Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna

Author:Danzy Senna
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-05T04:30:00+00:00

I left Betty Jean—with promises to be in touch—and drove north on the interstate toward Birmingham. I moved toward yet another stranger who claimed to be my relative. I could not say how we were connected, or even if we were. Her name was Yvonne and she had said on the phone from Betty Jean’s that she was my cousin. She told me she could help me in my quest if I came and picked her up and brought her back down to Montgomery. She was stranded, she said, without the use of a car. She had a thick Southern accent and said, “I love you,” to me before we hung up. I found myself saying, “I love you too.”

As I drove, I tried to put a family tree together in my head. My father might be the son of a Mexican boxer named Francisco José. Or he might be the son of an Irish American priest named Francis Ryan. Anna might be the daughter of a schoolgirl named Goldie Gadson, or she might be the secret daughter of Alice, the woman she’d been raised to call her sister, and a man named John Henry Loveless. Despite what the record keeper at Alabama State University believed, I was Anna’s granddaughter. But who was my grandfather?

Yvonne lived in an apartment complex called Homewood. I got lost driving through it, looking for the number of the unit she’d given me, so I called her on my cell phone and she led me through the maze of cul-de-sacs to the right parking lot, where, sure enough, she stood outside talking to me from her cell phone. We waved, acknowledged each other, and yet we kept talking into our phones.

“There you are.”

“I found it.”

“You look just like your grandmother!”

We kept talking until I was parked and out of the car and just a few steps away from her, at which point we muttered goodbye and hung up and embraced.

She was a thin woman in her sixties with a thick head of straight black hair. Her skin was an ashen shade of dark brown, which she later explained was caused by kidney failure. Her skin, she told me, showing me photos to prove it, was actually a rich warm brown. She wanted me to know what she used to look like, who she used to be before she got sick. The illness made it hard for her to walk faster than a trudge as she led me up the stairs to her apartment.

At the top she paused to catch her breath and apologized to me about the state of her apartment. She explained that years ago, when she was “between homes,” she’d had to put her stuff in storage. She’d been unable to pay the rent on the unit for some months, and by the time she got the money together, they had thrown out all her belongings.

Yvonne opened the door and I saw that, yes, she had lost everything. She was living in a mostly empty space.

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