August’s Mother Character Analysis

Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

In eastern Indonesia, families keep their dead in special rooms in their homes. Their dead not truly dead until the family has saved enough money to pay for the funeral. Until then, the dead remain with them, dressed and cared for each morning, taken on trips with the family, hugged daily, loved deeply.

The woman had staggered to the corner, grabbing for the stop sign and missing it before disappearing around the corner.

How were we to learn our way on this journey without my mother?

In 1968, the children of Biafra were starving. My brother was not yet born and I was too young to understand what it meant to be a child, to be Biafran, to starve. Biafra was a country that lived only inside my mother’s admonitions—Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra—and in the empty-eyed, brown, big-bellied children moving across my parents’ television screen. But long after Biafra melted back into Nigeria, the country from which it had fought so hard to secede, the faces and swollen bellies of those children haunted me. In a pile of old magazines my father kept on our kitchen table in Brooklyn, I found a copy of Life with two genderless children on the cover and the words STARVING CHILDREN OF BIAFRA WAR blared across the ragged white garment of the taller child.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

What’s in that jar, Daddy?

You know what’s in that jar.

You said it was ashes. But whose?

You know whose.

Clyde’s?

We buried Clyde.

Mine?

This is memory.

My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand. Squared, he said, is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.

Come with me, I begged.

But my brother looked up from his numbers and said, She’s gone, August. It’s absolute.

When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water—and kept on walking.

When you’re fifteen, you can’t make promises of a return to the before place. Your aging eyes tell a different, truer story.

Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

In eastern Indonesia, families keep their dead in special rooms in their homes. Their dead not truly dead until the family has saved enough money to pay for the funeral. Until then, the dead remain with them, dressed and cared for each morning, taken on trips with the family, hugged daily, loved deeply.

The woman had staggered to the corner, grabbing for the stop sign and missing it before disappearing around the corner.

How were we to learn our way on this journey without my mother?

In 1968, the children of Biafra were starving. My brother was not yet born and I was too young to understand what it meant to be a child, to be Biafran, to starve. Biafra was a country that lived only inside my mother’s admonitions—Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra—and in the empty-eyed, brown, big-bellied children moving across my parents’ television screen. But long after Biafra melted back into Nigeria, the country from which it had fought so hard to secede, the faces and swollen bellies of those children haunted me. In a pile of old magazines my father kept on our kitchen table in Brooklyn, I found a copy of Life with two genderless children on the cover and the words STARVING CHILDREN OF BIAFRA WAR blared across the ragged white garment of the taller child.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

What’s in that jar, Daddy?

You know what’s in that jar.

You said it was ashes. But whose?

You know whose.

Clyde’s?

We buried Clyde.

Mine?

This is memory.

My brother had discovered math, the wonder of numbers, the infinite doubtless possibility. He sat on his bed most days solving problems no eight-year-old should understand. Squared, he said, is absolute. No one in the world can argue algebra or geometry. No one can say pi is wrong.

Come with me, I begged.

But my brother looked up from his numbers and said, She’s gone, August. It’s absolute.

When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water—and kept on walking.

When you’re fifteen, you can’t make promises of a return to the before place. Your aging eyes tell a different, truer story.