In the Country of Women

  ALSO BY SUSAN STRAIGHT

  Between Heaven and Here

  Take One Candle Light a Room

  A Million Nightingales

  Highwire Moon

  The Gettin Place

  Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights

  I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots

  Aquaboogie

  The Friskative Dog (for children)

  Bear E. Bear (for children)

  Copyright © 2019 by Susan Straight

  First published in the United States in 2019 by Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  Some of these chapters have appeared, in different form, in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Oxford American, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Best American Essays 2010, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Linda Hogan for permission to reprint a portion of her poem Walking.

  Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are provided courtesy of the author.

  Photograph on title page: Rosie Morris and Alberta Sims

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-22-6

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965034

  Printed in the United States of America

  10987654321

  For General and Alberta Sims,

  and John and Gabrielle Watson

  Author’s Note

  Memory is a sixth sense, or seventh—and so belongs in specific truth to the people who told me these stories over a span of fifty years. I’ve written them here as they were given to us—people whose lives were not documented by history but by their own persistence in retelling all of us, again and again, how we came to be.

  For the six generations of women in this book:

  “Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you must do is put it on.”

  — JAMES BALDWIN

  Contents

  Prologue: Homerica

  PART I

  1Little House in the Thistles

  Glen Avon, California, 1963

  2The First Bullet

  Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876

  3The Dance

  Ruby Triboulet, Colorado Prairie, 1921

  4The Country Squire

  Riverside, California, 1973

  5Nurse-in-Charge

  Rosa Leu, Aeschlen, Switzerland, 1944

  6Hey Now

  Riverside, California, March 1974

  7Olympia—One Can Could Get You Pregnant

  Riverside, California, June 1974

  8Daisy Belle

  Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1915

  9Driveway #1—The First Love Letter

  Riverside, California, May 1976

  PART II

  10Castas

  11Mulato

  Riverside and Los Angeles, California, 1979

  12The Second Bullet

  Jennie Stevenson, Outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, Early 1900s

  13Fruitful

  14The Toast

  Riverside, California, 1983

  15Fruitful #2

  Riverside, California, 1989

  PART III

  16Run the World

  Riverside, California, 1989

  17Wild Things

  Riverside, California, 1995

  18Pig

  Rubidoux and Riverside, California, 1997 (South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia)

  19The Santa Ana River

  20A Secondhand Lonely

  Riverside, California, 1998

  21Dew Point—A Pack of Four

  Riverside, California, Endless

  22Love Strands

  Riverside, California, 2000

  23Crosses and Missions

  California, 1998, 2000, 2004

  24Coach—Driveway #2

  Riverside, California, 2004

  25The Batmobile

  Riverside, California, 2005

  26The Yard Couch

  Riverside, California, 2008

  27Grizzly

  Riverside, California (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Fraser, Colorado)

  28Nine

  29Al Green—Driveway #1, The Second Love Letter

  Riverside, California

  30Travels with My Ex in the Time of Revenue

  Orange County, California, 2009

  PART IV

  31Switzerland, Loveland, Cuddyland

  Always, January 12, 1950, Always

  32Bring Me Your Smartest Girl

  Riverside, California, 2008; Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1925

  33Kin—White House #1

  Los Angeles, California, 2009 (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Riverside, California)

  34A Place of Style and Refuge—White House #2

  Riverside, California, December 2011

  35Letter to My Nephew—Our Dungeon Shook (After James Baldwin)

  Riverside, California, 2012

  36American Human Not Interested

  37Braid/Züpfe

  Los Angeles, California, 2017

  38Ancestry

  Riverside and Santa Barbara, California; Ibadan, Nigeria, 2018

  39Saphina

  Tennessee, 1870

  40The Work of Women—Evaporation and Memory, White House #3

  Riverside, California, 2018

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Homerica

  To my daughters:

  They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: “Her passage was worthy of Homer . . . her voyage a mythic quest for new lands.” Women don’t get the Heroine’s Journey.

  Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. The monsters and battles and the murders. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get “the epic novel,” “the great American story,” and Ken Burns documentaries.

  But our women fought harder than men—they fought men! Men who claimed to love them, to protect them, to help them—men who trapped and tried to kill them. They fought for sons and daughters, they had the battalions of their sisters and mothers and aunts. Some bad-ass aunts. The women used their cunning and their bullets, the power of their ancestors and of the other women in the wagon or the truck with them. They survived passages that would have made a lot of men quit. Sometimes the men did quit. Sometimes the women quit the men—to stay alive.

