Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Natasha recalls the instance when Gwen announced that Joel wanted to adopt her—an unpleasant memory that she has often tried to forget. He also wanted her to change her name to Grimmette, and Natasha refused. She was in fifth grade at the time. Natasha thought often of the Brady Bunch. The Grimmettes and Natasha were also a blended family that lived in the suburbs. They had just moved to “a Tudor-style split-level with a tan and brown exterior,” like the Brady house (89). The subdivision had some idyllic name, maybe Canterbury. The house had an aboveground swimming pool, which drew the neighborhood children to go over. Natasha spent a lot of time outside in the summer, especially in the woods behind the house and at the creek, which separated the family property from a golf course behind it.

That year, 1976, Gwen announced that she had a new job, which would allow her some opportunities to travel. Natasha also first heard the phrase “white flight” in 1976. She made a new friend named Wendy. She and two other girls near Natasha’s age, Jody and Lisa, told Natasha about the White people who lived in her house before her family moved in. Jody shared with them her stacks of Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. To get them to like her, Natasha showed the girls Joel’s stacks of Penthouse, Hustler, and Swank, hidden in his closet behind his clothes. Jody instructed Natasha to read the captions under the cartoons. The characters in them, like Natasha, were Black. Then, Jody laughed and asked Natasha if she knew what MARTA meant. Natasha was slightly annoyed by the obvious question, as everyone knew the acronym stood for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. Jody shook her head. She then leaned in and said that it meant “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.” Wendy and Lisa laughed.

After school started, Natasha never saw Jody and Lisa again, but Wendy walked with her to school to help show Natasha around. When Wendy first appeared at the house, Joel went to Natasha’s room to inquire about the White girl waiting downstairs. He asked what her father did for a living. Natasha misheard him and thought that Joel was asking about Rick, telling him that her father was a writer and professor. Joel corrected her, saying that he was asking about Wendy’s father and didn’t care what Rick did for a living.

Joel finished technical school and started a business repairing refrigerators, air conditioners, and heaters. He worked odd hours, allowing him to be home when Gwen wasn’t. When Natasha arrived home in the afternoons, she longed to hear her mother’s voice. She called the office as soon as she got in from school. She then did her homework and tidied her room without being told. Doing all that she could to please adults, Natasha was troubled when her mother confronted her, accusing her of not doing her hair before leaving for school. Joel had told her this. Natasha didn’t tell her mother that she had found Joel’s hair, grease, and dandruff in her brush, despite her habit of keeping her hairbrush clean. Natasha still cannot explain why she said nothing at the time.

One day, while sick at home and in bed with a fever, Natasha became delirious. She hallucinated and dreamt that she was in a white room. Suddenly, the ceiling split open, and filth came raining down on her, covering her in soot. The soot reminded her of an album cover she detested.

At Thanksgiving, Grandmother Turnbough visited to see the new house. Not long thereafter, Gwen visited Mrs. Messick during a parent-teacher conference. Mrs. Messick told her that Natasha was a very eager student who seemed to love learning. Natasha read Mrs. Messick’s entire collection of books. She also wrote a novella about a girl who lived in the English countryside and solved a mystery regarding a weather vane. Mrs. Messick showed Gwen the novella, written on a yellow legal pad. Gwen then agreed to allow Mrs. Messick to take Natasha to a teacher’s meeting where she was able to show the story she had written. The other teachers marveled at Natasha’s imagination, at her ability to write a story about a life so unlike her own.

Earlier that month, Jimmy Carter was elected president. Gwen was invited to the inaugural ball. Natasha loved imagining her mother going to the White House, dressed in a gown that Grandmother Turnbough would have made. Then, Natasha heard her mother say to her own mother on the phone that she would not go because Joel would not have felt comfortable there.

During health class, Natasha watched a film about drug addiction. A police officer visited and showed the class the film. Natasha watched a Black woman with an Afro, like her mother’s, careening down a flight of stairs. She was experiencing withdrawals from heroin addiction. In the background, Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” played as a soundtrack. After white foam spewed from the woman’s open mouth, Natasha left the room. She could no longer bear watching a woman who looked like her mother in distress.

A few months after Natasha and her family had lived in the new house, she overheard her mother getting beaten for the first time. Joey was afraid to sleep in his own bedroom, so Natasha tucked him into her top bunk and slept on the lower one. From there, she heard a loud smack and her mother’s whimpering voice. So, when Mrs. Messick followed her out of class, wondering why she had left, Natasha told her teacher what had happened the night before. Mrs. Messick paused, placed her hands on Natasha’s shoulders, and said that adults sometimes got angry with each other. She then turned Natasha back toward the classroom.

At home, Natasha saw her mother, “sitting alone on the bed, her left temple dark and swollen” (102). Natasha told her mother that Gwen’s pain hurt her, too. Later that night, Gwen told Joel that Natasha knew about the beatings. In her voice, Natasha could tell that her mother hoped that this knowledge of his stepdaughter’s awareness would get Joel to stop.