Evidence

   Mom is not who she used to be, and for the past two years, that fact has been a stone in my shoe, a lump in my throat, a poignant sunset, the last leaf, a good fig, a mystery, a hole, an offense.

   Earlier this week it was an offense. I have been beyond upset. Should I be angry or depressed? Which would have been saner?

   Duty demands I not blame my Mom for the things she says, because she is not this person I am charged with loving. The frail and failing being in the bed, incapable, vulnerable, helpless, confused, nearly always sunny but sometimes not, is not my mom.

   But I can blame the universe.

   She was in a mood so dark it surprised me. Her hair needed a good washing; that might have been the problem. When my hair's greasy, I hate everybody. 

   But it was the hissing.

   She kept saying, "Oh God" and then groaning out the words, "More Pilgrims."

   I knew she was looking at her dear old laminated print of the Pilgrims on their way to church, stopping in the snowy woods to stare out at the viewer.

   "Oh God. More Pilgrims," Mom groaned. "So many of them are blacks."

  

   Dad was born in or near 1905, and although he worked in the War on Poverty and the OEO during most of my young life, he was a child of Mississippi County, Arkansas. Instinctively, he experienced skin color as a marker for intellect, and he felt he needed to help black and brown people, that it was his duty to "reach down" — even when he knew that was a crude stereotyping. He would marvel at educated black people as "articulate," for example. Get a drink or three in him, and out came the N word. But he had personal courage, and more than once I saw him confronting himself, calling himself out on his biases. Trying to be better than he was.

    My complicated dad.

    Mom was so much better. Twenty years younger, more empathetic, the child of Irish immigrants who had been discriminated against and denied opportunities because they were Irish. Long before she became a special ed teacher, she taught in a migrant school, and then she taught in a segregated school where all the students were black, before and a year after Texas decided to enforce desegregation. 

   When that school's textbooks were finally upgraded, Mom brought home the old ones to show me, so I would stop imagining that I must be smarter than most black kids just in general because I was smarter than everybody. 

   Those were some torn and dirty textbooks, and they had been used in the white school before they were discarded — given to the black school.

   "Do you think you would be making straight A's if you only had these books to read?" she asked me. "You're a smart girl. Some of the kids I teach are very smart, too. But they don't get the help you get."

   I'll never forget that, or the respect she routinely showed people in service occupations, how she knew not just the names but the life stories of janitors, clerks, secretaries and security guards, who so often were people of color.

   She was conscientiously, gently an advocate for justice. 

   

   And now, sometimes, she hisses the word "blacks."

   I feel helpless. What is there to do, but be my mother's child?

   So I turned to the woman in the bed and I said, more firmly than I felt, "No, Mom, no. We like black Pilgrims. Black Pilgrims are our friends."

   But she's not there.