The Daughters Of Black Migrants Part I

Damasia

“My mother was someone I only knew from photos. We had photos of her everywhere. In my family it was just the two of us, me and my dad. We had family but not here. We were supposed to but, we never got to go back. My mom died in the hospital after I was born and my dad, he didn’t really talk about her that much even though there were pictures of her everywhere. When I was little I thought he didn’t like to talk about her, but after he died I thought, maybe it was just too painful. You know how it is when you’re a kid. You ask questions about everything. Why is the sky blue? Why don’t we have more money? Why do I have to go to school? Papa was really patient with me about these things, but he got really quiet when I tried to ask him about my mother. I know maybe seven things, about her besides her name. I ended up just letting it go. When I asked him anything about her, he, he always had this look on his face. I didn’t know what that look was, what it meant. I just knew, it was like, something was wrong. The little girl me thought that just by asking him, I was doing something wrong. Something I was supposed to be doing, and that I should never ask him anything else about her, so I just stopped, but I never stopped wondering. Now I know that it was grief, and maybe trauma because I think he lost the love of his life. But when you’re little you don’t always know the difference, you don’t know there is a difference. If you’re lucky you don’t know what grief is, or trauma. I didn’t know that I was grieving for her, even though I never met her. Or maybe I did, before she, she died but I don’t remember. 


Later I learned to read his expressions. My father talked a lot to me. About other things at least. I think he felt like he had to, but he was really quiet when we were around other people. He tried to make up for it just being him. Us. The two of us. The things he did with his face, with his hands, that was universal. It didn’t matter who you were. He was always fidgeting. When he was around other people he did a lot of ‘hmms’, and ‘mm’s’, but his face always told you what he was thinking, or what he wanted you to think that he was thinking. I think I’m one of the people who recognised the difference, if you know what I mean. We had a family friendly, Senora Thomas. She was something close to a friend, something like a friend. Papa didn’t really have many friends, but Senora Thomas was one of them. We talk on the phone a lot, even to this day. She loved my father. I knew that even back then. She always sat next to us at church. She watched me sometimes if he was working late or had something to do. She ate with us on Sunday’s after church. Papa wanted her to come to our place to eat, because once we were invited to a Christmas dinner that Senora Thomas hosted at her apartment and the food was terrible. It was really, really bad. Really bad. And papa leaned close to me and whispered that the Bacalao croquetas tasted like cardboard, the salad was stale, and the Lechon was overcooked. He said Christmas was about joy, and if you couldn’t eat good food it was better to eat beans, rice, and plantains. But he ate everything and he made me eat it all too. That was the meanest thing he ever said, and I knew he felt bad about it, because maybe a week later he told me that it was a beautiful gesture, Senora Thomas cooking for all of us who were like her, far away from our families. He always said Senora Thomas was like him. That was something my father never understood. He always compared us. The way he put it, we were living parallel lives, but he never explained how I was going to be able to do things that he couldn’t do here. I had an ‘in’ that he would never have here, even if people were constantly telling me that I didn’t belong here. These cold people, and this even colder climate was something that I had known from day one. He and Senora Thomas, they knew this, this world but they also knew another one. They knew other things and, they knew this wasn’t the only place to be, the only way to be, the way you have to be to be here. I think that’s what makes it harder sometimes. Knowing why you came, why you left, and that the rules aren’t always ‘The Rules’, but you have to follow them anyway because you came so far. You left other rules behind in exchange for these rules. So just be quiet and just put your head down and take it. That was papa.


What they talked about for hours and hours every time we met always felt like a beautiful, strange fairy tale. Only for children and something that you stop believing in the moment you grow up, whenever that is. It doesn’t follow you, the fairy tale. There were the stories about family, school days, the neighborhood, and then there’s the bad things. Things he didn’t like to talk about, and things Senora Thomas was always eager to talk about. I think that’s why I haven’t gone there. I always wanted to go home with him. It’s funny for me to call it that actually. I never really think of it like a home, but it’s a home inside of me. To be here, to grow up here and to be from there, but born here and, always misplaced, I think I make my peace with the constant questions… the really annoying ones but I think of home, where they came from as being born in me. That’s how I think, that’s how I make sense of it. At least for myself. When I came out it, it was already there and then every conversation over cards, walks, the records he played, the calls to family who I could barely hear, like they were under the ocean or something… home was always being planted somewhere here. I think it still is. He said that we couldn’t go back. I always wanted to ask him if that was the truth. If we really couldn’t go back, if that was really it, or if he just didn’t want to go back and he didn’t want me to go either. Because I think those are two very different things. It’s another question on a long list of questions that I never got… I never felt like I could ask him. Now I can go back. I can go home, but I’m scared because what if home doesn’t feel like home? What if it turns out to be just another thing to lose? Can I lose something else? Can I afford that? I’m scared to ask, I’m too, I’m too scared… of the answer.


