communist Party. Then I realized how many people I was getting in trouble. I decided to call my Probation Officer and turn myself in.
“So again, they transferred me to the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers. Immediately, my best friend there was a black girl, who was pregnant. You have to understand that I identified with black, that’s just the way it is. It caused uproar at that place.
“Major Cox, who was in charge of the place, called me in and said that she could hardly believe what she saw. I couldn’t wait to see what she was talking about. On their days off, they used to go out into the world, wearing their scarlet letters, and what she saw was me walking and talking with this black girl.
“The next thing I knew, I was shipped off to St. Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers, where the nuns were very kind, but everyone seemed to be treating pregnancy as if it were a disease. And I was told that I couldn’t keep the baby, and my mother wasn’t going to go through that, which meant that she wouldn’t be responsible. But they told me that they found a wonderful wealthy couple to raise the baby. I remember being told that I would never be able to see my baby, but that my baby would be raised in a wonderful way with all the things that I couldn’t have.”
“Tamar, you mean you never met Jimmie when you were at St. Elizabeth’s?” Fauna asked.
“Oh no, my duty in the nursery, we all had jobs there, was to take care of this little baby named Patricia.”
“Patricia!” Fauna snapped straight in her chair staring at Tamar in disbelief.
“Patricia, yes Patricia. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing at all.” This was all getting too strange, too confusing. There were so many coincidences that she felt their lives were being manipulated by some higher cosmic order, but for reasons that were still very unclear.
“Well, Patricia’s mother didn’t want her. She was old enough to keep her, she just didn’t want to, which I didn’t understand. Patricia was my favorite. I think I transferred all my feelings I had for you into this little baby because I knew I had already accepted the fact that I couldn’t have my baby.
“When you were born, it was a real hard birth. It was treated like it was a disease. The labor was long and they didn’t tell me they were going to cut me and that I would have stitches. I didn’t know at that time that it was a totally unnecessary surgery. After I could get up, hobbling around pouring water on my stitches every couple of hours from a cold silvery pitcher, they let me see you through a door that had a large window, and the expression on your face was ‘What is going on?’ And I didn’t know what was going on; I didn’t know how to explain it to you. I never got to relay to you my feelings other than that one time, because they figured that I would get too attached. I probably had rights I didn’t know about.
“I named you Fauna because I loved Robinson Jeffers’ poem about Flora and Fauna. I asked that they keep that name. I wanted only two things, I didn’t think they’d let me have what I wanted, but one was that you be named Fauna, and the other was that you at least have on your birth certificate that your father was Negro. Because in my little world I believed that black people were made of far superior stuff than the whites I knew. All the great men that I knew, all the great girls that I knew were black: Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Josh White, and then there were those mystical Russian dancers in the Ballet Russe. But I was very unimpressed with my mother and my grandmother and my father and the entire white court system, and I was embarrassed to be white.
“The blacks had conscience. They spoke up about right and wrong; not in the moralistic bullshit way that white people did, who lied about right and wrong. They talked nobly and eloquently about kindness, love, and fair treatment. And they went through such terrible times. They suffered so much. The more I read and saw, and the more black people I met, the more impressed I was.
“If you knew Josh White, you would know why I loved him so much, even before I met him in the physical. When I did meet him, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem when I was about seventeen, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen.
“Black people treated me so nice. That’s why the greatest and only gift I could give was that I could at least give you the benefit of growing up in a black society and not a white society. And they treated me kindly like a beautiful person, not like an unwanted leper in my own society. I thought that in time, by setting an example and marrying a black man and having a mixed baby, and if enough of them did this, then there would be no separation of the races. My whole background was fairy-tales, noble people, and great people. And in those noble stories, that’s how things were done—change the world by the way you live.”
“Just after I was there, at St. Elizabeth’s, I had a visitor, a beautiful lady, Lady Nada. I didn’t know really who she was; I had no idea that she was an Ascended Lady Master, part of the Great Brotherhood of Life until many, many years later. She looked like the Mother of God, and told me that everything was beautiful and everything was going to be all right. The way she said it, it seemed okay. So I stopped being so upset. Later, after you were born, when I was depressed about losing you, my mother took me to Mexico City to forget. But I couldn’t forget, because there were all these maids there with these little babies on their hips, wrapped up in their serapes. You can’t just have a baby, have it taken away, and forget. But I wasn’t worried about you. I knew from the combination of my mother saying that everything was taken care of, and what Lady Nada said, that you would be okay.
