She mastered the art of making bread, rich, crusty, browned loaves fragrant and bursting aromatically when cut and the white perfectly raised loaf was smothered with her own preserves. But what she wanted most and never found was the joining, the belonging to her new acquaintances. Never friends, simply disjointed vagrants they seemed to her, soulless, heartless, mere brutes masquerading as Greeks while belching American lies and innuendos. She cared for her home, washed and baked, always baked, as she had been taught by a widow from her own island who seemed to have an inordinate fondness for her husband. Their visits together ended with his injury but he would often take long walks and she never knew where he went shuffling off to alone. She had huge expressive eyes and fully rounded lips, a patrician air and a glance that could freeze your blood. And she used her youngest daughter that would be me, until she became American and her second youngest after the birth of another. My mother, I am going to call her my mother although it seems that she saw me as her mother, since I carried her mother's name. She never taught me those things, about names that is, why Greek children are named after their grandparents. Now, I know, that is I think I know. There's so much to being Greek, it isn't merely in the food and we don't look any different from white Anglo Saxon Protestants, few of us look Italian although some do and not many of us look exotic like Indian or something like that. I want to find my mother, readers. Right now she's dead. But I'm searching for her in my travels, in my memories, in my stories. She's somewhere there and I want to know her, really.
Her favorite visiting friends, after my father died were storytellers and this is one of their stories, they told it to me in 1973 but I don't think time matters with Greeks. This is how I remember them as they told their saga and what I remember of their story.
THE STORY OF MARY
The old man sat sprawled in his chair. His wife sat directly across from him. After their coffee and sweets, they were content to just sit and sleep. But, tonight, they were visitors and they tried hard to stay awake and maintain a conversation. My eyes could not help but rest on his right arm. For there on the visible part of his wrist shone two watches. Two large gold watches on the same wrist.
“Ha,” he said, “I'm wearing them to see if they both keep the same time, heh, heh.”
“Oh, I was just admiring your suit jacket,” I answered.
“This! When I was young, I was a snappy dresser. You know I come from a wealthy family.”
To prove his point, he pulled out a yellowed envelope. From this he took out and passed around four photographs.
“My goodness, Uncle, who were these people?” I asked.
“I'm the young man with the mustache. The one next to me is my brother. Well?” He stopped as if expecting my next question.
“But, the black girl? Who?”
“My sister,” he replied.
“Oh, sure,” I laughed. “She looks just like you. Come what's the story?”
The rest of the family joined in my pleas and feeling quite sure that he would have an enrapt audience, he began. “You see, my father was a sea captain. Oh, sometime around 1880, he was docked at the port of Alexandria. He was newly married and I
suppose anxious to get home. While loading his ship, a turbaned man approached him carrying a brown sac.”
'Sir, would you be interested in this?' he asked my father.
“When my father looked in the sac, he saw a baby girl about one or two years old. Well, my father thought she would make a nice gift for his bride!”
“But.” I asked, “wasn't he curious where that man got her from?”
After favoring me with a condescending smile, he continued his story. I was determined not to interrupt him again.
“Well, my father takes her back to Symi. As you know, the Turks were overseers of those Mediterranean islands back then. So, he had to sneak the baby in without their catching him.”
“What am I supposed to do with this?” my mother screamed, said the man with the two watches on his wrist who wasn't really my uncle, but just another Greek from the same island as my mother.
'Never mind,' my father told her, "when she gets older, she can helpyou keep house so you can take it easy."
“But, it wasn't such an easy thing, keeping a black child a secret on an island that paid ransom to the Turks. One day, a neighbor came panting up to the house and barged into the kitchen where my mother, my father, and an uncle were sitting. The baby was playing on the table. 'What's wrong?' my father asked him?”
