I’ve been asked why having profiled friends, other family and a beloved pet here, I’ve yet to write about my mother.    Easy answer.   I didn’t “know” her.   

I knew that she loved me.   Not by what she said but by what she did.  What she said…was the opposite of what she did.  I had to keep that in mind, always.   Or I would have missed the love entirely.

She wore masks.   We couldn’t see past them.  She couldn’t see past them either.   So none of us ever knew who she really was.  Or would’ve been without them.

I understand where they came from.   She did not know who she was.  She had not been taught how to “be” anything.   And so she’d had to create makeshift masks she could change to appease whoever held her life in their hands at the moment.   And those moments didn’t last very long.

She never had a real family.   Her mother, Priscilla, had been an untamable force of nature—legendary, in the Mississippi Delta, for her herbal concoctions and “un-Christian” beliefs.  A stunning black woman, she could have any man of any race she set her mind on, and she took those men at will, I was told.   They knew the affair was over when the frying pan, often full of hot grease, flew.   And when a neighbor woman made a rude comment about one of her conquests as she passed her porch, Priscilla flung the “hot comb” she’d been using to straighten my mother’s hair with all her might—and perfect aim--leaving a burn mark on the woman’s upper arm that served as a warning to all.

To run off to Chicago with a lover she leapt from a window, tearing off the blouse that got caught on a nail and taking off, “topless,” on horseback to keep her rendezvous.  It did not end well.   She died ‘way too young of unknown causes, leaving my mother and her brother and sister wards of the court who were eventually sent back to live with an aunt and uncle in Mississippi where they worked in the cotton fields from sun up to sundown.  

My mother remembered that Priscilla was taken to the hospital one night, leaving her children with nothing to eat and no idea what their fate would be.    Determined to survive, her older brother managed, somehow, to steal a crate of bananas that they lived on for a few days until a neighbor called the police hoping to rescue them from their dire situation.   By then, my mother had grown so sick of bananas that the smell of them sickened her.   I believe it was more a strange permutation of grief than a real hatred of the fruit itself.   She associated the smell with her abandonment.   And confusion.

There are many theories about Priscilla’s death.   Some decidedly unsavory.   My mother hinted more than once that to survive she may have had paying “gentlemen callers” between marriages, and that somehow her death had to do with that.  But she never seemed able to explain how that “occupation” could have killed her.  That, too, seemed to be a psychological connection she made on her own.

And it may explain my mother’s disdain for and fear of men in general.   She always worked, refusing to take money even from my father whom she allowed to pay rent but little else the whole time they were together.   And it has always been a mystery to me how I was ever conceived, given her views—and incredible lack of knowledge about--sex.  When my father left us, reluctantly, to his credit, I wasn’t old enough to totally understand all that.  But a part of me “got it.”  They had not slept together in years—I curled up next to her in bed more often than he did.   She had, in fact, used the fact that they had a child in the house as an excuse to refuse him somehow.  My father had endured it, taking lovers, later, almost with her permission.  

When he moved away to live with one of those lovers—a lover I loved, too--she was relieved.   It let her “off the hook.”  But it also forced her to harden her heart against him and the world in which sex was a both a "sin" and a necessity.   She put that shoulder to the grindstone and never looked up again, rising at four in the morning to go to work, and working even after she got home until she was too tired to think.  Her smiling “dutiful employee” mask let her keep that job despite being functionally illiterate.    That job earned her a reputation for dogged dedication, and also the back, hip and knee problems that would put her in a wheelchair later in life.

I don’t remember having a real conversation with my mother aside from talking about what needed to be done in the house—I know we must’ve had a few, but I don’t remember them.  Except the ones that warned me away from men and, to my unending chagrin, white people.  While she tellingly saved her most incendiary and illogical insults for people of her own race—more on that later—my  mother vocally and unapologetically hated white people until the last days of her life when the God she so devoutly but somewhat hypocritically believed in got His/Her comeuppance at last.

