Two photographs of Aniela with the author’s mother:as an infant, and in the bottom photograph (1947), age 29
(in the following text, some names have been changed in the interests of privacy)
I cared for my mother after my father died in 2009. She was ninety-two. Her two older siblings, Juan and Isabella, were also dead, as were most of her friends. She liked to sit in the living room and stare out the patio window at the woods that separated our house from a neighbor’s property and reminisce about Aniela, her childhood nanny. She spoke about her like a second mother, which in many ways she was. My mother’s mother died of the flu in 1929 when she was only thirty-nine and my mother was twelve.
How did Aniela come to work for your family? I asked her one afternoon as I made us lunch.
I don’t know, she said.
Didn’t you wonder?
No, she said. She was Aniela. She had always been around. I was happy to be with her.
I presumed my mother’s lack of curiosity stemmed from the limits and barriers imposed on her bond with Aniela due to race and class. Especially as she grew older and became aware of such things. However, I was still surprised she never bridged these differences for a woman who provided the love of a missing mother. In fact, years later when Aniela needed her most and my mother was in a position to help she, Juan and Isabella abandoned Aniela to an institution for the mentally ill.
My mother never pried into the affairs of other people. To do so, she thought, was butting into concerns that were none of her business, that inquisitiveness was tantamount to rudeness. Yet she, herself, could be very inquisitive, and if not rude, certainly obnoxious when it suited her. When I was a boy, she would pick me up from school in her green station wagon with fake wood trim and on the way home would sometimes stop at a house that piqued her interest. She had an interior decorating degree from Manhattan College and was curious about how people accessorized their homes. I remember sitting in the car as she peered through the windshield at a stranger’s living room without a hint of self-consciousness. That’s prying by another name, I told her when I was home and recalled these moments. No, she would insist. I was just looking.
When it came to Aniela, however, someone she had loved, she showed little curiosity and grew impatient with my questions about her.
Don’t pry, she would say.
I’m prying now. I want to know why my mother, Juan and Isabella forsook Aniela. She was a woman I never knew except through my mother’s anecdotes, but those warm memories never extended beyond her childhood, long before she and her siblings shunned Aniela.
After my mother and I finished eating, I took our plates to the kitchen. She resumed staring out the window and remembered:
Stepping out of the tub, six years old and dripping water, Aniela wraps a white towel around me. I shiver against a breeze coming in the bathroom window. Hold still, she says. I shake water out of my hair, feel the strands of it slap, slap, slap around my face, and I start laughing when Aniela makes a face and turns her head a bit so the water won’t get in her eyes. She holds my head, rubbing my hair with a towel until I feel my scalp grow hot. Long after you were gone, Aniela, I read somewhere how one’s hair should be allowed to dry on its own; burnishing it with a towel only weakens the roots. My hair started to fall out in my fifties, Aniela. John Wayne advertised some kind of rinse, a concoction of egg and beer that was supposed to stop the shedding. Oh, how you would have laughed watching me pour that goop over my head!
Malcolm made chicken and rice this evening and I remember the summers in Puerto Rico. We raised chickens. I had never occurred to me that one day we’d eat them. The first time I noticed one of them gone, you told me the cook had butchered it for dinner. We stood in the kitchen, the curtains over the sink open to the sun. There in the sink, the dead bird slumped naked, one eye wide open to the sky as if it was observing the clouds. You stepped out for a moment. I watched you go and then I took the bird by the neck and went through a back door to the yard. A stucco fence divided our property from the neighbors. I heard their dog barking in the shadows, the rope tied to its neck dragging through fallen palm fronds. I buried the chicken with my hands and told no one where, only that I had taken it and they never should have killed my chicken. Aniela, you and Poppa begged and begged for me to tell you what I had done with it. Poppa was sure dogs would find it. But I would not tell you. I don’t recall what we ate that night, but it was not chicken.
My mother was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, to wealthy Spanish and Puerto Rican parents. She grew up there and in New York City, where her father practiced law. Aniela began working for her family in 1912 when her brother Juan was born. Aniela was fourteen and from Barbados. At the time, U.S. agencies recruited young girls as nannies from poor nations in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Being a nanny was seen as an opportunity to escape poverty.
One year, Aniela made plans to return to Barbados at the same time my then eight-year-old mother and her family prepared to leave New York by ship for a summer in Europe. My mother recalled hugging Aniela goodbye, weeping at the thought she would never see her again. When they returned three months later, however, Aniela was on the dock waiting for them. My mother rushed down the gangplank and embraced her. Years later, from comments she overheard her parents make, she learned that Aniela had returned to Barbados to meet a man whom her parents had arranged for her to marry. The wedding was canceled, however, and Aniela came back to New York. My mother never asked what happened just as years later she would never inquire about Aniela after she had entered a mental hospital. Perhaps her parents told her not to pry.
