Family and Forbidden Zones:
Finding the Keys to the Moon
Part Two of Two
by
Cynthia Haynes
The name is all we have. Joy Harjo, a Creek Indian who married a Cherokee, remembers asking a question when she was seventeen and about to give birth to her first child alone. She writes: "Where was the circle of women to acknowledge and honor this birth?" I asked a similar question as I lay in labor at eighteen, about to give birth to a secret. My daughter was unplanned, and initially un-named. She was given the name Baby Haynes on her birth certificate. That was because she was not mine anymore, because they kept her behind a locked door--like Wahnie, who had both her children alone, sending my grandfather off to fish while she did her maternal duty, only going to the hospital one other time, to die. Oh, what secrets we kept from each other. Why? Where is the circle of women? Who am I if not my grandmother's son's daughter who gave birth to the most secret secret?
Am I not also my father's daughter? Yes, a Moon child. Of course, the fact that my grandfather's middle name, Moon, is also a family name before him did not return to me like an arrow for a long time, its meaning secreted in shadows as Momaday's nameless arrowmaker found. It would take me several decades to find the resonance and serendipity associated with having that name in my history. It would take only minutes to claim it as an identity once the meanings were unlocked by the one Key. My name, Cynthia, is Greek for Moon goddess. I was born under the astrological sign of Cancer, also known as Moon children. For a long time, I thought I was related to the famous Baptist missionary Lottie Moon, but now I don't think so. I delighted in that identity, however. I was raised a Southern Baptist, and that seemed right. You see, even then I wanted to identify with a woman. The irony would be that the name would be among those from my paternal heritage. Where was the fabric from my mother's family? Where are her names among mine? They are loose threads, and they harbor secrets too--family names that were not legal, family quilts covering years of forbidden zones.
What threads can we weave together from my ruminations? What secrets have we unlocked about women in families, about forbidden zones, locked doors? It strikes me that the forbidden in families is not limited to women's experience, so much as it is expressed as the "space" in which women construct their identities within the family structure, and as a "space" into which they are relegated by cultural protocols designed to isolate women from their own language. Women in families wear the veil of their gender, and it divides them from the world, and also from themselves. They whisper, chatter, gossip, prattle, and store things away that serve as signs of their limitations. Boxes and glass containers hold the secrets of their youth, gathering dust until one day the threshold becomes a binding salvation, rather than a rift in their continuum--until one day the door is opened for all women, for all families looking for one single redemptive revelation.
It is revelation, not re-veilation that is called for. Reveling in the space of forbidden rooms, we revel in our own identities. We take pleasure in a new exchange, a new economy of keys with which to unlock old narratives and older structures of suppression. We walk across the threshold into Wahnie herself, sweet and billowy once again--a young woman caught no more behind the veil of another language, a story not her own. Here, now, Wahnie speaks in more than whispers, in more than contained life, in uncontained moments of joy. What we found behind Wahnie's door, that space we entered in order to fulfill our aim, was not a dust to dust existence, but a shiny series of possible futures. We found letters, hundreds of them--words that opened doors and windows on her life. We found secret hobbies, unfinished projects. We found paintings by two spinster sisters, kin to someone, tucked away in a drawer. We found handkerchiefs, dozens of them, unused and often still in their gift boxes--as were many other items. Wahnie stored her beautiful things away rather than use them. That's what living in the Depression did to people, and that's what her private ethic reinforced--save them so you'll always have them. My parents found many of the gifts they gave her over the years still in their original boxes--nightgowns, blankets, practical things. When you live on a ranch, as Wahnie did, you have to burn the trash, and she couldn't bear to burn things, so she saved them. Little by little that room became overrun by her secretly stashed objects, and by her privately held dreams. And so, she locked it. I guess I would too if I had saved every rattler off the rattlesnakes they killed each year, neatly organized into small labeled boxes--1941, 1942, 1943, and so forth. I wonder if she ever smiled when she imagined who would find these after she was gone?
We found old magazines and books, sweet perfumes and lilac powder in frosted jars. The mounds of photos and mementos rivaled the Christmas cards they had received over the years, names trailing at the end of each one in the unmistakable handwriting of women, the keepers of our language. Some new Christmas cards from the 40s remained unsent and unsigned in their original box, languishing there like the unsigned and unsent birth announcements for Baby Haynes. Funny, I could have used those then, that New Year's Day when I delivered a beautiful baby girl. Wahnie was alive then, and yet her secrets and my secrets stayed on opposite sides of that door.
Last year, in late spring, twenty-three years after her death, my husband and I decided on a whim to drive out to the ranch on our way from New Mexico back home. It was my father's birthday, and I knew we would be late, but something made me go there. She did, I think. I wanted to revisit that room. The house is gone now, the land sold long ago to neighboring ranches. But the exterior foundation is still there, clearly outlined in flagstone, weeds growing up where Christmas dinners were once served, and rattlesnakes once hid. I stood for a long time on the foundation. I wanted to step into the room, it was so tiny. I began to cry, not really knowing why. As I stepped into that space, I spoke her name--Jackie. Another part of my identity I can now claim. I am Jackie's birthmother. The circle of women will no longer be absent in this family, in our stories. This year my sister's daughter had her first child, and we were there to hold her hand, but most importantly, to speak another name into being. In a few months, we will welcome Jackie's child, and I will talk to her of Wahnie, of Wah-ne-nau-hi.
I would like to think that families and the forbidden is not a necessary relationship. I would like to imagine an identity unfettered by secrets and half-lived utterances that linger and take the shape of questions unasked, of joys unfulfilled. I would like to tell Wahnie a secret, and in the telling unveil the power of forbidden and forgotten dreams. I would like to lift the veil, to throw off the veil, of gender so that names come rushing into my face and all the stale air of con/descension rushes out. I would like to descend with my own name, not disappear into the unutterable and forbidden nominal unknown, but up--across my daughter's threshold that is my grandmother's, that is my mother's, my sister's, my niece's. I would like to see Wahnie and Jackie hand in hand--openly.
Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Harjo, Joy. "Three Generations of Native American Women's Birth Experience" in Life Studies: An Analytic Reader. ed. David Cavitch. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. 76-80.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. "A Family Supper" in Life Studies: An Analytic Reader. ed. David Cavitch. Boston: Bedford Books, 1995. 117-24.
Momaday, N.Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. "The Lace" in The Unknown Rilke. trans. Franz Wright. Oberlin College Press, 1990.
Cynthia Haynes also has a poem in Mother Millennia
titled, "I Never Tied Her Ribbons."
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