I told Mother about the birth of that old woman’s grandson, and I told her about what I had seen Iva do. I asked her why we did not have a Bible with my name and my birthday written down inside it. She had just gotten the fire going in the oven, and she was rolling out dough for biscuits. Rose and Otis were still asleep just a few feet away from us. When Mother finished rolling out the dough she cut the biscuits, and then she looked at me.
“Lilly,” she said, “it was just you and me and that man who called himself your daddy in that wagon on the way down the mountain. And there wasn’t hardly food or money to go around for two of us, much less three.” She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits inside. “If you think I was worried about toting along some Bible then I don’t think you know your mother as good you should.
“Besides,” she said, dusting her hands on the front of her dress, where her pregnant belly seemed to reach toward me, the dry flour and the cotton lint coming off her fingers like snow, “you don’t need no Bible to tell you that you exist in this world.”
And she was right, Edwin. You exist whether it is written down or not, and you are dead whether it’s written down or not too. If I decide not to send you this letter, that will not mean that the things I have written down never happened, that they are somehow less significant because I am the only one who has seen these words. If you never show Owen his birth certificate or if you lose it and have to send away for a new copy, that will not mean he does not exist or that his life matters less than it would have otherwise.
Maybe this is what I was thinking when I went out to the Bessemer City cemetery on the morning after they buried Mother. Hundreds of people had attended her funeral, and there had been great heaps of flowers piled atop her grave, but the next day, before I arrived, someone had returned and taken all those flowers. I may have realized it then, and I definitely know it now, but those flowers had not been arranged for Mother. Those flowers had been arranged for the newspapers and photographers who took all those pictures of me and Rose and Otis and Wink standing before her grave. Less than twenty-four hours later there was nothing on her grave but a rock to mark the spot where they’d laid her to rest. About thirty years ago, the AFL-CIO erected a huge stone marker there. They paid for it and everything: a huge, expensive monument saying something about who Mother was, what she did. They spelled her last name incorrectly, Mae instead of May, which is ironic considering how much money they spent and how important they said she was to them.
On this morning, the morning after she had been buried, there was nothing there but that rock. It was just a quiet place, with the earth still soft from her being put inside it. No words, no tombstone, no monument marking that she had ever existed, but she did, and she made me exist too, even though it was never written down. Here I am, Edwin, and here you are too.
If Otis never told you any of this it is because it hurt him to talk about it, about Willie’s death, about losing our mother, about losing Wink after we were sent to the orphanage. And there was the shame of it too, the shame of being Ella May’s child. After she died newspapers across the state called her a communist for being involved with the strike, a loose woman for not being married, and any other number of terrible things. There were years when we did not want anyone to know who we were. I made myself forget. Your father chose not to talk about it. Rose moved away to a place where no one had ever heard of us or knew the name Ella May.
But shame can work the other way as well. Once, years and years ago, when I first moved to Asheville, I was seeing a man who worked as a pharmacist for one of the drugstores downtown. He was very kind and very successful and the only son of a lovely old family, and I knew for certain that we would be married. And then, one evening, the woman who managed the boardinghouse where I lived knocked on my door and told me that the pharmacist was downstairs. I was surprised because it was a weeknight and I had not been expecting him. I found him on the porch, still in his white smock. It had grown dark out, and I remember thinking how white his smock appeared beneath the porch light.
I will be quick about things: he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. He did not give a reason, although I suspect he had met someone else. I had been grading student papers, essays about “What I Will Do Over My Summer Vacation,” and I had tucked my pencil behind my ear. I had hoped he would find it charming, but after his news to me I thought of the pencil and was humiliated because I had put it there on purpose to get his attention. He left, and I never saw him again.
I was devastated, Edwin, just devastated, and how I cried. He was the first man I had ever really loved, and I believe that at that moment I knew for certain that I would never marry. The funny thing is that I rarely think of the pharmacist now, but throughout that summer I was convinced that my life was over. I was only twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.
Months passed. Summer ended, and before I knew it I was heading back to work at the elementary school where I was scheduled to teach fourth grade for the second year in a row. One evening, I was in my room organizing my teaching materials, getting ready for school to start, when I came across a photograph the pharmacist and I had taken together at Lake Lure the previous fall. The two of us were sitting on a rock and holding hands, our legs crossed, both of us smiling. I wore sunglasses and he wore a straw derby and white jacket. We made a nice-looking couple. The photograph was in black and white, and you could not tell that the trees behind us were alive with color, but they were. I stared at the photograph, and the same feelings I had felt that night on the porch returned: the deep hurt and sadness, the disappointment, the certainty that so many things I’d expected of my life would not come to pass.
And then, I do not know how, I seemed to step outside of my body. I looked back at myself where I sat on the single bed in my small room in a boardinghouse in the mountains between the place where my mother was born and the place she had died. How had I come to be here? I wondered. How had I come to have the things I had? The dresses, the shoes, the books, the radio that sat on the shelf across from me that I would turn on in the evenings to hear music or a baseball game or the news while I sipped tea and looked at a magazine. I asked myself these questions on the way to realizing something important: I was twenty-nine years old, and I had outlived my mother by one year. I had outlived a woman who had never slept on a bed this comfortable in a room this warm, who had never worn a dress as nice as the dresses I often gave away after a season, who had lost one child while keeping four alive. It all felt so self-indulgent, this worry over a man, this longing over a photograph in which I wore sunglasses as if I were some kind of Hollywood starlet. In short, I was ashamed not of who my mother was, but of how much stronger she was than the woman I had become.
I want to tell you about her, Edwin, and I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t much, but maybe it’ll be enough for you to understand something about who she was, about who your father was, about who we are now.
Chapter Three
Verchel Park