GRACE AND GRAVITY

by Keshni Naicker Washington

{Salt} 

I traveled over eight thousand tear-soaked miles for over twenty hours to get back to her, from the east coast of the southern tip of Africa to Johannesburg, then flying sixteen hours over the Atlantic Ocean to Atlanta and lastly flying for another two and a bit hours to reach DC. My journey out to the east coast of South Africa ten days prior had taken me home in time to attend my mother’s funeral with my dad, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. Tradition dictated the cremation would need to take place only a few days after her passing. A sudden passing. She had won her battle with cancer and was seemingly in remission for almost a year. I received the news seven hours later than everyone else due to the time difference between the USA and South Africa. This left me less than a day to agonize over the decision to leave my ten-month-old baby girl, whom I had cared for full time since the day she was born, for the first time in her life. She didn’t have a passport yet. My daughter could not come with me to the funeral of the grandmother she had not yet met in person. The grandmother who had video called her multiple times a week to delight in every baby gurgle and sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” The grandmother to whom I announced her first granddaughter’s impending birth, the night before she went into surgery to get the cancer cut out. On that call, that night, I witnessed an audible transformation in my mother’s voice, from despair to joy.

Mom to me via WhatsApp: I couldn’t think about anything else before the surgery. And it was the first thing I thought about after the surgery. I’m so happy.

As I trembled my way through customs and baggage claim, I fashioned my Google search results into a mental security blanket.

According to the Internet wisdom: 10 month olds can recall specific events or people for a few days or weeks with repeated exposure.

The doors slid open. I squinted at the expectant blurry faces in the arrivals reception area through my sudden tears, as I walked too fast and paused too late past the end of the walkway.

“Hold it together. She will remember you.”

Then I found them both around the corner. She was in a sunshiny dress and blue jeans, an outfit I had never seen before. I sipped on the precious sight of her for a few more seconds before she spotted me. She squealed instantly and beamed a broad grin, but then looked back over her shoulder at her dad, as if asking for verification. I leaped to close the gap between us and scooped her up into a tight embrace. She was real. She was here. She was mine. She remembered me.

Bitter.

Before I crossed the ocean, heading west to Washington, DC, for the very first time, my teacup was filled with fragrance. A particular fragrance imbibed three to five times a day by my mom, my neighbors, my aunties. The fragrance of a continent; a country; my home. The fragrance of red bushes that grew in the clay earth of my piece of Africa. I reach for it still. Before I crossed the ocean, I imbibed primary colors. My teacup was filled with the searing red of an African sun’s last throes, as it bled into the two oceans roiling at the southernmost tip of a continent. The soil eroded from cliffs which contain caves where humankind created its first art six thousand years ago. The rain falls like sacred blessings from the Khoi San gods across the parched Kalahari Desert and deluges the Cederberg Mountains. All absorbed by leaves and stalks, brewed into rich red rooibos tea, and poured into my cup. After I cross the ocean to travel west, must I learn to run on Dunkin’?

After I crossed the ocean, I inhabited a land with over three hundred million other brave and free souls, yet in my mourning of Anandavallie, my mom, it felt as if the 3,500,000-odd square miles of the USA were utterly uninhabited. The loneliness of mourning someone no one else around me knew compounded and compacted inside me.

(Sour)

Something in me was diamond strong, like those extracted from the mines of the Johannesburg Highveld, the town that became my home after I left my parents’ house. Like things compressed generation after generation and passed down to me, from the truths and the injustices borne by the woman who brought her young child—my paternal grandfather—with her from British India, into a lifetime British indenture contract in Africa. There was surely an inheritance of grit from my father’s mother, a woman who was illiterate yet ran a vegetable stall in the market with financial meticulousness, and who could cut you down to size with her tongue. Part of my inherited strength was surely also passed from my mother’s mother, who strove to hold her family together with every breath she took, and every dish she cooked at the gatherings she compelled us to join. While she cooked, my grandfather, who was always reading, beat me at checkers, and challenged me with geometry puzzles he made using matchsticks. Under the government’s racial restrictions on access to work, he would be a presser in a clothing factory all his life. Then there was the young girl who collected herbs grown on the riverbanks to include in the samosas she would sell in parking lots—my mother. All were nonwhite in apartheid South Africa.

I will only ever know a fraction of my mother’s trials, and only those I witnessed with my own eyes. She was proud and unwilling to dwell on, or speak of, any weakness. Sadness and negativity were quickly cast off. When life handed her lemons… or something.

I contemplate these ancestors and how their strength and their sacrifice of self was rooted in the dream of a better future for those who came after. I would become intimately acquainted with my own such inner reservoirs when I began to care for the first generation of my family to be born in America.

Sweet.

Have you ever wrestled a baby octopus? That’s what it felt like when trying to get my daughter into clothing on any ordinary day, but this is no ordinary day. 

She was turning one and this was no ordinary clothing. It was her birthday dress. The clock was ticking. The photographer was surely about to ring the doorbell, and the guests would not be far behind. I was in her lilac room with the flowers and fairy lights, engaged in a wrestling match. And I found the most perfect extravaganza of a first birthday dress too: shiny sequins and a big tulle skirt. It’s gorgeous. And every time I thought I had gotten at least one arm into a rose gold sequined sleeve, my daughter seemed to still somehow be pushing me away, de-sleeved, seconds later. And she was strong too.

The clock was ticking, so I tried reasoning with her, “Why have you decided you don’t like this dress? You will look so cute in it. You will thank me later.”

