Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Natasha has “a large birthmark on the back of [her] thigh” (15). Seeing it makes her feel like she is remembering an old wound. It then triggers memories of her early childhood in Mississippi. Back then, she usually wore shorts, due to the warm weather. The shorts made the birthmark visible.

According to some cultural myths, birthmarks are the manifestations of a mother’s “desires or fears” impressed on her child’s body (15). Natasha’s birthmark looks like a place on a map, perhaps a place her mother may have wanted to visit.

Natasha was born on the hundredth anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day—a holiday that existed in steadfast opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Natasha is certain that her mother understood the irony of her daughter being born on that day. Interracial marriage was still illegal in Mississippi and 20 other states. Gwen gave birth to her daughter on the “colored” floor in Gulfport Memorial Hospital, but she knew that the nation was changing. Gwen had also changed in the summer of 1965, not long after Bloody Sunday, the Watts riots, “and years of racially motivated murders in Mississippi” (16). The memory of Emmett Till’s death, which had occurred in the state in the summer of 1955, was still fresh in Gwen’s memory, recalled from the images in her mother’s copy of Jet magazine. Gwen, like the rest of the world, remembered “Till’s battered remains, his destroyed face” (17). Despite her wish to ignore the racial violence, Natasha’s grandmother would not allow it to go unheeded. The elder woman always had the latest issue of Jet, which featured images of lynchings, protests, and resilience, on her coffee table.

The year before Gwen and Natasha’s father, Rick, met, a white supremacist had killed NAACP activist Medgar Evers in front of Evers’s home in Jackson, Mississippi. That same year, 1963, Natasha’s grandmother joined a group of other Black citizens at the beach in Biloxi. They gathered to stick black flags along the shore to protest being refused access to the public beaches on the Gulf Coast. Natasha also remembered learning about the disappearances of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, Freedom Summer activists whom the Ku Klux Klan had kidnapped and killed in June 1964 in Neshoba County.

When Gwen heard the news about the murder of the three men, she was out of state, traveling with “her college theater troupe” (17). During this summer of upheaval, Gwen Turnbough and Rick Trethewey fell in love. They encountered each other in a modern dramatic literature course. They married when Gwen was already pregnant with Natasha. Gwen was hopeful for a changing world, but she was also realistic about how much her child would have to learn to be safe in this world. On the other hand, Rick believed that their child would grow up unencumbered by the strictures of race. Her mother, too, espoused some of this and told Natasha, when she asked why she wasn’t the same color as her parents, that she had “the best of both worlds” (19).

When Natasha was with her father, she noticed how they addressed him as “Sir” or “Mister.” Conversely, people called her mother “Gal.” Only at home did Natasha feel as though she belonged to them both. Outside her parents’ bedroom was a large bookcase that held her parents’ many books and a set of encyclopedias that Natasha’s grandmother bought with the money that would have otherwise been used to bronze her baby shoes.

In the earliest dream that she can remember, a man stood in the hallway of that early home in front of the book case. His face was made of up of the sharply-edged crushed shells that covered their driveway. By then, Rick was studying for a PhD in English and working toward becoming a writer. He likely would have told his daughter that the man was the Cyclops or Grendel. He told her many tales from literature, including those of Narcissus, Icarus, Cassandra, and the riddle of the Sphinx. Natasha liked to curl up beside her father and trace her finger along his throat while he read to her. She asked him what the bulge in his throat was. He then told her the story of Adam and Eve, how Adam bit from the apple that Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge. The piece got stuck in his throat, creating a bulge. Thus, all of his descendants had that feature.

Natasha often found herself in the stories that her father told her. He also wrote short stories in which he created fictionalized accounts of his family life. In the stories, Natasha was named Cassandra. They went on long walks together. Rick recited poetry, while Natasha picked flowers or blackberries for her mother.

At this time, Natasha, her father, and her mother lived with Gwen’s maternal family. This gave Natasha the advantage of talking to her elders, who remembered when “North Gulfport had been a settlement of former slaves” (25). Natasha recalls a community center there, built by Mennonites, where she had taken swimming lessons. There was also the Elks lodge, where Uncle Son had been a member, several churches, and an equal number of night spots and juke joints. Her great-uncle, Son, had opened Son’s Owl Club, a juke joint where Gwen, as a girl, had helped select records for the jukebox, and her grandmother had made gumbo and red beans and rice for customers.

Son was a debonair, “high-yellow” man—so light that he nearly passed for White. People in the community whispered that he was the son of a man named Mr. Griswold, for whom the town had first been named. Son, everyone assumed, had so much land, particularly rental houses, due to quitclaim deeds—or a tool used to transfer property.

There were few children in Natasha’s neighborhood, requiring her either to spend time alone or in the company of adults. She especially liked to watch her mother putting up her hair or getting dressed up on weekends to go out with her father. Occasionally, she wore a cameo which was nestled in the vulnerable hollow in her throat, held in place by “a black velvet choker” (33).

