Original Essays
by Susan Straight, October 11, 2010 11:10 PM
I'm a short blonde woman, nearly invisible, and everywhere I go, people tell me their stories. At the DMV, our clerk relates how her mother came from Cape Verde, off the coast of western Africa. At the gym, a woman tells me an astonishing story about how a sister poisoned a brother and stole his best friend. Trimming sunflowers in my front yard, I listen when total strangers stop and say, "I heard you're a writer — I have a story for you." An elderly woman, standing at my fence, told me about a baby born to a white high school student and a Chinese shopkeeper, back in the early 1900s, and where the baby ended up. Everyone wants someone to listen, and I'm the only writer in my community — I write letters for people who can't, I write the funeral programs and obituaries for our family and friends, and at night, I write novels. I've spent the last five years working on Take One Candle Light a Room, a novel based on four indelible elements: a porch story, a murder, a snatch of overheard conversation, and a face I saw sometimes when I was 18. Years ago, I wrote letters to the Veterans Administration for a close friend's father. Mr. G liked to sit on my porch after we finished composing. One day, he told me how his father died when his mother was pregnant with him, deep in the pine forests of Florida, and how when he was seven, he was tired of being hungry, so he walked with a hammer to a farm a few miles away and killed a pig. He dragged the pig back to his mother and told her he wanted some meat. The fierce anger of his desperation was still in his throat even at 65, his turquoise eyes stark against his brown skin. Every day on my way to work, I pass a vacant lot and remember a 17-year-old girl found dead there, strangled, folded into a metal shopping cart. Her mother told the newspaper that police wouldn't care who killed her daughter, because she was just a pregnant young black woman; the hurt on her own face never left me. When I was about 18, I overhead someone say, "Well, we came out to California in 1950-something because Mr. — had decided he was gonna come get —" A powerful white man felt he deserved the favors of a beautiful young light-skinned black woman. The family left in the night. That same year, I rode a work bus with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. Her skin was like hammered gold, her eyebrows like black hummingbird tail feathers, her throat and long black hair and hollow collarbones drove men crazy. They said outrageous things to her, trying to get her attention, and she only stared out the window. Once we heard a love song on the radio, and she said softly to the bus driver that she'd only loved one man, and she couldn't have him. There are writers who travel all over the world for their stories, and writers who never leave home. I was born in Riverside, California, and though I left for college, I came back immediately, and somehow, this year, writing this novel, I realized a truth only when one of my characters said it: There are two kinds of people — those who leave and those who stay. Fantine Antoine says this when she comes home to the isolated orange grove where her father is a man like Mr. G. She is the main character in Take One Candle Light a Room, a travel writer in Los Angeles who's deliberately distanced herself from her rural family in southern California and Louisiana. She knows how her mother and the other women in her family got to California — they fled in the night after a powerful man raped three of their girlfriends in rural Louisiana. She knows her father was orphaned on the levee of a Louisiana river during the 1927 Great Flood with a seven-year-old boy, who watched his mother shot and floating down the floodwaters, and who killed a pig with a hammer to feed himself and the other boy. They made each other into brothers, those children. Decades later, one of them had a daughter who was so beautiful, skin like hammered gold, that her life could never be normal. When she couldn't have the one man she loved, she abandoned her own son. That son, Victor, Fantine's "nephew" and godson, grows into a dreadlocked intellectual who wants to be a music writer, a kid who loves The Who and Led Zeppelin and wants to hip the world to Gecko Turner, a Spanish musician who names himself after an iconic blues singer and writes about Nigerian prostitutes in Madrid. But Victor's riding with his childhood friends, who involve him in a shooting in Los Angeles. When he pleads with Fantine for help, she refuses at first and then finds herself driving across the country with her father to try and save her godson, a journey that will force her to face the realities of her own life and choices. Fantine was named for a young slave who saved Fantine's ancestor, Moinette. (Moinette was the main character in my last novel, A Million Nightingales; I began that book while watching my three daughters