From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(71)

Zoela swam up to me. She locked her body around mine, her legs around my waist. “Mommy, why do you think there are no other brown people in Aliminusa?” Our surroundings were not lost on her, either.

“Sweetheart, Aliminusa is a small town in a part of the world where people have not immigrated. It’s not like Los Angeles or big cities. For a long time, it has just been full of people who were born there, married there, and had kids there. Not a lot of outsiders.” I stopped myself before I descended further into a historical and geopolitical diatribe. I couldn’t even begin to address the refugee crisis with her. I didn’t know quite how to talk about the children, mothers, and fathers who were crossing the Mediterranean to get to the island on which we stood and the circumstances that also made this place a sea of tears.

“But why aren’t there brown people like us?” she asked again, sea salt forming at her hairline.

“Because people like us, black and brown people, did not originate in Europe. People like us were brought to Europe and throughout North America and even South America hundreds of years ago as slaves.” At once I saw myself as the overanswering daughter of people who had answered my own childhood questions with complex adult narratives. If we had been on shore, I probably would have started arcing out the slave route with lines in the sand.

“But are we the only brown people they know?” She asked as if the question and its answer had just reached her consciousness at the same time.

“Maybe. Yes. It’s likely, aside from the priest,” I said.

“I don’t want to be the only brown girl.” I knew what she meant; being different, being the only one, standing out because of skin color was hard. I suspected it made her feel “other” or, worse yet, less than. She certainly wouldn’t be the first black or brown girl who at some point hadn’t wanted to move through the world in a different packaging. Hell, untold numbers of books have been written and award-winning documentaries made delving into the psychological complexities surrounding identity and race for little black girls in predominantly white environments. And although we weren’t in the United States, I knew I had to triage any psychological damage that might be festering. I knew I had to do what black mothers have been doing for centuries: remind my daughter that she is valuable and beautiful in a world that often says otherwise.

“Being brown is beautiful.” I spun her in the water, brought her face close to mine. “Baby, a part of the gift of travel is going places where people are not exactly like you. Life would be boring if we never did that. And one day, I imagine you’ll travel to many places. Not everyone will be like you, but you will have fun and learn about all kinds of new things.”

I concluded the conversation with the reassurance of a kiss. It seemed enough in that moment. Then she reached for the locket with Saro’s picture that I still wore around my neck.

She rubbed it as though she were making a wish. “Can I have gelato before dinner?”

“Yes,” I said, relieved that we had stepped back from the conversation before I had to answer the question that I suspected was underneath the question: Do I belong here?

It was a question I had spent the better part of two decades trying to answer—to strangers, to the world, to myself. The question could be traced in a straight line back to my first trip to Sicily with Saro. But I had learned that identity is prismatic, that belonging requires claiming.

Later, after a dinner of grilled swordfish drizzled with a blood orange reduction on a bed of arugula, an ancient pairing of sea and fire, we walked from the restaurant along the seawall. I thought about Stromboli and our trip there last summer. Zoela was looking out onto the water as well. She turned to me.

“I want to know what is out there . . . Where does it end? . . . How does the water stay on the planet if it is a circle but also a flat line? Gravity, but still.” Her forehead was tensed in a fixed gaze.

It was the kind of rapid-fire, big-picture questioning that made me proud to see my tuition dollars at work.

“Sweetheart, those are the essential questions that prompted human exploration of the natural world,” I told her. She looked back at me as if she got about 70 percent of what I was saying. “You have to want to know first, before you can take a journey.”

“Well, I want to know!” she exclaimed. Sicily was having an additional impact, beyond just family connection.

As she said it, I considered my own journey. Some part of me desired to know what would become of me. That was keeping me going. Grief exhausted me, but it also made me want to live. It made me appreciate the brevity of life. I wanted to be around. I wanted to know how things would turn out for Zoela, the extraordinary human being who called me her mammina—little mother. I wanted to hear the voice of the woman she would become as she remembered the Mass in the tiny Sicilian church with the African priest and how worried she had been for him because “it is hard to be a priest if you are still learning Italian.” I wanted to know if she would remember that she had sung the word “Hallelujah” right alongside Nonna when the priest had said her father’s name during Mass. I wanted to be there to remind her one day—perhaps in some early spring or perhaps on a gloomy afternoon as fall turned into winter—a day when she would need to be reminded of who she was. I wanted to be there to see the recognition in her eyes when I recounted that story. I wanted to be there to share the details of her life, because I carried her story. I wanted to eat dinner in my daughter’s kitchen, lick the sauce from the spoon, and taste the influence of her father’s hand. I wanted to read a letter she might write to me from some place in the world I had never seen. I wanted to run my finger over the stamp and picture her there in my mind’s eye. I wanted to know whom she might choose to love. I wanted to greet her at a train station and have her ask me gleefully, “What took you so long?” She would take my hand, make me laugh, as we exited out into a busy street of a busy city and she’d hail a cab and I would hear her voice keeping time to the meter as we traveled along. I wanted to know what my hands would look like at eighty-five, what shoes I might like to wear, if I will prefer straps to laces, if orange will still be a favorite color. I kept going because I wanted to know how one puts one’s life together again, making up the bits and remnants into a new whole. I wanted to lose myself many times and find my way again. I wanted to know even more ways to carry love forward in the tiniest of gestures, how to see love in the smallest of things. I wanted to someday stand on a stage and thank Saro, my best beloved, without whom life would be a lesser, blander thing. I wanted to see the sand in the Berber mountains once again. I wanted to pick mulberries, eating till I felt drunk with the joy of what nature gives so freely, so completely. I wanted to hold another person’s hand when he or she dies, for that is such a great honor. I wanted to know what will become of the people, places, and things that have meant something to me. I wanted to learn something new from someone I have yet to meet. And I wanted to be able to know that I could see unspeakable pain and know that it, too, would change me but not undo me. I wanted to journey to beyond where my eye can see and greet the self who carried me forward to get there.