Steel Mill Stacks

Creative Non-Fiction by Jacqueline Owen 

Northeast Ohio Writer

My mother had about 16 weeks remaining. Cancer would end her life. Of course, I didn’t know the exact date of her death; only that her diminishing weight and vitality indicated that the end was near. 

Until her final months, my mother had performed the traditional maternal roles: protector, nurturer, companion, and counselor. She had also given me the gift of her compassionate storytelling. Unlike an expectant mother who reads fairy tales to her unborn child, I imagined that my mother had fed me with real-life stories instead. Even my birth was tinged with great pain. Despite the heaviness, I listened like a detective for each detail. 

For some stories, she provided snapshots of her characters. These visual aids, kept in a wrinkled Ziploc plastic bag, had minimal protection against my mother's occasional, albeit gentle, handling. Some images, extremely tattered, dated back to the 40s, while others, taken in the late 60s, were less worn. These snapshots gave her accounts the setting, profiles, and tone for a complete story.

“Jackie, this here Lena and Slim. They were my good friends. We partied and drank togetha.” Slim’s square face and attractive features made him a strikingly handsome man. With her charcoal black wavy hair and bright skin tone, it was clear that Lena’s not-too-distant relatives were White. She may have “passed” if not for her broad face. 

Concerned about the longevity of her fragile pictures, during my preteens, I purchased a Woolworths floral-colored photo album to store them, providing a nice resting place instead of the dingy plastic bag that she changed occasionally.

Maybe, too, I sensed that I’d be the next storyteller, detailing my foreparents’ disappointments and triumphs to my children. Yes, I’d be the one to enlighten the next generation about sharecropping and Jim Crow, and the regrets that the North offered to millions of Southern escapees. Preserving her memories in a photo album would be the first step in claiming my place as the next family griot.

In the opening pages of the album, I placed a photograph of my mother, dressed in a lightweight double-breasted coat with a scalloped-edge collar. The elegant garment, clip-on glass earrings, and subtle makeup gave her an air of confidence and glamour on par with that of Grace Kelly. My older sister, Claudia, sat alongside her, young and uncertain.

Someone had penciled “1955” on the back of the snapshot, confirming my mother’s age at 35 and Claudia’s at 11. The numbers were almost illegible. I had considered tracing them in dark ink, but what gave me the right to alter history, to change the inevitable? Things and people faded and disappeared. 

“Jackie don’t know how to cook, don’t know how to do laundry. I guess I shoulda taught ‘er better, huh?” my mother listed my shortcomings to the phone caller. I stared out of my bedroom window.

My bedroom, the smallest of the three in our modest-sized house, was crammed with my Aunt Alberta’s hand-me-down furniture. Her queen-sized bedroom set was evidence that she, too, had made the trek from Alabama. Green Allied Van moving stickers peppered the light beige furniture, marring an already modest set. After numerous attempts to remove the stickers, I accepted that the labels would remain forever.


As she grew weaker, my mother's conversations centered on how I would fare after her departure. She worried most about my time ahead, the youngest of her four offspring, and a recent high school graduate. How hard could it be to sort dark from light clothing? Hadn’t she chosen me as the executor of her tiny estate, ensuring her proper burial and division of her assets? She trusted that I would use common sense and integrity to honor her final wishes. Surely, I could add the right amount of bleach to a wash cycle.

I overlooked the abrasiveness of the pilled baby blue blanket, and closing my eyes, I contemplated the questions. How would I live without a mother? Could I remember all that she had shared about her life? 

She left Montgomery in the early 1940s on an iron horse for Chicago, which passed through Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga, Tennessee. She saw other sights, but those were the ones she referenced the most. 

Exiting the train in Cleveland, one of the depots before the terminal stop in the Windy City, she partied with her cousin Bette and promised herself she would return to the station the next day. The days extended into weeks, and then months. One child later, her destiny was sealed. Living in Chicago would be replaced with settlement in another large, segregated Northern city with plentiful mill jobs and unrealized dreams.

Not making it to Chicago became her biggest regret, her most significant "what if," her nurtured "if only." She believed that Fate would have been kinder to her if only she had stayed true to her original script. My mother never said this, but reading between the lines of her storytelling, I felt it. 

As I inhaled the sadness she exhaled each time she spoke of not arriving there, I realized there wouldn't have been a "me" if she had. Yes, she may have given birth to four children, two boys and two girls. But our names, Claudia, Ned, Alphonso, and Jacqueline, might have been Josephine, Paul, Michael, and Brenda. Our medium brown skin might have been darker, our slim physiques larger, our calm personalities brasher.
   
Maybe there would have been no dance with cancer. Instead, she would have lived to 90, instead of 62. But there were other maybes, too, like marrying a wealthy man, attending college, or living in a Chicago suburb with a garden of hydrangeas. 
           
​I listened for the end of her call, for a chance to sit with her during her final days. But as she placed the phone on the receiver and became silent, I remained fixed to my bed. I couldn't move. Maybe I couldn't sort the darks from the whites.

Jacqueline Owen

Jacqueline Owen has spent her career in various positions with non-profit organizations, including those that served foster care children, family day care providers, and single mothers earning their associate degrees. For the last several years, she has focused on writing her personal narrative, particularly about her childhood, when she was captivated by the stories her mother shared about her own broken dreams. The time of the Great Migration holds a special place in her heart and is woven into her memoir, a current work in progress.