Donna Hill - What Mother Never Told Me

H er dead mother was alive.

Yet, days after learning the unthinkable, Parris McKay was still unable to reconcile the truth with the lie shed been nursed and nurtured on for three decades. The enormity of it echoed throughout the cool stillness of the one-room church.

Her emotions shifted between disbelief and anger, anguish and shock, to despair and back again. So shed come here to the one place where shed always found answers, balance and a quieting of her spirit.

But even here, the solace she sought was unattainable, a vapor that could be seen but not touched. The letter she held between her slender fingers was yellowed with age and had been freed with the others from their hiding place behind her Nanas stove, its wizened face crisscrossed by the fine lines of an unfamiliar hand, cracked under the onslaught of air and light.

Parris held the letter like one unfamiliar with a newborncautious, fearful, yet in awe of its mysteries. There were answers here, etched between the lines that she struggled to see. She knew it, could feel it. She knew if she just looked hard enough she would know why .

The words, though not addressed to her, connected her to the woman shed only imagined. The woman that was buried on European shores after giving birth to heror so shed been told. Told so many times that she believed it, became part of the lie. She believed her Nana when she sat her down on her knee, looked her deep in the eyes and said, Your mama loved you so much, gal, wanted you to have a little piece of somethin so bad that she begged those fancy doctors to save her baby no matter what. Yessir, thats what she done for ya, cause she loved ya. Even fo you got here.

Imagine being loved like that, so hard and so strong even before you took your first breath. The thought of it filled all the empty spaces that the void of not having her mother left in her life.

And thats the lie she told her friends when they asked where her mother was and why she lived with her grandmother. She told her truth. The only one she knew. Now what she knew was no more. The ache of it settled in her bones, squeezed her heart and stripped her throat raw.

What was she to do?

She bowed her head as the long shadow of the cross fell across her lap, deepened as the sun shifted and prepared to settle down for the night. Shed lost track of how long shed sat on the worn wooden pew, its hardness softened and curved by hips and thighs that heaved, sighed and caressed it throughout the years.

Her green eyes, butterfly quick, flitted from one space to the next as a montage of images gathered around her. How many times had she walked the aisle as a child, a teen, a woman? How many sermons had she heard, christenings and marriages had she attended? How many songs had she sung in the choir? How many times had she looked out on the congregation to see her Nana Cora and Grandpa David watching her with pride? So many.

But how could any of thisall the things that she knewbe concrete when she was no more than an illusion? And if she was no longer real then nothing in her life could be, either. With familiarity now a stranger, she had no choice but to create a new reality. And if not here, then where?

Shed come back, back to her home of Rudell, Mississippi, to be witness to her grandmother Coras transition. The woman who raised her, loved her, taught her right from wrong, gave her the gift of musiclied to her. Lied. The word burned in her throat, stirring and simmering into something bigger than herself, erupting into an emotion that was so unfamiliarrage. Parris raged at Cora, raged at her for keeping the secret and nearly taking it with her to her grave.

Cora confessed on her waning breath that Emma, her mother, was alive, was living in Europe, that shed turned her infant daughter over to Cora only days after her birth and never returned. The only connection Cora had with her daughter through the years was the intermittent letters that filled the tin box behind the stove.

Cora turned the letters over to Parris in the final hours before her passing. They revealed so much and nothing at all. Handwriting style, frequency, location, inquiries about the child shed abandoned. Yet none of the letters collected for almost thirty years explained why .

Why was Parris unworthy of her mothers love? Why did Emma give her away and never come back? Why was Parris told that her mother was dead? And why did the woman whom shed idolized all her life keep the answers and take them with her?