Autumn, 1978. The Jonestown massacre had just splashed across the nation’s newspapers, and my mother protectively drew her family into her bosom in an almost hysterical way. Her career in local government often took her away to conferences, and this time she was due to be the keynote speaker at one in Atlanta the week following Thanksgiving. She usually left us home to hold down the fort, but this time decided that the whole family would go, take off early, and make a little holiday vacation out of it. On Thanksgiving morning, we piled into a roomy, rented twenty-six-footer RV mobile home, and headed east on Interstate 10, out of Los Angeles and into the breadth of these United States. I was a teen who had just gotten her driver’s license, and my stepfather promised I could have a try behind the wheel of this giant bread box, probably somewhere out in the desert, where there would be fewer other cars for me to endanger.
My mother and her best friend Dolores (whose kids were with their father for the holiday, so she was joining) had packed the RV with all that would be needed to prepare a Thanksgiving feast, and with Dad at the wheel the women immediately commenced to cooking in the small kitchenette of the RV. The plan was that wherever we were by the time dinner was ready was where we’d stop and have our Thanksgiving dinner. The two of them took up the whole middle section, which included the kitchenette on one side of the RV and a large table for eating directly across, against the huge picture window, and which immediately got covered with all the food preparation. Older sister Pam, younger brother Mike, and I were mainly relegated to the back, an area that was much like a large restaurant booth and table, around which we sat with our many board games, and stared out of the large back window onto the vista of road behind us. Above us were pull-out bunks for sleeping. Mike ran back and forth between the stern to riding shotgun with Dad. The women kept begging him to find a spot and sit still. Yeah, good luck with that.
The whole way across California, and by the time we hit the Colorado River, Mike and I had just about exhausted the adults with our impressions of bits from our favorite TV shows and hit songs, and I even shared some of my teen-angst poetry with Dolores, who was a better audience than my mother, as she seemed genuinely interested, though I’m pretty sure none of it was very good. Dolores was just great that way. And it wasn’t that my mother wasn’t interested, but that she had the whole world in her head at any given time. Pam had her head buried in political books, likely Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, or Mao’s Red Book, a constant place for my bookworm sister who had already begun her activist flowering. She would head off to Tanzania before long, to connect with our people’s beginnings and eventually give birth to her daughter there.
My stepdad was a bit of a video recording fanatic, so from the moment he invested in his new camera our family wasn’t given much peace or privacy. On this trip, Mike was in charge of the camera whenever Dad was doing the driving. And while Dolores would shy away whenever Mike aimed the camera her way, my mother was in her Norma Desmond element, always ready for her close-up. Pam would lift her head from her book and ham it up whenever Mike aimed the lens her way, and Dad couldn’t help micro-managing Mike’s shooting technique from the driver’s seat.
“You’re not doing it right. Here, let me show you.”
Mike ended up being responsible for lots of accidental vérité-like shots, but then, frankly, so did my stepfather, who often forgot that the camera was still on when he’d lay it on its side to go do something else. The shot would be a thrilling twenty-minute study of an ant crawling across the sideways table. Andy Warhol would’ve been proud.
And all the while, the women cooked.
Cooking was a calling for my mother. If she was in the kitchen, we knew an old-fashioned jubilee was about to happen. At home I had often watched her when she’d make her monkey bread. And sometimes she’d even try to teach me a few things, which would become an all-day affair: Learning to scald milk, a delicate procedure requiring precise timing and a tactile skill. Feeling the yeast between my fingers while dipping it in the lukewarm water. Adding just a pinch of sugar to the softened paste then watching it dissolve. Separating the egg whites from their yokes and adding them to the yeast paste. Watching the miraculous alchemy of flour and milk and yeast and eggs become dough, dusted then kneaded.
The sensual nature of my mother’s hands to the sticky white mixture, and the way she’d dip her fingers into the silky flour to handle the doughy mound, was artful. She never rushed it.
The soft mound was then left in a glass bowl to rise. She would always declare the watched pot never boils edict to me whenever I wanted to stare at it while it rose, but all I wanted to do was stare at it while it rose. And once it was ready to be brought back out to the wooden block, perhaps an hour later, she would knead it some more. A rolling pin would lay it out large and flat, and the flick of her wrist was something to see.
Next would come that part of the ritual in which the whole family was encouraged to participate. We’d each take a diamond-shaped cookie cutter, several of which she’d collected over the years, and carve out squares that we would then dip individually into a pot of melted butter, and place gingerly in a Bundt pan.
Layer upon layer of little buttered squares would fill up the pan, which would then be placed in the oven, until some forty-five minutes later the bubbling brown masterpiece with the molten jigsaw puzzle resemblance would be a most aromatic table centerpiece quickly devoured.
