The Morton Salt Girl
I was three years old when my daddy died in 1947, but he saw me learn to crawl, to walk holding his hand, then walk by myself. Relatives said “Lordy, how he loved that baby!” He imagined me older, running forward with direction and wonder. He never knew that I was always falling down, skinning my knees covered with Band-Aids. He couldn’t know that I walked with my head down because I was near sighted in fourth grade and afraid of stumbling on cracks in the sidewalk. Yet, in my mind, my back was straight and I could balance a book on my head and glide across a room. My daddy understood how I really was, but I didn’t at the time, know who he was.
My mother said I was the inspiration for the Morton Salt Girl on the round dark blue container. She was designed in my image, a fact which buoyed me. I imagined I was the dark haired girl strolling confidently under her oversized blue umbrella while the hard rain beat down and the wind ruffled the skirt of my dress. The Morton Salt Girl holding the package of salt under her left arm and pouring salt behind her was not scolded for spilling. She did not have to wear glasses or lace-up brown shoes. Her yellow dress did not have bunchy grow tucks for getting bigger.
In 2012 at Christmas, my oldest daughter excitedly told me she had found two Morton Salt Girl magnets with dark hair for my refrigerator. I almost cried because she remembered how special the drawing was to me. And I cried about what she didn’t know about my biological father. I stuck the magnets to my refrigerator and didn’t notice until after New Year that in the bottom right hand corner was printed the numbers 1914 and 1933. I was born on the winter solstice in 1944.
Maybe the numbers were not dates, but trademark numbers. So I went to Wikipedia to see what I could discover. Calcium carbonate was added to ordinary salt to make it pour freely and not clump up in dampness. This is why the Morton slogan was “When It Rains, It Pours.” People used that saying to mean that when something bad happens, more bad events follow.
My father was putting together a red tricycle for me on Christmas Eve, and the handle bars didn’t fit. He got mad, she said. He had a heart attack and they took him away and she never saw him again. She didn’t blame me, but I did. I didn’t like Christmas anyway.
In Wikipedia, the girls in the drawing closest to my birthdate, 1941, and the ones from 1956 and 2014, were all blondes. I had dark brown hair, black when I was a baby. Those three had white and yellow umbrellas instead of a blue one like my grandmother had bought me. In 1914 the girl looked clumsy and was not even walking or holding the umbrella with her hand to balance it on her shoulder. The 1969 and 2014 girls were looking down at the path as I do now. In 1933 she was looking straight at the onlooker and I was smiling.
Except that it wasn’t me. Despite my shyness and awkwardness, in my heart, up to that moment, I knew I was pretty and lively and happy. But, that was no longer true.
Mama also said, every time I wore all the bracelets I had made of pop beads, safety pins and ribbons, “That’s the Indian in you coming out.” I liked to go barefoot out to look at the moon and stars too. Being part Cherokee, my Grandmother said meant that I had immense patience and could walk silently and didn’t like competitive games. When Mama died she willed me her old Bible with all the relatives from Scotland, Ireland, and Arcadia. I made a complete family tree and there was no room for a missing indigenous person on my branch. It was another lie.
Mama also said I was allergic to night air when I came of age to go out on dates. She said my real daddy had once saved my life after I had been walking with him at night. He had grabbed me up by my ankles, turned me upside down and put his fingers down my throat to loosen the phlegm. Would one of my boyfriends be as tall as my father to do that?
My mother had lied to me. She had made it seem that my father, who died in Brawner Psychiatric Institute, according to his obituary that her dying older sister had given my daughter, worshipped me, saved my life, and put my image on the Morton Salt container so that I was famous. She had made me think that I had to stay with her at night.
At age 58 I wrote for my father’s death certificate. In the cause of death box, it didn’t say “coronary occlusion”; it said “tertiary syphilis.” How could that be? I hardly knew what that meant. I tried to get his hospital records but it was too late.
When I tried to picture my mother and father making a baby, my mother had on the loveliest peignoir set in the Sears Roebuck catalog and my father had on an Old Testament striped robe so he could lie with her. My mind stopped there. But when I imagined getting syphilis, it was about a crowded, yelling bunch of drunk, dirty people behind a pub in a Dickens’ novel. My daddy simply fell into their midst. I didn’t know how to picture naval officers and their men on a faraway beach with strange women who had flowers in their hair. How had my mother been able to imagine it? Surely in her mind she tried over and over.
