Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Natasha could not bear to keep the items from her mother’s apartment, not even her beloved record collection. The albums she had included music from the Temptations, Al Green, Donny Hathaway, Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye, and Jimi Hendrix. Natasha never could bear to look at the cover of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain—the screaming woman with an Afro buried up to her neck in soil. On the other side of the cover is “a clean white skull” (200). The image seemed to foreshadow what was to come.

On a spring evening in 2005, Natasha and her husband, Brett, walked into a restaurant in Decatur’s square. They had lived in Decatur since 2001, just several blocks from the DeKalb County Courthouse, which Natasha had long been able to avoid, despite her proximity to it. Soon after they received their drinks, a man approached them and asked if they had walked from the hotel. When Natasha and Brett said no, the man apologized and left them. Several minutes later, the bartender approached with another round of drinks and said that they were from Bob—the man who had approached minutes before. Finding this odd, Natasha and Brett went over to Bob and introduced themselves. Bob then introduced them to his wife. He told them that he had been an assistant district attorney in Rockdale County. Natasha then asked if Bob knew J. Tom Morgan, the former ADA in DeKalb County who had worked on Gwen’s murder case. Bob then began to weep. His wife revealed that he was the first officer to report to the murder scene. Not a day went by, the woman said, when Bob didn’t think of Gwen.

It had been 20 years since Gwen’s murder. The court was going to purge all the records of her case. Bob offered them to Natasha. A week later, he met her at a bar near the courthouse with “a big file in a shopping bag and a bottle of wine” (203). He told her that she would need the latter, too. He also recalled how Natasha looked that day at the police station, as though she had already seemed very far away from what had happened. 

Over the years, Natasha thought constantly about the time in Mexico when she had nearly drowned. She remembered how her mother looked, with her arms outstretched. There seemed to have been “a corona of light around her face,” like that of the Virgin Mary (207). Natasha wonders what came first, this early vision of her mother or the images of Mary in paintings and altarpieces. Her vision of that memory remains the same. What has evolved is how she has interpreted “the metaphors inherent in [her] way of recalling the events” (207). Particularly, Natasha considers a dream that she had right after her mother’s death—the dream that inspired her to write this memoir. In the dream, Natasha and her mother are together again, walking side by side. Then, a man emerges from the darkness. In the context of the dream, Natasha knows that her mother is dead and that this man has killed her. Natasha lifts her hand and greets him, saying “Hey, Big Joe.” Then, Gwen turns to her. There’s a hole in the center of her forehead. She asks Natasha if she knows what it’s like to have a wound that never heals. Then, a light emanates from the hole and the light encompasses her head. It is the only source of light in the darkness in which they walk. Natasha and her mother keep walking. They see the man again. This time, he’s holding a gun. Natasha knows that she must save her mother. She throws her body in the path of the bullet. When she has this dream, her own voice, screaming, wakes her from her sleep.

Ever since Natasha first had the dream, she has lived with the guilt of feeling somehow implicated in her mother’s murder. She had the sense that her mother was dead because she was not. However, in the story of her calling, which is to write, Gwen’s murder is given meaning. This is the story that Natasha tells herself to survive.