Parts of Us Not Made at Home
Illustration by Xia Gordon. For decades—no one knows exactly how long—my grandfather kept a portrait of his mother, the only image that remained of her, in the back of his bedroom closet, facing the wall. When we discovered it after he died, in 1998, no one, not even my step-grandmother, knew it was there.
The portrait showed a woman with an impatient expression and very striking features: dark hair, and prominent dark eyebrows, set a little higher in the oval of the face than you might expect. It reminded me a little of the famous self-portraits I’d seen of Frida Kahlo. It also reminded me of myself. This woman, Amy—Amelia—Brazil, my great-grandmother, resembled me more closely than either of my own parents.
As I understand it—to the degree I will ever understand it—my grandfather spent his adult life resenting her, resisting her influence; though when she died in 1963, he didn’t refuse his inheritance, which gave him the financial stability he’d never achieved himself. His father had died when he was in his twenties, and Amy went on to marry three other men, each one wealthier than the last. My mother remembers her as a grande dame among the influential families of Piedmont—the genteel town set high on a hill in the middle of Oakland—who took her out for fancy dinners at Trader Vic’s and paid for trips to Europe my grandparents couldn’t afford.
But there’s another way of telling this story: Amy Brazil was not white. Nor was she, as I’d usually heard, Portuguese: her parents were immigrants from Flores, an island in the Azores, a volcanic archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic. (Technically an autonomous region of Portugal, the Azores lie almost nine hundred miles west of the Iberian peninsula and northwest of Morocco.) Like islanders in many parts of the world, Azoreans complicate continental racial logic; they are descended from Christian or Jewish Portuguese colonists, north Africans, sub-Saharan African slaves, emigrants from other parts of Europe, or all of the above. I never met Amy, but I did once meet her brother, my great-great uncle
