Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [6]
“Which just goes to show you,” Mum says. “You must have been swapped at birth. You’re missing that clan loyalty. Fidelity to family above all else. Blood, blood, blood.” To rub it in, she has started introducing me to people as “my American daughter.” Then she leaves a meaningful pause to let my otherness, my overt over-there-ness sink in, before adding with a mirthless laugh, “Careful what you say or do, or she’ll put you in an Awful Book.”
In this way, Mum has made it clear that the blood of her ancestors has come to a screeching halt in the blue walls of her veins. Contaminated by my American ordinariness, condemned for my disloyalty, my veins are the equivalent of a genetic tourniquet. I am not a million percent Highland Scottish. I am not tribal. I have no patience with nostalgia. I’ve relinquished wonderful Old Africa and crossed the Atlantic to join the dull New World. And worst of all, I have Told All in an Awful Book, like on the Jerry Springer Show.
THE MAN IN CASPER, WYOMING, whose job it was to interview candidates wishing to become naturalized American citizens in The Cowboy State had been in the military for most of his adult life. His jaw had been wired together and he was forced to speak between gritted teeth, which made him sound as if he were barely containing a deeply felt rage against the world in general and against future immigrants to the United States in particular. He asked me a few questions about the Constitution and the American War of Independence. He asked how many stars were on the American flag and what color they were. And then he got to the Deeply Personal Questions.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you,” the man asked, “have a family history of insanity?”
In this situation, Mum would have felt the warm sensation of a student receiving an examination question on a subject for which she had prepared all her life. She would have settled herself comfortably in her chair, arranged herself for the long haul and begun with, “As a matter of fact, there is a long line of mental instability in our family going back centuries: funny moods, mental wobbliness, depression, that sort of thing.”
But I, shaking my head for added emphasis, looked the man straight in the eye and answered firmly, “No.”
Thus, having denied my own mother and most of her ancestors, I entered Scotland in the early autumn of 2002 as a foreigner. My brand-new blue American passport looked very flat and shiny, and as a consequence, a little counterfeit, as if I were a spy for hire, equipped with temporary documents. I rented a car and drove west across Scotland until the roads turned into single tracks and the scenery began to take over with craggy violence. Just like the postcards, there really were sheep everywhere and sheep had the right of way (they stood in the middle of the road and looked baleful as I crept around them), but once I got to Skye, the triangular yellow signs that warned of sheep on the road had been altered to depict elephants, camels and Cape buffalo. Beware elephants on the road. Beware camels on the road. Beware Cape buffalo on the road.
I leased a cottage for a week and then, of course, it rained. Not an ordinary sort of rain, or even an ordinarily heavy sort of rain, but the kind of rain that was like standing under the sea the moment Someone Almighty decided to tip it out on top of you. The wind blew so hard the car alarm kept going off. Seagulls gusted past the cottage windows, backward. For four days I stayed indoors, refusing to believe that weather like this could last forever. On the fifth day, I wrapped myself up from head to toe in waterproof materials and ventured out with map and notebook to a great chunk of wild land on the northwestern claw of the island.
I was guided as much by snatches of conversation I’d