sleep, their varying shades of gold and almond skin, hair splayed out on their pillows. I imagined what their lives might be like in the early 1800s, how they would be valued only for beauty, and how a mother would feel each night, frightened to wake up and find them sold away.) Slaves made each other into blood family, and clan is still that way today. Being the only writer in my community means this: it feels like a moral imperative to tell the story, and to tell it right, because it was entrusted to me. African-American history, as my three daughters know, is so often an oral tradition, and the legends in our family are epic. However it happened that I got to be the one, and that I read Eudora Welty, Ernest J. Gaines, and James Baldwin when I was very young and understood that they, too, were the storytellers, I can only be mystified and grateful. One other image began this novel: when the moon is full, and it rises in a certain way behind the palm trees that line my street, the bright light makes the palms' tossing fronds look like an enormous lit sparkler. Victor's mother shows him that image, and it makes life beautiful even from the balcony of a drug-infested apartment complex, and even if only for a moment. A porch story, a murder, a snatch of conversation, a stranger's face: my books come from places like these, and from sights like a palm tree firework, the glimpse of a man seen out of a car window, a photograph in a newspaper, and from all the stories people tell in my community, stories that might never exist on paper if someone hadn't leaned in close and asked, "What happened
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Guests
by Susan Straight, April 21, 2006 9:24 AM
My two youngest chickens are outside now, looking almost like cartoon versions of themselves because they are teenagers. They are six months old, which is adolescence for them. The black speckled one is named Smoke, and the golden-yellow one is Butter. They are Rosette's chickens, as her dad brought them when they were one day old for her, but really they like to hang out with me because I always turn over rocks and bricks so they can find the bugs underneath. They have eaten nearly every insect in the back garden, which means the roses and blackberry vine and lavender are bigger than ever. One of our twelve rabbits got out of his cage again, too, so it looks like some version of Easter chicks and bunnies on steroids scampering around, because they are all so big now. (We've had rabbits live to be ten years old. This one is four.) I didn't know I would like the chickens. These chickens. I have hated some of the other chickens my ex-husband brought, because two turned out to be roosters (we promptly gave them back to him, as he lives in a neighborhood where lots of people immigrated from Mexico and don't mind roosters) and one always ate her own eggs (we gave her away after three weeks of watching what we considered infanticide, which then led to a discussion among my daughters about why it was okay for us to eat the eggs but not her). That's the thing about the chickens. They remind me, during a strange week like this, and preparing to go on the road again for a week to talk about slavery and my novel and motherhood and ownership, about what women did to survive in the past. All those phrases that come from chickens and women ? egg money (women often got to keep it), don't put all your eggs in one basket (while taking them to market to sell), and waking up with the chickens (it's sure as heck early, when they start making noise). When I feed them, and I realize my hand makes a movement millions of other hands have made and are making now, in rural counties and countries everywhere in the morning, the motion of scattering cracked corn, it's a strange connection. The chickens are company, sometimes, when I sit back there reading someone's manuscript. And they saved me the other day from possible death ? I turned over some old truck toys and bulldozers that we keep for visitors, and black widows came out. Those chickens snapped up the spiders, and I watched in horror for a moment to see what would happen. Nothing. They just looked for more. I wondered what in the world a black widow tasted like, as compared to a worm, pillbug, earwig, or slug. Apparently, it was good, because they followed me excitedly as I emptied a washtub of firewood, and they got a few more. I have killed countless black widows in my yard over these eighteen years, but I'm glad to have murderous company. *** Writing for Powells this week seemed intimidating at first, but I've loved reading all the other interviews and blogs. What I loved the most was how passionate we all are about books. One of the best things about being a writer is mail. In the mail, we get galleys and advance reading copies. When I was in graduate school, my mentor and wonderful professor Jay Neugeboren invited my then-husband and me to his house