The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (21 page)

IN THE FALL OF 2011,
I was sitting in bed at three
A
.
M
. reading Mary Karr’s memoir
The Liars’ Club
, which chronicles the author’s experiences growing up in a family struggling with alcoholism but also incorporates wonderful moments of humor and familial warmth. As I read, thoughts from my own childhood began to intrude. Not dark memories but pleasant snippets, mostly about my mother. The memories carried me from my bed and deposited me in a chair at the kitchen table in the little yellow house. Mama was at the stove stirring a huge pot of gumbo. The memory was so vivid I could smell the spices, sausage and shellfish. She was wearing her royal blue muumuu with yellow hibiscuses. She was still young, tall, powerfully built, thick-legged, wide-hipped and busty.

I smiled, put my book aside and powered up my laptop. I retrieved the picture Teresa sent me over a year earlier of our mother and her on the Mexican cruise ship. Though I had looked at the picture dozens of times, it struck me for the first time how old and frail my mother looked and how little time she had. How little time we all had.

It took years for my pent-up anger to drain away enough to free me to reconnect with my birth mother. I was for the first time able to remember her clearly and not through the haze of my pain and anger. My birth mother was not a monster who failed me but a woman who did her best in the face of poverty, addiction and social injustice to raise her children. My anger was gone and in its place a newfound respect for the woman I’d hated for most of my life. I was finally ready to go back.

For fun I decided to Google her to see what popped up. I typed in her full name and poked the Enter key. My heart stopped when Google slapped me with an obituary for Mary Nell Kennedy. In a panic I opened the link and was relieved to see, instead of a photo of my mother, a picture of a bespectacled, gray-haired white woman in a plaid jacket with a huge red bow around her neck. Definitely not my mama. But the thought that it could have easily been her unsettled me.

I e-mailed my sister Teresa. It’d been nearly a year since my last awkward phone chat with her. I was tired of fighting. I needed to let her know where my heart lay and I wrote:

Hello Teresa,

I’m writing to let you know that I will be in the Bay Area in early 2012 and would love to try and meet again. I’ve carried a lot of anger and regret and I’m proud that I am at a point where I no longer feel the need to carry it anymore. I know that our mother did the best she could with what she had and in retrospect she did an amazing job. While life was far from rosy she made sure we were fed and clothed and had a roof over our heads. About a year ago I visited our old house in Oakland and I thought it would stir up bad memories. But the opposite happened. I remembered us playing Monopoly, making rock candy by heating water and sugar in a spoon over the stove, playing Pac-Man.

I’d forgotten the good times we had. I’ve also been thinking that our mother is getting older and I would hate to lose the opportunity to see her and get to know her. And to let her know I have thought of her and truly appreciate the struggles she faced in trying to raise us.

I would love to meet with you, Mama, Randy, Deborah’s children, everyone eventually, and try to rebuild a positive relationship.

Best,

Mary

The minute I sent the e-mail, my anxiety lowered. I placed my laptop on my nightstand and picked up my book again, not expecting to hear back from my sister until the following afternoon if at all. A few days later she responded. I sat staring at her e-mail in disbelief but unable to open it, scared that she’d reject my offer. Scared that she wouldn’t. In the end I decided to shut my computer down without opening her e-mail. It felt like slamming the lid shut on a box of vipers.

When I mustered up the courage later that day to read her response, I found an open invitation. She gave me our mother’s phone number and suggested I give her a call on Christmas Day, which was a few weeks away.

“She’ll like hearing from you. You don’t have to talk long if you aren’t able. Just say hello.”

I got a sheet of copy paper and wrote “Mama,” “Christmas Day” and the phone number on it in big block letters with a black Sharpie and stuck it to the refrigerator. Not because I was afraid I’d forget to call but to get used to a daily reminder over the next few weeks that I was finally going to hear my mother’s voice.

When Christmas arrived, I waited until the early afternoon to call. I dialed the number and was relieved when an automated voice told me to leave a message. I hung up before the beep. I called back a half an hour later and after three rings was about to hang up again when I heard,

“Hello?”

Other than sounding a bit crackly and out of breath, her voice was the same.

“Hey! It’s Lawanna.”

“Lawanna?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“You sound like Deborah’s daughter. I thought this was Deborah’s daughter. You sound just like her!” she said with a chuckle.

“No. It’s me. I got your number from Teresa. I wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you too!”

“I also wanted to let you know I’ll be in the Bay Area in the New Year. I was thinking I’d come and see you.”