  The women might have wanted to return home. But they couldn’t. They were not Odysseus, with rowers and soldiers, returning after conquer and plunder. These women had to travel to new worlds—pioneers and explorers, mythic as goddesses of war and love and intellect—because the old world was trying to kill them, starve them, or bury them alive.

  Our women were not in history class, or film, or the literature of “the canon.” Our women survived the men who survived the cannons of war, and those were hard men. We hung out with hard men. Weak men. Good men. We married them. We got the babies. The violence. The guns. More babies. The laundry. The pots. Dancing. Pigs. The barter—sex and beds and sheets. The chickens. The bread.

  We kept the nation alive.

  The women who came before you, my daughters, were legends. Their flights lasted decades, treks that covered America, after they arrived here from the continents of Africa and Europe and married into the indigenous peoples of this continent. They crossed countless rivers. They were, like Odysseus, imprisoned and seduced and threatened with death. They slept with lotus-eaters and escaped monsters like the Cyclops and Charybdis, and sometimes they battled other women w
ho were Sirens or who tried to steal their children.

  Because they always had their children on the boat, and even other women’s children for whom they had become responsible. Odysseus survived everything to return to his wife and son, but he didn’t have little kids on his boat. Though he kept losing his soldiers, he started out with a damn army, and instead your female ancestors had endless brigades of foolish and jealous men trying to stop them.

  These women had murder and marrow on their minds. They shed blood for us.

  Fine, who was your father’s great-grandmother, utterly alone after her enslaved mother died when she was six or seven. No sailors on her ship, no gods to capture winds in a leather pouch and deliver them to her for speed when she fled the violence of Reconstruction in Tennessee.

  Daisy, your father’s grandmother, a lovely trickster who kept secret the identities of the men who fathered her four daughters—even, as they say, taking their names to her grave. A woman with a smile so incandescent she was threatened with death if she took her face away from her first husband. Her single captain was Aint Dear, a fierce goddess of retribution herself after they fled Mississippi.

  Ruby, my paternal grandmother, her hopeful travels in a Model A Ford with a battalion of five sisters, from Illinois to Colorado and then marriage to someone she fled again and again—the sisters her aid, the husband her love and her enemy, until the Rocky Mountains claimed her.

  Rosa, my mother’s stepmother, a woman from a Grimm’s fairy tale, a stern and tireless general who with no assistance kept my feckless grandfather and his children alive by leading them to Fontana, California.

  The promised land. All the women ended up in Calafia, a mythical island ruled by a warrior queen, whose inhabitants were black women. It is said our state was named for her.

  The Odyssey was an epic poem meant to be declaimed aloud to people assembled for hearing the tale of harrowing travels home, for loyalty and love. We heard our stories spoken cautiously, or whispered. Here are the women. The origin bodies for thousands of Americans, including you, my daughters.

  My mother gave me my first book when I was three. I read the Greek and Roman myths when I was five, in D’Aulaire’s wonderful illustrated anthology, because a kindergarten teacher was kind to me and let me sit in the corner with books. I was mesmerized by the pantheon of gods and goddesses, memorized their powers, fascinated by The Odyssey, by the monster Scylla and the beautiful Sirens. I imagined myself running like Diana the Huntress when I was attacked by boys or men, actually prepared perfect scathing rebukes, like Athena, who sprang from her father’s head fully formed and intellectually whole. My father was gone, and my mother was working, but I sprang from the pages of books fully formed, though I was so small and thin and ugly I was often invisible, except for when I was hunted as a girl and young woman, as so many of us were then, and I had to use what I’d learned in books to escape.

  Sometimes the women in our family didn’t escape.

  The women crossed thousands of miles of hardship so that when I was fourteen and your father was fifteen, he could walk one mile from his house to the end of my street—no one had cars, no one had any money for a date, we met only in parks—where he bounced a basketball in the playground of my elementary school. I walked there to meet him. We sat on the wooden bench against the chain-link fence that separated the playground from the railroad tracks twenty feet away. His shirt: white waffle-weave long underwear with the sleeves cut off for a tank top. I remember the smell of freshly laundered cotton and Hai Karate even now. My shirt: a halter top I’d sewn from two red bandannas, from a pattern I found in Seventeen magazine. We talked for a long time in the darkness, played a few games of H-O-R-S-E (I wondered why it was always horse and never something more entertaining, like platypus or elephant or anaconda), and returned to the splintery bench. We kissed for the first time.

  His arms were the color of palm bark—brown with a glossy red underneath—and his fingers so long and elegant that when he put my palm against his, my whole hand barely came to the middle knuckles. My arms should have been pale, but this was 1975—some girls rubbed Johnson’s baby oil onto their skin and lay at the beach or beside pools to get brown. I had the baby oil—but no beach or pool. I mowed lawns and lay in the bed of my dad’s truck while he drove us to the desert.

