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.