There is a large birthmark on the back of my thigh. Even though it has been with me over half a century, I can’t recall which leg bears its dark outline, and so I have to look at myself backward in a mirror to remember. Seeing it is not unlike encountering a forgotten scar, a remnant that recalls the moment of wounding. It takes me back to my early childhood: the long, warm days in Mississippi when I wore shorts much of the time and the birthmark was plainly visible, not hidden as it usually is now. Though not the shape of a hand, it is the size of one, and in exactly the spot where, if you were told to sit on your hands as my mother was, you might leave a mark.

Across cultures myths abound about the imprint a mother can make even before her child crosses the threshold into the world, the way her desires or fears can be manifest on the body: birthmarks in the shape or color of food she craved, a lock of gray hair where she tugged at her own. To stanch the cravings, they say, eat a bit of dirt or clay; to steady the hand that worries the hair, sit on it. Had my mother done any of this, there might have been a single story in my family about what my birthmark symbolizes. The only thing the elders agreed on was that it looked like a place on a map, somewhere my mother might have dreamed of but had never been. I’ve often imagined her anticipating my arrival, both hopeful and anxious about the world, the particular time and place I would enter: a fierce longing taking shape inside her.

In the spring of 1966, when I was born, my mother was a couple of months shy of her twenty-second birthday. My father was out of town, traveling for work, so she made the short trip from my grandmother’s house to Gulfport Memorial Hospital, as planned, without him. On her way to the segregated ward she could not help but take in the tenor of the day, witnessing the barrage of rebel flags lining the streets: private citizens, lawmakers, Klansmen (often one and the same) raising them in Gulfport and small towns all across Mississippi. The twenty-sixth of April that year marked the hundredth anniversary of Mississippi’s celebration of Confederate Memorial Day—a holiday glorifying the old South, the Lost Cause, and white supremacy—and much of the fervor was a display, too, in opposition to recent advancements in the civil rights movement. She could not have missed the paradox of my birth on that particular day: a child of miscegenation, an interracial marriage still illegal in Mississippi and in as many as twenty other states.

[ Return to the review of “Memorial Drive.” ]

Sequestered on the “colored” floor, my mother knew the country was changing, but slowly. She had come of age in the summer of 1965, turning twenty-one in the wake of Bloody Sunday, the Watts riots, and years of racially motivated murders in Mississippi. Unlike my father, who’d grown up a white boy in rural Nova Scotia, hunting and fishing, free to roam the open woods, my mother had come into being a black girl in the Deep South, hemmed in, bound to a world circumscribed by Jim Crow. Though my father believed in the idea of living dangerously, the necessity of taking risks, my mother had witnessed the necessity of dissembling, the art of making of one’s face an inscrutable mask before whites who expected of blacks a servile deference. In the summer of 1955, when she was eleven years old, she’d seen what could happen to a black child in Mississippi who had not behaved as expected, stepping outside the confines of racial proscription: in my grandmother’s copy of Jet magazine, Emmett Till’s battered remains, his destroyed face.

Even had my mother wanted to ignore the racial violence and increasing turbulence around her, my grandmother would not allow it. In her house the latest issue of Jet lay on the coffee table beside a book of documentary photographs of the civil rights movement, images ranging from lynchings to peaceful protests and the resilient faces of black Americans—constant reminders of the necessity of fighting for justice in a state where the external reminders were increasingly unavoidable. The year before my mother met my father, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been gunned down in his driveway in Jackson. That year, 1963, my grandmother joined a group of black citizens in the Biloxi wade-in to protest being denied the right to use the public beaches. To mourn Evers, the protesters placed hundreds of black flags in the sand—an image my mother, watching from the seawall, would not forget. Nor would she forget hearing the news of the three civil rights activists working on the Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been abducted and murdered in June 1964, their bodies found two months later, buried under the weight of an earthen berm in Neshoba County.

When the news reached her, my mother was out of the state on a field trip with her college theater troupe. Back home the Ku Klux Klan had initiated its campaign of terror, the Mississippi she returned to having grown even more frightening. That summer was a season of fires, of danger coming ever closer: flaming crosses and black churches burning all around the state. My mother and grandmother, living across the street from a church, slept less soundly then, awakening often in the night to listen.

It was against that backdrop of imminence and upheaval that my parents, both college students at the time, fell in love. They met in a literature course on modern drama, and their conversations on books and theater propelled them from the classroom out into the afternoon sunlight as they walked the campus and beyond, among the rolling green hills of Kentucky. When they eloped in 1965, traveling across the Ohio River into Cincinnati, where it was legal for them to be married, only my mother fully understood what this might mean for me, the child she was already carrying. In letters to my father during their months apart, she was at once sanguine and practical, hopeful for a changing nation but also aware that any child she brought into the world would have much to learn in order to be safe. That meant I would need to understand the realities I would face: the painful, oppressive facts of a place slow to accept integration even as it was now the law of the land. My father, idealistic in nature, was still naive enough to believe I could grow up as free of the burdens of race—of blackness, that is—as he was.

