Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

“And yet—undeniably—something else is there, elegiac even then: a strange corner of light just behind her head, perhaps the photographer’s mistake, appearing as though a doorway has opened, a passage through which, turning, she might soon depart.” 

Natasha continues to meditate upon the professional portrait her mother took a short while before her murder. The flaw includes a light that appears above Gwen, which the reader could either liken to the “gates of Heaven” or to Gwen’s possible hope, which went unfulfilled, that she was entering a new life. 

“Though my father believed in the idea of living dangerously, the necessity of taking risks, my mother had witnessed the necessity of dissembling, the art of making of one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile deference.” 

This quote describes the difference between Natasha’s parents’ lives, which were predetermined by race. Rick’s racial privilege and gender afforded him opportunities to take risks, as well as the freedom to live according to his whims. Gwen, on the other hand, learned to anticipate White people’s expectations and to model her behavior accordingly, in order to remain safe and alive in the Deep South.

“That summer was a season of fires, of danger coming ever closer: flaming crosses and black churches burning all around the state.” 

In the Freedom Summer in 1964, which occurred nearly two years before Natasha was born, Civil Rights workers were registering Black voters in Mississippi. Three had been killed for performing this service. The fires were literal attempts to destroy progress and to terrify Black people back into submission.

“My father believed—as the poet Robert Frost cautioned—that one must have a thorough education in figurative language.” 

Natasha takes this lesson that her father culled from the American poet and applies it throughout the memoir, finding meaning in such details as her mother’s portrait and her final interaction with Joel, to make sense of her mother’s life and her own. Natasha came to rely upon this when the empirical world, which drew from science, history, and social science, offered little help.

“I am looking directly at the photographer, toward a new idea of absence, of phantom ache—knowing nothing about how potently one might come to feel it.” 

Natasha reflects on one of few family portraits that she has, particularly those that include her father. The photographer was a double amputee—a fact that shocked and fascinated her as a little girl. The photographer’s admission that he could still feel his missing legs is one that Natasha likens to her sense of still feeling her mother’s presence, despite Gwen no longer being there. 

“You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”

This statement explains why Natasha’s father encouraged her to find a home in literature, particularly in the language of metaphor. Both science and history are sometimes flawed with biases, depending on the researcher. That which is positioned as fact cannot always be trusted, thus creating the necessity to find the meaning that belies every supposed statement of fact.

“She knew that as a mixed-race child—halfway between them—I would ultimately be alone in the journey toward an understanding of self, my place in the world, yet carrying the invisible burdens of history borne on the back of metaphor.” 

Natasha refers to her mother’s awareness that Natasha’s life would be different from hers due to her biracial identity, which might make it harder for people who would try to categorize her. However, not being White, she would ultimately bear many of the burdens that come with Black identity, including experiences of racism and marginalization.

“She knew, too, that language would be used to name and thereby attempt to constrain me—mongrel, mulatto, half-breed, ni****—and that, as on the back of the mule, I would be both bound to and propelled by it. My mother wanted only that I not be destroyed by it.” 

Natasha continues to ponder the ways in which Gwen understood the difficulties Natasha would face due to racism, and how she tried to prepare her daughter for them. Natasha refers to some of the pejorative language that racists use to describe biracial people. She uses the mule that she encounters on a family trip to Mexico as a metaphor for both her biracial identity and the necessity of carrying burdens.

“If she felt any pull to the place of her birth—any familiarity or longing—she never mentioned it. Sometimes I think that’s where her silence began […] a past she was too hurt by or ashamed of to pass down to me.” 

Gwen was born in New Orleans, but she said little about her origins there, as they were marred by colorism and her father’s ultimate abandonment of her and her mother. 

“For as long as I can remember, my father had been telling me that one day I would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of my experience I would have something necessary to say.” 

Natasha relates this thought after detailing with the experience of being chased away from a birthday party by a group of White boys who called her a “zebra.” The incident recalls her parents’ insistence that she try to understand the ways in which language would trap her into other people’s need for categorization. Her father’s insistence that she become a writer was embedded in the hope that she would free herself from those constraints. Also, it would upend her tendency, as in this instance, to stay silent about the things that hurt her.

“As the smoke rose from the car toward the skyline, I couldn’t help thinking that, at any moment, everything we had would be consumed by flames.” 

Natasha recalls when she and her mother stood by the side of the road on their way to Atlanta, waiting for car assistance. She describes the moment when the car overheated as an omen—a signal of the impending doom that awaited them in Atlanta. The consumption of their lives in flames also signals the image of the phoenix—the mythical bird that rises from the ashes of self-immolation. After her mother’s death, Natasha found a new beginning as a writer.

“[T]he thing I had desired was reward for perfection, attainable if I were smart enough, and that my mother’s happiness would depend on my performance.” 

Natasha describes the reasons why she worked so hard in school and tried very hard at home to be diligent about her chores. She wanted the approval of adults, particularly of her mother. Natasha never provides a reason for this. However, the reader can infer, based on her description of Gwen’s moodiness, as well as the difficulty of their starting anew in Atlanta, that Natasha did not want to add to her mother’s existent stress.

