The Office of Historical Corrections(20)
At eighteen, my mother left home for college. She only went as far as Jersey, but her grandfather was dead within two years of her going. It wouldn’t occur to me until well into my adulthood, most of it spent in California, a full country away from her, to question my mother’s conviction that the former event had caused the latter, or to wonder what she wanted me to do with a cautionary tale in which the caution was against growing up.
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By the time she came to visit me in Oakland, my mother had been involved in some form of litigation or negotiation with the U.S. government for the better part of twenty years. Her latest calculations—which she had me double-check annually, adding the accrued interest—concluded that the U.S. government owed us $227,035.87. She wanted the number exact so that we did not seem unreasonable. I was a kid when she started the complaint process, first with letters to the Board for Correction of Military records, the same board her grandfather had been writing letters to for years before he died. This was right after my parents’ divorce, though I’m not sure it’s fair to imply the correlation. Before the divorce they had fights about the fact that she wouldn’t sell any of Papa’s old belongings, or dispose of the boxes of paperwork, but it wasn’t those fights or any other that finally broke them up so much as the way they had less and less to say to one another when they were happy. With my father out of the house, my mother threw herself into a mission to clear her grandfather’s name, to finish in her lifetime what he hadn’t been able to finish in his. There were no adults around to talk her out of it, only me. She asked me what I would do if someone told a lie about her, asked if she died with it still written down somewhere, whether I would ever give up fighting to prove the truth. I knew that the only correct answer was no.
Her odds of succeeding were low. When she started the process, it had been fifteen years since Papa’s death, and more than seventy since the conviction. Still, there was a logic to her argument—the discharge paperwork she kept carbon copies of in our attic said he’d been pardoned, and she thought it would be easy, from there, to have his dishonorable discharge changed to an honorable one. It didn’t make sense, she reasoned, that if he’d been cleared of the crime he was accused of, that the government should consider him dishonorable. As years passed without action or response, she was buoyed by occasional signs of what she saw as precedent on her side. In 1999, Lt. Henry Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, had been given a posthumous presidential pardon, more than a hundred years after he was falsely charged with embezzlement in a scandal designed to push him out of the service. My mother had bought a bottle of champagne and shared it with me while we watched the official pardon ceremony, where descendants of the late Lt. Flipper sat on a podium with Bill Clinton and Colin Powell and received a formal apology.
“Do you see what happens,” my mother had asked me, “when you don’t give up on making things right?”
But what I’d seen happen—before that brief moment of optimism and especially in the five years since—was my mother becoming increasingly dependent on an outcome that seemed less and less likely. She taught elementary school, but all of her holiday breaks, half days, and weekends went into the litigation, into letters to the army, the president, her congressman. Not counting our hourly labor, my mother must have already spent almost half of the $220,000 we were theoretically owed on court filing fees, photocopies, and certified letters. When I had lived at home, my spare time went into organizing the files, photocopying important documents, holding my breath. Two months after I moved to Oakland, the Supreme Court denied my mother’s request that they hear her appeal against the VA. My mother called from the other side of the country, sounding defeated. There was nobody left to argue with.
“Papa will never have his name back,” she said.
“You know who he was,” I said, but it didn’t seem to comfort her any.
After I got off the phone with her, I’d felt helpless, and finally booked a reservation on one of the Alcatraz tour boats. When I got out to the docks at my appointed time, I couldn’t bring myself to actually get on the boat. I’d milled around Fisherman’s Wharf instead, ducking out of tourists’ snapshots and trying to name the source of my unease. I’d watched the water for a while—the same fierce, unwavering blue of it that I felt had called me here—and ended up stopping at one of the gift shops on the pier and buying my mother a poster commemorating the Native American takeover of the island. Alcatraz Indians, it said on the front, under a cartoonish picture of something half man, half eagle. I thought it might be easier to remember that this could also be a place of freedom, I scrawled on the back. She never mentioned receiving it.
Reticence was not my mother’s nature, and when, in the weeks that followed, she had less and less to say about anything, I panicked. She was still a few weeks away from the start of the school year. I insisted she come out to visit me. I wanted to see for myself how bad things were with her.
She arrived twenty pounds lighter than when I’d seen her a few months ago. My mother, who lived in discount denim and told me once that she found mascara unseemly, was wearing makeup and designer heels. If I hadn’t known she didn’t believe in mood-altering drugs, I would have taken her for heavily medicated. She was dressed like an actress auditioning for the part of my mother in a movie. A different daughter might have been reassured, but I looked at my mother and saw a person directing all of her energy toward being outwardly composed because the inside was a lost cause.