They complemented each other, as opposites do: my mother graceful and reserved, attentive to details; my father, with his rough manners, rowdy and bookish at once, often distracted by his thoughts. It was my mother who stanched the blood on my cheek when, after watching my father shaving, I tried using his straight razor; it had been my father, absentminded, who’d left the razor on the counter within my reach. One day, when I cut my knee in the ditch outside, revealing what appeared to be a layer of white skin underneath, I lay between them, holding their hands up side by side, asking why they weren’t the same color, why I didn’t match either of them exactly. What was I? “You have the best of both worlds,” they told me, not for the first time.

[ Return to the review of “Memorial Drive.” ]

Out in the world, alone with either of them, I was just beginning to feel a profound sense of dislocation. If I was with my father, I measured the polite responses from white people, the way they addressed him as “Sir” or “Mister.” Whereas my mother would be called “Gal,” never “Miss” or “Ma’am,” as I had been taught was proper. So different was the treatment I received with each of them that I was unsure where or how I belonged. Only at home, the three of us together, did I feel profoundly theirs, and in that trinity of mother, father, and child I would shut my eyes and fall asleep on the high bed between them.

Outside that bedroom was a long, narrow hallway leading to the den and, just inside the door, a tall bookcase that held my attention countless afternoons. It housed my parents’ books along with a ser of encyclopedias my mother had insisted my grandmother purchase, instead of bronzing my baby shoes, to commemorate my birth. In the earliest dream I can recall, that hallway led to something unknown by which I was both drawn and vaguely frightened, a hint of danger that lay before me. In the dream I woke to a house so dark and quiet it seemed I was alone. I rose then and stood in the doorway, peering down the length of the hall. Opposite me, at the other end, blocking the bookcase, was a figure the size of a man: faceless and made entirely of the crushed shells that covered the driveway beside our house, the sharp edges I’d walked over barefoot countless times.

It makes sense to me now that my earliest recollected dream took on such a shape. By then my father was in graduate school part-time, working on his PhD in English, becoming a writer. Had I told him what frightened me, he might have reminded me, as a comfort, that the imagery resembled some of the stories he recited to me at bedtime: the trials of Odysseus, his encounter with the Cyclops blocking the exit to the cave; the monster Grendel, at the entrance to the mead hall, in the legend of Beowulf. Beyond those tales were the stories of Narcissus, Icarus, Cassandra, the riddle of the Sphinx—stories about bravery, vanity, hubris, knowledge.

I liked to curl up next to him in his large chair as he read. One evening, I ran my finger along his throat, over the knot there sharp as a knuckle.

“What’s this, Daddy?” I asked. From Sunday school I knew the story of Adam and Eve, but not the part my father now recounted: how when Adam bit the apple from the tree of knowledge it lodged in his throat, giving to his descendants this lasting anatomical feature.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said, furrowing his brow as usual. “But it is one of the consequences of knowledge.”

“Why don’t I have one?”

“You do,” he said, placing my hand against my own throat. “It’s just smaller. Say something and you can feel it.”

What my father wanted me to know about the world he did not always say explicitly and so I listened intently to his stories, finding myself in the characters. When I swung too high on my swing set even though he warned me not to—nearly going backward over the crossbar, the chain buckling and sending me flailing to the ground—I heard the story of Icarus. When I played too long before the mirror imitating my mother at her toilette, enthralled by my own face, it would be the story of Narcissus.

In the short stories he was writing, fictionalized accounts of our lives, he named my character Cassandra, after the figure from Greek mythology. For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra’s fate is that she is merely misunderstood—not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. “She was a prophet,” he told me, “but no one would believe her.” Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation—that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind’s eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.

The language of allegory and metaphor undergirded our days. “How’d you like to have that ball to play with?” my father said one afternoon, pointing to the red sun great in the sky.

“Don’t be silly,” said my mother. “You know she’d burn her hands.”

Even then I knew something had passed between them, some difference in how they aimed to prepare me for the world. My father believed—as the poet Robert Frost cautioned—that one must have a thorough education in figurative language. “What I am pointing out,” Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.” My mother, who’d majored in literature and theater in college, must have believed as well in the necessity of an education in metaphor, and yet she was the direct one, less interested in abstractions and figures of speech than in more practical lessons, admonishments about dangers I could not yet imagine.

[ Return to the review of “Memorial Drive.” ]