I don’t wanna lose anything else, and that, it creates a lot of problems. For real. Believe me. I can’t lose anything else. I always felt sorry for my father. Guilty too. If I could chose one thing to let go of, it would be that because sometimes it’s so heavy I can’t move. He gave me everything. Everything he did, he did for me and I knew that. Not because he was the type to tell you, you saw it. You felt it, and it was overwhelming because what could I give to him? What could I… possibly do. Going to school, staying out of trouble, really? That’s it, but like any good dad, or any good parent he always made it seem like being happy, and me being me was enough. I would just look at him, because I knew what he was doing. I tried not to know. I would look at him and… watching him sleeping on the couch, but not looking like, even then, he was resting. Do you know what I mean? Resting… Then I remember one day looking up and seeing the lines, the ridges on his forehead. They weren’t always there, or were they? I remember thinking one day what made them. Were they always supposed to be there? I like laugh, I like, I like that they’re called laugh lines and that’s a really nice way, nice, ha… of thinking about it, but… but sometimes his laugh, it sounded like he was choking. It came from, from the small of his back, then to his throat and out of his mouth. And he had that kind of way of doing it, of laughing, that, that it, required I guess you could say, it required him to close his eyes when he did it. When he laughed. So… so, maybe he was in pain. Maybe they were laugh lines, or maybe they were just lines. Lines that other things had cut and put there. I really don’t know. He made sure that when I came home from school that there was something for me to eat in the fridge, and that it was something that he had cooked himself. That’s one thing I know about my mother. One out of seven. First it was the food and then it was love. Apparently as the legend goes, he told her when they met that she was beautiful, and she was! She told him “I know.” She said she wanted something more useful than compliments. My grandmother was a cook and she taught my father and his sisters and brothers how to cook, so my father started cooking for my mother and her family. Her mother told her, Rosa, you must marry this man. If for nothing else do it for the food. She told him what my other grandmother had said, her mother, and then she said that she couldn’t marry him because he would feed her so well that she would always need new clothes. But she didn’t know something else about my father! He could sew too. He made a dress for her, she’s wearing it in a picture of them taken before they left. He didn’t teach me how to cook because he said I would never need to learn because I had him. It’s one of the things I’m still angry with him about. That and the fact that he must have been in so much pain, so much… I can’t even imagine, I can’t, I’ve tried and I’ve played back me and him and him not looking like anything was in any way wrong. My cousin Sylvia who lives in the U.S., we facetime and she helps me with family recipes but they never taste like papa’s. I still try to cook the things that he made for me, it’s another way that I, that I try to be close to him again. To this day, food that I don’t have to warm up, doesn’t taste like food to me. There was always food waiting for me in the fridge. I may no know my mother. I never met her, but I guess I am her daughter. I have so many memories of warming things up that papa had made for me. Good food is food that you have to warm up, that’s just how it is. These little things, they’re the things that people leave behind for us. It hurts that I have the memory of the flavors, of the food… I can taste it, but I can never get it to taste the same way it did when papa cooked it. He’s gone, so that magic that he made, it has to be gone too. It’s like it can’t exist without him. Some I can only remember what it’s supposed to taste like. I can’t reproduce it, I can’t replicate it. 


