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Pridružen/-a: 17.01. 2017, 09:11
Prispevkov: 71
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 Objavljeno: 15 Maj 2017 09:19 Naslov sporočila: On Mother’s Day, a Daughter’s Guilt |
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My grandmother Alexia suffered from bloody noses. The blood would drip out of her nose and ruin all of her school dresses. Teachers would return her to her house in the middle of the day and tell her parents that she was too sick to stay in class. It is such a shame, the teachers would say, while walking away from my grandmother’s tiny home in Rhodesia. It would be foolish to pay for a girl, especially one who was sick, to continue school. At 14, she was no longer allowed to learn from her teachers.
My grandmother used her time at home wondering who she would become if she was no longer like the other girls in grade nine with good health. Her father worked at a farm that was far enough from home to give him feet with broken skin, but close enough to bring back a raw chicken bundled under his arm to cook and split among his children and wife. He kept the chicken feet for himself to suck to the bone.
Once she was 15, he got my grandmother a job with a white family that would ask her to cook and clean. You are a beautiful girl, her mother would tell her, you are lucky to be able to go work for these people with money. Her mother combed her hair and gave her a handkerchief that she could hold to her nose if it were to bleed. Be quiet and be good.
This was how my grandmother learned the things that English could get her. The windows that she cleaned in the white people’s home showed far distances of the land that only the people inside of the home could see. She learned to fold sheets that were so white that she feared that they would bleach her skin. She read to the children until they were old enough to tell her how poorly she read. She practiced how to make Battenberg cakes and cream icing with peaks until she knew from memory how to please the stomach of the white man who owned the house. It was good work for a young black girl.
My grandfather, a learned man, and a teacher, knew not to let go of a woman who was good enough to work in a white home. He was a teacher at Kutama College, an esteemed position for a man his age, and would make my grandmother his wife. While my grandfather was sitting behind a desk in a room full of students, my grandmother was cleaning the clothes of the priests who led theology, to bring in extra money. Once they had kids, my grandmother would take her sons and daughters with her to work. She would teach them how to hold an iron in their hand and how to fold clothes if they should ever leave home. She had six children. They, like her, would know how to keep a home tidy.
When my mother was of age, she was sent away to boarding school to be a girl who would learn. She held books with her peers and talked about receiving money using a paper and pen. She was educated in leisure, with hobbies like tennis and a scrapbook of magazine clippings of Mick and Bianca Jagger falling in love and getting married. She would pass her scrapbook around to her classmates who would write in bright red marker over the pictures: “ROCK AND ROLL.” My grandmother would hand-sew her uniform for school, while my mother would wear short skirts hiked up while pulling beer from the throat of a bottle with friends.
My mother’s first job as an adult was with Mercedes-Benz. It was her role in the company to walk around the complex with a clipboard to moderate other people working. She made good money. She would bring back sofa sets and a new carpet to her parents’ home. The furniture remained long after my grandfather died. My grandmother started a garden to put her hands into the ground and sell the vegetables to the people from church for money. My mother watched her wash the carrots, beets, and corn under the sink before she got back into her car, a Mazda 323, dressed in her pastel dress suit. You are your father’s child, my grandmother would say. My mother would honk her horn, wave, and drive away.
There was nothing that my mother needed from the man that would become my father. He was charming enough to meet for lunch and a decent audience for her sense of humor. They would go on road trips to Bulawayo and drink wine that he would pour by her request. She birthed me without him and didn’t send as much as a letter to ask for his help. I grew up knowing that my mother was a professional woman who didn’t operate by the traditional ways of the world.
My mother was studying to be a woman who could stand beside a man whether or not she was acquainted with him. She made it to America from Zimbabwe in the 1990s to work on case files as a parenting coach of American families in court. My mother for the remainder of her career would defend what was fair and just. There were papers often on our dining room table and the glow of a computer screen seeping into the pores of my mother’s face. I would slip into her high-heel shoes and walk in clumsy circles behind her back as she worked.
We used to take long drives where I would sit in the backseat as she told me about how to never be turned away from making money and about the people who weren’t safe to trust in this world. I would fall asleep with my feet touching one door and my head touching the other as she kept a steady pace toward home. My mother brought the prayers of my grandmother into our home. Every night we would burden our knees to exchange a blessing from God. When my uncle died, my grandmother’s second son of six children, we prayed a whole day.
Last month, my mother and I took a long drive back from the only liquor store in her town with fair prices. We discussed the years that have passed us with our feet dug into the dirt. My eyes well up whenever I think of the Sundays that my mother would warn me about how tight money would be that week. My plate every night was still full. There is a guilt that I feel about being a writer. I haven’t brought a piece of furniture to my mother’s home. I beg my mother to release me, let me struggle, and find her own adventure. My grandmother is still in Zimbabwe selling the corn in her garden for money that she will use to buy milk and eggs. My mother sends her beaded gowns that she can wear to church. The sacrifices that she has made haunt my mother, like they do me, as we know time is one debt that can never be repaid.Read more at:http://www.marieprom.co.uk/backless-evening-dresses | http://www.marieprom.co.uk/plus-size-prom-dresses |
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