To: The girl in front of the portrait
As a little girl, I used to roam the rooms of my grandmother’s old colonial house. Day after day I did the same, stopping right before the imposing painting of the great-grandparent’s portrait. I stood in awe before the image of 200 years of African American history, detailed in gentle strokes of dissimilar colors in a rigid old canvas. I did not know the whole story behind the masked expressions of the great-grandparents, nor did I understand it. What caught my attention the most was the altered expression on my great grandmother’s face. Her profile reflected, not the true history behind a woman dominated by the circumstances of the era she lived long before coming to this great old house, rather her features were redesigned by a now unknown expert painter, long after the emancipation, with the only intention of hiding the reality of her past. Her smooth and pinkish unwrinkled complexion displayed a youthful image of a beautiful black woman, but her eyes, those eyes could not lie. They could not hide the deep emptiness in them, as if life itself had left them.
This was her house, where she spent the last years of her life as a free woman; where she came to live after she married my great grandfather, and together, raised a family. This was where she suffered the pain of letting go as she saw each of her children leave to live their own lives and where she said goodbye to her one true love.
My great-grandmother decided, long before we were born, that her descendants should remember her in a less painful way. For that reason, she took the original photograph and hid it in a drawer of the cellar, where it would remain far from the probing eyes of her beloved relatives, until that day when my roaming and curiosity took me to it. There I was holding history in my hand; there I saw the true story behind the portrait: A decrepit face with furrows of pain turned into wrinkles, resembling branches of dry grapes. The signs and scars of the horrors of slavery flashed before my eyes and left me with a numbness I could not bear. I felt removed, isolated, for many days to come.
Before her deathbed my grandmother called every one of her relatives to her bedside saying: “Take what you want from this old house. I cannot give you any more than I already have, so consider what you take as your inheritance.” My mother chose the portrait. Carefully, laid it on the dining room table and wrapped it in old newspapers as if it could not withstand any more years of harm. I, already a grown woman, ran towards the cellar in search of the old photograph. I looked among the rubble of time for what was left of my family’s history, but I did not find it. My roots disappeared as my grandmother died.
© María del Carmen Guzmán Rodríguez