Memoir Writing
I'm writing a memoir about growing up in south Texas in the 1970s, becoming an anti-racist lesbian, and living in New York City. I'm workshopping the memoir with Morningside Writers Group.
Mother's Day (Essay)
by Jessie Daniels
Copyright 2002-2009
All Rights Reserved
I never came out to my mother as queer. She killed herself long before I had the chance to do that.
What would I have said to her? How would she have reacted? If there is some consciousness in an afterlife, does she know now? And if so, is she pissed? If I meet her in some afterlife incarnation, will I have to endure her homophobia? Or, is there some sort of heavenly-PFlag chapter which assists in the rehabilitation of homophobic parents so that they can greet their queer children upon their arrival? One ponders such unanswerable questions when one is queer and rendered permanently incapable of coming out to one's mother.
Often around Mother's Day, I have imaginary conversations with my mother about my life now, and about my queerness. It always goes something like this, "Mother, I have some good news and some bad news. First the good news, you'll be pleased to know that I pursued my education, finished college and then two other degrees, I'm a published author, I've been a college professor, I often dress well, and I get my nails and hair done regularly. The bad news is...I'm a dyke." There's another version of this conversation that includes facts about my girlfriend, Julie, who is from Boston. "I love her, she's good for me, I'm happy, we're content..." And, in my head, my mother always ends up saying something derogatory about a "Boston marriage." I know she would say something like that. She would have some assinine and off-the-wall comment that both simultaneously demeans and trivializes my life while placing at least part of the blame on "living up North." "Living up North" was both a region of the U.S. and a lifestyle where I grew up, a place almost entirely without redeeming qualities and the source of corrupting influences. It never goes well, this imagined conversation with my mother. I can't imagine how it could have gone well, given Shirley's history.
Shirley was not equipped to have a daughter who was queer. She grew up poor, the first generation not raised on a rural farm, but just as dirt poor in the city. The middle child of three children, she grew up in Galena Park, a nasty-smelling little down-on-its-luck town east of Houston wedged in between paper mills and oil refineries, where "red neck" was more a descriptor of what you got after a long day working in the sun and rarely a pejorative. For reasons that are beyond reason, Shirley was the scapegoat-child, and her mother treated her worse than if she were a stepchild she never wanted rather than her own. Perhaps Eugene, the oldest boy was the favored child of Annie Mae, and Carolyn, the youngest girl was the favored child of Tyson, and after all that favoritism for their first and last born, Annie Mae and Tyson didn't have anything left to give Shirley. Maybe they just didn't like her, and weren't very good at hiding it. Maybe Annie Mae was just crazy-mean, and Tyson was as afraid of her as her children were, and he learned early to look the other way. Whatever the source of it, there was an unending river of pain that flowed from Annie Mae toward her daughter Shirley over a lifetime. When Shirley was a child, Annie Mae would beat her with electrical chords until she bled. In an era in which many people believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, Annie Mae believed that if you didn't make them bleed you hadn't gotten their atttention. If one of the other children violated some household rule, or god forbid broke something, Annie Mae would spank all three of them, just to make sure she got the right one. Once in school, Eugene and Carolyn had friends and participated in after school activities like sports and band. And, though she did well in school, Shirley was never allowed to have friends over, stay after school for any reason because they would interfere with the household responsibilities she had (but the others didn't), and Annie Mae frequently kept her home from school to clean floors.
When Shirley was fifteen, a 26-year-old man named Floyd that worked with Tyson, expressed an interest in Shirley. They went on one date, and he asked Tyson for his permission to marry her. Annie Mae and Tyson encouraged her to marry him because, "who else would have you?" Shirley jumped at what looked like a chance at escape, and despite her good grades, quit high school and married Floyd when she was 15.
By the time she was 16, she was pregnant and Floyd was gone. She had my brother Gary when she was 17, moved back in with her parents, and started working as a secretary in downtown Houston.
