Cooking as Fast as I Can (10 page)

Along with the recent letters was a stack of envelopes. Every year on my birthday, Joanne—my birth mother—had written
to the home, asking after me, and these were those letters. I took each one out of its white envelope and read it. The same handwriting, year after year, wondering the same thing: How was I doing? Was I healthy? Happy? Well loved? I was a little teary-eyed. I felt both stunned and special. All these letters. I marveled at her determination and suspected I inherited my penchant for stubborn loyalty from her, for which I suddenly felt unaccountably grateful.

The next morning, while my dad was getting ready to leave for work and my mom was scrambling up some eggs, I told her I wanted to call my birth mother. Right that minute. She slid the eggs onto a plate, picked up the phone, and made the call. A week later my parents, Grandmom, and I were on our way to the Mississippi Children's Home to meet Joanne. I was so eager to lay eyes on the woman who'd given me life.

A social worker greeted us in the waiting area. She put my mom, dad, and Alma in one room and me in another. There, the social worker and I waited for my birth mother. I believe I would have been more nervous if it hadn't been so surreal. I had a mother and father whom I loved beyond measure, and yet now I would have another mother, one whose DNA I shared. The door opened and Joanne walked in, and we fell into each other's arms. The Coras were tall people—Dad is six feet and my mom is five eight. I'm five two, and Joanne was petite like me. I looked so much like her. She had fine, dark features and small hands that I recognized. The nail beds, the tapering fingers, all like mine. Years later, after we'd spent some time together, we would marvel at all the mannerisms we shared, the way we gestured when we talked and the way we laughed.

We hugged until it got awkward, then both laughed and blotted the tears from our eyes.

The social worker sat on a metal chair off to the side. She was there to help facilitate the conversation, but her services were unnecessary. We talked easily, and Joanne had twenty-plus years' worth of things to tell me.

Joanne was fifteen when she went to a concert with a friend and fell hard for the drummer in one of the bands. His name was Knox, and he was twenty, an older man. He had long hair that hung over one eye. When she wound up pregnant, his daddy told her daddy that marrying her was out of the question, that it would ruin his life. It was 1966, and her options were to have an illegal abortion, to have the baby and keep it, or to have the baby and put it up for adoption. She knew a girl who'd snuck away to New York for an abortion, but her parents were God-fearing Mississippi Christians and no way no how was this ever going to happen.

She was packed off to a foster home before she was even showing. Her foster parents were an old couple and business was so good they built an addition onto the back of their house specifically to house their foster children. The old man liked to wander back and look through the bathroom window and watch her while she bathed. When she told her parents about this, they sent her to the unwed mothers' home in New Orleans. The first day she was there she was on the trolley by herself and a man exposed himself to her; she was immediately whisked off to the Florence Crittenton Home, where she met girls from California and New York. She liked her roommate, a teacher from up north who had her baby only a few days before I was born.

Joanne told me that she had the option not to see me, and even though she knew it would bring her heartbreak she
had to hold me, count my fingers and toes, and look into my eyes. She passed me over to the Mississippi Children's Home, and then she went home herself, to Greenwood. She was sixteen.

Still, a month later she took the bus back to Jackson, then a taxi to the Children's Home. She marched in, shaking with the nerve of what she was about to do, and asked to have me back. She thought that if she walked in the door of her parents' house with a babe in arms, they would glimpse their own flesh and blood and experience a change of heart. But she was too late; I had already been placed with Spiro and Virginia Lee Cora.

She didn't believe them. “You're lying!” she screamed. “I know she's back there. Let me see her. Let me have her back.” She was hysterical. No one could calm her down. The woman at the front desk called Joanne's dad. Joanne's mom had reported her missing earlier in the day, and had had a pretty good idea where she was headed.

“Every year on your birthday I would call the Children's Home and ask whether you were okay. They couldn't tell me anything other than that you were alive. Once I sent a doll, but I'm not sure whether you ever got it. I've spent a lifetime looking for you. I knew that if I glimpsed you in another woman's arms or in a stroller, or playing with a bunch of kids at the park, or even later, hanging out at the mall, that I would absolutely recognize you.”

Only a few years earlier, Gaylon, a friend of hers, spied a picture of the new crop of Gayfer Girls on the department store wall near customer service. Thinking she recognized me, she called Joanne, who rushed over to see for herself. “I knew it was you,” she told me. “I didn't even need to see your birthmark.” I smiled at that old southern saying, which means
I know you so well I would recognize you anywhere.