“It’s a kind of magical thinking, the way children come to believe they can cause certain events, the way the obsessive-compulsive believes certain talismanic acts must be performed to prevent disaster—that disaster can somehow be prevented.”

Natasha recalls how Joel began to abuse her emotionally by driving her around the periphery of the city on the interstate, pretending that he was going to drop her off and abandon her. Natasha convinced herself that Joel would have never truly abandoned her, which compelled her to remain silent about these episodes. She convinced herself that her refusal to believe in his cruelty might have made it go away.

“That night, descending to work beneath the city, my mother was already entering an underworld from which she would never fully emerge.” 

Natasha recalls watching her mother dress at night for her job as a cocktail waitress in the Atlanta Underground, at a restaurant called Mine Shaft. She isn’t sure if Gwen had already met Joel or if she would that night. However, Natasha characterizes that meeting in the mythological context of the future goddess of the underworld, Persephone, being lured into darkness while in pursuit of something beautiful and bright. 

“The mind forgetting, the body retaining the memory of trauma in its cells.” 

Natasha recalls a bad dream, or an unpleasant semi-wakeful state, that she frequently had during fourth grade. Around this time, Joel had begun to demonstrate abusive behavior toward her. She analogizes her sleep paralysis—the temporary division of her mind and body—to the feeling of compartmentalization that she adopted later to cope with her past. She willfully forgot things, but still felt them. 

“This is the name that is not your name, the name that makes you different from everyone in your household.”

Natasha recalls the name on the mailbox at her house—Grimmette, which was Joel’s surname. Gwen had taken her husband’s name, and Natasha’s younger brother, Joey, also had Joel’s name. Her refusal to take it (Joel had offered to adopt her, despite Rick still being alive) made her different from everyone else in the household. This difference, forged through her connection with her father, may have also made it easier for her to stand up to Joel.

“The need in the voice of your powerful, lovely mother is teaching you something about the world of men and women, of dominance and submission. You hear it emanate from the most intimate of spaces, the bedroom with its marriage bed.” 

Natasha overheard Gwen telling Joel that Natasha knew about Joel’s abusive behavior toward Gwen. The need to which Natasha refers might have been Gwen’s wish that Natasha’s knowledge would have shamed Joel into redressing his wrongs against them. However, Natasha connects Joel’s behavior to long-standing misogyny, which has bred Joel’s sense of entitlement over his wife.

“LOOK AT YOU. EVEN NOW YOU THINK YOU CAN write yourself away from that girl you were, distance yourself in the second person, as if you weren’t the one to whom any of this happened.” 

Natasha criticizes her own use of the second-person when recalling her confrontation of her mother’s abuse. She refers to the tendency to use this form of voice as a method of avoidance.

“I had begun to compose myself.” 

After learning that Joel had begun to read her diary, Natasha began writing entries to him directly, chastising him for his behavior toward the family. By confronting Joel in writing, Natasha was able to fight back, but she was also developing her identity as a writer, which requires some confrontation with sources of pain.

“I’ve replayed this scene in my head countless times: She. Will do. WHATEVER. She wants. Even how I hear in my mother’s voice, her measured restraint, the origins of my own.”

Natasha recalls the instance in which her mother stood up for her after Joel put down Natasha’s expressed ambition to become a writer. She says that her mother’s declaration that her daughter would determine her own fate, which meant becoming a writer, gave Natasha the courage to make that declaration for herself. 

“My rational mind knows very well what my irrational mind is doing. So why not let both exist simultaneously?”

After a visit to a medium, Natasha wavers between wanting to believe the psychic’s claim that his mother was present and disbelieving that such a thing could have been possible. She knew that she was telling herself the former to find comfort, creating sense out of something nonsensical to feel connected to her mother. This episode ties in with others in which Natasha used superstition and ritualistic behaviors as sources of comfort.

“The length of tape that held her voice had been as tenuous as the faith that held Orpheus and Eurydice together as he tried to lead her out of the underworld. In my impatience, I had severed it.” 

Natasha recalls finding and playing an old cassette recording of Gwen speaking. In her eagerness to hear her mother’s voice again, Natasha accidentally snapped the tape. Using the lessons from Classical myth that her father taught her, she compares this to the instance that Orpheus permanently severed himself from Eurydice forever by looking back at her, despite Hades’s warnings not to do so. Orpheus had followed Eurydice into the underworld after she had been bitten by a snake and died. Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, allowed Orpheus to go find her but said that she could only return to the light with him if he did not look at her until they reached the living world. Not believing she was behind him, or being too eager to gaze upon her, Orpheus turned back. Eurydice was condemned to Hades forever. Similarly, Gwen’s voice was forever lost. 

“This is where it begins, our estrangement. For several minutes I watch her, the girl I have left behind, stepping again and again into the last place I saw my mother alive.” 

Natasha recalls the instance in which a news camera captured her going into her mother’s former apartment to collect Gwen’s things. The entrance into the apartment is symbolic of Natasha crossing a threshold into a new existence, one in which she would bury the memory of her mother’s murder in an effort to get on with life. Otherwise, she would have been trapped with the memory of that trauma, on repeat.