Just out of reach
Stories about grasping for goodness in an uncaring world
“We’d be the deadeyed Black Folks they throw up on KDKA after a story about recalled strollers,” writes Jennifer Maritza McCauley in her debut story collection, “When Trying to Return Home.” For the Black American and Afro-Latino characters in these stories, tension exists not only in dealing with the way society suffocates them through racist caricature, but also how those images begin to take on a life of their own, worming into minds and damaging any clear notion of personal identity.
Whether set in Pittsburgh, Louisiana, Miami or Puerto Rico, Ms. McCauley’s characters too often ask, “Do I deserve this success? Do I deserve this love?” Especially when mothers, brothers, cousins and lovers seem trapped in circumstances they don’t know how to overcome.
In “Torsion” a family is in disarray when Child Protective Services take away a young son dealing with renal failure when he’s found living in less-than-optimal conditions. Moved by grief, the mother enlists the help of her college-age daughter, Claudia, to kidnap the boy from his new caregiver and flee to Florida. Claudia wants to say no, this is a “True Crime,” but doesn’t feel she can. Her mother has always been there for her: When Claudia was a kid with a stutter and a crooked nose, her mother assured her she’d “always have her. So I was hers.” And while her mother is a mess in so many ways — two exes with whom she’s had children and now a drug-addled boyfriend, plus a job that often only just pays the rent — she also has, for her family and friends, a big heart:
“I’ve always seen her the same way: twirling … her arms outstretched, eyes huge. Like an overeager saint, holy light spit from her like knives, blasting through the pores of her body and cutting everyone around her. Everything around her subsumed and stabbed by all that Mamalove …”
It’s this language that reveals what’s so dynamic about Ms. McCauley’s writing. The reader wants to dislike a woman who is prepared to wreck her daughter’s life, but must continue to rethink what they know in light of the way Claudia speaks about her mother. Because this is also a woman who has put her daughter through three years of college and, even though his body rejected it, gave one of her kidneys to her ailing son. Claudia knows she hasn’t yet committed a crime, that it’s still possible to “do something nice with my life,” but how can she deny her help in the face of all that “Mama-love”?
In “Liberation Day,” Estelle has decided to leave her place with the Sisters of Grace. She’s someone whose heart speaks to her, a feeling she refers to as a “Soft Space” inside that guides her decisions, first to join the convent and now leading her away from it. For some time she found contentment in her ongoing conversation with God and with her sisters, but when one rebellious nun asks for her help in “revising” a portrait of the Blessed Maria by making her brown-skinned, something shifts in Estelle’s calling. She realizes something she might have always known, that “Maria’s face was bleached and cold,” and no matter how hard Estelle tried, this white Maria didn’t feel like “home.” By the next day, she’s sure the convent is just one more place where she doesn’t belong.
In the title story, “When Trying to Return Home,” Andra moves to south Florida where everyone wants to know where she’s from, “No … really.” And while she knows that “her daddy is Black American; her mami Caguas-born, mixed with several Something Elses,” the longer she stays in Miami and the happier she feels, the more she wants to know about those Something Elses, “if it’s something she’s missing.” One day at the grocery store, Andra sees a woman who looks like her dead mother and both women feel a quick connection, a spark of ancestral recognition. The feeling is so good. But then reality sets in. Andra is afraid to talk to her in her “slanty Spanish,” and now that they’re face-toface, it’s clear the woman looks nothing like her mother. Not really. The connection they both hoped for doesn’t quite happen.
It is this kind of moving close to something good, but not quite ever getting it — a “nice life,” which includes a strong sense of who you are — that defines the breathtaking poignancy of these stories. Perhaps even more important, Ms. McCauley’s “When Trying to Return Home” reminds us that every day of our lives is both dangerous and, despite fear and anxiety, beautiful.