say mole? Mole sounded terrible. A blind animal nosing out of the earth. I was so nearsighted I could barely see the playground, because I’d left my glasses at home. “Beauty mark?” I said.
He laughed. “That’s if you paint it on your face.”
“Who says?”
“All my aunts.”
I remember too the smell of sulfur in the rocks along the railroad tracks, and the pepper trees nearby with their spicy pink berries.
Thousands of miles of migration—from slave ships arrived to America, from boats leaving Europe after World War II, from indigenous peoples, hardened ranchwomen, and fierce mothers. The women moved ever west, fled men, met new men, made silent narrow-eyed decisions in the darkness, got on buses and in cars and walked for miles to survive. West until there was no more west.
We were born here, to more dreamers of the golden dream, the ones you never hear about. We moved through the streets of southern California, still with no money, but we had more than those women did when they were girls. We shared one burrito four ways, we rode eight to a car in a Dodge Dart or crowded the bed of a Ford pickup, we partied in the orange groves or in a field by the towering cement Lily Cup, where our friends’ parents worked at the plant making paper cups that Americans used to hold at the water cooler.
More than a year later, your father finally picked me up in the Batmobile, a 1961 Cadillac with vintage paint oxidized brown as faded coffee grounds, with huge fins as if sharks would chaperone us down the street. The sound was like a freight train. Sitting in the passenger seat, I saw a dark stain along the inside of the door. It was cold, and I asked your father to roll up the window, but he didn’t want me to see the spiderweb cracks around the bullet hole in the glass. Some guy had been leaning against the car window when he was shot. The stains were reminders of his blood. General Sims II, your grandfather, had bought the car from under a pepper tree where it had sat since the murder, covered in California dust. Your father drove me a mile and a half, to General and Alberta’s house, and in the driveway Alberta held out her hand and said, Come and make you a plate, and my life changed.
That is how you, our three daughters, became California girls. Via the Batmobile. You are the apex of the dream, the future of America, and nearly every day of my life I imagine the women watching you, hoping they—the ancestors—won’t be forgotten.
In the country of women, we have maps and threads of kin some people find hard to believe. The women could not have dreamed that in this promised land we would still have bullets and fear and murder. Fracture and derision and assault, sharp and revived.
I was born here, and I am still here, and I didn’t leave, which doesn’t feel very heroic. You three have laughed at me for looking out the kitchen window of our house toward the hospital where I was born, where your father was born, where you were born. My daily life is a five-mile radius of memory and work and family. You three daughters know this in your genes: You love only orange-blossom honey, because you grew up with that scent and those flowers, that fruit and those bees. You long for Santa Ana winds and sunflowers, tumbleweeds and the laughter of people eating at long unfolded tables in a driveway. We bury descendants of the women, and we serve funeral repasts in church halls built by some of California’s black pioneers. The women in our family are everything: African-American, Mexican-American, Cherokee and Creek, Swiss, Irish and English, French and Filipino, Samoan and Haitian. Some of their heritage remains a mystery.
I was not beautiful, and I never went anywhere. But I’m the writer. When I was seventeen, and left for college in Los Angeles, one of my first class assignments was a Xeroxed copy of Joan Didion’s famed essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I read it three times, actually breathless. Her sentences were lapidary and precise. She dissected the place where we live with lovely caustic prose: “This is the country where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers’ school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
I was stunned.
She was writing about us, except for the Dial-A-Devotion. (I never knew anyone who did that.) My mother and all three of my aunts had been “divorcees.” One aunt had been married three times. One was recently divided from a Fontana Hell’s Angel biker. My stepmother was divorced when she met my father; she was now his third wife. My friends—black and white and Japanese-American and Mexican-American—were named Kimberly and Sherry and Debbie. We lived amid the citrus groves described in the essay, with low walls built of riverbed stone.
I went home that weekend, passing through the places Didion’s essay made famous: Ontario, Fontana, and Rialto. Finally I got to Riverside, and in my mother’s kitchen, standing at the Formica counter I had spent half my life scrubbing, I tried to explain the piece to my mother. She was distracted, cooking, not interested until I read part of a paragraph out loud, wherein the cheating wife pushes a burning Volkswagen that contains her unconscious husband into a lemon grove. My mother looked up at me then, and said, “That was Lucille Miller. Your aunt Beverly lived across the street from that woman when it happened. She always said Lucille was going to kill someone.”
I was further stunned.
I went outside to look at the palm tree in our front yard, whose stair steps of gray dessicated bark I had climbed when I was five, everyone shouting at me to get down. I knew a version of us, of the girls and women here, that was not in the essay. Debbie Martinez, Deborah Adams, Deb Clyde. Girls descended from Mexican and black families arrived in the 1920s, and white families arrived from Arkansas after the Korean War. Our mothers and grandmothers remember their pasts.
I wanted to write about us.
Your father and I took our first journey three days after we were married in the oldest black church in Riverside, Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal, founded in 1875. (The afternoon of our wedding, we were driven around the city lake in another Cadillac, belonging to our friend Newcat, a car with a broken horn, so that your uncle General III stood in the open sunroof, his arms spread wide, shouting to people, Honk, honk, goddamnit, these two fools just got married!) We drove across the country from California to Massachusetts, in a Honda Civic—a truly tiny car back then, in 1983, and your father was six feet four inches and 195 pounds, so it was no joke sleeping in the front seats at rest stops.
In Amherst, we found a mattress and some furniture on the street and lived in a studio apartment while I learned to be a writer and your father worked nights in a correctional facility. But we met James Baldwin, my teacher and mentor. His driver, Rico, and his secretary, Skip, were tall black men who wanted to play basketball with your father. So everyone came to dinner in our bleak front room with two card tables we’d borrowed, the gray linoleum scrubbed, and the tiny red television my brother had won by selling newspaper subscriptions when he was twelve, which he’d given me for Christmas seven years earlier.
James Baldwin said the apartment reminded him of old days in Harlem. He walked the floor slowly holding a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label, leaning toward my small blue typewriter on the windowsill, reading the handwritten note I had taped to the glass:
With the rhythm it takes to dance through
what we have to live through
you can dance underwater and