When Natasha left her family’s North Gulfport community and went into town, she noticed the hostile glares that White people gave her parents. Sometimes, they whispered and shook their heads while looking at Natasha. They noticed how cute she was, but they pitied her for being Black. Ross Barnett, the governor at the time, monitored interracial social activity, and Natasha’s maternal grandmother had been on a watchlist ever since she had attempted to record Rick and Gwen’s wedding announcement in the local paper.

Sometimes the hostility toward Gwen and Rick became more aggressive. Natasha recalls someone following the three of them “out of Woolworth’s to the car” and how Gwen tried to prevent Rick from confronting their aggressor (34). Once, a group of White men accosted Rick on his way home from work, asking why he lived with Black people.

During the Civil Rights era, Natasha’s grandmother sheltered a few White, Mennonite missionaries who had arrived in Gulfport to teach, repair housing, and proselytize. The local White population, outraged by this display of integration, threatened to bomb the Mennonites’s Bible camp. Then, the Ku Klux Klan expressed plans to bomb Mount Olive Baptist Church. Refusing to be cowed, Natasha’s grandmother slept with a pistol under her pillow. She was unwavering in her belief that she was obligated to open her door to those in need.

Natasha’s family gave her the sense of feeling insulated from the hatred that smoldered around her. Her uncle, Son, drove the school bus that deposited children at the state’s Head Start facility. He picked Natasha up first in the morning and dropped her off last in the afternoons. Gwen also worked for Head Start as an administrator. When Natasha arrived home, her grandmother was there waiting for her, working from home as a seamstress. She answered her granddaughter’s questions about her absent grandfather and told the story about how, during her first trip to northern Mississippi, she had mistaken the cotton fields for gladioluses.

The constant presences of her extended family made Rick’s absences less pronounced for Natasha. One of the few photos that she has of her and her parents was taken in 1969. Natasha’s grandmother hired a photographer, who happened to be a double amputee, to take the photo. Gwen warned Natasha not to stare at the man, but the little girl couldn’t help it. She noticed how “he scratched the air around one of the missing limbs” (39). He saw her staring, leaned forward, and told her that he still felt his limbs, despite them being gone.

Shortly thereafter, Rick bought a used Lincoln Continental and drove the family to Mexico. While vacationing at a hotel, Natasha nearly drowned. Her father had likely gone inside to get another book, as his daughter floated to the deeper section of the pool. Natasha recalls not feeling afraid as she sank in the water. She remembers seeing her mother, “who could not swim, leaning over the edge—arms outstretched—reaching for [her]” (40).

Natasha has only one photograph of herself from that trip. She is alone and sitting on a mule. The image was taken in 1969 in Monterrey. Her father took the picture, marked its date and place, and had the idea of photographing Natasha on the animal. In one of his poems, he had referred to her “as a crossbreed” (41). To him, it may have been a joke—a little girl on the animal whose name described her “caste—mulatto.” She doubts that her mother would have found the barb funny. However, both Gwen and Rick would have agreed that their daughter would have needed to know what it meant.

After the family returned home, Rick began to study full-time as a graduate student in New Orleans. There, he shared an apartment with another student. On weekends, Rick and Gwen took turns driving between their respective cities. Gwen, however, always had trouble finding her way into New Orleans. Usually, she and Natasha met Rick off the interstate at Vieux Carré.

Gwen was born in New Orleans. Grandmother Turnbough lived near the city’s port where her husband, Ralph, sailed away with his naval unit two days before his daughter was born. Grandmother Turnbough gave birth to Gwen alone, before the doctor arrived. Then, her mother-in-law, Narcissus, came from Mississippi to verify the child’s paternity. Narcissus, who looked nearly White, was still flabbergasted that her son had married someone as dark as Natasha’s grandmother. Also, to prove that Gwen was kin, Narcissus looked for a red birthmark at the base of the infant’s head—a trait Narcissus had passed to all of her children. Indeed, Gwen had the birthmark. Still, Narcissus could not accept the brown-skinned woman who had given birth to her granddaughter. She turned and left.

A year after Gwen was born, Grandmother Turnbough found out that Ralph had married someone else, despite still being her husband. Natasha’s grandmother filed for divorce, packed her bags, and went back to Mississippi. Gwen saw Ralph just once after that, when she was 16. She took the train to Los Angeles to visit. He was still married to his second wife. When Gwen returned, she never spoke of Ralph again. Still, Natasha’s grandmother kept a portrait of Ralph, drawn by a street artist in charcoal. Natasha recalls how handsome he was in that image, how he had passed his “high cheekbones, a chiseled jaw, and full lips” to Gwen (46).

When Gwen and Natasha went to New Orleans, they seldom went out on their own. When they did, Gwen took Natasha shopping, giving the little girl an opportunity to marvel with her mother at the elegant, columned houses. They browsed in the department stores on Canal Street, then went in search of a pattern to sew a dress or suit back home. Gwen’s closet was full of clothes that she and Grandmother Turnbough had made.

