Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Donna Hemans
Lucky
My mother has become an icon of sorts. A Jamaican woman,
a nurse, she has learned to fly a plane late in her life, and in her first solo
attempt, the tiny plane she was flying developed the sort of mechanical
difficulties that would scare even an experienced pilot. But my mother
brought the plane down smoothly, landed it on a highway cleared of
traffic, and walked out into the midst of television crews and newspaper
and wire service reporters ready to cast the day’s latest hero onto the
world. She held her head down, modest in that moment of glory.
My mother, who wiped her hands of mothering the day I turned
eighteen, is the new shadow on my life. On my eighteenth birthday,
my mother turned to me and said she was done mothering. “I raised
two self-sufficient children,” she said. “I don’t expect to be bailing you
out for the rest of your lives.” We had dinner, and then she went to fly
a plane, her first solo flight. Those who know me are now expecting
me to exhibit my mother’s bravado, as if that brand of heroism is
excreted in breast milk and lies latent until an appropriate future
moment. What seeped into me is her manner of speaking, the milk of
the mother permanently imprinted on the child. Try as I did to sound
like American children, I couldn’t. Somewhere in my childhood in
this very same America where I was born, my mother implanted the
idea that we, my brother and I, were not fully Americans, and would
never, ever be truly African-American, no matter which slang we
picked up, no matter which style of clothes we wore, no matter what
letters or numbers or designs my brother tried to shave into his hair,
so we should just as well accept that we were Jamaican and she would
be raising Jamaican children even this far away from the Caribbean
island. By way of explaining all this, she said that when growing up she
was never allowed to speak Jamaican patois in her parents’ presence,
so she grew up speaking the King’s English (which king, I don’t know),
and sounding sometimes like a foreigner in her own country. Foreigner
as she was, taunted as she was, that is what she expected of us.
Anyhow, my mother’s reincarnation from nurse and wife and
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