The Memory Jug

My mother died in her sleep last week. She was 78 years old. My brother and sister came for the funeral, and to get her things in order. My brother came from Washington D.C., my sister from Los Angeles, and I from New York City. My brother handled the legal stuff, my sister dealt with the friends and mourners that my mother left behind, and I made a memory jug.  It was something our family had done for loved ones for years. Our ancestors acquired the tradition from the slaves they once owned, who had brought it from Africa. It would carry all the pieces of her life. I used a vase I’d made for her when I was in my high school art class. It sat in the foyer, in the place of honor, where you could see it right when you walked in the front door. My mother saved everything I ever made. Each crayon drawing and lump of clay. My siblings and I were her greatest source of pride. I covered it in red clay, and while it was still soft and malleable I pressed objects into the clay. I pressed the objects that made up my mother into the clay. I pressed my mother into the clay.

This is what I put in my mother’s memory jug:

1. A photograph of my mother, when she was young. It must have been the nineteen forties when that photo was taken, judging from her hairstyle and clothes. But I think it was probably taken before my father went off to war, because she was smiling. She didn’t smile much after she learned that he’d died. She didn’t smile for years after. But in the picture she gave one of her last smiles. She leaned against a fence post, her lips turned up and her mouth partially opened, as if she were laughing at something the photographer was doing. The sunlight was coming from behind the photographer in the picture, so she squinted to keep the sun out of her eyes, but you could tell she was smiling in her eyes too. I arranged the photograph as the central point on the jug. All of the other objects would go around that, I decided.

2. My mother had saved some of my father’s old shirts, and my sister wanted to give them away to good will. I took one, and cut the buttons off. I arranged them in a circle around the picture of my mother. Now they were together again, after all these years.

3. Her mother’s earrings were the next things to go on the jug. My grandmother had died in childbirth (giving birth to my mother’s younger sister). My mother was given the earrings to remember her by
(some of my grandmother’s other jewelry went on her own memory jug). My mother never wore the earrings. They weren’t her style. Too big, too ostentatious for a practical woman like my mother. But she showed them to us when we were children. She told us “These belonged to your grandmother”.

4. Next were graduation tassels. One had a charm with the year 1942, the year she finished high school. The other had the year 2000, the year she finished college.

5. A gold ring with a tiny sapphire on it was next. Her father had given her that ring the night of her debut. Yes, that’s right, my mother, the practical war bride who raised three kids on her own, began life as a southern debutant.

6. Three baby teeth: my brother’s, my sister’s, and mine. I never even knew she saved those until today, when I found them in a small box. Each was individually bagged with a piece of paper that had each of our names and the date we lost our first baby tooth.

7. A key to our house: we’d moved in here when I was twelve, when she’d finally been promoted after working in a steno pool for almost fifteen years. It was our first and only real house (before that we’d rented an apartment on the top of an old lady’s garage). She never sold it, even after we all moved out, and it was really too big for one person. She lived there until the day she died.

8. Finally I put my mother’s coin collection on her jug. She didn’t collect rare or valuable coins, but coins from different countries. She’d never left the United States, but she liked to joke that if she
ever did, at least she’d be able to buy a souvenir.

The jug will stay with me sometimes, and sometimes with my siblings,
because it is her jug, but it is also ours.

This was my mother.

From Fran:  

This is a story I wrote a while ago and updated fairly recently. It was inspired by my reading an article about Memory Jugs. These are a tradition in parts of the American south that is believed to have been brought over from Africa by slaves. Basically it is a way of honoring a dead loved one by creating a sculpture using objects that meant a lot to them.  It struck me that each of these jugs is like a life story in and of itself and I decided to write one of those stories.