In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (43 page)

I saw myself sweeping them out from around his feet like so many ants. If they're running around his feet for the two hours between the time he comes home from the office and the time we put them to bed, I thought, they'd be underneath my desk all day. Sweep. Sweep.

My mother continued. “Why,” she said, “until my fifth child I was like a young girl. I could pick up and go anywhere I wanted to.” She
was
a young girl. She was still under twenty-five when her fifth child was born, my age when I became pregnant with Rebecca. Besides, since I am the last child in a family of eight, this image of nimble flight is not the one lodged forever in my mind. I remember a woman struggling to get everyone else dressed for church on Sunday and only with the greatest effort being able to get ready on time herself. But, since I am not easily seduced by the charms of painful past experience, recalled in present tranquillity, I did not bring this up.

At the time my mother could “pick up and go” with five children, she and my father traveled, usually, by wagon. I can see how that would have been pleasant: it is pleasant still in some countries
—
in parts of China, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, Greece, and other places. A couple of slow mules, ambling along a bright Southern road, the smell of pine and honeysuckle, absence of smog, birds chirping. Those five, dear little voices piping up in back of the wagon seat, healthy from natural foods: Plums! Bird! Tree! Flowers! Scuppernongs!
Enchanting.

“The other reason I will never have another child out of this body is because having a child
hurts,
even more than toothache (and I am sure no one who has had toothache but not childbirth can imagine this), and it changes the body.”

Well, there are several responses from the general supply of Women's Folly my mother could have chosen to answer this. She chose them all.

“That
little pain," she scoffed
(although, caught in a moment of weakness, she has let slip that during my very own birth the pain was so severe she could not speak, not even to tell the midwife I had been born, and that because of the pain she was sure she would die
—
a thought that no doubt, under the circumstances, afforded relief. Instead, she blacked out, causing me to be almost smothered by the bedclothes).
“That pain is over before you know it.” That is response number one. Number two is, “The thing about that
kind
of pain is that it does a funny thing to a woman
[Uh-oh, I thought, this is going to be the Women's Folly companion to the women-sure-are-funny-creatures stuff];
looks like the more it hurts you to give birth, the more you love the child.” (Is
that
why she loves me so much, I wonder. Naturally, I had wanted to be loved for myself, not for her pain.) Number three: “Sometimes the pain,
they say,
isn't even real. Well, not as real as it feels at the time.” (This one deserves comment made only with blows, and is one of the reasons women sometimes experience muscle spasms around their mothers.) And then, number four, the one that angers me most of all: “Another thing about the pain, you soon
forget it.”

Am I mistaken in thinking I have never forgotten a pain in my life? Even those at parties, I remember.

“I remember every moment of it perfectly,” I said. “Furthermore, I don't like stretch marks. I hate them, especially on my thighs” (which are otherwise gorgeous, and of which I am vain). Nobody had told me that my body, after bearing a child, would not be the same. I had heard things like: “Oh, your figure, and especially your breasts [of which I am also vain] will be better than ever.” They sagged.

Well, why did I have a child in the first place?

Curiosity. Boredom. Avoiding the draft. Of these three reasons, I am redeemed only by the first. Curiosity is my natural state and has led me headlong into every worthwhile experience (never mind the others) I have ever had. It justifies itself. Boredom, in my case, means a lull in my writing, emotional distance from whatever political movement I am involved in, inability to garden, read, or daydream—easily borne if there are at least a dozen good movies around to attract me. Alas, in Jackson, Mississippi, where my husband, Mel, and I were living in 1968, there were few. About the draft we had three choices: the first, conscientious objector status for Mel, was immediately denied us, as was “alternative service to one's country,” which meant, in his case, desegregating Mississippi; the second was to move to Canada, which did not thrill me but which I would gladly have done rather than have Mel go to prison (Vietnam was never one of our choices); the third was, if Mel could not become twenty-six years old in time, to make of him “a family man.”

From my journal, July 1968:

And now we own our house. For a brief time, surely. And if the draft calls before I am certified pregnant, what will we do? Go to Canada? Mel hates running as much as I do, which is why we're in Mississippi. I hate this country, but that includes being made to leave it …

January 2,
1969 (two months before I became pregnant):

Only two and a half months until Mel is 26. If we can make it without having to “flee” the country, we will be thankful. I still think his draft board has a nerve asking him to join the Army. He's already
in
the Army.

My bad days were spent in depression, anxiety, rage against the war, and a state of apprehension over the amount of annual rainfall in Vancouver, and the slow rate of racial “progress” in Mississippi. (Politicians were considered “progressive” if they announced they were running for a certain office as candidates “for
all
the people”; this was a subtle, they thought, announcement to blacks that their existence was acknowledged.) I was also trying to become pregnant.

My good days were spent teaching, writing a simple history book for use in black child-care centers in Jackson, recording black women's autobiographies, making a quilt (African fabrics, Mississippi string pattern), completing my second book, a novel—and trying to become pregnant.

Three days after I finished the novel, Rebecca was born. The pregnancy: The first three months I vomited. The middle three I felt fine and flew off to look at ruins in Mexico. The last three I was so big at 170 pounds I looked like someone else, which did not please me.

What is true about giving birth is… that it is miraculous. It might even be the one genuine miracle in life (which
is,
by the way, the basic belief of many “primitive” religions). The “miracle” of nonbeing, death, certainly pales, I would think, beside it. So to speak.

For one thing, though my stomach was huge and the baby (?!) constantly causing turbulence within it, I did not believe a baby, a person, would come out of me. I mean, look what had gone
in.
(Men have every right to be envious of the womb. I'm envious of it myself, and I have one.) But there she was, coming out, a long black curling lock of hair the first part to be seen, followed by nearly ten pounds of—a human being! Reader, I
stared.

