Mama’s Child
by joan steinau lester
Ruby, the narrator in the following excerpt, is the biracial child of a white mother and African American father who met during the civil rights movement. This scene takes place when Ruby is 38 and a professor at Harvard. She has not spoken to her mother, Elizabeth, in 15 years. Ruby’s baby daughter, Ella, is very light-skinned, which she is not.
Ella was dozing in her jogger, her sweet head with its copper curls lolling off to one side, and I was nodding, too, on a bench in Hastings Park, down near the river. Willow branches swayed in the breeze. I gently rocked the jogger, tilting my face up to catch some late winter afternoon sun, which felt pleasantly warm on my cheeks. I was reaching over to touch Ella’s forehead, checking whether she was too hot, when a well-dressed white woman with four-inch heels and a black Tumi briefcase accosted me.
“Do you have other days available?” she asked brusquely, glancing down at Ella.
“Beg your pardon?” My head jerked up, startled out of my sun-and-fatigue-induced trance.
“I was wondering if you had other days available.” She tapped her foot.
For a second I thought she might be from the department, asking whether I could teach another class. But that wouldn’t be happening here, not like this.
“We’ve been trying to find a nanny for weeks,” she began, her impatient foot beating time with her quick words.
Still my mind wasn’t grabbing on. “We have …” I started to say, “We have a good one, but I don’t think she has any more time,” when, like dawn breaking at one specific moment, after half an hour of creeping light, I understood. In a flash, I saw what she saw: a brown woman in jeans and head-wrap, rocking what she thought was a white child’s stroller. I decided to complete the sentence as I’d mentally begun it, maintaining my dignity by refusing to acknowledge the picture she perceived. “We have … a good one, but she’s fully booked.” I smiled coolly, dismissing her, while instinctively I bent over to give Ella a protective touch.
And now it was the white woman’s turn to be thrown off balance. I could actually see her puzzled, quick brain working: it was like observing a cutaway science graphic, watching the synapses — painted red for illustration — firing, one after another, with tiny explosions, until the necessary connections had been made and she, too, understood our exchange. Eyes averted, she mumbled a brief apology for the “misunderstanding” before clicking away, briefcase swinging with each stiletto step.
The nanny. This was the second time, but evidently the first incident had left such a light groove in my brain that I wasn’t prepared. Thank goodness Ella was asleep. She would not have understood the words, but might have picked up the discomfort.
Involuntarily, I thought of Elizabeth. What had happened with her, back in the sixties? She never spoke about it. People would not have assumed she was the nanny, but what did they think? I remember how tightly she held me in public, a habit I’d construed as part of her neurosis, her need to be publicly identified with African Americans. It had never occurred to me that she might’ve been trying to protect me by indicating, without speaking, that we were family. A wave of visceral memory flooded me; I heard her high soprano voice warbling, “I’m stickin’ to the union,” when she tucked me into bed, smoothing the hair from my forehead, and my breath relaxed into the deep comfort of her hand, her song. Shaken, I rose, swiveled the kelly green jogger in the direction of home, and began to run. A longing rose in me like a tide.
Joan Steinau Lester is the author of numerous national essays and five critically praised books: three non-fiction, the young adult novel “Black, White, Other” and the new novel “Mama’s Child.” Dr. Lester has won the NLGJA Seigenthaler Award and the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Finalist Award. “Mama’s Child” was a Bellwether Prize finalist and a May 2013 Editor’s Pick from Ebony magazine. Joan lives in Berkeley.