Every time I drive through Washington and Oregon, I get nostalgic. Pine and fir trees cover the hills, snowcapped peaks in the distance—the classic Pacific Northwest coastal landscape, suspended in memory-amber from camping and fishing trips with Morfar and Mummi, my Swedish American grandfather and Finnish grandmother. I learned to drive in my thirties, and the first time I truly felt American was behind the wheel of my own car, on a road like this one, moving through it on my own terms. But when the terrain shifts to the sepia scrubland of eastern Washington, the jagged cut of the Columbia River Gorge, the long dry stretch of Tribal Lands, I burst into tears. The coast makes me nostalgic. The interior makes me weep. I don’t entirely understand the distinction. It happens every time.
This particular drive is my Spring Break. My husband and I usually spend it abroad—with our birthdays falling in early March, our anniversary on April Fool’s Day, international travel has been our seasonal ritual. Not this year. There is my pending unemployment. There is the state of our marriage. There is, more practically, the state of this country and the danger of flying while Black or Brown.
Before leaving California for this pilgrimage home, I download two digital versions of the historic Green Book and book rooms in Eugene for both legs—a college town, reasonably safe, midway on I-5. On the drive up, I spend an hour on the phone with a high-powered friend rethinking my career trajectory, another hour with an entrepreneurial writer-teacher friend who retired early and is actively planning to leave the country.
I sleep that first night in a vintage camping trailer, teal and white, doll-sized—the kind Morfar and Mummi towed behind their car when they dropped Mom off at summer school in Seattle and took me to the coast: fishing, berry-picking, setting up camp in the grey Pacific rain. As I snuggle into the berth bed, I am eight years old again, already building small worlds from whatever was at hand—suede tipi, Barbie camper with collapsible cookware like ours, G.I. Joe submarine submerged in the stream. In the morning I swing by a famous Portland bakery. You don’t arrive to your Nordic mother’s house without pastry.
At this stage of her life, Mom is clearing out the garage—making room for a small apartment for the honorary grandson who has become her primary caregiver. Fifteen years ago, when he was in high school, he was her yard boy. Now, never having left, he calls her Abuela.
Margareta Magnusson’s döstädning—Swedish death cleaning, the practice of clearing your possessions while you’re still alive so your family won’t have to—asks a simple governing question: Will anyone I know be happier if I save this? My mother, being practical and Nordic, has decided to apply it. But what she is clearing is not ordinary accumulation. There are five thousand children’s books. A thousand international paperdolls. Four dollhouses. Dozens of dolls, mainly Nordic or Black and brown—Nigerian, Ethiopian, Thai, Swedish, Finnish, Sami, Indigenous, Pacific Islander. Growing up the only Black girl in my school, my family, my town, I lived inside an erasure. Mom constructed the counter-archive: one that saw me, one that placed me at the centre of every possible life. When she mentions she’s lined up takers for all of it—the dentist’s kids, the Black in-laws of the new grandson, local schoolteachers—I float the idea of driving up first to photograph everything. She is so excited, it is a plan before I’ve finished the sentence.
More pastry. You don’t arrive for a Swedish death cleaning empty-handed.
Mom texts me updates as I drive, and corrects herself after each one, because she is who she is:
A Found Text Poem by Holly
There not their
Hasn’t not haven’t
Ratted not rated
Bots not bits
Brock not Broke
Cobbler not cooler
Lovely not lively
News not new
I am also listening to Blackouts—Justin Torres’s novel, in which a young man visits a dying elder named Juan at a desert facility called the Palace. Juan possesses a copy of a real 1941 study, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns—research originally gathered by a queer woman named Jan Gay, then co-opted by the male medical establishment to pathologize homosexuality. Juan’s pages are largely blacked out, fragments left legible: acts of reclamation he is passing on before he dies. I am teaching it this semester in what has become, without my choosing it, my final undergraduate class. We have learned that the school is closing. The symbolism is almost too much to sit with.
Two days after leaving California, I pull into my mother’s driveway. She is already at the garage door.
My morfar built the looming three-story medieval castle—each room a stackable cube wallpapered and floored with real linoleum or carpet samples. My uncle Michael-Vaïno built the massive log cabin beside it, heavy and true, a Finnish invention, my schoolteacher mother would remind us. My mother’s Victorian dollhouse, assembled from a kit, occupies its own table; a fourth starter dollhouse, cheap wooden furniture and all, stands nearby. The castle, the log cabin, and the canary-and-orange Barbie camper all fit Black Barbies, Black Ken, Black G.I. Joe. Mom designed the wardrobes and interiors, sewed the doll clothes from the same fabrics she used for my clothes and Mummi’s—so that when I dressed my dolls, I dressed them in the same world I lived in. In a town with no mirrors for me, she made mirrors everywhere she could.
