Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (43 page)

I am searching
. It has taken the writing and reliving of all of this to convince me that this is what I am doing and that my search must have at its core not just my mother and whatever answers she could provide for the questions I never learned how to ask. I’m also searching for a glimpse of the person I could have been alongside her but chose not to be: the confidante, the fearless interlocutor, the daughter eager to share how it feels to take her first resolute steps into the onrush of experience. What shape would God have taken on inside that version of my mind?

There was a moment in writing this book when I thought that I would watch the videotape that was made, in 1991 or ’92, of my mother giving testimony at that North Carolina church meeting. I thought that sitting down and listening to what she was saying, hearing the words in her voice, and watching her face, her body, the ways that she communicated herself and her faith, might help me to finish saying what I had set out to say. I thought that sitting
down and watching her give testimony might allow me to finally live out and release the adolescent feelings of embarrassment that had prevented me from watching the video in the first place. And I thought that listening to her describe her own need for God and the faith that she had embraced might allow me to claim a piece of whatever it was she once testified to. It would have been so easy to let her have that last word and to convince myself that she was speaking for both of us. I was ready to give that much to her, to cede that much.

But I discovered that the video is gone. Just like the life we all once shared in that house, the video disappeared in the years after our mother’s death—boxed up, carted off, mislabeled or mistaken for less than it was. If she is to speak now, it will be in a voice I command myself to hear, a voice I must remember or imagine into being.

I am three, resting my head on my mother’s hip, tucking my body into the crook of her knees as she lies on her side on the couch. She doesn’t speak. It is early afternoon and we are alone together in the house. I can hear the quiet mewling of her stomach, digesting the lunch she’s just eaten. I have eaten the same thing, but my body is silent. The only sound I make is my breathing. We are napping together, but I am awake, wedged into the space between my mother and the cushions of the couch. There is nothing I currently want. There is nothing I must do. I feel the fabric of her pant leg against my cheek and smell her perfume. Her body seems to bob or sway, but only slightly, as she breathes. My mother seems like a mystery because she is larger than me.

“Mommy?” I’ll say, finally, knowing she is there, that it is her
body my small body has burrowed into, but wanting to know that she knows I am there, too. “Mommy?”

“Yes, Tracy?” she’ll ask, calmly, once I have punctured her sleep with my need to hear her voice, to feel it rise through her and hum against my ear.

“Oh, nothing,” I’ll answer. “Nothing.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written without a number of happy coincidences.

Princeton University, which has been my professional home since 2005, has brought me into conversation with some of the most remarkable writers of our time and facilitates the stability that has allowed me to invest my energy and focus upon my writing. My colleagues there inspire me to want to grow, develop, produce, and contribute to the conversation their voices make in the world.

The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, in its generous commitment to young artists and to the conversation across genres and generations, provided me with the opportunity to work closely with eminent writer and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger. His guidance, his example, and his friendship have forever changed my sense of myself as a writer and a citizen. He gently but honestly pushed me to find my voice in prose, to invest in characters, and to invite the world beyond myself into this story.

My agent, Markus Hoffmann, helped me to hone the core of this book. I remain indebted to him as the reader whose interest urged me on when it would have been very easy to stall or stop.

My editor, Robin Desser, became the reader for whom I committed to push into the most difficult regions of the story I had set out to tell. Her compassion, insight, and belief calmed and consoled
me. And her wisdom and intelligence taught me how prose is built. It would have been quite nearly enough just to share this work with her, but I am immensely grateful that she has helped me to turn my own private material into a book.

Continued and ongoing thanks go to Tina Chang, for her faith, insight, and friendship through these many years.

It is one thing to excavate one’s own private material and another thing altogether to share it with the world, having discovered, along the way, how much other people’s lives and stories are integral to it. I wish to thank my family for trusting me to tell my story, which has brought elements of their stories to light. And I wish to ask forgiveness for anything they would have remembered differently or anything they’d have preferred to forget.

I conceived of this as a book from a mother to her daughter. My luminous Naomi has been in my mind and heart throughout the writing of every line of this story. And now that her brothers, Sterling and Atticus, have arrived, perhaps this book will give them access to their mother and her people that will be important to them as sons and one day as men.

My most urgent, exultant, profound, and loving thanks go to my husband, Raphael Allison. My first reader. My best friend and soul mate. This (and everything else, always) is also for him.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry:
The Body’s Question
, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize;
Duende
, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and an
Essence
Literary Award; and, most recently,
Life on Mars
, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, a
New York Times
Notable Book, a
New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice, and a
New Yorker, Library Journal
, and
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year. Other honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.