Years later, when a job brought her back to the area, she decided to finally reckon with her past. And I just learned to ignore it, so that the friends I was with wouldn't realize that this strange person was actually following me. But it is the very thing, that kind of awareness of death, of that possibility, that undergirds everything I do. I need now to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother’s life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy. That’s what’s drawn me back: the hidden, covered over, nearly erased. Then Joel entered the picture, an underemployed Vietnam vet who constantly invoked his wartime service to justify his oddities. Though I knew exactly where it was, knew the landmarks leading up to it, I drove right past at first and had to double back to enter the tree-­lined front gate. For moodier portraits, as if to convey a sense of seriousness or formal elegance, there’s the plain black scrim. For a short time, it was bliss. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web. Row after row of rusted stair rails and window screens mark the shabby buildings—just a decade old when we moved in—and a lighter shade of paint coats the walls, as if to hide the dark history beneath it. Hindsight makes me see the portrait differently now—how gloomy it is—as if the photographer meant to pro­duce something artistic, rather than an ordinary studio portrait. I keep an image in my head of myself from that first day after her death, at the apartment. On seeing footage of herself on TV walking into her home with the caption, "daughter of the murdered woman". They are walking together, side by side, when her mother turns to her, bullet hole visible in her forehead, and says, “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”. The thought of that has always filled me with despair, and so for years I chose other stories to tell myself. It would have been repaired soon after, filled and painted over, and I wondered now if the building had settled more with age, the walls shifting. The passages describing those years are among the most lyrical in the book. Tretheway says she aimed to "forge a new life for myself that didn't include that past." There I was in a hotel room that the police put us up in to hide because they hadn't captured Joel yet. The last image of my mother, but for the photographs taken of her body at the crime scene, is the formal portrait made only a few months before her death. “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.”. To know such grief means that when you experience joy, you know the depths of its opposite, and that makes it that much sweeter. Meanwhile, she excelled at school, made the cheerleading squad and vowed to keep quiet about his troubling behavior. On learning her stepfather was following her and planning to kill her, too. If I had to leave home to go to school for practice of some kind — gymnastics practice or cheerleading practice or even to meet a friend to go to the movies together — he would often follow me, and I would see him frequently like that. But early on, the little girl noticed that white people reacted differently depending on which parent she was with. She does not look at the camera, her eyes fixed at a point in the distance that seems to be just above my head, making her face as inscrutable as it always was—her high, elegant forehead, smooth and unlined, a bill­board upon which nothing is written. From there I could see Stone Mountain in the distance, suddenly visible where Memorial crests, as if to remind me what is remembered here and what is not. The officer recognized Trethewey; years earlier, he had been first on the scene the morning of her mother's murder. I've lived with the survivor's guilt of that moment ever since. Until I had to. Is there nowhere I might go and not find you there too?" In 2005, Trethewey and her husband were walking in Decatur, Ga., when a policeman approached them. The result is “Memorial Drive" (Ecco, 214 pp., ★★★★ out of four), an exquisitely written, elegiac memoir that tells the story of Trethewey’s charismatic but doomed mother, born Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, and tries to account for her disastrous second marriage and violent death. It originates in the middle of the city, Memorial, and winds east from downtown ending at Stone Mountain, the nation’s largest monument to the Confederacy. For the sitting she’d chosen a long-­sleeved black sheath, the high collar open at the throat. It’s as if she’s still there, that girl I was, behind the closed door, locked in the footage where it ends. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I have needed to most.”, She begins the book by recounting a dream she had three weeks after her mother’s death. It means that as a nation, we have a chance at a historical reckoning that will allow us to tell a fuller version of our shared history, and not a skewed version or a version that erases a very important part of what we share. Trethewey writes about her mother's murder in the new memoir, Memorial Drive. Throughout my child­hood it had been my responsibility to tend it, every week, dusting and misting the upper leaves and snipping the browned lower ones. And then finally he left. Mom: My Greatest Terror, My Greatest Love. Trethewey's stepfather was sentenced to life in prison, and Trethewey, who was 19 at the time, spent years trying to forget what had happened. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother as "colored", and the race of her father as "Canadian". I think about [Federico García] Lorca's idea of "duende," the wound that never heals. Later, she came to regret forgetting. From the book Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey. I can’t bear to think of the alternative, can’t bear to think of her in that horrible moment, the sudden realization of her imminent death after allowing herself to believe she had escaped. Struck dumb, we say when fear or shock or astonishment renders us mute; dumb grief, when the grief is not expressed in uttered words. I know that most likely the life insurance policies were simply one of the benefits of that job: she’d have signed up for them during the open enrollment period for new employees. The childhood idyll was not to last. Sometimes it’s a sky­-blue scrim that looks as if it’s been brushed with a feather, or an autumn scene of red and yellow leaves framing a post-­and­-rail fence. ... We did not talk to [the reporters], but they captured that scene of me going into the apartment and shutting the door behind me. "When I talk about her now, as painful as it is to go back to that place of willed amnesia, to try to recover it, I do find some happiness in bringing back what few parts of her that I can," she says. The last time I was at the apartment complex, the morning after her death, I could see the faded chalk outline of her body on the pavement, the yellow police tape still stuck to the door, the small, round hole in the wall beside her bed where a single bullet—a missed shot— had lodged. On watching Confederate monuments be taken down in recent months. When Natasha Trethewey was 19, her stepfather killed her mother. I’ve seen the depression a once-covered nail head can leave when a house settles, a pock in the drywall like a wound opening from beneath the surface. I kept only a few of her books, a heavy belt made of bullets, and a single plant she had loved—a dieffenbachia. And he stayed there for a while. The abuse continued until her mother finally moved out and filed for divorce. A lasting metaphor for the white mind of the South, Stone Mountain rises out of the ground like the head of a submerged giant—the nostalgic dream of Southern heroism and gallantry emblazoned on its brow: in bas-­relief, the enormous figures of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. Imagine what we would know as a people if those were the monuments that inscribed the landscape. "And in trying to heal the wound that never heals," he wrote, "lies the strangeness in an artist's work." I knew that my grandmother was on a list of people being watched among the citizens' council, because she had tried to place my parents' ... marriage announcement in the newspaper. In reality, if the psychic told her anything it was most likely something promising about her future—romance, perhaps, or hopeful predictions about the new job she’d just taken as personnel director for human resources at the county mental health agency. In 1966, her mother had to give birth to her in a segregated hospital ward. Trethewey's stepfather was sentenced to life in prison, and Trethewey, who was 19 at the time, spent years trying to forget what had happened. I knew that I was sort of rendered illegitimate in the eyes of the law because my parents' [interracial] marriage was illegal.

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