She’d seen her uncle, who refused to work for white people, beaten to a pulp by torch bearing night riders and had spent most of her childhood in fear, hiding under floor boards if a stranger approached the house at night.   So I understood the origins of her anger.   But I could not stand the things she said about them even after she paradoxically moved me to an almost all white neighborhood. 

She had done this because the school there was one of the best, if not the best, in the city.  This was how much, deep down, she loved me—I knew and was grateful for this.    But she bitterly and constantly complained about having to sit next to white people on the bus every morning on her way to work with them all day.   I began to bring home white kids to sit on her couches and eat at her table every as often as possible.  From a neighborhood where many youngsters were raised by servants who looked like her, my new friends adored her --and her cooking.   She put on a “matronly mask,” sure that any white parents who would allow their children to eat at her table must be neglectful parents indeed.

The only other topic of discussion I remember was  chores I had not done.   My father teased that he was going to make a tape of her customary greeting and just play it every evening.  It would’ve gone something like, “I see the garbage hasn’t been taken out.   And there are dishes still in the sink—girl what have you been doing since you got home from school?   Ernest, why don’t you make that child do something besides sit there watching TV?!”

And speaking of Daddy, he arrived every evening to have dinner, do homework and talk—and play—music with me, until my college years.   He did this, I know now, to keep my heart from hardening, indulging my every whim and encouraging all my wildest dreams.   When I got a job at 17, and earned enough money to go to the “swinging England” of my beloved British bands—a trip my mother railed against—he secretly cashed in one of his weird little insurance policies to make sure I had extra spending money.   Every black adult I knew had stacks of those and a stash of matured savings bonds back then.   He seemed to have more than most.

In fact, when he died, my mother was still the beneficiary of his policies and accounts.   This, the astonishing sum he’d saved and the rest of his pension money allowed her to live very comfortably in old age.   That had been the plan all along.  His lover, who actually felt sorry for and later befriended my mother to everyone’s unending amazement, had agreed to this.   She’d had Daddy.   Mom could have his money.

So as her health declined, I moved her to Tucson and into one of our most exclusive “assisted living” compounds.    When my daughter ate lunch with her in the plush dining room for the first time, she asked if she could move into Granny’s building.   Tucked away in the Catalina Mountains outside of the city, it had pools, a spa, a game room, a grand piano and huge stone hearth in the sitting room, a snack bar, gift shop and movie theater--and a staff who adored and waited on her hand and foot.   Friends visiting from Chicago would sit and watch the sunsets from her patio, wistfully.   One wiped tears from her eyes and said she wished her mother could’ve lived her last years in luxury like that.

My mother frowned, clucked her tongue and dismissed their praise.   There were too many white people, she would snap.  And almost in the same breath she would grouse about all the “funny talkin’” Africans and Jamaicans they hired—she didn’t trust them.   They stole things, she said.

I learned to laugh, sigh, and move on.   The woman could not be happy.  And she enjoyed, therefore, making others unhappy.   It got to be a game her friends played with her.  They would gush about something wonderful they’d seen or done, and then they would look at her and wait for the disparaging remark they knew would come.   If a friend arrived in a lovely new dress, she would tell them how big her butt  looked in it or that it was a color she, herself, would never wear.  I was always too fat or too thin.   And my choice to wear my hear in a short ‘fro gave her something to complain about  for decades.   She didn’t like it straightened, either, once I did it.  I knew she wouldn’t.

To counter her constant censure, my friends ‘ parents made love offerings of food, compliments and bear hugs.   The mother of my oldest friend had a huge public row with my mother for belittling incessantly me in her presence.   It’s the only time I’ve ever seen my mother stunned.  She blinked and blushed.   And she obeyed this rule from then on.

But she did this only for the one old friend.  Just after the birth of my daughter years later on the Hopi rez, a friend of mine overheard my mother bellowing at me as she was passing our house one morning.   She had met my mother while she was wearing her “make a good first impression” mask, and had commented that contrary to the warning I’d given her, she’d found her quite charming.   The woman she heard as she passed by that day upset her so much that she back tracked and walked right in without knocking.   When my mother saw the frown on her face, she ducked her head and went upstairs.   My friend looked at me and said, “God, I am sooooooo sorry.”  And she begged me not to leave my mother alone with the baby.  Ever.