After she graduated from college, my mother stayed in New York and lived in an apartment on East 78th Street. Her father covered the rent, and Aniela cleaned and did her laundry. My mother met my father during World War II. They married in 1947. Their wedding album has two photographs of Aniela. In one, she wears a black hat. Glasses perch on her nose and her smile shows a missing tooth. She has a hand on my mother’s right elbow. The fingers of her other hand curl around a purse and a pair of white gloves draped across it. My mother rests a hand on Aniela’s left arm. They face away from each other. My mother stares into the camera. The expression on her face seems to be saying to the photographer, Is this all right? Aniela looks past her as if she sees someone she recognizes.
A photo on the next page shows Aniela behind my father’s mother. Aniela smiles into the camera but my grandmother wears a grim expression, her shoulders slumped forward. She may not have been happy about the wedding. My mother described her as domineering. Grandmother stayed with my parents the first year of their marriage. My father did not object to her influence until my mother put her foot down, as she liked to say, and told him he had to choose between her and his mother.
My parents left New York for Chicago, where my father was vice president of the Midwest branch of Perfecto Garcia Cigars. His father had started the company in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. He later moved it to Tampa, where my father grew up. He had an older brother, Manuel, and two older sisters, Louise and Jo.
In Chicago, my parents rented a duplex on Belmont Avenue. My brothers, John and Tom, spent their early years there. By 1957, when I was born, my parents had moved to a suburb north of the city.
My maternal grandfather died in 1955, and Aniela became unmoored. She had been his employee for forty-three years. She drifted. She visited my parents in Chicago and helped with John and Tom. John remembered Aniela as an elderly black woman who stayed for a few months at a time. Tom had no memories of her other than she made wonderful buttermilk pancakes. I do not remember her at all.
In Illinois, segregation in public accommodations had been outlawed in 1885, but it was still a norm when John was born. Aniela entered my parent’s apartment building through a back door, and she used a blacks-only elevator. That’s just how things were in those days, my mother said. She opposed the civil rights movement, believing that social issues should be left to the states. Both she and my father thought it ridiculous when black people insisted on being called black in the 1960s. It took time for them to stop referring to them as negroes.
My father’s family disdained black people. I remember going to restaurants with them in the 1960s and early 1970s when we flew to Tampa for spring break. Manuel would shout to black waiters, Boy, bring me some tea. Boy, where’re our menus? Boy, what’s the special today?
I never heard my father say anything derogatory about black people. He left Florida at eighteen and attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After he graduated, he enrolled in the graduate business school at Harvard University. His life outside of Florida may have influenced his attitudes towards black people, although at the time, the late 1930s, I cannot imagine he encountered many people of color at either college. He did not express shock or dismay when in my mid-twenties I lived in San Francisco with a black roommate. He did comment on his height. He’s a tall boy, he said.
Aniela would also stay with Isabella and her husband, Diego, in Mexico City. They had three boys: Carlos, Luis, and Adrian. Carlos, now almost eighty, told me in an email, I have a very vague recollection that Aniela had somewhat of a British accent. She was an older woman when I knew her, of slender build but physically strong. She doubled as a kind of part-time nanny for us when my mother visited Puerto Rico. She was strict but in a good way. I do remember my mother saying that she had been her nanny as a child. My recollection is that my mother had kind feelings toward her. I don’t know much else. From the circumstances mentioned, she must have been living in Puerto Rico or nearby. She must have been retired from work, to judge from her age. I know nothing of her economic circumstances or family relationships.
Carlos’s younger brother Luis had only vague memories of her: I seem to remember that she came down to Mexico for a few months to help our mom with us when we were children. That’s all.
My cousins grew up in a large, two-story house with many rooms. I remember a Maya woman, Akna, who, like Aniela, had begun working for their family when she was fourteen and Carlos was a baby. She had been born in a poor village outside of Mexico City and most likely worked for my aunt for the same reason Aniela worked for my mother’s family.
I can see Akna now in a gray, stained dress with a white apron. She would climb a curved staircase two steps at a time to the second-floor living room. Isabella, Diego, and my cousins barked orders at her. She would nod and in breathless voice say, Si señora, Si señor, and hurry off to do whatever they had asked. She had a small room on the first floor at the back of the house. A narrow cot took up most of the space.
One year when I was twenty-four, I spent the summer with Isabella. I spoke to Akna in her room and practiced my Spanish and watched her make tacos on a hotplate. She laughed easily at my mistakes and corrected me. She struck me as a little shy. Or perhaps she was nervous. No one in the family ever spent time with her. If she was needed, they called her on an intercom. A chauffeur about my age also worked for Isabella and Diego. His name was Ernesto. One afternoon, I went with him on an errand. We stopped on the way home and watched a soccer game. Isabella later scolded me for fraternizing with the help and took Ernesto to task.
