Rowan McCandless - Persephones Children: A Life in Fragments

a life in f agments

ROWAN MCCANDLESS

Copyright Rowan McCandless, 2021

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Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Whitney French

Cover design and illustrations: Laura Boyle | Interior designer: Sophie Paas-Lang

Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Persephones children : a life in fragments / Rowan McCandless.

Names: McCandless, Rowan, 1958- author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200373374 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200373439 | ISBN 9781459747616 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459747623 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459747630 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: McCandless, Rowan, 1958- | CSH: Women authors, Canadian (English)21st centuryBiography. | LCSH: Abused womenCanadaBiography. | CSH: Black Canadian womenBiography. | LCSH: Racially mixed womenCanadaBiography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PS8625.C364 Z46 2021 | DDC C818/.603dc23

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich, from Diving into the Wreck

A is for ancestry.

Those who have come before me. Those who are known. Those who have been lost and will never be found. A is also for ambiguity, anemia, and ancestry.ca.

B is for blood.

As in ties, as in relatives, as in covenant.

Blood can boil, run hot, run cold. Blood is thicker than water, according to your fathers family creed passed down through generations. Cast adrift on a sea of whiteness, family became your only life preserver.

Blood of the covenant. Blood of the womb.

Another interpretation: The bond between soldiers on the battlefield, forged ties stronger than family.

B is for Black Empire Loyalists, for Black Canadian history neglected, erased, and never taught in school.

Grandma Daisy, your fathers mother, was the keeper of family history. Remember, she said. You be proud. Youre eighth-generation Canadian on your fathers side. Our people came up with the Empire Loyalists. Weve been here longer than most, and still they treat us like dirt.

B is also for brown, for Black, for a colour of crayon, a bullshit concept called race the one-drop rule that reigned over wombs for the benefit of white privilege.

C is for conception.

Immaculate, miraculous, or otherwise.

C is also for childbirth, and for crabapple the only species of apple tree native to North America.

Once upon a time, a pregnant woman was tempted by ripe, reddened crabapples hanging from backyard tree branches. She plucked and ate, ate and plucked, until she doubled over in pain and was rushed to the hospital, confusing the agony of labour with a wicked stomach ache. Your mother called you her crabapple baby, as if your intention since conception was to cause her pain.

Civil rights. Civil wrongs. C is for colour, coloured, colouring. First years of elementary school with fresh packs of Crayolas, you had trouble staying within the lines excited by the prospect of filling mimeographed colouring sheets with tangerine grass, ruby-red raindrops, and aubergine skies.

But you never knew what to do with that flesh crayon.

Before,

You were Black,

You were Coloured,

You were caught

In a trap

Not of your choice or creation.

C is for Catholicism,

censer,

censor,

and censure.

We had trouble finding a priest that would marry us, Mother said. They said it was wrong for a Black man and a white woman to be together.

Your father was in charge of Sunday family drives, while your mother nourished soul as well as body. You rose early in the morning, dressed in your very best for Catholic Mass, your dark hair hidden modestly, apologetically, beneath a babushka, just like your Polish Canadian mother, her mother, her grandmothers mother; Eves daughters, your bodies wellsprings of original sin. You sat on worn wooden pews next to your mother, next to your brothers, next to families who accepted you and families who didnt. You listened to the liturgy in Latin; sat, stood, kneeled, and genuflected under the watchful eyes of priests, saints in stainedglass windows, statues of the Virgin Mary and of her son nailed to the Cross.

You learned man was made in Gods image a likeness white as driven snow. Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. You questioned how you fit in without a penis or purity of bloodline.

D is for Dark Shadows.

The late-sixties/early-seventies black-and-white American gothic TV soap opera that scared the bejesus out of you when you were younger. Dark Shadows, a supernatural tale of the Collins family, with witches, ghosts, and vampire curses; Barnabas Collins, released from his coffin with an unquenchable thirst for blood.

For a time, as a child, you believed vampires were real. At night you sought comfort in the rose-coloured plastic crucifix your Grandma Frances had given you. It dangled from a delicate chain around your neck. You slept in bed with the hallway light on, slept on the living room couch with one arm draped across your neck.

D is for dolls and dress-up, being Daddys little girl whether you wanted to or not.

D is for diasporas across ocean and continents, huddled masses fleeing poverty and persecution in the bowels of ships steerage, Massas slaves, shackled in chains, transported in Hells wooden underbelly.

D is for divisions.

Divides

not to be crossed.

D is also for divorce.