“You gonna come by?”

“Yeah.”

“OK! If you got a pen I’ll give you my address!”

“No. I don’t need it right now. When the time comes I’ll call again and get it from you.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Well, I just wanted to say Happy Holidays and I’ll see you soon.”

“OK.”

“OK.”

(Awkward pause.)

“Well, I have to go but I’ll see you soon.”

“Lawanna?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Uh . . . love you too.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I hung up the phone completely dazed. That was the first time I ever remember my mama saying she loved me. I said I loved her too because that’s the appropriate response, but I didn’t completely believe that. I said it because a part of me did love her. Never stopped loving her.

The lady I had just spoken to sounded like my mama, but the sweetness and openness that the voice carried was new. The overall impression I got was . . . cuteness. A cute little old lady taking a holiday call from her middle-aged daughter as if they had never spent more than a few days apart.

Was it possible that the drunk, angry, depressed mama had mellowed into a sweet-hearted granny? My rational mind was not easily convinced, but my heart had softened. The weeks leading up to my Bay Area trip suddenly seemed less daunting.

I ARRIVED
at the Oakland airport in late March. From the moment the plane landed on a day as gray as tepid dishwater, my main objective was to get out of Oakland as soon as possible. Within minutes of snatching my luggage from the carousel, I boarded a train for San Francisco. From the train window, the city’s despair oozed from the shabby houses, the struggling residents, even the graffiti was sad and pathetically executed.

While many things languish in Oakland, some things have always thrived. Oakland, like any ghetto worth its salt, can boast robust exponential growth in several businesses: organized crime, churches, liquor stores and fast-food joints. It is a rare block that is not inhabited by one. Many host all four.

The sense of gloom didn’t lift until the train left Oakland, slid under the bay and emerged in San Francisco, where I booked a hotel room perched precariously on the boundary between the affluent shopping and residences of Union Square and the squalor of the Tenderloin. One could literally stand on the corner where the hotel sits, look to the right and be face to face with dozens of the city’s underclass gathered for the social services offered by my hotel’s neighbor, Glide Memorial Church. If you looked to the left you’d see scores of tourists toting huge shopping bags emblazoned with the logos of upscale department stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdale’s.

Standing on that corner where these two worlds meet, I couldn’t help but think how for the past two years I’d also been standing on a similar line of demarcation that runs between my birth family and my adopted family. Though a narrow strip of metaphorical macadam separated these two worlds, crossing between them was no easy feat. Once one has crossed from one to the other, re-entry was as hazardous as a rocketship’s fall through the upper atmosphere. The potential to crash and burn was great.

I settled into my hotel room and slept for twelve hours. Then I called my mama. We made plans to meet. I took the train back across the bay and hailed a taxi back to our old neighborhood. She had not strayed more than half a dozen blocks from the little yellow house.

During the taxi ride, I struggled to keep pessimistic thoughts at bay. My mood lifted when my big, burly Nigerian cab driver unself-consciously started singing along to Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” which blared from the radio. As a huge Celine Dion fan who gets berated by my friends for my predilection, I found his unabashed enjoyment of the song charming and a mood booster. When he pulled up in front of my mama’s house, in a show of support I joined him in belting out a verse before I got out:

Lost is how I’m feeling lying in your arms

When the world outside’s too much to take

He grinned at me in the rearview mirror. I grinned back.

My mother lived in a little beige house with dark green trim, with a tiny yard out front teeming with overgrown grass and weeds. Four steps led me onto her concrete porch and past a picture window. I tapped solidly on the black wrought-iron security door. I waited. I tapped again.

“I’m coming!” my mother said through the closed door. I could hear her fumbling with the lock. When the door opened, I had a hard time seeing her because her house was dark inside and the black iron mesh of the security door was obscuring.

“I can’t move fast. It takes me a minute. Whew!” she said as she swung open the security door. I noticed right away that she had shrunk. At least a foot. Contributing to her short stature was the fact that she had a back problem that prevented her from standing fully erect. Her hair was a wild, white cotton ball and her eyes twinkled with a combination of mischief and glee. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt and cotton pants with an elastic waistband and brown Ugg boots. She reached for me and we hugged. It was a hug I had been waiting for for a very long time. There was no emotional preamble. In my imaginings this hug took place in slow motion accompanied by a sound track worthy of a 1940s melodrama. In reality it felt more like two acquaintances meeting after a brief absence as I rested briefly in Mama’s arms.

