In 1985 I doubt that anybody would have believed that I would write another book. A review in Time Out said the one thing my readers would be certain of is that I would never write again and my editor for Real Life moaned, ‘How can you want to write when it takes you so long!’ She’d come to our flat on Marlborough Place and watched my slow pecking at a manual typewriter. I have to admit that there have been thousands of instances while I’ve been labouring over subsequent books when I’ve wondered if she didn’t have a point.
I didn’t become a weeper until I became a writer and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the craft which drives me to tears or the characters that I write about that I’m forced to live with daily. On the other hand the isolation I’ve imposed upon myself so that I could churn books out might make a lot of people emotional. Friends couldn’t understand why I moved to Folkestone in 1986 and then slipped off to a remote house in France in 1989. But I can hear myself telling them ‘I have to be alone to write.’ It also gave me the time and space to recreate myself as an author without anybody to challenge me with ‘But you’re a singer …’ or ‘But you’re an actress …’ or ‘You’re that girl from Hair who had Mick Jagger’s baby …’ Thank God I’ve never allowed other people’s perceptions of me to stop me from living my life, because I’d now probably be a bag lady toting tatty plastic carriers full of Hair press clippings circa 1969.
No doubt you think it’s crazy that I’ve now moved to the Irish countryside but this is no more bizarre than your buying a house in San Francisco, within a few miles of the very place I deserted when I tromped off for a European adventure nearly thirty years ago. But when I encouraged you to go to an American university so you could shed some of your public school ways, how could I foresee that you’d make the States your home? It seems these days that you see more of your father than you see of me. But I’m glad that you’re happy and surrounded by some of the friends you made at Yale.
By the way, thanks for Fed-Exing those set dressings to me in time for my performance of Joy last week. They arrived two hours before the play was starting and to see that little yellow party dress hanging on stage brought back endless memories of two summers ago when we got together in France to adapt my novel and prepare me to perform it at the Edinburgh Festival. God that was fun wasn’t it - like old times with just the two of us. I can still hear you asking me the first time I cried in rehearsal, ‘Mum, are you all right?’ So that I had to step out of my character to say, ‘I’m fine Miss Karis … just acting.’
I hope you’ll stage Joy in San Francisco, because there must be scores of older black actresses needing a good role, and if you can direct me, you can direct anybody.
I was sure last Monday that I’d forget my lines but somehow they came back to me. And at the end of my performance I was tempted to tell the audience, ‘My daughter produced and directed me in this play at last year’s Edinburgh Festival’ but I was scared it would reek of a mother’s pride. After 30 years in Britain you’d think some English modesty would have rubbed off on me, but it still feels unnatural … Speaking of which, next February 28th will mark the anniversary of my arrival in London from Berkeley. I’m not one for parties but maybe I should have one to coincide with the publication of Repossessing Ernestine which comes out two weeks earlier. Have you read the uncorrected proof yet? I think you should since you keep popping up in it. That picture Stefan sent me of you in France will be included amongst the photographs. Everybody says you look lovely.
It seems unbelievable that I finally finished writing Ernestine’s story. It’s taken four years in all from the beginning of my quest to find her, and it seems like a light year ago when I rang you at Yale to say, ‘Somebody claims that they’ve spotted my grandmother in Memphis’ and you told me I had to go see her and even beat me to it. Fifty-two years in a mental ward and still standing. What’s sad is that she’s not compos mentis enough to read her own story.
Anyway, Miss Karis, it’s now 6am and raining hard. I’m alone because Alan’s away working. The house is spectacularly quiet. So much so that I can hear the sound of the felt tip I’m writing with scratching on the page. A lot of people would hate this silence but I thrive on it after the years of being in France on my own … I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Ireland, because unless I go into town, it seems I could be anywhere. The country’s like that somehow, especially when I’m indoors. But as soon as I hit Dublin I think, ‘Lord, woman, how have you ended up in Ireland!’ Of course Alan’s the answer and thank goodness he didn’t live somewhere weird. I love this house and there’s something in the air which says that I’m being afforded another new beginning.
I hope you don’t mind that this book has been republished. It’s not supposed to dredge up old wounds but merely stands as an account of the first thirty-nine years of my life. Thank you immensely for your part in it and trust that if I had to live it all again, I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.
I send endless hugs and love, Mama
The atomic age dawned on 16 July 1945 at 5.30 am in the New Mexican desert with the success of a bomb with 20,000 times the power of TNT. I was probably conceived around that time, as it happens.
I guess you could say I got my start in an airplane factory called Brewster’s, where my mother, Inez, and her sister, Thelma, worked at the time, just a commuter’s distance from Philadelphia. Women were establishing themselves as an invaluable factor in the US workforce. Trained to read the blueprints, to rivet, to run the drill press or drill gun and build planes which were a main instrument of war, they would never again believe that their usefulness was restricted to home and child-rearing.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been dead one year and three days when I arrived, on 15 April 1946.
My genetic make-up was to prove a disability, because it automatically meant that the equality and freedom that were supposed to be endemic elements of the American culture were not going to be mine.
I am only referred to as American when I am out of the country. My skin colour is oak with a hint of maple. Of the various races I know I comprise – African, American Indian, German Jew and Irish – only the African was acknowledged, and I was labelled ‘coloured’. This was changed to ‘Negro’ in more sophisticated circles. The less evolved would often call me ‘nigger’. Over the years, I would encounter a slew of nicknames and variations on the theme of my complexion. Being colour-coded was a determining factor in who or what I could become.
Americans of slave descent are not purely African. Though we are a combination of races, this fact is avoided by all. The consequent dilemma is that entire aspects of our heritage, attitudes and behaviour are never attributed to our genetic make-up. This seems short-sighted on everyone’s part, especially as Americans are so big on understanding human nature.
I am not merely what you see. I’m the total sum of my parts, and the dominant elements aren’t necessarily the most visibly apparent ones. One morning in Paris, I realized that to come to terms with myself meant that I would have to come to terms with my ancestral past. It was 5 July 1985, the day after America’s celebration of her independence.
While growing up in Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, had enhanced my sense of the nation’s history, I had never examined my own. As it was cautiously overlooked by everyone else, it had been easy for me to carry on as if it didn’t exist.
I enthusiastically set out to trace my family tree. I took out a library book on genealogy. Tracing my family turned out to be impossible, since slave births and deaths were not recorded and marriage was not allowed. It’s as if my great-grandparents just fell out of the sky.
While