My handmade birthday banners were hung, and the table had been decorated with my hand-painted signs. The cake, of which I baked three versions: the first time because I put parchment paper in the pan, and it took the wobbly shape of the parchment paper instead of the pan; the second time, without parchment paper but then that darn lemon layer broke right down the middle while I attempted to get it out of the pan too soon; and, well, the third time was the charm. I iced it and carefully placed every sugar flower, gummy heart, and rainbow. It was beautiful. All that was left to check off the vision for the birthday party was to get my daughter into that dress. Then she pulled out the only move she had left, the tears. I comforted her, took a brief break, and tried again but this time with bribery. It worked. As I picked her up off the changing table, she grabbed a handful of pink tulle, lifted it, and locked eyes with me, in clear nonverbal communication, “Like seriously, Mom.” “You will wear this dress! Now, off you go.” I won!

I was struck by that déjà vu feeling. But this was like a reverse déjà vu with a twist.

A memory surfaced. Those same words, “You will wear this dress.”

Except it was uttered by my mom to me, at my twenty-first birthday. It wasn’t the first time we had this discussion, but it would be the last. My mom insisted I wear a dress she laid out. I did not want to. I hadn’t wanted the party in the backyard of our below street–level house in an apartheid-segregated township. I didn’t want to be the center of attention. My refusal was a big deal. In my conservative community, you lived at home until you were married, and you always obeyed your parents. We argued. But I stood my ground, and I wore pants instead. I won in that moment. And I would leave home shortly after to move first to Johannesburg and eventually to Washington, DC. My teenage tendency to see things within hard lines with no room for grayness, and the typical generational clash of parent and child, often set us on opposite sides, worsened by my perpetual fighting stance against the context of our larger sociopolitical reality in South Africa.

Fast forward, decades later, under a northern hemisphere sky, I find myself looking into the defiant dark brown eyes of my infant daughter. Even at this young age she has earned the nickname “rebel without a cause yet.” Her arrival had upset all the neatly crafted rangoli of my life. Just as you would carefully choose the rangoli colors for the grains and sprinkle them with slow precision into an intricate pattern at your doorstep to invite good luck, I had crafted my life, loved and failed, and adventured myself into an adult on my own terms. Terms that were sometimes at odds with what other people thought I should do or be—and certainly despite the implicit and explicit messages I had received about who I was not or what I was allowed to be throughout my childhood in South Africa. My brand of self-determining rebellion was survival. My leaving was survival. In a different way, my mom fashioned her own armor for the unwelcoming world she found herself in that enabled her to remain intact while remaining within it, without the option of leaving.

Everyone who arrived for my daughter’s first birthday party declared how adorable she was in that dress. I looked around at my handiwork and felt satisfied with how everything had come together. I spotted my daughter. She was walking around a little awkwardly, tugging at that tulle skirt; unsure about how to run at full speed, as she usually does; unsure about how to judge the distance to the toy she was reaching for. That tulle skirt was between her and everything else in her world. She was usually so confident. Was this win worth it? I sped up the phototaking and whisked her off to her room. I swapped the dress for her everyday clothes. She was running around at her usual speed, with abandon, soon after.

And here comes the twist. Why had it been so important to me to do all this with my mom having passed away only seven weeks before her granddaughter’s first birthday? The answer is that my mom loved celebrating her children’s birthdays. And she made them super special. You could wake up to a room full of balloons. There would be a special cake that she had stayed up late baking. We also only got new clothes on our birthdays. In my family, we don’t say I love you, but every year on my birthday I always got a special new birthday dress. 

[Umami]

On a cold, northern hemisphere October day, my mom passed away, under the African sun. Our relationship had its ebbs and flows. But something transformed when my daughter came into my life. She melted all my well-drawn lines. There was an unexpected, acute awareness of what mothering means, in all its glorious complexity and dichotomies. From that day forth, I have lived in the gray. And in the gray, I found forgiveness. Real forgiveness. The kind that at low tide washed out to sea all the debris off the mom-daughter battleground beach of my childhood and young adulthood. Leaving the kind of space that allowed long walks and talks. The kind that, at high tide, flooded the beach with love and small, surprising seashells or sea-glass treasures to collect and keep.

My mother left this world before I got the chance to say this all to her in actual words. I never got to tell her that I was over it all, that I could finally see beyond the judgments I had previously propped up to prop myself up. And what I found beyond those was peace in the gray. I never got to tell her that, as my daughter is growing into toddlerhood and beyond, I was discovering that everything she gave me before I left home at twenty-one was more than enough. And that so much of the mothering that she did moves the hands that care for her first granddaughter.

If I could say one last word to her, I’d say, “Sawubona.” The Zulu greeting from the South African province where my ancestors lived, and where I was born. 

It means, “Hello.” It also means, “I see you.”

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Keshni Naicker Washington’s stories are influenced by the two continents she calls home. Born and raised in an apartheid-segregated township in South Africa, as a teenager she witnessed the transition to democracy. She now also considers Washington, DC, home. And after a decade here, she has finally gotten used to Orion being the right way up in the night’s sky. Her stories are an interrogation of her personal lived experience on each of these continents and the communities she has known, and built, and lost, and claimed on both continents. Rooted in this experience is an evolving definition of home and belonging, and the effects of the tides of social and political change that move her, and us all. She believes in the power and potential for stories to be signal fires and she hopes to be able to continue writing and creating such beacons for the rest of her life.