The young woman and her grandmother were sitting on a porch swing, rocking gently together. It was a warm night, and the young woman was filled with questions.
What was it like when you were growing up in Louisiana? When you got married and settled in Alabama? When your husband moved to Chicago and left you behind? When you came here on your own to be with him?
“I don’t know what I can tell you,” the grandmother said. “You know, we had some good times. People lived their lives, that’s all. Just like you’re doing now. Wasn’t any different.”
It was a frustrating moment for Natasha Tarpley. She loved her grandmother. Nana had been a source of wisdom, strength and love. But at this moment, Nana wouldn’t or couldn’t dig back in her memory to find answers to Tasha’s many questions.
Nana, for her part, was frustrated as well. Her body was beginning to fail her. Her legs were so painful she could hardly walk, hardly make it up the stairs from the basement.
In the coming days of Tasha’s visit, Nana would lean on her granddaughter for help. And Natasha would let her.
For now, though, the two women rocked on the swing, slowly, companionably, in the warm Chicago night.
– – –
Natasha Tarpley was asking questions of her grandmother, and of her mother, too, because she was writing a book about the three of them, a memoir now in bookstores called “Girl in the Mirror” (Beacon).
In the manner of many a writer before her, Tarpley was using the writing process as a way of trying to understand her own place in the world. She was looking at her mother’s life and her grandmother’s life to see how they were similar to hers — and different. She was trying to tease out clues about what she needed to do to achieve happiness by looking at what they did in searching for peace and fulfillment.
The three women were all African-Americans, but their lives, at least on the surface, seemed very different:
– Anna Mae Dudley, who had grown up on a farm, worked as a nurse’s aide in Chicago while raising two children on the city’s segregated South Side.
– Marlene Tarpley, Anna’s daughter and Natasha’s mother, was the mother of four, wife of a Chicago police officer and an administrator with the Illinois Department of Public Health.
– Natasha, the product of integrated schools and resident of integrated neighborhoods, was a writer of essays, poetry and book reviews. In her mid-20s, she was a law student and unmarried.
Yet, what they shared — what everyone in this interwoven story shares — is a life of movement, restlessness and hunger.
On almost every page of “Girl in the Mirror,” people are in motion: striding across fields, walking out doors, driving to Chicago, moving to a new neighborhood, flying to Boston, taking the kids to Europe, running after lightning bugs, drifting to D.C., walking to the Texaco station, heading to the limousine to go to Nana’s funeral.
Not that Tarpley’s family is more nomadic or frenetic than others. The motion is just, Tarpley found, the nature of life. You search, as she did in going into the book project, for a way to find rest and contentment, and you discover that life instead is a journey. Even death is called passing or leave-taking.
“I have learned,” Tarpley’s mother wrote to her shortly after Nana’s death, “that staying in one place, you don’t grow, you fade away. You become a stranger to yourself.”
It’s a universal story, even though Beacon Press has added a subtitle — “Three Generations of Black Women in Motion” — that will steer the book toward an African-American audience.
“My point in the book,” Tarpley says, “was to write about three women — three African-American women but whose experiences are just like everybody else’s. It’s about human beings. These three women’s experiences — anyone can relate to them.”
– – –
It was 1942, and Anna’s husband, Jack, had gone off to Chicago to make money, to make his mark, leaving her behind, telling her he would call for her when he’d gotten settled, when he had a stake. Anna waved him goodbye, turned and entered their home:
And sure enough, when I went to make the bed, the emptiness was there in the sheets still wrinkled in the shape of his body. It was there, pressed up against me as I cleaned the greens for supper, breathing down my neck and begging for a taste when I bent to check the ham browning in the oven. It was stretched back in the armchair as I dusted around the living room, rippling through the dirty water left over from the wash, swaying with the clothes blowing like ghosts on the line.
– – –
Anna Mae Dudley never wrote those words, or said them, or thought them in exactly that way. They are her granddaughter’s imaginings. They are a fiction — but a fiction rooted in fact, anchored in Natasha Tarpley’s knowledge of and affection for her grandmother.
“Girl in the Mirror” is an unusual memoir, but, then, Natasha Tarpley is a writer of unusual books.
She was in her early 20s and a sophomore at Harvard University when she conceived her first book, “Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity,” published in 1995 by Beacon Press. The work is a collection of short essays and poems by 42 writers about being young and black. What sets it apart is Tarpley’s willingness as editor to include many pieces that speak of experiences that aren’t unique to African-Americans.
Her second book was “I Love My Hair,” a picture story for young children (with warm watercolor illustrations by E.B. Lewis), published earlier this year by Little Brown. In a rich poetic text covering just 32 pages, Tarpley tells of a young girl, Kenyana, and all the ways she wears her hair. Reviewers have been impressed by the book’s deeper message, even if they weren’t in agreement on what that message was. Some called it a story of self-esteem; others, a paean to a mother’s love; others, a celebration of African-American identity.
Like any memoir, “Girl in the Mirror” is built on a solid structure of facts and dates from Tarpley’s family history.
It begins with Anna’s life alone in Alabama and moves with her to Chicago as she decides on her own to follow her husband to the big city. Then, there are Marlene’s struggles — her bumpy marriage and the series of miscarriages before the birth of her four children; her husband’s callousness and the illness that brought about his early death; her move to Boston and the ties that still bound her to Chicago and her mother.
Finally, there are Natasha’s efforts to find her own way as a student and a writer and a woman. Anna and Marlene are her touchstones. She is pulled toward them and pulled away from them. She looks to them for answers, but they are groping through life just as she is.
It’s a compelling story of three intertwined lives, made even more compelling by Tarpley’s decision to break with the traditional memoir form and employ her own imagination to tell about her mother and her grandmother.
“There were a lot of silences — things they didn’t want to talk about, things they skirted over,” Tarpley says, sitting on a cushion on the floor of her Hyde Park apartment. “I took the fragments of what I heard and allowed myself to expand on that, based on my own impressions. I gave myself a lot of leeway.”
Another risk Tarpley took was using a poetic prose, heavy with metaphors and evocative language, in the sections narrated by her mother and grandmother, as well as her own.
“I was an African-American studies major, and it was frustrating that the facts were presented in very objective, almost non-human terms. I wanted to give voice to how people feel,” Tarpley says. “Poetry is a very good way of conveying those experiences. It strikes you at the heart. The things that people don’t know how to say — you can say in that kind of language.”
Shortly after Tarpley began work on the book, her grandmother died. But, throughout the project, her mother “was very trusting of me,” she said. Marlene read every draft and, at times, would make suggestions to improve the book’s accuracy. But it is a measure of the close relationship between the two women that Tarpley’s mother never found anything in the manuscripts “that she out and out said: `No, that’s wrong.’ “
There was one difference between the two women: Tarpley felt strongly about the lack of attention her father had paid to her mother, but Marlene preferred to remember the good times of the marriage. As a writer, Tarpley solved the problem by putting most of her description of the relationship in her own section — and in her own voice.
– – –
Tarpley, now 27, graduated from Northwestern University Law School in May. But she has no plans to go into practice.
Instead, she’ll be on the move again, leaving Chicago in September for a job in New York as a reporter at Fortune magazine. And, once again, she’ll be leaving her mother behind.
“My mom,” Tarpley says, “is at a point where she has to reinvent herself. She says she misses being someone’s little girl.
“It’s a hard process for me to watch. I want to rescue her now. At the same time, I want to go off and see what’s out there for me.”
———-
A review of “Girl in the Mirror: Three Generations of Black Women in Motion” will appear in Sunday’s Books section.
