Zibby Mag

By Diane Marie Brown

I didn’t grow up in a big, boisterous family, but what I lacked in siblings, I made up for with my imagination. Growing up in Stockton, California, the daughter of a creative, craft-loving, elementary school teacher, storytelling came easy to me. As an only child, I played out stories where Barbie dolls, Star Wars figures, and Cabbage Patch Kids had their own lives, dreams, and aspirations, sharing town cars, spaceships, and buggies. These scenes often mirrored the daily dramas of my neighbors or what I watched on television—big families with cousins, meddling aunts and uncles, doting grandparents, and siblings who ate meals together, held massive celebrations for birthdays and, every now and then, aired their frustrations and disagreements.

In my stories, imagined characters gathered together in Barbie’s townhouse and took trips from their busy lives in my bedroom to the bucolic backyard. They picked giant lemons and braved the tall grass to find the safety of our deck, a place where their camper could settle down for a few hours. My childhood was wonderful; friends who visited my home always commented on how many toys and games I had. And yet there was still a sense of loneliness. I would have readily swapped all my possessions to join one of those chaotic, lively, overbearing households I saw on television.

I did what I could to create my own. Hardly a week went by without a friend coming home with me after school and spending the night. I begged for visits to Oakland, where my cousins lived, though I was much younger than them. Some days, I asked my mom for a sibling, which would have been my biggest dream come true. I didn’t realize until much later that my mom had had me at an older age, and that my parents were looking forward to retirement rather than expanding their family.

I got a little bit of this family experience in the summers, when my mom and I would travel by train to visit my uncle Raymond in New Orleans. We’d be welcomed in by his “lady friend,” as my mom referred to her, who had one of those extended and ever-present families I so desired. Folks of all ages crowded his shotgun house—cooking, dancing, playing cards. There, I learned about BET (which we didn’t get back then in Stockton), gas ovens (the click of a burner still takes me back), and Popeye’s Chicken (we only had Pioneer and KFC).

The lady-friend’s granddaughters were about my age, and they had a cousin who went everywhere they went. We spent long days together running up and down steps, chasing the neighborhood dog, taking turns riding down the street on my uncle’s motorcycle (to my mom’s horror). I secretly adopted these young women as kin, connected like I hadn’t been to others. Our visits down south made being an only child much more bearable.

But as I reached my mid-teens, our trips stopped, the hot months of summer reserved instead for cheerleading camp or weekend trips to Magic Mountain with new friends. I went to college. I had a baby. I started my career, got married, bought a home. When my uncle passed away and I flew down to attend his service, I realized that over 15 years had passed since I’d been to New Orleans.

In my children, I could see my mom’s creativity, and my dad’s knack for numbers, which made me wonder about their parents, their uncles and aunts and grandparents.

A few years later, I finally had my own big family, with four daughters, in-laws (including three sisters!), nieces and nephews. An interest began to brew for me, a need to know more about my extended family now that I wasn’t just interested in playmates and get-togethers. In my children, I could see my mom’s creativity, and my dad’s knack for numbers, which made me wonder about their parents, their uncles and aunts and grandparents. What traits and peculiarities had my ancestors passed along that got my youngest to jump so high during a volleyball match, or gave my oldest the coordination and rhythm to pick up drumming so naturally? These were the types of things that made me wish I asked more questions about my grandparents—whom I never met—when I had the chance.

Before she lost her battle with cancer, my mother probably figured I would eventually want to know more about them. Not only had she curated dozens of annotated recipes, photos, and notes in a folder (which inspired the book of spells in my novel, Black Candle Women), but she’d also documented a list of my ancestors in a journal, one I found while going through her things. There are names she noted for aunts, uncles, and cousins with a few details about them, as much as she could remember, it seemed.

I searched many of the names online, finding obituaries for a couple of people, hopeful in locating their loved ones who could still be alive, who might know of my mom. Considering my family tree made me think about Roots by Alex Haley, and more recently, The Love Songs of W. E. B Dubois by Honoree Jeffers, epic tales that reach back in the past to connect to the present. Books such as these remind me of the value and significance of documenting our stories; the beauty in understanding how the blessings, struggles, and triumphs of our foremothers and fathers shape us.

I started my novel over a decade ago as a piece in a graduate fiction class, but it wasn’t imbued with the familial history documented in the book of spells until years later, after my mother passed away. Writing Black Candle Women and infusing it with tidbits from my own life let me play make-believe again, imagining who my ancestors could have been beyond just their names. I could finally imagine what it was like to have sisters growing up, to have had a relationship with my grandparents.

My daughters now have a wonderful start on their histories because their grandparents helped raise them. And beyond my daughters’ own experiences with them, I will answer questions about our family that they haven’t yet thought to ask. And I will document all that I can remember (although not necessarily in a spell book). In navigating their futures, they will be well aware of the wonderful women who came before them.

As for me, I’ve let the Barbies and the Dream House go. But I still have a shoe box full of Star Wars figures—dirty, broken, and well-handled—underneath my bed.

++

Diane Marie Brown is a professor at Orange Coast College and a public health professional for the Long Beach Health Department. She has a BA and MPH from UCLA and a degree in fiction from USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program. She grew up in Stockton and now lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, their four daughters, and their dog, Brownie.

Brown’s debut novel, Black Candle Women, available here. Told from four irresistible perspectives, it is a richly imagined story about redemption and changing one’s destiny and a deeply moving portrait of the unbreakable bonds between mothers, daughters, and sisters.