She invited me in. Her living room was dark, warm and close. The curtains were drawn and streaks of cigarette smoke drifted throughout the room like cloud cover. She told me to relock the security door.

“You can’t forget to lock up around here.” She chuckled and walked in a slow, plodding way back to her overstuffed chair that sat facing a flat-screen TV tuned to
The People’s Court
.

“Wow! You have a lot of pictures!” I said, noticing dozens of family photos, many I’d never seen, ranging from large 8x10’s to tiny wallet-sized, lining the walls and resting in frames on bookshelves. We never displayed photos in my childhood home. There were old photos of my siblings: Deborah as an infant, a large photo of my mama in her twenties holding my baby brother. A photo of me and my brother sitting on the floor at Soledad with Daddy in front of a mural. Louise as a smiley little girl. My paternal grandmother, my mother’s great-aunts. Several photos of Deborah, Donna and Teresa as little girls before the other siblings came along.

All of my siblings in various life stages were represented, including pictures of me from elementary school. In one photo I was smiling brightly into the camera with a perfect sphere of an afro. I was wearing a heavy coat, which was my custom even on warm days to mask my growing bosom. I recognized childhood photos of Donna’s daughter Latasha and Teresa’s daughter Atraui. My brother, Randy, now a husky full-grown man with wife and child. There was an adult picture of my sister Louise with her children. She lives in Las Vegas. Mama told me her firstborn were twins, which made me smile because when we were kids and played the board game Life, she always wanted to have twins in her car token as it rounded the board.

There were many children I did not recognize. Nieces and nephews conceived, born and grown up in my absence. Mama instructed me to show her the photos of the people I did not know.

“My blood pressure acts funny if I stand up and sit down too much.”

I showed her a family portrait of a young light-skinned woman surrounded by five children. “Oh, that’s your niece Latasha and her kids. She live in Houston.” I pointed to a dark-skinned little boy. “That’s Donna’s other child, Bruce.” I showed her another photo of a beautiful brown-skinned little girl with thick, long braids standing with a handsome, slim boy. “These are two of Deborah’s children. Teresa and I raised them after Deborah died.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“Oh, they around. They was the sweetest little thangs when they was little. But because Deborah was using crack when they was in her, they went kinda wild when they got older. We couldn’t handle them. They grown now, living they lives.” She told me Deborah’s firstborn, a boy, was born with severe birth defects from his mother’s drug use and remained in the hospital for a year after his birth. He was adopted by a caring family after he was well enough to leave the hospital. He would never learn to walk or speak. Mama showed me pictures in a photo album of my sister looking thin and sickly in the hospital, holding the baby she’d never raise.

“She visited him a lot when he was in there. Because he was born with so many problems, she made sure she didn’t use as much crack when she was pregnant with her other kids.”

I stared at all these faces staring at me from the wall. I didn’t know how they could bring my mother comfort. All I could think about when I stared into these faces was how much many of them suffered.

“Hey!” my mother said. “Get me that photo album over there on that shelf.” She pointed to a book resting on a shelf to the right of the TV.

“This?” I asked, touching it.

“Yeah. Bring it here,” she said, gesturing for me to sit in the overstuffed chair next to hers.

I sat down and began to pass the photo album to her. “No. You open it.” I took it onto my lap and opened it and saw photos of me. Photos taken after I went to live with Jane. There was a photo of me graduating from high school, pictures of me hiking the Appalachian Trail. There were enough photos to fill half the book. Many of the photos I recognized as ones I posted on Facebook. Someone (probably Teresa) had downloaded them and had prints made.

“I’ve been following you,” my mother said, staring at me intently.

“So I see,” I said. This collection of photos made me feel as if I’d just discovered I had a stalker for several decades. I returned the photo album to its place on the shelf.

“So you live here alone?” I asked.

“Well, me and Marsellus.”

“Marsellus?”

“My Rottweiler!”

“Your Rottweiler?”

“I got him when he was a puppy. His full name is Marsellus Wallace, after that tough guy in that movie
Pulp Fiction
.”

“Oh.” I thought:
Who is this woman? She never showed the least interest in dogs before, and now here she is with a Rottweiler as a companion?

“He out there in the backyard. You can go look at him but don’t go out, he don’t like strangers. The only people he like is me and Atraui. Teresa and Randy scared of him ’cause he’s so big.”

I walked a few feet toward the back of the house and pulled the drapes back, exposing a sliding glass door. Lying in the middle of the yard was indeed a big Rottweiler. He stared at me through the glass, mildly curious. I was a dog lover, so to me Marsellus didn’t inspire fear. I thought he looked downright cuddly.