While Gwen worked on making clothes, Natasha went out to explore. One afternoon, she met a group of children around her age who were having a birthday party. She walked toward them, hoping they would invite her. One of the larger boys pointed at her, called her a “zebra,” and prompted the other nine children to chase her. It was her first time hearing that word to describe herself. She kept the incident quiet.

Natasha and her mother began to visit New Orleans less frequently. In hindsight, she realizes that Rick and Gwen were probably making the trips largely for her benefit. Natasha had always told herself that she was fine with her parents’ eventual divorce. She now realizes that “this was only the first of many stories [she] needed to tell [herself] over the years” (50).

Natasha recalls one of the last photographs from that period of her life, taken one year before they left Mississippi. She and Gwen are wearing purple dresses. Gwen has just started wearing her hair in an Afro. A flaw in the photo created “a white spot at the center of her face from which she already seems to be disappearing” (50). 

For many years, Natasha tried to forget the years between 1973 and 1985. Instead, she marked her and Gwen’s departure from Mississippi in the summer of 1972 as an ending, while Gwen’s death was a beginning. Still, many memories returned. One comes from the period a few months after she and Gwen moved to Atlanta. On a winter evening, Gwen changed into the clothes that she wore for her job as a cocktail waitress at a restaurant called the Mine Shaft in Underground Atlanta. She also wore “a heavy brass bullet belt slung low around her slender hips” (52).

Gwen had wanted to get out of Mississippi for a long time, long before Natasha was a factor. Natasha recalls hearing her mother sing the Temptations’s song “Just My Imagination” constantly during that period. She took interest in Atlanta—a city that had become increasingly progressive in the post-Civil Rights era. Long before, when the city was founded in 1837, it was called “Terminus.” Its former name referred to an intended meeting point for two railroads. Atlanta was to be the end of the line.

Gwen wrote a letter to Rick, confirming her and Natasha’s arrival in their new city. She left out the part in which she and her daughter stood by the side of the road, waiting for help while smoke billowed from under the hood. Gwen likely knew that Rick would have been upset, considering how he had always admonished her for not taking proper care of her car. Natasha recalls how her mother shut off the engine that day, let the car coast to the side of the interstate, and crossed herself while praying silently. It was the first of many times that Natasha saw her mother do this. She later learned that her mother had converted to Catholicism.

Gwen and Natasha got out of the car and stood by the guardrail, waiting for help. She remembers “the lime-green jumpsuit” that her mother wore (55). Natasha loved it because Gwen looked like both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane, like a powerful Amazon and a brainy career woman who still believed in chivalry. Natasha had not wanted to leave Mississippi and had “felt vaguely responsible” for having to leave (57).

Gwen found an apartment for them in a duplex “[i]n a previously white enclave” (58). Natasha attended Venetian Hills Elementary School. There wasn’t a single White student in her first-grade class. The White teachers who remained and the newly hired Black teachers embraced the change, using it to steep themselves and their students in a curriculum that acknowledged the abundant contributions of African Americans year around. The only books that did not feature Black people were the Dick and Jane readers left over from the segregation era. Natasha recalls seeing the faces of James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes on the walls. She remembers singing a song about the legend of John Henry, reciting Johnson’s “The Creation,” poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” during assemblies. Natasha felt at home in the school. On the other hand, her and her mother’s apartment felt large and empty. The area behind the stairwell on the ground floor looked, she thought, like the mouth of a cave at night.

To help Natasha adjust, Gwen decided to turn the space under the stairs into a play area. She even hung a sign that read “Natasha’s Room Beneath the Stars.” Still, Natasha had a terrible dream shortly after they moved. In it, she was sitting in her grandmother’s background when, suddenly, she felt an earthquake. The ground split open and Natasha had one foot on either side.

Natasha and Gwen spent most of their time together. Gwen was usually reading on the stoop while Natasha played hopscotch or rode her bike. On Sundays, they would go to the public library. One weekend, they went to the zoo in Grant Park. There, Natasha looked at the silverback gorilla, Willie B. The animal sat on his haunches, looking morose. Natasha asked her mother if Willie was sad. Gwen said that anyone would be, considering how isolated Willie was.

Natasha recalls her mother’s occasional dark moods, which recurred at the time, though they never lasted long. The moods made Natasha want to please Gwen. She excelled at reading, writing, and math. Then, one evening Gwen called her daughter out of her playroom to meet a man who stood in their kitchen doorway. His name was Joel, but Natasha decided to call him “Big Joe.”

Though Natasha was wary of him, due to his uneven smile and the “twitch in his upper lip,” they spent a lot of time together (69). Joel babysat her in the afternoons while Gwen was in class. On those days, they would drive around the city. Natasha recalls Joel singing along to a Curtis Mayfield album that played in his car. He taught her how to recognize when an unmarked police car was following.