“I always sent love to you. I just sent this ray of light, like when I hold a picture of something, and I say I never give up. It was like an umbilical cord; I just never let go. I also believed that I would never see you in the physical sense because my mother said so. I just thought you were off in some mystical world, being raised by a good family.
“When I found out about where you were years later, sitting in Hawaii with my second daughter, her name is Deborah Elizabeth Wilson, who is half-black, and had the privilege of really being black, and is the daughter of Stan Wilson, I was shocked.
“When Deborah was about sixteen, she wanted to have a better name than Debbie, as everyone called her. She said that she would like to use the name Fauna. She knew how I felt about losing my baby, and she wanted to use that name. And I thought, well, that’s all right, sure. I was trying to get used to calling her Fauna. It was really hard after calling her Deborah all of her life.
“And then, about two weeks later, sitting in my house, after I had just given birth to my youngest son, Love, Debbie, now Fauna, said to me, ‘Fauna, your daughter, is on the phone.’ I mean, the world dropped away from me. Get away! How could I relate to any of this? I never thought of this possibility.
“Now just prior to this, I had told George that Debbie was no longer Debbie. After trying to explain that to him, he said to me, ‘How would you like to talk with the real Fauna?’ I was stunned. He said that he had your address, and that he had been in touch with you. He never said that you had searched for him, or anything. He said that he would send it to me. I just thought that he had done research. I never heard from him again. George says things and sometimes never does them. He didn’t follow up with it, so I just dismissed it from my mind.”
“I know very well,” said Fauna, “about George saying things and not meaning it.”
“What do you mean?” Tamar asked.
Fauna told her about the time when Aunt Lucille died and George was supposed to meet her in Los Angeles. Tamar wasn’t surprised. But then she did surprise Fauna.
“Would you like to speak to him?”
Before Fauna could say anything, Tamar was on the phone calling Manila or Tokyo or someplace. “Hello. It’s Tamar. I have the real Fauna—here, with me—here in Hawaii. Would you like to speak with her?”
Fauna’s heart was racing. Tamar handed the phone over to her daughter without a word
, as if she were trying to get her to confirm everything she had said about George.
“Hello, Fauna?” he paused, then said, “Well, what do you think of Tamar?”
Fauna couldn’t think fast enough; things were happening too quickly for her to understand any of this—all that had happened to Tamar, all that had happened to her as a result of their relationship. She was frightened, confused. And now he wanted to know what she thought of her real mother, the woman she had dreamed of ever since she could remember.
Fauna answered him with something stupid, like “she’s very interesting.” They didn’t say much to each other. He must have sensed that Fauna was very uncomfortable. She was glad when he said good-bye.
After that phone conversation, Fauna was now at a point where she just wanted to go home. She wanted something familiar, something safe. She wanted Billy to hold her and get her away from all of this. It was late. Her eyes were burning from lack of sleep. She arose from the table and walked toward the screen door. She could hear the whooshing sound of the waves again, sounds that soothed her troubled heart.
Tamar appeared to be exhilarated from their meeting, but Fauna couldn’t listen to any more. She was exhausted and needed to get some sleep. Tamar showed her into a bedroom that was even more sparsely furnished than the rest of the house. There was no bed, just a small mat on the floor, something that was as foreign to Fauna as everything else she encountered on this odyssey. But it didn’t matter she needed the sleep and cried herself into her dreams.
Christmas Eve morning she awoke early to the laughter of her brothers, Peace and Joy, playing just outside the bedroom window. It was a beautiful, sunny day in Hawaii and the sunshine somehow made her feel much more content and relaxed than the night before.
Tamar was on the phone when Fauna entered the kitchen and she seemed to be arguing with someone over money that she owed. She lowered her voice when she saw Fauna. Fauna poured herself some tea and walked outside to view the clear blue waters of the ocean that stretched in a straight line to what seemed like the ends of the earth. It was a revitalizing sight. Fauna took a deep breath and returned to the kitchen.