Between the time she was 17 and 22, she had a series of emotional and mental breakdowns. She tried to committ suicide half a dozen or so times, and was hospitalized about as often. She was diagnosed as "paranoid schizophrenic" and given electro-shock treatments (ECT) which scrambled her brain and gave her permanent memory-loss. Somehow, she managed to recover some sense of self and started working again,this time a good job with Encyclopedia Brittanica, again in downtown Houston.
There, she met my father, Jim Tom, whom she described as "the handsomest man" she'd ever seen. They worked in the same office building, and started courting at a restaurant across the street called Hebert's ("Pronounced a-BEAR's" the sign outside said). They married when Mother was 24 and my brother was 9, and moved to the west side of Houston, a universe away from Annie Mae but not out of her control. Shirley still called Annie Mae everyday and if she didn't there was hell to pay.
Over the next few years, Shirley and Jim Tom had me, and six years later moved to Corpus Christi, four hours to the south of Houston. There Shirley seemed to do better, it was the furthest she had been from home her entire life and she was no longer required to call Annie Mae every day. It had a liberating effect for the first couple of years. She even felt well enough to invite the children her brother and sister, my cousins, to visit us on the Texas Gulf Coast, so they would have fun and I'd have playmates for the summer. One such summer, my cousin Jean Marie was staying with us. Jean Marie was the middle child of Eugene, Shirley's older brother. Late one night, a call came from New Orleans where Eugene's family lived. Eugene had killed himself. My mother's brother put a gun to his head, called Leslie his 16-year-old son into the room, and pulled the trigger. He left behind a wife and 5 children, all under the age of sixteen, none of whom ever understood why he did that.
Four years later, Shirley's younger sister Carolyn, who lived in Monroe, Louisiana started having serious stomach trouble and her doctor could not find the problem. Carolyn came to Houston to consult specialists and they did find the problem, but no hope. She had colon cancer. After an agonizing five months, and as many surgeries, she died at 36, leaving her husband and three young kids.
Not long after these two deaths, Shirley had another breakdown. She was hospitalized in Corpus for about six weeks and eventually released with lots of medication, but no therapy. She seemed to get better eventually, but then we moved back to Houston.
We were back in Houston about six months when Jim Tom went to Kentucky for a gas-compressor-related business trip. He was working with a bunch of other guys, getting compressed gas moved from a hole in the ground onto a truck, when the truck blew up, killing four of the six men there, and severely injuring Jim Tom. He had second- and third-degree burns over 77% of his body and it was not clear whether or not he'd survive this accident. Shirley, Annie Mae and I flew from Houston to be with him. Shirley was strong, focused, and clear about taking care of him. I passed out three times after I saw my father burned to a crisp like a marshmallow you held over the campfire too long. So, at 15 years old and no license to drive yet, I flew back to Houston to deal with the movers (my parents had just bought a new house) and pay the mortgage and be a grown-up.
Shirley seemed to find a purpose from my father's injuries. She was, in some ways, the best I'd ever seen her. More capable and energized than I'd ever known her to be. Jim Tom did recover fully, and with remarkable speed after this, but Shirley never was the same again.
Soon afterward, I left home and Jim worked non-stop trying to rebuild a business that was destroyed in the fire and makeup for lost time. That meant that Shirely was left by herself, alone, most of the time. She only left the house once a week for a trip to the hairdresser, grocery store, and liquor store; and, she drank a lot more, sitting there alone. By the time she swallowed five bottles of pills one night in March 1983, she was swallowing about a fifth of vodka a day.
Shirley packed more tragedy into one lifetime than should be allowable by any karmic law. Having a daughter who is queer would have only seemed like another tragedy to her. In many ways, I'm relieved that she was spared this additional "tragedy" (as happy as it makes me being queer), and I'm doubly relieved that I was spared her homophobia. The much harder answerable question is an existential one: would I have had the courage to come out had my mother not killed herself?
I can't answer that question. I only know that the struggle for me was always about how to stop Shirley's pain and, at the same time, how to have my own life. There's no easy answer to that one, no Hallmark-approved Mother's Day card that can tie a suicided mother and a queer daughter into a neat bow suitable for purchase. I do hope that if there's an afterlife, they have P-Flag meetings.