My Mother’s Letters

I recently moved from Mexico back to my native state of Mississippi. On that bright, September morning when the moving van pulled up to my new house in a leafy Jackson neighborhood, holding possessions that had been in storage for a dozen years, I scanned the stacked boxes for my old blue trunk.

In that trunk, I would find my mother’s letters.

She had died just months before the move. But ever since her watershed stroke, four years earlier, I’d rarely heard her voice. Now, still mourning, I needed to reacquaint myself with that voice, with who she was before the stroke, with what our complicated relationship was like. I needed to reread her letters.

I carried that Army surplus trunk with me up north, when I left for college. I was the first in our family to go to college out of state — and only the second to go at all — and I had a hard time adjusting to cold weather and challenging classes. My mother sensed this, and so she wrote to me.  Every letter I got, I collected in the trunk.

She wasn’t a letter writer by habit. She hardly thought of herself as literate. She was born in the low-slung hills of Yazoo County, Mississippi, in 1924. Her people were farmers — “dirt farmers,” she called them — who grew cotton on patches of rented land. Then one morning, when she was 5, her father got up, leaned against the chicken house for a smoke, slid to the ground, and died. He was 45 years old.

After that, she and her nine siblings furnished the field labor: in the spring and summer planting and chopping cotton, in the fall dragging a burlap sack up and down the rows, picking from “can see” to “can’t see.” She went to a one-room schoolhouse, but only during the late fall and early winter. She was 13 before she learned to read, 20 when she graduated high school. When I was young and used to beg her to tell me more about her childhood, she would drop her head and snap, “I don’t remember.”

We weren’t close; at least, that was the story I always told myself. She seemed distant and, I thought, mean. I sent her a shakily penciled note in third grade, imploring her to “be nice to me.” But this presumed meanness wasn’t hers alone; her entire family shared the trait, a kind of toughness necessary, I now suppose, to eke out a living in Mississippi hill country during the Great Depression. Its hallmarks: nonstop hard work and no complaining. In that harsh world, there wasn’t room for sentiment.

I was in Mexico when she had the stroke. Over the next four years, I visited her in the nursing home as often as I could. Though paralyzed on the right side and largely silent, she could still get out the occasional, quirky sentence. Once when I asked how she was feeling, she answered, “Fit as a bowling ball.” Aggravated by her loss of language, she laughed anyway at these odd new metaphors — her dark humor another remnant of a Mississippi hill country childhood.

Her dirt-farmer stubbornness helped her through those tough final years. Despite the aphasia, we grew closer. We often sat on the nursing home’s patio, admiring the clouds, holding hands. When I wasn’t visiting, we “talked” on the phone daily. After her health got even worse, she had a nurse dial me in Mexico and managed to breathe into the receiver, “You’ve been good to me.” Two weeks later, when she died in her bed at the nursing home, I was again holding her hand.

Not long after, I finally completed the steps to obtain a permanent residency in Mexico, and ironically was free to spend more time outside my adopted country. My husband and I decided to buy the house in Jackson. As the writer Willie Morris said about his own delayed Mississippi homecoming, “A man had best be coming back to where his strongest feelings lay.”

The day I dragged the blue trunk into my new home office, I was surprised to find not dozens but hundreds of letters from my mother. Most were from my college years, handwritten in red ballpoint, her loopy script filling the lined pages. Some are typed on the stationery of the farm-implement company where, in her 50s, she went to work as a secretary. She wrote from the office when the boss wasn’t looking, in between typing orders for disc harrows. She wrote from home, while my father was still asleep. She wrote from under the hooded dryer at the beauty salon.

The letters are a history of many small things.

They contain her modest hopes: to take a rare vacation on the Gulf Coast, to fix up the run-down duplex where she and my father lived, to improve herself. She asks that I send her word-power books. She takes shorthand and bookkeeping courses but fails the shorthand. She tries to learn to ride a bicycle and falls off. Though she’s employed full-time, at home she keeps up a manic schedule, cooking, cleaning, and sewing. She preserves figs and freezes fresh peas. Aside from the weather, there’s little about the external world. These letters are about her world, the circumscribed, task-filled world she’d always known.

But she also divulges confidences. She answers my questions, ones I forgot ever posing. About whether she loved my difficult father: “I do not mind telling you that I have always loved him and always will. Even if he is the stubbornest man alive.” About her grim childhood, she recalls a few memories, even pleasurable ones: of spotting “large and pretty butterflies” when she went to the fields with her mother, of picking wild grapes, of riding an old mule. She encloses a photograph of herself, taken during the 1930s, tussling with other kids in the schoolyard. She is long-legged and lean and smiling broadly, and I can imagine a childhood for her that’s a little happier than what I’d thought.

More than anything, the letters tell of our forgotten intimacy. She writes me through depressions, boyfriend breakups, mono, bad grades. She is a gentle mother, a best girlfriend. She types “I LOVE YOU” over and over. “I promised you a first spring flower,” she says, and presses a daffodil between the pages. She aches for my visits, plans long talks about “everything.” She tells me how glad she is to have me for her daughter. I am her honey, her darling. “It is a lot of nonsense that you believe we cannot be or never were very close.” 

Why had I thought we weren’t? Rereading her letters, I can recall feeling ashamed of her hardscrabble, sharecropping past. Ashamed of her. It’s true that she’d been a distant mother, held back perhaps by her own sense of shame. But I came to realize this: While growing up, I had also kept my distance from her.

Ultimately, the letters bear out the faultiness of memory. They are filled with words I hadn’t remembered, about an early bond with my mother I’d overlooked. Mama wouldn’t have spoken to me about these things, even before her stroke. She was never much of a talker. But in the intimacy of the letters, in the exigencies of my absence, she finds her voice. It is an antidote to mourning.

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