“He’s so cute!” I cooed.

“Yeah, he’s a good boy. He’s normally in here with me but I put him out for you.”

I took my seat next to her and noticed the various prescription bottles on the little end table between us.

“What are all these for?”

“Lawanna, I got a lot of thangs going on. High blood pressure, COPD, arthritis, sleep apnea, asthma . . .” she said as she lit up another cigarette.

Like most old people, she went into a detailed description of her medical history over the past decades. I sat across from her, riveted.

“I have an appointment with the doctor to get my own oxygen tank soon,” she said proudly. In that warm, smoke-filled room with disgruntled litigants screaming at one another on the television, I was thinking I could benefit from an oxygen tank myself. Though I was feeling a bit queasy from the cigarette fumes and the too-warm room, I couldn’t imagine any other place I’d rather be than right there listening to Mama telling me about how much she hates wearing her dentures.

I spent a couple of hours catching up on that first visit, and when we embraced to say good-bye, I felt an unexpected closeness. When she called out “Love you!” as I descended her porch for the waiting cab, I paused to tell her I loved her too. And I meant it.

•   •   •

Uncle Landon was coming to pick me up at the BART station near his home. He still lived in the Fruitvale neighborhood, which was just one BART stop from Eastmont, but the two neighborhoods couldn’t have been more different. As I exited the Fruitvale BART station, I reflected on how the Fruitvale neighborhood had always been a step up from Eastmont, but while Eastmont had slid farther downward over the years, it looked to me as if Fruitvale had held steady and in some respects improved.

When Uncle Landon pulled up and stepped out of his car, I was surprised to see he had not aged much at all. He was sixty-eight and still tall and fit. He told me I was heavier but wore it well. As we drove along, Uncle Landon told me about his recent return to the Bay Area. A lifelong community activist, he left for several years to do community organizing in post-Katrina New Orleans. He and his current wife had returned to Oakland almost a year previously—he and Jan had been divorced for over a decade—and were still in the process of unpacking.

We pulled up in front of the always welcoming two-story bungalow with the large tree out front, and I was flooded with pleasant memories of hanging out with Uncle Landon, Aunt Jan and my cousins. I remembered taking my then two-year-old cousin Thembi to a yard sale next door and how the homeowner greeted my cousin with baby talk and she responded in full sentences and how impressed the woman was. I remembered setting the table for dinner and playing with my cousins. I spent a lot of time in this house. I was sure that without my uncle and the sanctuary he provided, my life would have been a lot more hazardous.

When we went inside, the house enveloped me in its familiar woodsy scent. They had done some renovating over the years, expanded the house to create a beautiful family room, but for the most part it was the same: bright, clean and welcoming.

I asked about Daddy, and Uncle Landon said that Daddy went back to prison for five years for domestic violence. He didn’t seem to want to tell me much more about him. I got the feeling he didn’t want to talk about Daddy because he didn’t want to tell me that he wasn’t interested in seeing me. Though I would welcome a visit from my father, I was not troubled by his continuing absence. Uncle Landon showed me some recent photos of Daddy and it looked as if life had not been treating him so kindly. My once vibrant, handsome father stared back at me from a photo as a shrunken old man with a hard, weathered face. I have a hard time missing him because I never truly knew him.

Uncle Landon wanted to know what I’d been up to professionally, and I spent the next hour and a half telling him about my travels and my work history with the homeless, African refugees and the environment. He seemed to swell with pride at each revelation. I could see that more than anything, he was proud to know that I, like him, did work that benefitted others.

Next he got out the photo albums and caught me up on my four cousins who, unbelievably, were all grown women. One cousin was married and lived in the Pacific Northwest, another was in college in San Francisco, another lived up the street with my Aunt Jan and had a small daughter. Another also lived in Oakland and had two grown sons, one of whom got into some scrapes with the law and was living with Landon. I told him I was glad to see he was continuing to be a shelter in a storm. That made him smile.

•   •   •

Mama and I took a trip to see her aunt Nell, my great-aunt, whom we visited occasionally when I was growing up. Aunt Nell was one of twelve children. At ninety-five years old, she was one of the remaining two. My aunt Nell had one of the few homes in the neighborhood in which the front and back yards were perfectly manicured. Her lawn was like a neon green shag carpet, and it seemed colorful flowers were always in bloom. As we pulled up to her house, this fact has not changed in a neighborhood where many houses fall into neglect. Aunt Nell’s little house was still a showpiece.