SONI BROWN
I watch my mother take in the unfamiliar mountain landscape of Provo, Utah, as we enter the clinic. “Is this Jamaica?” she asks. It’s October 2018, and I’m regretting my hasty decision to bring her to live with me. Two days in, and I’m yelling at her for washing her hands in the toilet bowl. Two days in, and she calls me “Miss Lady.” Two days in, and I wonder what I owe a woman who gave me scars but needs my healing now that her mind has emptied itself to the sky.
“I live 80 years of trial and tribulation. Nothing wrong with me except I can’t hear so good,” she tells me outside the free clinic, her words coming in jagged spurts, like she’s spitting rocks.
But there is something wrong. The reports from my sister in Jamaica catalog it: getting lost on familiar paths; wandering late at night until villagers brought her home; inviting strangers to live in her house; emptying her bank account; threatening neighbors with machetes.
I look at her as she probably looked at her own mother when I was a baby. Forty years ago, Grandma was wandering the city streets mumbling to herself and eating out of rubbish bins. I wonder if my mother asked herself then as I do now how exactly one becomes unknown to herself. I recall stories of my grandmother abandoning Ma at three months. Grandma wanted to shed the yoke of rural life and become someone. She went to gallivant in Kingston, hosting salons for politicians. My mother grew up without her. They didn’t connect until Grandma’s body needed dressing for burial. This is my inheritance, this unravelling. This duty.
My mother and I are two women separated by more than oceans and continents. We are twin islands losing the landmarks which once defined us. She forgets her name, and I shed my accent. She loses her way home, and I refuse to call Jamaica home for decades. She is involuntarily lost from herself while I choose for my sanity not to connect with anything that reminds me of her.
I fled my mother’s suffocating expectations of the old ways by using physical distance — the 1,690 miles between Kingston and Provo. The cultural divide is even worse. I rejected the obeah traditions to embrace an American life. There is the cognitive gulf now widening as dementia erases my mother’s memories, transforming me from daughter to caretaker to stranger. And beneath it all runs a current of ancestral disconnection — the stories, customs and knowledge that die with each forgotten name.
I was chosen for this vigil because of my estrangement. “It’s your turn,” my sister said, her voice delivering the fact always left unsaid. I’d spent the least amount of time with our mother. My siblings had their reasons for distancing themselves. My sister wanted freedom after financing our family. My farmer brother couldn’t reconcile with our mother’s cruelty. Two other brothers in Florida felt they’d sacrificed their youth as her surrogate husbands. As the youngest at forty, I was the “wash belly” — the last fruit of the family tree, the one meant to care for the parent. I’d been selected by my siblings to watch her die.
The clinic’s waiting room screams faux cheer with its primary colors and fake plants. I watch my mother crouch by the window facing Provo’s cemetery-cum-city park. “Put Alzheimer’s disease on that line,” the receptionist says, slashing through my scrawled “cognitive impairment” on the intake form. He can see what I hadn’t.
The land shapes us. Jamaica — lush, vibrant, demanding — forged my mother into a survivor. The mountains and valleys of her village taught her to be unyielding, to grow food from unforgiving soil to weather hurricanes and droughts. Utah — sterile, ordered, alien — offers no such lessons. Here in Provo, with its grid system and temple spires, we are both displaced, uprooted from the fertile chaos that defined us.
Growing up in Kingston made me too sensitive. As a cure, I became my mother’s unwilling apprentice in her world of whispered spells and spiritual rituals. By day, her words marked my place. “All gal children good for is to breed,” she’d say, while pouring resources into my brothers. I was a wife-in-training. By seven, I could scale and fry fish. By eight, I knew to bleach shirts whiter than holy. By nine, there was nothing my mother could do that I couldn’t do myself.
Nights transformed her. The cold cream smell as she slathered it on her face would draw me to her bedroom. Perched on her bed, I became not a future wife, but a treasured consigliere. She whispered obeah spells, taught me to commune with the dead and to sense evildoers’ vibrations. I learned to brew ancestor-calling potions and plant money-summoning shrubs. She practiced openly what most hid in shadows. These illegal secrets made me a reluctant medium, split between living and binding to the dead.
For twenty years, I tried to outrun this legacy. I crossed oceans and remade myself, yet her influence clung to me like the persistent aroma of burning garbage.
My estrangement from her ran parallel to my rejection of my culture: they fed each other, creating concentric circles of disconnection. Rejecting my mother’s spiritual practices meant rejecting the ancestors. Fleeing Jamaica meant leaving behind the land that shaped her worldview. Each choice to distance myself from her traditions widened the gulf between us, until we stood on opposite shores — she with her ancestral knowledge, me with my American reinvention.
Memory is like the sea. It ebbs and flows, erasing boundaries between seen and unseen, dredging hidden depths to the surface. At the clinic, my thoughts carry me back to the year I turned nine. Before this, I was the selectively mute child at a fancy prep school, taunted for having a mother who practiced obeah. “Boogie Girl,” they called me, “Everything you touch is buggers.” Their words lay inside me like lead until I stopped eating. When doctors and potions failed, my mother emptied her savings to consult a man more powerful than her ancient ways.
We arrived at his hut in the hills at dawn. My heart pounded. My palms slimed themselves with sweat. “Mama, please. Don’t take me in there.” She pushed me inside. A man’s eyes reflected the smoke. His hands were instruments of menace. One hand clutched an ordinary kitchen knife which in the dim light became an extension of his might.
I whispered, “He’ll hurt me.” But my mother — she who should have protected me — only turned and said, “Child, don’t be ignorant. This is our way. This is what we do.”
The bamboo door creaked shut behind her as she left. “You the vessel o’ purity,” he said as he began to remove my clothes then his. I squeezed myself tight and imagined I was a duppy, a ghost who could board any Air Jamaica flight leaving the island with no intention of returning.
Is this where our estrangement began? Not with my physical departure at twenty, but here, in this moment when protection became betrayal? When traditions became trauma? When my mother chose ancestral ways over my trembling body?
The doctor’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Physically, your mother seems fine,” she says. “Her heart’s holding up.” The pause stretches. Each word falls like a stone as she continues. “We can’t say it’s Alzheimer’s disease without a scan but looking at her. Reading the symptoms. Her quality of life needs to be the focus.”
I hear the rest in fragments.
“Advanced stage of dementia for sure.”
“Her speech will stop.”
“Then walking.”
“Maybe eating.”
“Could live another ten years, maybe three.”
The irony twists like a knife. My mother, who pressed stories into my ears with urgent insistence, “Don’t forget,” now forgets herself. The keeper of ancestral knowledge loses words like water through cupped hands.
As we exit the clinic, Ma’s eyes sharpen. “Listen,” she says. “J-o-y-c-e. That’s my name but you call me Madge. Don’t forget.” Her fingers press into my arm.
We have both become strangers – she to herself, me to my roots.
In Provo’s pallid sunlight so unlike the Caribbean heat, something shifts. As Ma stumbles, clinging to me, she whispers, “Don’t leave, you hear.” And I promise, “I won’t, Ma.”
I secure her seatbelt like I do my toddler’s. “Bless you, Miss Lady,” she says. The words slice deep. A stranger again. But perhaps estrangement isn’t permanent. Perhaps it’s cyclical, like memory, like the sea.
We are adrift in this land of Mormons. I’m caught between Ma’s forgetting and my reluctant remembering. I start the car. A prayer slips from my lips to whomever might be listening. Help me heal us both in the spaces between what’s lost and what remains.