It reminds me that we lived with a lot of ghosts, my father and I. Ghosts of a place that we would never see together. Ghosts from histories that wouldn’t stay where he left them. He thought that because I didn’t know the names of these ghosts that they couldn’t follow me. So I never told him, I never said, ‘Papa you know that there are ghosts here. There are ghosts here too papa!’ How could I tell him that this wasn’t a home, that they would even though I had all of the keys, they were so many ways, so many times access was denied? It was not a home, not a place that could be born inside of me like that mythical place that he and Senora Thomas laughed about. It didn’t matter that I spoke the language, that I thought of the culture here as ‘culture’… None of that mattered. If I die here, this place, this land, the, the soil it’s not gonna take me into it, cover me, and readily accept what’s left of me. I will never be integrated, not even in death, he wasn’t either even though I can visit him. His grave. I don’t. I used to keep all of this, I kept it to myself, and we had really hard times when I was a teenager because I was angry with him. I blamed him for not knowing. He was supposed to know that I was… I was not okay. Of course it was his fault! How could he not know? I blamed him for not knowing about all of the shit that I was going through in a language he barely spoke. I had to blame him in a language that we never shared. For talking about a home I never knew over and over again. For talking about a time that he could never travel back to, and and, the two of us, we were even going there together. It belonged to him and even though he talked about all of the good things, I was so, I was confused. How could it be both the best place in the world, and the most cruel at the same time. How you do you love a country that you also despise? But my father, he listened to me. Even when I was shouting. He spoke to me with his eyes, and for years they said ‘Damasia, I’m here. I’m here’, and I knew that’s what they were saying but I didn’t know how to reach out to him and when he tried to hold me, it was me who pushed him away. One day we were sitting on the sofa watching tv, or pretending to, and I looked around and I thought, I just realised, this whole house, everything it was my mother. The furniture, the decorations, she chose everything and he never changed it. There were pictures of them and pictures of some of his family and my mother’s family, but we never added ourselves to this wall, to this timeline. We didn’t really take a lot of pictures anyway but that’s not the point. There were pictures that papa took of me, and he kept pictures of me in his wallet from school, but we never put them up, we never changed the flat. We didn’t even reorganise the furniture, not once, and when I was sitting with him on the sofa, right there I realised that she was there, but not ‘there’ at the same time. It had always been like that. Her absence was it’s own presence and… she was that absence, she was as my father remembered her, and she was all of my questions and none of the women who I looked to and wondered if that’s what a mother’s supposed to be. Her absence, it took up a lot of space. And I hated that, that feeling. You know, I hated feeling like that. And I didn’t know what to do with it. I was, I was fifteen, and I said to him, why does our house have to be a tomb for her? My father, he took a deep breath and his eyes, eyes that could have looked angry when I was a kid, when I was a girl, I knew instead that they were the eyes of a sad person. But because I had started it, because I had that kind of anger that makes you, you know, you… you sit up and it’s all over you, it’s all around, you know it’s yours and… it makes it really hard, it makes so hard to, to stop yourself and to do the right thing which is to apologise. But I knew that what I said was so cruel and I couldn’t take it back. Papa didn’t say anything because he knew that I knew. It was disrespectful to my mother and insulting to my father, this man who did everything for me. But I had said it! I thought I had to keep it going. I couldn’t take it back. He just looked at me like, ‘Well okay daughter, what are you going to say next?’ This is… I kinda wanted him to hit me. He hadn’t hit me since I was really young, and that was because I was nine years old and I decided that I could have dinner at a friend’s place without telling him. He was so scared. That, that was the only time he hit me. So, I did it. I said something like, ‘We can’t keep everything like this just because that’s how she left it. ‘Something like that. He took a deep breath, bit his bottom lip, something he did when he wasn’t sure what to say, or if he should say whatever he wanted to say. It took him five minutes to say something, okay, not five minutes but it felt like five minutes. Finally, he said, ‘If you want to make some changes daughter, get up and do it yourself’. Then got up, and went for a really long walk and he didn’t come back… I don’t know where he went, but I waited up for him or at least I tried to.  


The next day he acted like nothing happened but slowly things in the flat began to change. We got new furniture. He painted the living room white, it was painted turquoise before, and one day all the family photos were gone. He replaced them with art prints. Picasso, Matisse, Rembrandt. It was an act of rebellion. It was a way for my father to tell me that I had hurt him and that we would live with that hurt, literally, but it was also him giving me what I had asked for. What I said I wanted. I missed the red sofa, the floral curtains, the black and white and faded color photos, the cheap lamps. We never talked about it and I never asked him where the photos went. What happened to them. Of course I found them later. Almost right after that, after I looked up and everything had changed, that’s when he got sick, or as I think about it now that’s when he couldn’t function, when he couldn’t hide it anymore. He was sick for years. I remember the doctor asking him about it, asking him ‘How long did you feel like this, this pain’, and papa just kinda shrugged his shoulders and avoided any eye contact with me. A little pain got stronger, it grew, and I was mad at him for years about that too. Why didn’t he say anything? Why? We could have done something about it… but that’s the thing that it took me so long to figure out. My father was used to being in pain. It was his normal. I feel like my life is so planned. I know where I’m going. There are securities that I have that my father will never have, and in fact he couldn’t of dreamed of, not even for me. What’s a little pain, and oh its growing? So what, I guess. He lived with a lot of things that he didn’t speak about. My father, who I sometimes think of as the boy in the photos he kept on the wall before my outburst, the other ones of him and my mother, or him and his sisters, or him and a friend. He was so far away from that. He had become a father in a country that he didn’t come from, a single dad with very little support and a lot of struggles. We knew it was the end, but we kept expecting time to stretch, to give a little bit, just a little bit, until we were both ready to really talk and to really listen. He never had a problem telling me that he loved me, he wasn’t one of those people. So that’s what he said to me and what we said to each other everyday. I couldn’t tell him who I really was. I wanted to ask him about it. We saw two women on the Uban and he caught be staring and he just smiled at me, and told me to, to not stare. I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t. I couldn’t tell him about the ghosts either and that he was wrong about that and that I needed him to understand even though he… I’m just learning to live with it and I’m glad I didn’t. He couldn’t tell me about all the pain he had over losing the person who he loved and who he literally ran away with. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t tell me how much pain he was in, how he felt like nothing in this place where I was supposed to have everything. So we both just said “I love you”, and time didn’t wait for us to say anything else, and we didn’t do enough, or we didn’t do everything that we could have done with the little time that we had left and now it’s too late. I’m living with that too. I’m living with it being too late. No more time left.”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021