often, and I loved to wander around the rooms of his big farmhouse and look at all the books. Galleys and books for reviews ? it seemed like a treasure trove to me, a poor graduate student who usually touched books only at the library. I would disappear for hours into a corner and read. Now my house has piles of books everywhere. It is a small farmhouse, at the edge of the Santa Ana riverbed and in the middle of a large city. But it's a writer's house, I know, because when the many kids and visitors and students come by, they all see the books. Galleys with plain covers, advance reading copies which look like paperbacks, and all the books I buy and can't wait to read. Last night I was reading two new galleys I love, and though I am supposed to talk this month about my own novel, I can't help saying Peter Orner's new novel, set in Namibia, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, is amazing. Also, Rebecca Lee's The City is a Rising Tide kept me awake, which is hard to do. So I am coming to Portland, a great city of books, Sunday for Wordstock, and I will see more writers and books than ever, and then I go to the Bay Area, which is also full of writers and books, and then I will return to my children and my ex-husband and parents and neighbors, who will probably ask me only not to leave again so soon. I will feed the chickens, because they really like me best, and we'll look for black widows, and I'll think about all the words dancing on all the pages
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Guests
by Susan Straight, April 20, 2006 10:16 AM
A boy named Christian spit on my youngest daughter Rosette yesterday on the school playground. When I went to the school this morning to see the vice principal, another mother whom I've known for ten years said, "How come it's always the boys named Angel or Christian who are so bad?" I didn't have time to look for him on the playground. I know what he looks like, because we've had trouble with him all year. He is a white kid, ten years old, stocky, and wears camouflage pants. His hair is streaked and highlighted and colored. (That always makes my daughters and me suspicious ? he's ten, shouldn't he be out riding bikes or feeding the dog or playing ball, rather than sitting for extended periods with complicated beauty products on his head? I mean, my girls all have hair to their waists and we don't spend that much time.) In November, this same boy called Rosette a nigger. Now, the word seems offensive, even when written here, and we're used to seeing the coy version. The n-word. But he didn't call her the n-word. That's not what he said. In November, when she came home and told me that, my older daughters were shocked, too. My girls are Swiss, French, African, Irish, Creek, and Cherokee-American. They have all gone to this same elementary school, and no one had ever called them that. Trouble has always come with boys in the fourth grade ? Gaila had a boy touching her all the time in line, trying to intimidate her by putting his hands on her butt. He was mixed race. I put on black clothes and sunglasses and caught up to him at lunchtime one day, and told him he'd better stop touching her or her father might have to speak with him ? at the correctional facility where he works. That was that. Delphine had five boys, all recent immigrants from Mexico, decide that she had pale brown skin and so should speak Spanish and be in love with them. They professed their desires by hitting her in the head with frozen water bottles and palm fronds. I tried to do the playground visit, but as I'm a thin blonde woman, they remained unimpressed in the most macho way. So Daddy had to stand outside the classroom door one day and study the boys. My ex-husband is 6-4, weighs 300 pounds, has worked for twenty years as a correctional officer, and favors wraparound sunglasses and Big Dog shirts. He rarely has to say more than a few words to be effective. He stood near the door and asked Delphine, "Which ones are they?" Then he just studied them and nodded. They ran. The trouble ceased. This time it's different. In November, I went to the vice principal and told him what had happened. I said the word to him, and he flinched. He's a tall white man, eminently reasonable. He didn't want to hear this word. I saw how he wanted me to say "the n-word." He immediately said he would call Rosette and talk to her about it, and I made him more uncomfortable by telling him that then she'd feel worse. Not only did someone call her something that stings and penetrates and goes inside the cartilage, now she'd be the one called in and talked to first, grilled in a sense. She had already told me that's what would happen. "Call Christian in first. Grill him," I said. "Don't make my child feel bad again because this happened." It's nearly impossible to explain, unless you're speaking to a parent of a black child in America. I see people watching my mouth, but not