  Your father pointed to the dark brown dot on the skin below my collarbone. “What’s that?” he said quietly.

  Was I supposed to say mole? Mole sounded terrible. A blind animal nosing out of the earth. I was so nearsighted I could barely see the playground, because I’d left my glasses at home. “Beauty mark?” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s if you paint it on your face.”

  “Who says?”

  “All my aunts.”

  I remember too the smell of sulfur in the rocks along the railroad tracks, and the pepper trees nearby with their spicy pink berries.

  Thousands of miles of migration—from slave ships arrived to America, from boats leaving Europe after World War II, from indigenous peoples, hardened ranchwomen, and fierce mothers. The women moved ever west, fled men, met new men, made silent narrow-eyed decisions in the darkness, got on buses and in cars and walked for miles to survive. West until there was no more west.

  We were born here, to more dreamers of the golden dream, the ones you never hear about. We moved through the streets of southern California, still with no money, but we had more than those women did when they were girls. We shared one burrito four ways, we rode eight to a car in a Dodge Dart or crowded the bed of a Ford pickup, we partied in the orange groves or in a field by the towering cement Lily Cup, where our friends’ parents worked at the plant making paper cups that Americans used to hold at the water cooler.

  More than a year later, your father finally picked me up in the Batmobile, a 1961 Cadillac with vintage paint oxidized brown as faded coffee grounds, with huge fins as if sharks would chaperone us down the street. The sound was like a freight train. Sitting in the passenger seat, I saw a dark stain along the inside of the door. It was cold, and I asked your father to roll up the window, but he didn’t want me to see the spiderweb cracks around the bullet hole in the glass. Some guy had been leaning against the car window when he was shot. The stains were reminders of his blood. General Sims II, your grandfather, had bought the car from under a pepper tree where it had sat since the murder, covered in California dust. Your father drove me a mile and a half, to General and Alberta’s house, and in the driveway Alberta held out her hand and said, Come and make you a plate, and my life changed.

  That is how you, our three daughters, became California girls. Via the Batmobile. You are the apex of the dream, the future of America, and nearly every day of my life I imagine the women watching you, hoping they—the ancestors—won’t be forgotten.

  In the country of women, we have maps and threads of kin some people find hard to believe. The women could not have dreamed that in this promised land we would still have bullets and fear and murder. Fracture and derision and assault, sharp and revived.

  I was born here, and I am still here, and I didn’t leave, which doesn’t feel very heroic. You three have laughed at me for looking out the kitchen window of our house toward the hospital where I was born, where your father was born, where you were born. My daily life is a five-mile radius of memory and work and family. You three daughters know this in your genes: You love only orange-blossom honey, because you grew up with that scent and those flowers, that fruit and those bees. You long for Santa Ana winds and sunflowers, tumbleweeds and the laughter of people eating at long unfolded tables in a driveway. We bury descendants of the women, and we serve funeral repasts in church halls built by some of California’s black pioneers. The women in our family are everything: African-American, Mexican-American, Cherokee and Creek, Swiss, Irish and English, French and Filipino, Samoan and Haitian. Some of their heritage remains a mystery.

  I was not beautiful, and I never went anywhere. But I’m the writer. When I was sev
enteen, and left for college in Los Angeles, one of my first class assignments was a Xeroxed copy of Joan Didion’s famed essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I read it three times, actually breathless. Her sentences were lapidary and precise. She dissected the place where we live with lovely caustic prose: “This is the country where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers’ school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

  I was stunned.

  She was writing about us, except for the Dial-A-Devotion. (I never knew anyone who did that.) My mother and all three of my aunts had been “divorcees.” One aunt had been married three times. One was recently divided from a Fontana Hell’s Angel biker. My stepmother was divorced when she met my father; she was now his third wife. My friends—black and white and Japanese-American and Mexican-American—were named Kimberly and Sherry and Debbie. We lived amid the citrus groves described in the essay, with low walls built of riverbed stone.

  I went home that weekend, passing through the places Didion’s essay made famous: Ontario, Fontana, and Rialto. Finally I got to Riverside, and in my mother’s kitchen, standing at the Formica counter I had spent half my life scrubbing, I tried to explain the piece to my mother. She was distracted, cooking, not interested until I read part of a paragraph out loud, wherein the cheating wife pushes a burning Volkswagen that contains her unconscious husband into a lemon grove. My mother looked up at me then, and said, “That was Lucille Miller. Your aunt Beverly lived across the street from that woman when it happened. She always said Lucille was going to kill someone.”