Underfoot

"I can't tell you my story," she screamed at me through tears. I had begged my mother for years to tell me who she was, who she is, and what she wanted to become, because I couldn't figure her out. She was always a mystery to me. At 87, she is still a woman of unique style. But, she is also a woman with nine closets, clothes hanging in them with original retail tags affixed and shoes in boxes, never worn. I didn't understand a lot of her behavior. On this particular day, I decided to press for the story that had eluded me. As I recall our ride in the car, I can't remember where we had been or were going, but her story still resonates. She was unusually frayed. "I want to be your friend," she challenged as we entered the car. "You want to be my friend? Friends share feelings, dreams, confidences, and intimate stories. You don't want to do any of these with me. It's a one-way dialogue with you. I tell you everything; you get to comment. I don't want this kind of relationship with anyone." That's when she shattered and burst and announced, "you will never really know me." "Why don't you let me be the judge of whether I am capable of understanding your story," I begged. "It's shameful," she hedged. "Mother, I'm not ashamed of you. I want to know about your childhood." And then, as she was saying she would never give details, they oozed from her.

Sometime around 1920, Mama's dad, J'Papa, and several other rural real estate hopefuls, pooled what money they had to buy Louisiana rice farmland. J'Mama, my grandmother, came to her marriage with means, so J'Papa used her money to enter the deal with his cronies. It's hard for me to imagine the barbed wire thin, rough-hewn 6'4" man I knew as my grandfather having friends, under any circumstances. The crystal blue gaze I remember from the 1950s was so austere that even his energetic grandchildren couldn't elicit a twinkle. What I didn't know is that by the time I met him he had lost all of J'Mama's money in the plantation investment due to weather conditions that could not support his dream of rice crops. Now, he and J'Mama lived as sharecroppers in an unpainted wooden three-room house with no electricity, water, or indoor plumbing. Occasionally, it was fascinating to visit the house in Richard that lay near the winding gravel roads, far off the rutted highways of Southwest Louisiana. We'd tumble from the car Daddy parked under the shade of an arresting bank of twisted oaks draped in low-hanging moss casting carelessly about in moist breezes. Beyond trees that congregated like a gossipy gathering of wise old widows, lay a hardscape of sandy dirt clods barely supporting a tumbledown rusty iron fence. Sometimes, after rain, it was all just a mud pit. The two-holer outhouse was off to the left.  The welcoming committee of pigs forced their snouts through wire fencing at the right and snorted greetings. We usually dealt with my mother's discomfort about these visits by swatting approaching chickens and scuffling over who could be first to pump water from the outdoor well and get a cool drink. Dust was still flying on the wind as we ran for places on the lopsided, uncooperative wooden porch swing. We were never successful with initial approaches to it; one of us dumped off the back or front.

Once we assembled on the porch, J'Mama rumbled over to dispense generous squeezes all around and then disappeared into the kitchen to fire up her wood-burning stove. Soon, coffee smells burst through her bare windows and we ran inside to see what else she might make for us. Sometimes she let me turn the shiny black beans in the grinder and help her drizzle quarter-cups of water over the fragrant brown powder until an inky brew wept into a chipped white ceramic pot. J'Mama's warm embraces erased all the fear we shared about the few snaggly teeth that remained in her generous smile. With the coffee dripped, she pulled out tall steaming yeasty rolls and a bowl of cane syrup so thick that we had force the bread into its sweetness. Her banquet helped us ignore the oily smell of kerosene lanterns that cast sooty black shadows onto the walls and ceiling.

While adults chirped endlessly, I mined the sparse shack for remnants of mother's childhood.  I never found traces of a younger Clarisse sitting alone for hours shaping dolls and their clothing out of discarded paper. Nor could I see the young girl trailing J'Papa through his shared fields to collect vegetables for dinner.  Early in Mama's life, J'Papa couldn't provide beef or pork for his family. Most of the neighboring farmers pooled their money to participate in a boucherie. Cajun families often slaughtered larger animals together, cooking and canning as much of the meat as they could harvest, dividing it equally. Mama's family got their leftover suet and lard to flavor vegetables. Any money there might be bought flour, salt, basics that couldn't be coaxed from the clods. When mother was old enough to be trusted, she walked barefooted along the winding gravel road to the grocer to negotiate a trade of one chicken for flour, cornmeal, milk, or whatever she could barter. With the limp neck of the animal hanging under her arm, she made her way to the store. Many times, dirt flying off a laughter-filled car driven by her high school classmates sprayed over her. They threw rocks at this girl who had no shoes to walk to the store, or wear to school. When she moved out of the crumpled cottage and away from Louisiana, the humiliation of it all took up residence inside her.

So this was it, the obsessive shopping. "Mom, these are the things I want you to share with me. This is how we get to be friends." She snapped back quickly, "I told you, I don't talk about it. Let's go look for new shoes," she twittered. And it was the last time I saw the little barefooted girl.