understanding. In November, after a few weeks, Rosette received an insincere sorry note from this boy. He avoided her for a time, and then, after Christmas, went back to subtle attempts at playground intimidation. Rosette is tall and fast and strong. There were incidents on the swings. We laughed them off. We called him pathetic. Then yesterday he hawked up a practiced glob of saliva and spit on her jacket sleeve. Of course I asked ? anyone else? No. On purpose? Yes. Christian. So well-named. My first inclination was to tell her to spit back. I did, and she gave me an incredulous look. "I tried," she said. "But I don't know how to do that." Well of course she didn't. I haven't trained my girls to collect their spit and use it to insult people. It's saliva, it's the message, it's the tool used to deliver the message during all those years of segregation and civil rights and busing and riots. It's spit. It means something. I would have liked to explain this to Christian, on the playground, but times are different now, and a parent cannot approach someone else's kid. (Though in our old neighborhood, any parent could discipline any kid, and that was community.) I would have liked to explain this to the vice-principal, but he was at another elementary school, doing double duty. So, sadly enough for both of them, I will call Daddy, as I would have anyway this morning, and tell him of the spit, and the boy again, and tomorrow morning they will receive a visit from him as it is his day off. My ex-husband still remembers with vivid clarity the first time someone called him a nigger. He was eight, and the boy was eight, and it was in our city park. It's in the cartilage and blood and memory. It's there now in Rosette, and I am washing the liquid off her jacket even as I write, and she knows tomorrow her father will stand on the playground, his arms folded, shoulders the width of the picnic tables nearby, and he will do what he
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Guests
by Susan Straight, April 19, 2006 9:11 AM
And then the mail came. A nice big envelope about Wordstock, the book festival in Portland which I can't wait to see. I love the poster. I'll be reading from my novel at the festival, and I'll get to see the azaleas and rhododendrons and blossoming trees in town. I'm staying, in Portland, with a friend who grew up in Riverside, a block from where I sit typing now. She's a great tour guide for Portland, the lovely old neighborhoods, the school renovated to the coolest collection of restaurant, bar and movie theatre I've ever seen. Portland is a great book town, with Powell's as the center of book culture, and I always meet the most interesting readers there. This time, I know my friend and I will get to talk about Beverly Cleary, and Ramona, and Klickitat Street. I heard an interview with Beverly Cleary on NPR a few weeks ago, and the wonder in her voice as she talked about growing up there, and how she created the characters in her much beloved children's books, reminded me of why some of us are writers. Making up stories, capturing the exact scents and sounds and conversation of a place ? that immersion into someone else's life or, if we're writing nonfiction, into our own. These past weeks have been crowded, and yesterday my middle daughter hit the hurdle during track practice and tore off most of the skin on and below her right knee. It wasn't pretty. My house was full with my kids, other kids, my ex-husband, my mother, and I was trying to stanch the blood. This is a tough child. Her profile and hand and one curl of her hair are on the cover of my novel. She has broken her arm, and not cried, but kept a stoic, nearly feral look on her face. Last night, two hours after I stopped the blood, she played in a basketball game, on adrenaline, but today she can barely walk. She hobbled off to school. I lay awake last night thinking about pain, and my house full of people, and couldn't sleep. At four in the morning, I wrote an essay due today for a new magazine launch in the fall. It's about how my daughters and I have always collected the seed heads in the garden ? columbine, larkspur, Flanders poppies, love in a mist ? and put them into jars to give the people who walk by and ask for seeds from my yard. The seed heads themselves look like elegant Chinese lanterns or papery bubbles topped with strange flourishes. In our neighborhood, there are three or four gardens almost exactly like mine, which started from these small jars. Given the rest of the week so far, I'm grateful for that. The other thing that sustained me, at dawn, was reading the journals of other writers. At my public library the other day, I picked out May Sarton, MFK Fisher, Madeleine L'Engle, and Doris Grumbach, all writers I've admired over the years. I had no idea that their lives mirrored mine, and other writers who are working mothers, so well. Madeleine L'Engle wrote a series of journals which were