Winner, Janice or How Well Do You Know Your Dead Mother?
September 18, 2013
On election night, 2008, shortly after news outlets called Obama
the winner of the Presidential election, I received a text from Janice. This young woman was my mother’s best friend,
and knew her perhaps better than anyone else - maybe even better than her blood
family. The text was fairly common
bigotry from the time: “We have just
elected a Muslim as President.” The
subtext was clear to me and anyone with at least one eye and a brain, even as
she threw back all manner of rationalization, notably the “I am not a racist”
catch-all for use anytime a non-white person is the subject of a racist story. Then she added, with the mournful honesty of
someone drunk, “Your mother would not have wanted this - not this!”
How dare she imply that she knew my dead mother better than
I knew my dead mother! If I didn’t know
her, then my mom’s would be the biggest betrayal of all. This fresh wound bled nicely, but as a
southern woman who innately understood the properties of salt, Janice loosened
the shaker top and poured: “You didn’t
live here. You didn’t know her. She told me that she just agrees with you
because she don’t [sic] want to argue.
You know that sweet lady just wanted to keep the peace, so she would
tell you and your daddy one thing, but tell me the truth.” That is exactly what my mom told me, about
her.
In the campaign for a dead woman’s affections, I wondered
which of us really knew more about my mom.
Would my mom have wanted a woman to be the next President of
the United States?
Would a Hillary win be a betrayal of my mom’s own worldview? Was that worldview more like mine or like
Janice’s? To fool ourselves and those
around us is to survive when we see no other way - all three of us did it - but
to see another succeed, one such as Hillary, can be deadly, if it we backtrack
from self-worth and into the land of comparisons. Is this all I did with my life while she went on to rule the world?
Would my mom have wanted to travel to the places she had
already visited in books? To her, safe
travel often meant never leaving the bed.
I can confirm this. I remember
that New York made her a paralyzed voyeur to a mugging across the subway
tracks. It was the forced voyeurism of
chance but, to her, it must have felt like a rape by proxy. She trembled as though she were the victim. Worse, her world-view was confirmed: No one
tried to help the victim. Everyone
looked away, so not to see a problem in need of a solution. Through her tears afterward, she never
mentioned the mugger or the crime, she only said, “They just stood there.” Maybe she did mention the crime. We watched Dreamgirls that night on Broadway, but
my mom was still on the subway platform.
Would my mom have wanted to read about her shame had I given
her the books? She read about horrific
stories of men who died from AIDS. I put
them in her hands because I demanded that she know and feel this and not just
smile, smile, smile. It was an
outrageous demand that I made. She hid them
under her mattress to keep them hidden from my dad. He wouldn’t understand, she maintained. Maybe she was right; maybe truth can be so
energetic and blinding that it needs the dampening effect of a mattress. Or maybe she understood nothing.
Would my mom have wanted to read openly if she knew that
victim-daddy-husbands talk to everyone about anything that results in sympathy? Or pity.
Pour that poor man a drink. Would
she have wanted to know that personal experience makes people far worldlier
than does any book-based adventure?
Still, when you have no choice, you’re going to use the only key you
have to escape, which for her was a book.
My mother taught me about keys.
Would my mom have wanted to know that her son knew and
thought about all of these things? Would
my mom have wanted a son not quite so adept at survival, like her? By the end, she knew that survival strategies
work only so long before the stress of their maintenance opens the door to the
real killer.
I didn’t want to destroy my mind’s image of her, so I let
things be. Some arguments are not worth
fighting.
Winner, Janice. She needed it.