Six large trunks, each one opening to create its own theatrical stage: Black dolls with complete lives she had imagined and constructed. There is Faith Golden, her nose gnawed by one of my pet rats, with evening gowns that matched my historic Halloween costumes. There is Diana, a ballerina—Ethiopian and Portuguese—who travels with her own doll-sized trunk of layered tunics and bejewelled yokes when she visits family. My mother wasn’t sure what Ethiopians wore. She consulted Abyssinian paintings in her college art history textbook and did her best. Then the Madame Alexander dolls—boxes of them, expensive porcelain. My first was Thai, named Chula. I did not know then that I would spend a year in Thailand as a high school exchange student, and another year in college as a Buddhist nun. A full box of Nordic and Sami dolls. And the international paperdolls—some darkened with brown marker or taupe nail polish, their skins glittering.
Mom was building a world that could see me, long before I had any idea such a world was possible.
For four days I make the same drive: thirty-five minutes each way past the Yakama Reservation, flat rural road, my mall hotel backing the Yakima River—muddy tan and fast-moving, swollen from the rains, more flooding this spring than anyone can remember, cows washed away in some places. The landscape surprises me. Have there always been so many cherry blossoms? Lacey white and pink trees lining the road, and the pastures full of baby calves—black dots on lush, improbably bright green. I autopilot the flat stretch accompanied by the soundtrack of high school: the same rock my babysitters listened to when it was new, that I listened to, that the grandparents of current high schoolers are now listening to in their own cars on their own flat stretches of road. Led Zeppelin. U2. Steely Dan. Fleetwood Mac. 4 Non-Blondes. Crowded House. Red Hot Chili Peppers. I scream along to all of it.
I text my writing group to help me witness and process, sending photographic evidence. Day 1: Black Barbies, the mod years. The psychedelic Barbie camper. That collection. Your mom and her constant awareness of everything. Those outfits—masterclass. Day 4: I send a video of the medieval castle. Gold lamé walls adorned with peacock feathers. Faux leopard print rugs. GI Joe in blue satin harem pants, falcon on his wrist. Black Ken in chain mail, guarding the downstairs larder. Now accepting the Oscar for set and costumes: Holly, one texts back, accompanied by a row of clapping emojis.
On the drive back to California, I stop in Portland for lunch with a cousin who recently lost her wife in a tragic accident I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around. We talk about writing: how long it took her to begin again. We talk about the memorial service, what made it exactly right, how she could feel her wife depart the house afterward. After lunch, she walks me around the corner where a childhood friend is waiting outside a chocolate shop. Though he’s a year younger than me, he’s planning to retire on Easter—because his health has left him no choice. He worked in the Arctic Circle and asks if I have Finnish citizenship, if I’ve considered moving to the Nordics. As we part, he hands me a small glass jar of handmade marmalade from the aptly named Buddha’s Hand fruit, jewelled and glistening gold.
I press on to Eugene, where I’ve booked a flat that looks like my Black Barbie dreamhouse—mid-century modern wood furniture, rust and orange upholstery, starburst wallpaper, black walls with gold flocked stars, magenta glitter bathroom floors. Fabulous. I post a photo of my mother laughing over a horchata cocktail from the night before, captioned with something about Swedish death cleaning. Instagram concludes she has died and sends its condolences. I call her. She finds this very funny.
She tells me about her mother and how relieved Mummi finally was when she could stop pretending she was going to beat cancer and moved into the hospital to die. She was probably high most of the time, Mom admits with a giggle. What Mummi did, in those last days, was sleep and chat with Mom, who visited every day, and relive the books and films of her past. Her mind, she told her daughter, was like a chest of drawers. Each drawer held a book, a film. Each day, she pulled one open and found—to her surprise—the characters and plots intact, vivid, waiting.
A chest of drawers. Six trunks, each one a stage. Diana and Faith Golden, in their boxes.
Juan, the elder in Blackouts, does the same thing—passes a blacked-out archive to a younger person before he dies, and says: carry this forward. What he transmits is not tidy: fragmented, erasured, the queer lives the official record tried to extinguish. What my mother transmits is not tidy either. It is Faith Golden, named for a girl her daughter would one day become, a ballerina who packs Ethiopian tunics sourced from an art history textbook, paperdolls with glittering brown skin, a castle whose inhabitants have travelled far from anything the toy industry imagined for them. A Green Book of the imagination: every place in the world mapped for a Black girl who would one day need to move through it, charting the safe routes, marking the places that would see her.
Both archives ask the same question: what do you do when the world as given leaves you out? You build a better one. You make clothes for it from the same fabric you made your own. You pass it on and hope the person receiving it knows what she is holding.
The writers gathered in this section know what they’re holding. They travel through places that have not always made room for them, carry knowledge that is inherited and improvised and sometimes constructed from whatever sources were available, and they bring back something the official record was not going to preserve on its own. That is the work. That has always been the work.
My institution is closing; my childhood is departing in boxes and trunks. My mummi is long gone; my mom is preparing to join her. The pastries were good though.