This age-old midwestern tradition (the sweet version likely from Hungarian Jewish origins) became lovingly ensconced as a savory bread dish in the soul food culture. It’s called monkey bread because when turned over and released from the Bundt pan onto a bread platter it merely needs to be pulled apart with one’s fingers, not cut with a knife, and that was an especially enticing notion for us kids. My mother made a pretty spectacular monkey bread.
I loved watching her stand back and enjoy satisfying her family’s bellies, and I knew that this, for her, was a kind of sacred meditation. I also knew I could never connect with any task (or art, as this had to’ve been for her) the way she did. She was miraculous. And I was just a girl in puzzle pieces, trying to find my way to fitting them all together, and a mother with too many flights of fancy to be here with me on earth.
So, though we were all having a ball driving through town after town, on this holiday mobile-home odyssey, singing songs from the latest Earth, Wind & Fire album, telling jokes, and either ducking or mugging for the video camera, my mother never lost her stride or piercing focus in preparing our food. Dolores was equal to the task with her revered soul-food pigs feet and hot-water cornbread, but it was my mother whom I’d watched and studied for more years than I’d ever put into homework, so her talent was palpable for me.
Before long, the RV cabin started to fill up with the aroma of turkey and oyster stuffing, and sweet potatoes laden with marshmallows and brown sugar, and blueberry cobbler, and collard greens and cabbage, and macaroni and cheese, and lima bean casserole, and the famous monkey bread (which, this time, was actually prepared at home and brought with). It was insane, inexplicable, and a testament to their cooking prowess, how Martha and Dolores had managed to accomplish all this culinary breadth in the tiny kitchen of this moving tin can.
We were in the middle of the desert somewhere at the far end of Arizona when dinner was called, as daylight still hung about but was inching toward dusk. I’d finally been given my turn to do the driving. I hadn’t killed us, or anyone else, but I had definitely made a few precarious lane changes that had my mother and Dolores yelling at me, for almost losing a bowl or a dish to the floor.
“Sorry!” I would yell, secretly giggling and feeling my oats.
Dad filmed the whole thing, laughing at my cowgirl driving, and Martha and Dolores trying to hold onto the pots and pans.
I continued to drive only until we spotted a rest stop with a cluster of picnic tables off the highway. I parked. We all stepped outside. The air was cold and crisp. Colder than we Angelenos were accustomed to. We bundled up in our various coats. There was no one in sight. Because who plans picnics at the threshold of winter? In the middle of the desert? On Thanksgiving?
We all unloaded the many suitcases my mother had packed into the undercarriage of the RV, and dragged the heavy things out to one of the picnic tables. While Mike and I immediately commenced to chasing jackrabbits, and my stepfather found his challenge in keeping up with a camera perpetually glued to his eye, my mother, with Pam’s and Dolores’ assistance, began to unearth from the suitcases the many emblems of my mother’s love for antique collecting. Out came Martha’s prized Dutch linen table cloth, the eight matching napkins, her silk Damask table runner, crystal water goblets that had been carefully bubble-wrapped, silver place-settings and napkin rings, her Noritake china, long taper candles, and an ornate candelabrum. It was like watching a magician pull the kitchen sink out of his top hat. And my mother proceeded to transform the prickly, cactus-surrounded dust bowl of rough and tumble nature that we’d claimed as ours into a dining experience for kings. And thought nothing of the peculiarity in the whole affair. Martha was in her nutty splendor, and it may have even been what my stepfather loved most about her. I think we all did.
She then yelled for Mike and me to stop chasing rabbits unless we intended on capturing one to go with dinner, which had us screaming in mock horror, and she commanded us help her unload the many hot platters and fragrant casserole dishes and steaming pots and containers.
Oven-mitt-clad, Mike and I carefully walked the food in several trips over to the finely dressed table. The periodic lizard or tumbleweed would scamper by, and the sun began to set. And right there in the middle of endless Arizona horizon and desert stillness, with only a dusted dusk and my mother’s candlelight, we bundled up in our coats, sat to a most opulent spread, held hands, and bowed our heads as Martha said grace.
“Thank you for blessing this food we are about to receive, for the nourishment of our bodies, and for the love and communing of family. Amen.”
We raised our glasses to toast the feast, dug in to ridiculously mouthwatering fare, and absolutely loved the crazy novelty of it all.
Grace was not a word often associated with my audacious mother. As a wheeler and dealer in her business universe, ballsy was more her word. But like catching a shooting star in one’s periphery, I would see, just here and there in my growing up years, brilliant evidence of it. Sometimes in only tiny, fleeting swatches. At other times still, as with our never-to-be-forgotten wilderness Thanksgiving where my mother did the damned thing! it would scream out in bold strokes of wild color, a magnificent comet. A consummate illustration of grace. And which, in whatever form, if at times elusive, was always amazing.
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