I felt dizzy trying to absorb the reality of this—that while I'd been going about my business growing from child to teen to young adult, the woman who'd given birth to me was looking into the faces of all the girls she came upon on the street, seeing if it was me, her daughter.

After our reunion, Joanne and I saw each other a lot. We met for lunch, and sometimes she came to dinner at our home on Swan Lake Drive. Once she invited me to drive up to the small town of Belzoni, in the Delta, to the house where my birth father, Knox, lived. Belzoni, population two thousand, give or take, is famous for its farm-raised catfish and is home of the World Catfish Festival, held every year in April. I thought of Knox only as Joanne's baby daddy. He hadn't taken responsibility for having created a child. I couldn't think of him as my birth father. I knew exactly who my daddy was, and it wasn't this guy.

Knox didn't live there anymore. After college he'd moved to the Caribbean, where he started a charter boat business. Still, she wanted me to see where he grew up. She was hoping we could meet; she at least wanted me to clap eyes on him.

When we arrived, his mother was outside mowing the lawn in shorts and a sleeveless plaid shirt.

“Who're you?” his mother asked.

“Joanne. Knox's daughter Cathy is in the car.”

The woman just stared, didn't say a word.

“She would at least like to see a picture of her daddy,” said Joanne.

The woman dropped the mower handle and went into the house. She came back with a single snapshot and said, “When you get through leave it on the porch. Then please leave.”

I watched her in disbelief. Was this a joke? Joanne's family had been eager and happy to get to know me and embrace me as one of their own. How could this woman not appreciate that I was her son's flesh and blood,
her
flesh and blood? I stared at her, this old country woman who looked to be about a hundred, perched on her skinny legs, a cigarette stuck on her lip, and I thought,
You are as mean as a snake
.

As far as I know, her son still lives in the Caribbean. Through an old high school friend, Joanne discovered that he eventually married and had two children, a boy and a girl, now college aged, my half siblings. He apparently knows about me, and knows I know about him, but there it rests.

My parents encouraged me to spend as much time with Joanne as I wished. Now that I'm a mother myself, I often wonder how much discipline this required, and the strength and selflessness it must have taken for them to let go. They were confident and had complete faith in the love I had for them, and they for me, and in our bond, so that I could build a relationship with Joanne. It's a testament to the grace and courage of my parents.

I could tell my mom worried a bit that Joanne, eager to catch up on all those lost years, might overwhelm me with her need to develop a relationship. Joanne was keen not just on spending time together but on drawing me into the life of her mother and sisters.

One day my mom sat me down and said, “Honey, if you don't want to get this involved you can blame us, just say, ‘I don't think my parents would care for me to do that.' ” I wanted to get to know her, but it was complicated to try to negotiate the emotional terrain. I needed time to adjust. This had the potential to be a deep, important relationship, but I was only twenty-one. I didn't even know myself.

When my twenty-second birthday rolled around, my parents invited Joanne and her family to the party. Taki and Maria came. Before the party I sat my parents down on the couch and said, “Look, Joanne may be my birth mom, but y'all are my parents.” I loved having Joanne in my life, but I wanted to be sure my mom and dad knew I had room in my heart for them all.

This wasn't just a Hallmark sentiment. Joanne and my parents seemed to understand intuitively that the best way to show their love and support for their daughter was to form a united front. This was progressive thinking twenty-five years ago. The notion that I would not just find and grow to love my birth mother, but that she and my parents would form a relationship, was extraordinary. I like to think of it as kismet. Both Joanne and my mom were nurses. My mom's birthday is September 14, and Joanne's is September 18.

Over the years I've also gained an extended family through Joanne: a birth grandmother, Jessie; two aunts, Judy and Jan; an uncle, Webb; a half brother, Jason; a half sister, Kim; a niece, and a bushel of nephews. Joanne and her husband, Terrie, live a mere twenty minutes from Swan Lake Drive; to this day, whenever I find myself in Jackson we all get together. I call Joanne every Sunday, just as I do my mom. I never forget how lucky I am.

eight

I
knew I loved food, and I knew that cooking made me feel settled and happy, but otherwise it wasn't obvious that I'd make a life for myself in the culinary world. I was female, for one thing, and in the early 1990s female chefs were about as plentiful as female fighter pilots.