But this hymn of praise I, anyhow, have heard before, and will not permit myself to repeat, since there are, in fact, very few variations, and these have become boring and shopworn. They were boring and shopworn even at the birth of Christ, which is no doubt why “Virgin Birth” and “Immaculate Conception” were all the rage.

The point was, I was changed forever. From a woman whose “womb” had been, in a sense, her head—that is to say, certain small seeds had gone in, and rather different if not larger or better “creations” had come out—to a woman who . . had two wombs! No. To a woman who had written books, conceived in her head, and who had also engendered at least one human being in her body. In the vast general store of “
literary
Women's Folly” I discovered these warnings: “Most women who wrote in the past were childless”—Tillie Olsen. Childless and
white,
I mentally added. “Those Lady Poets must not have babies, man,” John Berryman, a Suicide Poet himself, is alleged to have said. Then, from “Anonymous,” so often a woman who discourages you, “Women have not created as fully as men because once she has a child a woman cannot give herself to her work the way a man can… .”

Well, I wondered, with great fear (and resentment against all this bad news), where is the split in me now? What is the damage?
Am I done for?
So much of “Women's Folly,” literary and otherwise, makes us feel constricted by experience rather than enlarged by it. Curled around my baby, feeling more anger and protectiveness than love, I thought of at least two sources of Folly Resistance “Women's Folly” lacks. It lacks all conviction that women have the ability to plan their lives for periods longer than nine months, and it lacks the courage to believe that experience, and the expression of that experience, may simply be different, unique even, rather than “greater” or “lesser.” The art or literature that saves our lives
is great to us,
in any case; more than that, as a Grace Paley character might say, we do not need to know.

It helped tremendously that by the time Rebecca was born I had no doubts about being a writer. (Doubts about making a
living
by writing, always.) Write I did, night and day,
something,
and it was not even a choice, as having a baby was a choice, but a necessity. When I didn't write I thought of making bombs and throwing them. Of shooting racists. Of doing away—as painlessly and neatly as possible (except when I indulged in Kamikaze tactics of rebellion in my daydreams)—with myself. Writing saved me from the sin and
inconvenience
of violence—as it saves most writers who live in “interesting” oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

I began to see, during a period when Rebecca and I were both ill—we had moved to New England for a year and a half because I needed a change from Mississippi—that her birth, and the difficulties it provided us, joined me to a body of experience and a depth of commitment to my own life hard to comprehend otherwise. Her birth was the incomparable gift of seeing the world at quite a different angle than before, and judging it by standards that would apply far beyond my natural life. It also forced me to understand, viscerally, women's need for a store of “Women's Folly,” and yet feel on firm ground in my rejection of it. But rejection also has its pain.

Distance is required, even now.

Of a ghastly yet useful joint illness, which teacheth our pilgrim that her child might be called in this world of trouble the least of her myriad obstacles—

Illness has always been of enormous benefit to me. It might even be said that I have learned little from anything that did not in some way make me sick.

The picture is not an unusual one: a mother and small child, new to the harshness of the New England winter in the worst flu wave of the century. The mother, flat on her back with flu, the child, burning with fever and whooping cough. The mother calls a name someone has given her, a famous pediatrician—whose popular writings reveal him to be sympathetic, witty, something of a feminist, even—to be told curtly that she should not call him at his home at any hour. Furthermore, he does not make house calls of any kind, and all of this is delivered in the coldest possible tone.

Still, since he is the only pediatrician she knows of in this weird place, she drags herself up next morning, when temperatures are below zero and a strong wind is blasting off the river, and takes the child to see him. He is scarcely less chilly in person, but, seeing she is black, makes a couple of liberal comments to put her at her ease. She hates it when his white fingers touch her child.

A not unusual story. But it places mother and child forever on whichever side of society is opposite this man. She, the mother, begins to comprehend on deeper levels a story she wrote years before she had a child, of a black mother, very poor, who, worried to distraction that her child is dying and no doctor will come to save him, turns to an old folk remedy, “strong horse tea.” Which is to say, horse urine. The child dies, of course.

Now too the mother begins to see new levels in the stories she is at that moment—dizzy with fever—constructing: Why, she says, slapping her forehead, all History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world. “Progress” affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

It was during this same period that, risen from her bed of pain, her child well again and adapting to the cold, the mother understood that her child, a victim of society as much as she herself—and more of one because as yet she was unable to cross the street without a guiding hand—was in fact the very least of her obstacles in her chosen work. This was brought home to her by the following experience, which, sickening as it was, yet produced in her several desired and ultimately healthful results. One of which was the easy ability to dismiss all people who thought and wrote as if she, herself, did not exist. By “herself” she of course meant, multitudes, of which she was at any given time in history a mere representative.

Our young mother had designed a course in black women writers which she proceeded to teach at an upper-class, largely white, women's college (her students were racially mixed). There she shared an office with a white woman feminist scholar who taught poetry and literature. This woman thought black literature consisted predominantly of Nikki Giovanni, whom she had, apparently, once seen inadvertently on TV. Our young mother was appalled. She made a habit of leaving books by Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, and Zora Neale Hurston face up on her own desk, which was just behind the white feminist scholar's. For the truly scholarly feminist, she thought, subtlety is enough. She had heard that this scholar was writing a massive study of women's imagination throughout the centuries, and what women's imaginations were better than those displayed on her desk, our mother wondered, what woman's imagination better than her own, for that matter; but she was modest and, as I have said, trusted to subtlety.