published in the Seventies. In the one I read last night, it is summer, and she is in her New England farmhouse with her own mother, her many children, and friends and neighbors and visitors who constantly clamor for her attention, and need food and clean clothes and time. She can't write, and I know that feeling of the brain being full to bursting like a seed pod. Madeleine L'Engle would walk down her land to a stream, wade into the icy water, and actually sit down in the rush and scream until she felt better. Her family knew better than to follow. I'm grateful as well that she wrote, and that the book still exists, on the library shelf where I reached for Beverly Cleary as a child, and that I can take books down and hold them at dawn, in my bed, just as I did when I was
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Guests
by Susan Straight, April 18, 2006 10:04 AM
There was a feature article about the new book, with a photo of my three daughters and me, in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, I found out in the morning via email. I don't get the Times every day. I tried, but it gets stolen from the sidewalk in front of my house if I don't pick it up at dawn. So after I took everyone to school, which involves two hours of driving around in the same circles because they are in different schools, I decided to walk to the market and get the Times. It's almost a mile. I was pretty happy, walking under the oak trees and carobs lining our old sidewalks, thinking about myself, wondering how I looked, about my book and having a lot more people know about it, until I turned down one street and saw a brown pit bull running loose. He was actually leaping around in people's yards and up onto their porches in a crazed way, as if he'd taken some PCP, but I remembered from my former neighbor's pit bulls that crazed was their normal appearance. I was scared. I've seen pit bulls, in my neighbor's yard, hanging from chains dangled from tree limbs (to strengthen their jaws) and repeatedly launching themselves against the wooden fence that separated our yards (until actually chewing through the wood and destroying the fence). I stood behind a bush. He was about eight houses down. I wasn't counting. I was staring at him as he cavorted and leapt over hedges, the power in his shoulders and legs. He lifted his broad head very delicately and slanted it toward me. Did he smell me? What was I? Not even marginally famous, or an author, or anyone. I was hiding. I was prey, or a game. He ran my way for a few lawns, then cocked his head again, hearing a cat or something, and ran the other way. I saw that I was in front of an ancient crumbling adobe house, one I've known all my life, and that the gate to their chainlink fence was unlocked. The dog came bounding my way again, and I stepped inside the gate and closed it. But what if this yard had a dog, too? I couldn't remember, though I walk past here often. I stood in the corner, in the dark, hoping the pit bull wouldn't see me. He ran this way, then that, and stopped two lawns down. He smelled something. He wasn't sure. I dialed 911 on my cell phone. He could definitely get to me through chain link. The number was busy. Busy? 911? The iconic three numbers of our times, of 9-11 and 911? This was the fifth time I'd called 911 in the past two years, three times for car accidents that happened on our street, once for a domestic violence case my daughters and I witnessed in a yard. Each time, the number was busy. The dog wandered closer, wandered away, then heard the sound of children screaming. At the end of the street was an elementary school. He leaped from the bushes of the house next door to the one where I hid, and then he ran down the sidewalk. I dialed 911 again. He was headed for a school, for God's sake. And what about the mailman? Number busy. I edged out of the gate, looked for his shiny brown coat, so shimmery it was like beaten copper. He was running the other way still. I can't run that fast. I'm forty-five. I kept to the porches and hedges and bushes, walking as fast as I could, knowing how high he could jump, hoping if I heard him, I could leap onto a car or shed. I kept turning my head, like a thief, to see if he saw me, followed me. He didn't. I turned the corner and ran several blocks. All the way home, about seven blocks, I turned my head to look behind me, knowing that to passing cars I appeared insane or tic-ridden. I was just hoping none of my friends saw me. I was in the Los Angeles Times. I didn't want anyone to see my picture later and wonder why I was scurrying down the street as if I'd stolen something. I looked as disturbed as the dog. Not like a writer, but more like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, running through Central Park. I made it home and went into my own backyard, where the three chickens and twelve rabbits waited to be fed. I sat on a chair back there until I could breathe again, thinking about emergencies and help and muscled shoulders. Who would my kids call if someone were attacking them? I put my cell phone back in my pocket and sat under my wisteria. The purple blossoms fell in the wind, and everything was very quiet but for the
