The smell of warm basmati rice bubbling on the stove brings me back to my mother.
In my mind, she is wearing the dull red apron which means business—or the denim blue one which replaced the red one, once it became too stained and frayed from decades of cooking down the house for parties and the dinners we used to share as a family. Or, she is reading The Wind in the Willows alive into magic for my sister and me by the lamplight in our room; my mother makes the voice of Mole lilt with his characteristic gentleness and anxiety as she guides him through whitewashing the walls of his burrow for springtime. We are traveling with her down the river with Ratty, Mole’s newfound friend, in the little rowboat as they fish for watercress and minnows. Mole is happy, because now he has a friend. He is no longer lonely. When they meet Badger, they both have a protector. And the forest is a much safer place for our friends, the three woodland animals in waistcoats and trousers who accompanied me into my dreams on those few precious nights that I could be coaxed into sleep by the sound of my mother’s voice as she brought worlds to life in bright spiderwebs of spoken sound.
I fell in love with my mother as her daughter the way that men do with women: through my stomach. She made the dishes which thrilled me and could hush me into obedience with her promise of having them for dinner, or, the temptation of her food pushed me into flagrant thievery as I crept down to the fridge at night or at nap time to open it silently for a secret spoonful: the potato salad, the cookie dough, the spaghetti, the fried chicken wings cooked to dark brown perfection, the deviled eggs, the challah bread, the turkey wings, the peach cobbler, the buttermilk biscuits, the apple pies, and any dish she found interesting from her holy texts at the altar of cooking—Food & Wine Magazine, The New York Times Recipes section, or the copy of The Joy of Cooking which was always kept open, perched on its own dedicated stand on our kitchen counter. She could make rice and pigeon peas, but she couldn’t make curry goat or oxtail like my tías. Unlike her sisters, my mother was born in America and her recipes reflected the world she’d grown up in—and she had perfected them.
She used to complain, in a way which still sends me to giggles, that our annual trip to Antigua wasn’t as fun for her because, “I have to clean the sand out of three heads of hair and three coochies every evening.” My mother’s dark brown skin reminds me of Spring and Summer: of lobsters hunted by me, my father, and my sister beneath craggy ocean rocks, treasures from the sea that she would cook in boiling water. Blue-grey-brown shells became bright red, and four sets of brown hands and one set of white hands would crack open the exteriors like Crème brûlée to get to the buttery meat beneath. My mother’s dark brown skin reminds me of crab feasts in our backyard, a white tent erected overhead as she directed the feeding and joy of her guests, family, and friends. All of us, so many pairs of hands orchestrated in a union of pulling, cracking, separating, hammering, and eating in one fluid stream of spent shells and lemon water.
She was golden-dark brown, as polished wood is filled with many colors and, as long as I can recall, she had dreadlocks, although the photo of us together I like the most, shows her with a shaved head, glowing and summer dark in a white collared sleeveless blouse. Except for one snaggletooth at her right side, her smile is perfect. I am frowning, also summer brown, with a corner of my mouth pulled downwards. I don’t look at the camera, but somewhere off to the side outside of the frame. My arm, other than betraying what year it is by the large plastic 90’s kid’s watch I am wearing strapped to my tiny wrist, shows the scar from the burn injury which still stays with me over twenty years later.
In the photo, I am perhaps four and the burn is already somewhat healed. I can tell that I am about four years of age because the photo is from my graduation at the Black Nationalist ‘freedom school’ I went to for preschool before moving into ‘real school’ at age five. The burn is on my left arm, as it still is today. In the photo, there is a light patch around the exterior of the burn where the skin was quicker to repair, like a frame, and a darker area inside the outline where the skin will never fully recover from the contact with the heat.
The day I was burned, there was a party. I must have been three or four, dating back from this photo. I remember running in the backyard; I was chasing my sister, or was she chasing me? The black grill was always set up in the same place at the corner of the house by the back kitchen door for parties. I remember running, and then I was on the grill. What were we grilling that day? No one remembers. I remember only lying there on the grill’s charred surface on my left side. Here, accounts differ: I believe I faintly remember someone, my father or a family friend, noticing and pulling me off. My mother has said she thought she remembered someone noticing that I was burned while I was swimming in the pool, as though I had just calmly picked myself up off the grill after being burned and gone swimming. But unless a guest had brought an inflatable kiddie pool with them to the party that day for us to use—I don’t remember one—we never had a pool. Nor can I recall my mother’s probable hysteria; she was the parent you’d want caring for you when you had a cold or stomach flu, but not the one we relied on in emergency first-aid situations.
What I do remember most is my father carefully, lovingly, and with a complete air of capable authority, cleaning and wrapping my arm in a bandage. I recall feeling traumatized and terrified, but simultaneously safe. My father was, to me at that moment, the only person I would want tending to my arm. I was upstairs alone with him in the room I shared with my sister, crying and watching my arm. The skin which had been burnt was white and curly. I will never forget the look of my body, transformed that way. “It looks like macaroni,” I remember saying to him through my tears. We did not go to the hospital.
Now I live with a brown patch, rougher to the touch than the rest of my skin, on my left arm extending toward my shoulder. From my memory of the event, the surface area it still covers all this time later, and the fact that the mark has remained, it must have been an extremely serious burn. I’ve always had inexplicable burning pains in my left shoulder; I call this my ‘trauma arm.’ When I was my most stressed or sad or scared as a kid, my left shoulder would begin to burn with a shooting, slicing pain that made me wish I could just cut my arm off at the shoulder and be done with it. Even today, when I look into a reflective surface as I walk by, I can see that I continue to hike up and hunch over my shoulders as an automatic response to stress. Consciously, I try to drop them, stretch them, heal them, to relieve the tension. I know that her hands worked cocoa butter into my scar, as she did with all of our scars, from the yellow stick she kept in the upstairs cupboard, to no avail.
I have forsaken my mother in return for retaining myself, but when I wish to feel close to her, I go to the grocery store, buy a pack of ground beef or ground turkey, and assemble my seasonings on the counter—her seasonings, which she taught to me. Thyme, paprika, Goya with the blue cap, salt, pepper, rosemary, turmeric, garlic chopped small. As a little girl, I stood at her arm and, together, we shook the powders and herbs through filtered plastic holes in a rainfall of flavor onto the meats which fed our family. I watched her crack an egg like a goddess making the world into the red heart of ground beef, and turn her strong biceps and her clever fingers with the graceful oblong nails she rarely painted into a flowing rhythm which melded separate flavors into a single symphony of taste combined with the aroma of her skin. A quiet comes over the mind when a West Indian woman is seasoning the meat—for some of us, and I think for some of my ancestors, this may have been the only time we had in the day for our mind to rest. I sit, stand, or squat in kitchens of houses I do not own, over camp stoves on the ground, and against counters I am paid for cooking at, and recreate the flavors my mother gave to me in my own way. It is as close to her as I can bear to be.
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