Diego suffered from manic depression now known as bipolar disorder. In December 1982, about six months after I had returned from Mexico, he died by suicide. Carlos, out for a jog, stopped by the house and found him in the bedroom dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For months after his death, Isabella could not sleep alone. Akna stayed with her at night. Isabella would shout, Diego, in her sleep and Akna would awaken her. Shh, señora shh. Está bien, está bien.
Time passed. Isabella recovered from her shock and grief and could reminisce about Diego without crying. One time I asked her, Do you remember when you were visiting my parents and you wanted him to stay in bed because he had a cold and instead he got up and started jogging back and forth down the hall in his pajamas and robe with a thermometer in his mouth? Yes, yes, she said and laughed. When it was time for lunch, Isabella told Akna to make us sandwiches. Si, Senora, she said in a hurried, breathless voice. As far as I was concerned there was no need to rush but she hastened to the kitchen. After decades of working for my aunt, she knew better than me what was expected of her. By then, she had resumed sleeping in her own room.
My cousins never expressed any affection for Akna. They had known her from infancy but they displayed no sense of attachment or any kind of warm feeling that I saw. They snapped orders with overbearing impatience as if she were a barely tolerable burden, and they spoke of her as one would of a reliable but flawed employee who required great forbearance and endless instruction. After Diego and Isabella died, my cousins provided her with a severance package they said was large enough to provide for her for the rest of her life. Luis called her from time to time to inquire about her well-being. After a few years, he stopped calling. My mother, interestingly enough, was appalled by this. Akna practically raised all of them, she said.
My mother died in 2015; the house she shared with my father and where my brother and I were raised sat unoccupied while we cleared it of furniture, clothes, books, and heaps of photos and magazines and other things that fall into the general, ill-defined category of “stuff,” the detritus of my parents’ sixty-two-year marriage. The wood paneling of the living room, the green shag carpet of the second floor, the red-tile of the front hall, the bathroom fixtures, everything dated back to 1957, the year it was built. My parents refused to use cellphones or computers. Like the house, they had become relics of another era. Framed photos in the front hall included my grandparents, aunts and uncles from both sides of the family, but not Aniela.
One afternoon, Tom asked me if I wanted a blue couch and a square end table in the living room. When we were sick and stayed home from school, our mother would put a sheet on the couch and we would spend the morning watching Password and other television shows.
I don’t like it, I said.
Neither do I, he said. I think we could sell that. People like retro. Do you want that? he asked about a wooden dinner table.
Looking at the table, I remembered how our father would shake salt over his food so vigorously that it sprayed across the table like birdseed. I saw stains where one of our cats coughed up fur balls, pale rings where my mother had placed potted plants dripping water. My brothers and I did our homework on this table. The wood shone from years of propping our elbows on it.
I might take it, I said.
I’d get it refinished, Tom said.
Then it wouldn’t be the same.
Tom shook his head. Like my father, he was not sentimental.
I’d get it refinished, he repeated.
Behind the table, I discovered a cabinet filled with envelopes stuffed with old photos. Some of the pictures had been taken 100 years earlier, according to dates scrawled on the back. Many were riddled with holes while the sun had bleached others.
Perhaps my parents had intended to someday frame and display them. I could imagine my father stashing the photos to get them out of the way. Or perhaps my mother bundled them and put them in the cabinet so he would not discard them.
I found one photo that showed my mother, Isabella and Juan as children beside their mother. They sat in the front seat of a car, casting sidelong glances, presumably at the photographer. Staged scenery of a tree with white flowers and a hill in the distance rose behind them. Perhaps they were at a Coney Island studio that my mother said they had visited as children. Aniela sat in the back seat. She, too, is staring off to the side. She wears a white coat and her hands are folded on her lap. All five of them looked stiff and self-conscious.
A date on a second photo read July 1918, one year after my mother’s birth. Aniela kneels in a garden surrounded by large, leafy plants and white flowers. A two-story house towers above her. Laundry hangs off a line from the porch. Aniela has on a white gown and looks into the camera, her brow furrowed against the sun. Her short, dark hair catches the light. She holds a baby in her lap, maybe my mother. A white bonnet wreaths the infant’s face. Stamford, N.Y., someone wrote at the bottom of the photo. I remembered my mother telling me that my paternal grandfather rented a house there in the summer. Aniela cleaned his office and helped look after the children.