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Guests
by Susan Straight, April 17, 2006 9:39 AM
Yesterday was Easter, and that meant I spent most of the day wrestling with a sixteen-pound ham, dismantling it with sharp knives and thinking of my mother-in-law and my children's ancestors and even some of the characters in my novel. My novel is set during slavery in Louisiana, from 1811 to the early 1840s. Meat was used for reward and punishment during slavery, and some people in the novel always crave flesh. Their bodies need it, and their minds desire the equality of the meat ? the people who owned them ate ham and bacon, and the owned were lucky to get white salt pork or innards. I wrote one scene where a woman steals ham to repay someone for kindness, after the fall butchering of hogs on a plantation. The ham ? the pink feathery flesh of the leg, made me think that we are only animals as well, when I wrote about the butchering. My mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, taught me to make a good ham, and to share it with everyone. My own mother was born in Switzerland, and for Easter, she concentrated more on the eggs and desserts and chocolate. Growing up, we might have had a canned ham swimming in watery juice. But my husband's mother, from the time I was sixteen and first met her, always made a huge smoked ham whose smell permeated her tiny kitchen and even wafted outside to the driveway. She fed fifty or so each holiday. When I married her son, she taught me how to make dishes that fed everyone, even the casual visitor who showed up with a nephew, or some guy walking down the street who stopped because he saw people eating in the driveway, sitting on folding chairs. My mother-in-law felt that anyone who stepped onto her property was her guest. It's a longstanding tradition in the black community ? the only way to show someone hospitality is to offer food. (My eldest daughter has started to notice that her wealthier school friends often have parents who offer no food, or any encouragement whatsoever, to guests.) From the time I was a teenager, in my future husband's house, I heard stories of how people craved meat. The men I knew had shot squirrels and possums and raccoons for survival, and their mothers and wives had skinned and roasted and stewed what was brought to them. (They said they'd never eat snake, though.) In Riverside, California, where I have always lived, my in-laws shared a whole pig with us sometimes, and my father-in-law's friend raised the hogs and butchered them. We ate pork chops unlike anything found in a grocery store. Alberta died in 1995, months before I had my third daughter. I think of her every day. At Christmas and Easter, I buy a large smoked ham. Today, my back was killing me. Ferrying around twenty pounds of meat and bone is hard. I put it on a rack in a huge roasting pot from my ancient Fridgidaire stove. After it's been in the oven for half an hour, I take it out and pull off the collar of skin, leathery and etched, which has loosened with the softened fat. I trim more fat from the sides, and I stare at the shimmery tendons and slick surfaces of cartilage. When the ham was nearly done, I put a glaze on it, and then spent the next six hours slicing at various times. My parents, my ex-husband, my children, and my neighbors all got plates of sliced ham. My neighbor M came over to tell me her car broke down again today, to ask if I can drive her kids to school this week. She has driven mine many times. We have been neighbors for seventeen years. She is as fierce as can be, and whenever there are drug dealers or roughnecks on the block, she's the one who stands with me in the yard staring them down, or calling the cops, or just threatening them ourselves ? we're both short and implacable. (Her favorite phrase ? "You take us all out to the woods, and I know who's coming out after a week ? you and me. We can survive on anything.") When she first moved in, and she and her husband noticed my light on until three in the morning, they came over to ask what I was doing so late at night. (He was a machinist working in his garage, so his light was on, too. But we had methamphetamine cookers on the block back then, so we were all checking each other out.) I told her I was writing. She cocked her eyebrows and said, "Why?" (That's a question I ask myself quite often even now ? the existential why of writing, like now, at midnight.) I couldn't explain it. I ended up telling her and most people I was folding laundry, and they were cool with that. Now she knows what I do. Tonight, like always, I gave her a big plate of ham when she
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