Family and Forbidden Zones:
Finding the Keys
to the Moon
Part One of Two
by
Cynthia Haynes
The door was brown, rickety, and smelled of west Texas red dirt. If you looked through the keyhole, you could just make out the foot of the bed and the long-ago freshness of sheer lace curtains that sometimes in summer moved with the night breeze. I remember that bed, big and sinky in the middle. It was a small room, but it held her daily stored-away dreams. I guess it was a big room in that respect. All I know is that one summer it was unlocked, and the next summer it wasn't. Funny. She must have had more moon-bound dreams than usual that year, to have made her take to locking it like that--with that big skeleton key and all. But now, looking back, I'm not surprised that she locked everyone out of her room.
Wahnie Keys Haynes, my grandmother, was a product of the Depression, and also a 'child' of countless unnamed women forced to express themselves in private, to fill up their rooms, closets, diaries, and pantries with bits and pieces of their identity. Such forbidden zones mark a salient feature of women's role in the family and domestic sphere, but in the (traditionally male) public sphere, these zones mark their absence. That is, they function as the space of women's identity and also as the space of their lack of identity. I am interested in entering the forbidden zone of women's identity for the purpose of discovering (in general) a key to the encryption of women in the family, and of finding (in specific) Wahnie's Keys to my own identity. As Jacques Derrida says, "What returns to your name, to the secret of your name, is the ability to disappear in your name." (13).
You know how it is when you are little. You think you know everything. You stumble through your energetic little life on the full steam of your so-called self-consciousness. Then somewhere along the way, you lose that self-confident-consciousness. You start to question, and answers don't always come when you want them, much less when you need them. For me, that day came when my grandmother died in 1973. For the first time in my twenty years, I wanted to know who she was. I think that it was important to me that I didn't know, or more startling, that now I couldn't know, not really. So, I asked, remembering that room where we were forbidden to go, and those Siamese cats she kept in that chicken coop into which no one else dared stick their hand. Wahnie. I asked my father, "Dad, what does Wahnie stand for?" He said, "Just Wahnie." "Oh," I said, thinking to myself that "just Wahnie" didn't answer my question. Then I realized that was the wrong question. So, I spent the next twenty years asking the more important question, "Who was Wahnie?" But I did so, cryptically. It seemed to fit after all.
Women move behind the veil of marriage, of motherhood, of domesticity. In that respect, they encrypt themselves as women. They lock away the code necessary to understand why they must move behind veils. They hide from themselves their feelings, LARGE feelings made of spent emotions. Immense pockets of language lay unrehearsed like lines from a play ghost-written by Shakespeare's sister. What is not said behind veils would fill an entire epoch, not to mention a history. My grandmother hid behind handkerchiefs--lots of them--each one a gift from some young girl in her Sunday School class. I want to breathe for her when I see all those nice, white, dainty kerchiefs bordered in lace, and I hear these lines from Rilke:
Being human: term for a flickering possession,
existence of a happiness still undemonstrated:
is it inhuman, that a pair of eyes
turned into this small densely woven piece of lace?
Do you want them back? (31-32)
Yes, I want them back. But, would she? Maybe she would give the kerchiefs back to the young girls, telling them not to hide anymore, not to dwell in the sadness of their gender.
I never saw my grandmother sad, not once. I did see her terrified, but when death is near, terror becomes familiar. She died of complications from a stroke. I think she was young. In terms of parting with secrets, she was young because her secrets were not old, they were born when she died. We used to tease her about that room, sitting round the dinner table. She would feign bemusement, but deep down I could tell she was afraid...afraid we would follow through with our idle threats. Sometimes, my father would hear her in the kitchen cooking or cleaning, and he would walk over to the door and rattle the old round metal handle. She would come streaking into the living room, and it would just tickle my father to death, prankster that he was. That dinner table talk was full of not-saids, secrets, private fears, personal triumphs not shared--the table cloth as veil. She used to iron those table cloths, just like those kerchiefs that she never used, that she stored in that room, that we found after she died long after they were put away.
In Kazuo Ishiguro's story, "A Family Supper," a family sits down to supper, and the shadow of the dead mother hangs over the meal. In her absence, talk was stilted, and sentiments unuttered (117). What secrets are discovered when mothers and grandmothers die? Who are they--just some woman photographed in a white kimono? Just Wahnie? I think their veils take many forms, even photographic. Sometimes their name is a veil, like Wahnie. N.Scott Momaday suggests that the "the dead take their names with them out of the world" (33).
It was not until my grandmother died that I began to learn, and now it seems that I began then to become who I am, that I began to speak my name. That is why it disturbs me when, in some fiction, women are absent, or women are absented from themselves. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: Or, a Modern Prometheus is a perfect example. We all know the story. But do we know the women in the story? Or the woman who wrote the story? I would say, probably not. All the key women in that story are either dead or die during the course of the novel, with one exception. Shelley strategically gives the novel voice through a woman not present, but not absent--Mrs. Margaret Saville. Not many people know that Frankenstein is a tale within tales, that the novel proper begins and ends as a series of letters from a sea captain to his sister in England. All we have is her name.
My name is Cynthia Haynes. I don't tell you that in order to inform you, for you have only to look at the author of this essay to see that. I tell you so that in speaking my name, I call myself into being. I afford myself an identity beyond the legacy of secrecy that I inherit from my gender, my generation, and my generic--Haynes. It is my father's name, the same name my grandmother took when she married his father, Morris Moon Haynes. Now, Wahnie was a Keys. That the Keys had Cherokee ancestors is well-known up in the northeastern parts of Oklahoma where she was born. How could I know that? I never knew until I asked the wrong question. What did Wahnie stand for? Who was she? The short answer is that she is descended from Major George Lowry, last Cherokee Indian chief prior to the days of the reservation, and grandfather to Lucy Lowry Keys, great-grandmother to Wahnie. But Lucy wasn't really Lucy. (Oh, this is getting complicated.) Lucy was really Wah-ne-nau-hi, a name I have only recently learned translates (another locked door?) as 'storyteller' in English.
to Part Two of "Family and Forbidden Zones"
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