Made of Clay
by Sherri Wise
Winner, Fall Emerging Writers Contest
Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze
When I was a little girl, my mother would bring home bags of clay. From this unpromising primordial muck, she brought figures miraculously to life: disembodied hands, headless reclining nudes, the profiled bust of a regal Black woman, and my own childish head, complete with a bow in my hair.
Her best works were two versions of a mother and child. My mother’s sculpting skills were even more impressive given the fact that in her forties, when I was six, she suffered a devastating stroke that robbed her of her speech. Despite her determination and hours of therapy, her speech, at its best, was a halting and pared down version of English. The verb “to be” disappeared, resulting in simple statements such as “I excited” or “I aggravated.” For particular emphasis, she made liberal use of both “No, Sir!” or “Yes, Sir!” both delivered loudly and with great gusto. When she got frustrated during a phone call, usually while ordering from the Eaton’s catalogue, language would desert her, completely necessitating my quick intervention. Often I was reluctant to be her interpreter; much later I realized that serving as my mother’s voice helped me to develop my own.
My mother never complained about her lot, but her inability to express the complex thoughts and feelings within her must have been maddening. Her rich inner life was shut off from those who loved her and therefore open for me to invent. When I was an undergraduate studying literature, I imagined the nuanced conversations we would have about Jane Austen or Proust and how her mature insight would counterbalance my own youthful enthusiasm. While she had read these texts as a young woman, after her stroke her reading was limited to newspaper headlines and audio tapes from the local library. Yet I never heard a word of self-pity or anger. Instead, she told me that she was surprised and grateful to be alive. “I want live,” she once asserted with what struck me as startling eloquence.
The sculpture she cast in bronze is a faceless, muscular nude planted solidly on the ground. She is as smooth and round as a boulder. Her wide back curves into a protective embrace of a tiny infant. Her comically frog-like feet end in splayed toes. The mother’s head is bent, and the heads of mother and child meld at the point of the mother’s kiss. The figure exudes strength.
The other sculpture is more representational. Though her face is featureless, her hair is coiffed in a high bun giving her the air of a Roman matron. She sits on a stool hugging her infant to her breast. Her short, sleeveless dress reveals well-proportioned limbs and muscular calves. Well-defined baby legs emerge from beneath the mother’s strong, graceful arms; its head is covered by the mother’s enlarged right hand in a gesture that suggests both protection and blessing.
I had always found her preoccupation with nursing mothers curious because she herself had never nursed—nor had she even borne a child. I was adopted because a botched surgery before her marriage had left my mother without a womb. My father, who wanted children, married her anyway. When I learned this about him well into my own adulthood, the nobility of his choice would melt any of my recalled resentments into immediate absolution.
My adoption was explained to me matter-of-factly by my parents as soon as I was old enough to understand. After this initial revelation, further discussion was discouraged, albeit subtly. I intuited that the topic possessed a dangerous energy. If I became angry, it was the ultimate weapon in my arsenal—the one that preempted any parental rejoinder. “Why did you adopt me anyway?” This question, delivered as reproach, silenced them. Their sad looks made my childish victory shameful and Pyrrhic. The topic was like a painful bruise in a place you can’t see. Periodically, you prod it to see if it is still tender.
When they were in their seventies, my parents went to visit my father’s family in Winnipeg. Driving back from my uncle’s cottage, they were in a car accident. My mother was sitting in the back without a seatbelt. The impact catapulted her from the back seat, through the dash and twenty feet from the car. I am haunted still by the image of my frail mother, flying through the air like an antiquated superhero. Miraculously, she survived. Heavily pregnant with my fifth child, I flew out to be with her. I had grown into the strong, reliable daughter who worked, studied, and ran a large household like a Swiss clock.
When I got to the hospital, my father, still dazed and bruised, led me to the ICU. With the antiseptic smell, my courage began to falter. Then I saw her. She was all bandages and tubing, like a high-tech mummy from a horror film. I did not think. I did what any frightened child does, I ran to the bed and burrowed myself into what appeared to be her shoulder. I shut my eyes and willed this horror away. Then, from somewhere deep inside of my broken mother, warm soothing sounds emerged, more welcome to me than the most artful profession of love. She embraced me with her wing-like cast. I had come to support my injured mother, but she was the one to support me. Many months later, after her eventual recovery, I spoke to her about this moment. She had no memory of my visit whatsoever—or even of the accident and its aftermath. I learned then that the bond between us, though it was not biological, coursed through our blood and being and gave us both life.
Many years later, after my mother died, having lived well into her nineties, I sat shiva for her in her apartment, surrounded by her antiques and sculptures. Alone in the silent apartment, I kept returning to the nursing mother sculptures. It was only then that it dawned on me that this was not merely an exercise in rendering the human form, but rather through her sculpture, my mother had been expressing her own fiercely loving motherhood: she was that mother nurturing and shielding the child she longed to see as her own and best creation.
Photo by Sherri Wise
Photo by Sherri Wise