My mother would later envy the relationship I had with my own daughter.   We would take long train trips across the country to see her in a sleeper where we had little junk food fueled slumber parties every night.   Once we’d arrived in Chicago we continued to laugh and chatter into the wee hours in granny’s bed, while granny slept on the sofa—her choice, not ours.   And my mother would seem peevish and prickly in the morning.   She cooked enough food for an army and fawned over us in her own way, but there was always a strange tension in the air. 

If we spent time with other friends and family, we came home to a barrage of criticism—of them, not us.  But it was about us.   We had “abandoned” her in favor of them.  My daughter stopped wanting to visit her, after a while.   We continued to visit, though.   My daughter came along mostly to spend time with my friends, Daddy and the woman who had rescued him.   My mother sensed, but never mentioned this.   She would take it out on us later when she moved to Tucson, by making sure we knew that nothing we did would ever please her.   We kept trying, despite that.   Despite that, we loved her.

When she was dying, the masks fell off one by one.  But first, we did this little dance.  She would tell us to just let her die.  I would demand that she stop saying that.  I would argue with the doctors and nurses, so that she could see it--guerilla theater.   I knew that my mother really wanted to die.   But she liked having others see me fight the inevitable for her.  It proved she’d been a good mother—she needed others to believe that and she needed to believe it, too.  

I believed it.  I truly did and I still do and there is, to me, no contradiction there.   You can love even if you don’t like.  Or fully understand.   And she had done well by me.   I never wanted for anything material and had been raised in safe neighborhoods with amenities my old inner city pals couldn’t have imagined and that she had dreamt of as a neglected child herself.

And so I’d made sure that she wanted for nothing material or emotional, either, as she faced her final days.   So did the largely all white staff.   And the beautiful black man who lifted her frail body into his arms and took her to the bathroom constantly—that comeuppance I spoke of.   Sometimes young white men bathed her and combed her hair.   She chuckled wryly about it once.   But never complained.

In fact, she praised them as fiercely as she had railed against them years before.  They called her “Mom” and spent so much time taking care of her that other families complained.   Whenever she had to be rushed to the hospital the entire staff walked her to the ambulance and visited daily to bathe her and do her hair.  I would hear about this from her doting doctors and nurses.   I was deeply moved and grateful.  God, as she’d said, is indeed great.  I don’t necessarily share her beliefs, but…I saw them at work during those last weeks of her life.  And was humbled.

But the neglected child in her had wanted to die most of its life.   And when her body could no longer fight it, that angry baby snatched off the masks one by one.   And the raw rage revealed was almost too much to bear.   She was almost feral.  Her sunken eyes burned.  Her arthritic claws swatted away all attempts to touch or otherwise comfort her.   Weeks before her belly began to reject all forms of sustenance, as if to ally with her against us, she began to spit out even her beloved peppermints, when I slid one onto her furry tongue. 

She would “bark” for water and then knock the plastic cup out of my hand when I raised it to her lips.  This was, for me, the oddest, most passive aggressive dance we had ever done in our long, strange, strained relationship.   Toward the end, she refused even the little sponge tipped sticks which had become her only source of moisture.   Every move she made had a deep psychological significance, though she seemed to be acting from pure sensation and impulse.   She tore the covers off of her legs as if they scalded her.   Later, she would do the same with even her little hospital gowns, no matter how we teased, cajoled or appealed to what used to be an almost abnormally strong sense of modesty.

The last look she gave me, the day she died, was a deep frown that softened into a quizzical stare.  I recall that she  held that stare as if trying to remember something very important about me…and us.  I told her I loved her, I told her to behave and I told her I would be back shortly.   When I got back she was sound asleep, but twitching and startling like a newborn.  

Later that night, I got “the call.”   She had finally gotten her wish.

I…exhaled.