When I was a junior in college, I needed to talk to my parents about an important decision. I brought two cups of coffee to the red Formica kitchen table. I didn’t want to major in Education and teach five years in a public school, which would mean my getting a good job and paying back the money after graduation, if that was possible. I wanted to major in English with a minor in Creative Writing. I wanted to talk to my mother first before I brought the subject up to my stepfather who would rail about my choices being impractical, short-sighted, and stupid.
I put my fingers on the metal table’s edge, took five deep breaths, then folded my hands in fists on the table. Mama reached over and unfolded my fingers.
“You have his hands.” Her eyes were full of damp black pearls.
“Mama, I need to talk to you about my major at school.”
“Yes, you have his hands. Your thumb is about as long as your middle finger.” It was easy for me to reach an octave on the piano, but that didn’t make me a concert pianist. “He could draw anything with his hands—squirrels, Arabs, little boys in their little suits, women.” All I had ever seen was water color and pen sketches of women in black lace for calendar art. My mother said that before I was born, my father taught classes at the Atlanta Art Institute, which didn’t yet have a building. But, what he got paid for, his brother told me, was lettering on trucks at the Chevrolet plant. That’s what my Uncle did too. “He once painted Roosevelt’s dog, Fallah, at Warm Springs,” my mother had told me a hundred times. I checked many books out of the library, and I couldn’t find a bedroom or sitting room at Warm Springs with that dog on the wall or on an easel. “I imagine they rotate the art,” my mother said.
Mama idolized him. Still did at age 89. Growing up, her wedding bouquet of white orchids, now turned brown, matted in burgundy and framed in gilt, hung over my bed, and a large sepia photograph of him hung in the hall outside my bedroom door. My real watched over us, my grandmother said. That always embarrassed me because my stepfather and mother were married when I was six years old. After my step-father died, the sepia portrait hung on the pine paneling in mama’s den with the lounge chairs covered in plastic to ward off wear. On the bookshelf was an 8” by 10” photograph I had made of my stepfather wearing a cowboy hat on the rim of the Grand Canyon. I had the wedding flowers on a shelf in my closet.
Before mama died in May of 2009 I confronted her with my father’s death certificate and his diagnosis. She said she couldn’t see it.
“He was taken from us, so young, by a heart attack.” That is what she and his mother had always said. When I gave that information, many years ago, to my General Practitioner, and then to a Cardiologist, they had run a battery of heart tests every three years. They put me on preventive medications for years and my mama knew that. Surely medical doctors checked my mother for syphilis. Did they tell her it was for iron poor blood which they used to call anemia. Was it possible I was telling my mother in her last week’s something she had not known? I found that I still lied on those charts doctor’s offices give you that list the age your close relatives died and what from.
“Why was he in Brawner Psychiatric Institute?”
“Well he had horrible headaches that made him lose his temper at things,” she said.
“My Uncle went to see him and said he was swollen with pain in his stomach and must have had stomach cancer, not a heart attack.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she trailed off and closed her eyes.
When mama died, her final wishes disrupted the whole family. My mother’s people were all buried at my grandfather’s church in Henry County, Noah’s Ark. My stepfather’s people, of course, thought my mother would be put to rest by her husband of 57 years. He was put in a mausoleum with pull out containers like file cabinet drawers. There was a vacant spot next to him where we all thought mother would go. My biological father was buried in the same cemetery but where there were markers in the ground circled around a pool with cherub statuary. Even though there were some vacancies, she didn’t choose to be buried there either. In the same mausoleum as my stepfather, but around the corner and halfway down the hall, my mother had purchased a niche in the wall for a rose colored urn with her name and dates below it. She had his mother, whom she never liked, moved next to him, leaving one vault unused. The vase sitting alone made her look as if she had been an old maid, a spinster.
On the rainy day of the funeral, her friends were dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs. Most of the relatives looked grim over their set jaws and jowls. I wore a yellow suit and carried my bright blue umbrella. What my mother had done wasn’t proper, and she hadn’t discussed it with her family at all. When nosy people asked me, I said my mother always was secretive. A few people took one look at her vase around the corner from my stepfather and stomped out slamming the large brass doors. Others said Jesus didn’t really answer the question when asked which wife a husband would be with in paradise. He glossed the answer. A second cousin popped me on the back: “your mother went to work when you were but a tot; she’s always been loose upstairs.” He laughed and I maneuvered away from him.
Standing against the marble wall where my mother’s urn was, I could barely see out the stained glass window across the aisle. If the glass had been clear, I would have been looking, at some distance, at marble cherubs playing in a stone fountain. The city was conserving water, so the fountain was not on. But I had seen it many times with my granny when she took me to visit her son’s grave. It’s not unusual to be able to know what you cannot see or say. Or to say things you need to know are true.