There are Rubbermaid containers piled high, reaching my breastbone. They are yellowed with age, formerly clear. I pry the lid off the closest container, hungrily and hopefully inhaling the musty air. Am I smelling Gran Gran?
Scads of Jiffy Photo envelopes lay inside this one. Photographs spill out of a woman I knew until I was five. Her bright blue dress and jacket compliment her darker skin, her coils are neatly arranged under a fascinator hat. She had a beautiful smile. If I squint, can I see that smile in my mind’s eye? Does the mirror reflect this smile?
In this one, a wooden bead curtain. I carefully pull it out and hold it against a grimy wall, the deep browns, blues, and greens cascading down into the image of a hummingbird. I finger the string of beads with my free hand. I imagine walking through it. So smooth, like a gentle caress. It formerly hung in Grandma’s kitchen doorway. Gran Gran had brought this from Jamaica. I remember words echo in the air: This thing is so tacky, it makes us look cheap. I could find a space in my tiny apartment to hang this in. I could soak up Gran Gran through my fingertips.
Grandma was ashamed of her, Dad told me once in hushed tones. Gran Gran cleaned houses, and her darker skin made their family lower class. My grandmother’s lighter skin, inherited from the father who had abandoned them, afforded her opportunities. It also gave Grandma a calm, confident superiority she had carried like a shield.
She met my Irish Grandpa, and relief escaped in her happy sigh when Dad arrived light-skinned. My father barely knew Gran Gran, he was not allowed to know her. He said she kept her distance, only coming around for special occasions. She did not want to shatter the illusion Grandma worked hard to weave.
And then there is me, anchorless and drifting.
Gran Gran and Grandma are gone, their stories buried with them. Grandma kept her lips tightly buttoned, and Dad hadn’t been bothered to ask, he won’t even come here now.
I feel anger fizzling up from my belly and settling into the corners of my eyes. I am the faded writing on a palimpsest, my story overwritten by my family and even strangers. I am neither light nor dark enough, but still other, Every new interaction a variation of the same questions: Where are you from? But how, when you’re so pale? Is that why you have that hair?
So I unlid containers, burrowing through dust-caked artifacts of my denied inheritance, taking the pen in hand for once. I will fill the holes with bits of decaying paper and pea soup memories, displaying what I find and telling anyone who will listen.