In the late 1950s, Aniela moved in with her sister in Brooklyn and stopped visiting my parents and Isabella and Diego. Her sister complained that Aniela was talking to herself and exhibiting other peculiar behaviors like shuffling papers and opening and closing cabinets and picking up the telephone receiver repeatedly for no reason. It scared her, she told my mother. She asked for money so she could take her to a doctor. She also spoke to Juan and Isabella. I do not know if they offered to help but I know my mother did not. Aniela’s behavior grew increasingly bizarre. Eventually, her sister committed her to a state-run psychiatric hospital.
At that time, such facilities took poor patients and were known for their unsanitary, warehouse conditions. They were understaffed and underfunded compared with private hospitals which served mostly white people. Patients suffered a variety of mental health problems and misdiagnosis was common. Schizophrenia and forms of mania were less frequently diagnosed in white patients than black patients who were then also hospitalized longer and physically or chemically controlled more frequently than white patients
Aniela hated living there. She pleaded with my mother, Isabella, and Juan to talk to her sister and get her release.
My father warned against getting involved. This was a matter between Aniela and her sister, he told my mother. Aniela would be worse off in a private facility. White doctors and staff would resent a black patient and treat her poorly. It would also be very costly. As bad as it may be, she was safer where she was. My mother did not object. Neither did Juan nor Isabella.
I thought your father knew best, my mother explained to me. That’s just how things were handled in those days.
Over the years, my mother wondered if Aniela had suffered from dementia or possibly Alzheimer’s disease. She never spoke to her doctors. She did not remember the name of the hospital. Aniela’s sister called when she died sometime in the early 1960s. My mother did not attend her funeral. She did not know the date of her death or where she was buried.
After I graduated from college, I moved to New York under the erroneous impression I had acting talent. I auditioned for plays without success and worked temp jobs. At the end of the day, I would take the D train to Brooklyn and walk five blocks to my apartment in a brownstone on Cumberland Street between Green and Lafayette avenues. I found the apartment through an ad in The Village Voice. My mother told me Aniela had lived on Cumberland with her sister. She didn’t remember the address.
Other brownstones dating back to the 1940s stood on both sides of the street, and on overcast days the worn buildings appeared to slump beneath the weight of gray skies. Discarded furniture and trash covered the cracked sidewalks. Tree roots snaked through the broken pavement.
Piles of sawdust and stacks of tools filled the front hall of my brownstone, and the carpeting had been torn off the staircase that led to my second-floor apartment. A handyman, Virgil Chance, had been hired by the landlord to rehab the interior but it was a chance in a million if he ever showed up.
My apartment had bay windows and the sun warmed the room on winter days. A broken-down fireplace took up the front room, which also included a kitchen. Chunks of ceiling plaster filled a bathtub. My first night, I knocked on the door of the apartment above me and asked the black woman who answered if I could borrow a blanket. She gave me one filled with holes. I asked her about the neighborhood, if it was safe. It is if you’re black, she told me.
I bought a blanket the next day and returned hers. She invited me in and introduced herself: Jean Penson. Comforters covered two large chairs. I sat in one and sank almost to the floor. The dim ceiling light left the living room in shadow and a line of white light ran through a show playing on her black-and-white TV. She offered me a joint and told me she worked as a dispatcher for the Brooklyn Police Department.
We started hanging out every night and would get stoned staring at the hazy screen of her TV. Thirty-two years old and divorced, she dated several men, none of them seriously. One guy would pound on my door every time he came to pick her up. He told her he did not appreciate a white boy in the neighborhood.
His last name’s Garcia, Jean would say. He’s not white.
I don’t know what prompted me to think about Aniela. She has always been a mystery to me. Even as a child I wondered about her. She was present in my mother’s stories but absent at the same time. I wanted to draw her from the shadows and give her the presence she occupied for me.
Now that I have, I cannot say what if anything I would have done for her had I been my mother. Would I have had the courage to help her and challenge my own biases and those of my family, friends, and community? Do I need to pry more deeply into my own life and choices instead of focusing on my mother? She did not see herself reflected in the attitudes of my cousins toward Akna; perhaps I do not see myself reflected in her attitude toward Aniela. Done well, prying might be the only real antidote to dehumanizing and discarding our common humanity but it would require a unique self-awareness I do not know I possess.
Toward the end of my mother’s life, I’d sit with her in the living room at night before she went to bed. A throw on her lap, a cup of black tea on the end table. She would often fall asleep. Like an old clock, her body was winding down. Sometimes, I heard her say, Aniela.
Everything all right, mom? I asked.
Yes, she said, opening her eyes. Just thinking. Raising her head she would stare out the window at the dark evening and see things I did not. Then she would doze off again and whisper, Aniela. As if she could conjure her and resolve something unsettled.
J. Malcolm Garcia lives in San Diego. His most recent book is the novel, Out of the Rain (Seven Stories Press 2024). He is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Prize for writing about the working classes and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism.