July 10, 2011
Sunday

I think of [Nella Larsen] as my literary muse. . . . I just want to thank her — for being brave enough to write the story of her complexity — being both black and Danish — almost 80 years ago!  She made my book possible.
        — Heidi Durrow, b. 1970s
            American fiction writer and essayist

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in Chicago in 1891, the daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and a black West Indian father who quickly disappeared from her life. When her mother married Peter Larsen, Nella took his surname. As a mixed-race child, and the only mixed-race member of her household, Nella experienced difficulties fitting in and defining herself in the socially rigid milieu of turn-of-the-century Chicago. She lived for a time with some maternal relatives in Denmark, briefly attended Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee, went back to Denmark, and finally returned to the United States to attend nursing school in New York City.

In 1919, she married Elmer Imes, a prominent African-American physicist, and moved to Harlem. She undertook training as a librarian. And she began to write. She became part of the Harlem Renaissance, and eventually gave up library work to write exclusively. She weathered an accusation of plagiarism, and endured a divorce,. Although she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, she had lost confidence in her work. She withdrew from the literary circles where she had been popular, and did not publish again after 1930. She died alone and largely unremembered as a writer in 1964, when she was 72.

I have never read any of Nella Larsen’s work. Not yet, anyway. I never would have heard of her if I had not come to know Heidi Durrow, a  mixed-race novelist who is the daughter of an African-American Air Force man and a white Danish mother who met in Germany. When I was awarded the fellowship at Jentel in 2007, I googled for people who had been there, and came across Heidi and her blog, Light Skinned-ed Girl. I wrote to her to ask for insight or advice about life in an artist’s enclave in Wyoming, and an online acquaintance sprang up. Although we had both been at Bread Loaf in 2004, we didn’t meet then. We did when she returned as a scholar in 2009. Last year, she was the fellow in my Bread Loaf workshop, and her generous, insightful feedback continues to help shape my work.

Heidi’s novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, concerns a mixed-race girl whose Danish mother, driven to despair by her isolation, commits suicide by leaping from the roof of her Chicago apartment with her three children in her arms. Rachel is the only one who survives, and because her black G.I father cannot care for her, she goes to live with her black grandmother and embarks on a childhood of learning to define herself on her own terms.

I would have been interested in this story even if I had never heard of Heidi Durrow. It echoes an event I study, the Bissinger Tragedy of 1875 in Reading, Pennsylvania, in which another desperate mother took her children with her into a raging river. Further, Heidi took the inspiration for her novel, the what if? of it, from a brief newspaper article about a similar tragedy that captured her imagination. It turned out to be a book well worth reading, and learning from.

Heidi became interested in Nella Larsen when one of her teachers mentioned that she knew of a writer who, like Heidi, was the child of a Danish mother and a black father. Nella Larsen died before Heidi was born, but she served as a spiritual mentor in Heidi’s quest to establish herself as a writer and to understand her own identity, her complexities, as she says of Larsen. She would learn that Nella Larsen died alone and largely forgotten as a writer, and that her gravesite was still unmarked more than forty years after her death. Heidi undertook to provide the headstone herself, a quest she recalls in “Dear Ms. Larsen, There’s a Mirror Looking Back.”

Longtime readers of this space certainly know my interest in remembering and being remembered, in seeing that one’s grave is kept clean. Nella Larsen is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. How could I not go there during my summer in the city?

Cypress Hills Cemetery was founded in 1848 and intended by its planners to be “the cemetery of tomorrow.” Established in the tradition of the rural or garden cemetery, it stands today as a good example of that concept. It has rolling hills, leafy glens, water views, and a surprising sense of peace and tranquility despite its being bisected by highways. Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter whose work I like, lies buried there. So does baseball hero Jackie Robinson.

Honoring those figures will have to wait for another day. Despite its being only a few miles from where I am staying, a distance that could be covered in fifteen minutes at home in my Toyota, it took 90 minutes on the train (on several trains and a bus, actually) on a Sunday afternoon to get out there from the Upper East Side. I arrived on the only day the office is closed. Although I had detailed directions from Heidi for the location of Nella Larsen’s grave, I would have been at a loss as to how to find Mondrian’s or Robinson’s, even with plot and section number, since the paper map I picked up outside the office is not very helpful.

Although the office was closed, there was a flower vendor on duty. I bought a bouquet and then set out up the first hill I came to. Heidi had said that Nella Larsen’s grave was on the opposite side of the cemetery from the office, a good fifteen-minute walk.

The flower vendor had told me to keep an eye out for the caretaker, who was driving around in a light blue pickup. He could help me with better directions. Fortunately, he happened to stop near the restroom building just as I was getting started. “You don’t have car?” he asked. I said I didn’t. “I take you,” he said, and yes, I climbed into a blue pickup with a six-inch hunting knife on the floor of the passenger seat, driven by a total stranger who took my white card that had not only the information regarding Nella Larsen’s location, but also my return bus/subway directions, and popped it in his pocket.

Had I not accepted the ride from this stranger, I never would have found the place I had come to see. We drove through paved roadways and under bridges, a trip that was a cross between the meandering narrow lanes of my favorite cemeteries at home and the Transverse Roads that bisect Central Park. He let me off at the corner of Gil Memorial and Highland Way, beside the imposing Cypress Hills Abbey. “Up there,” he said, pointing to an area that rose sharply from the roadway. I had the presence of mind to retrieve my index card before thanking him and getting out.

Once in the right section, it did not take me long to find Nella Larsen’s spot. All of the graves in that section have flat markers, and I am assuming that some cemetery regulation led to the design of the marker Heidi provided. Nella’s is a little different from the others. I liked the way the bouquet mixed my two favorite colors, orange for forward motion and purple for my fiction work. Although the Cypress Hills website does not list Nella Larsen as a “notable burial,” there is a marker at the foot of her grave saying that she is. I suspect no one in the Cypress Hills organization had ever heard of her until Heidi made her arrangements.

I spent more than an hour in the Garden of Memories. There were no benches, but in an older section, where the monuments are not flush with the ground but have railings to perch on or edges to lean against. I found a child’s grave, that of little Edward Samuel Dresher, who was just three and a half when he died in 1916. He was born on July 11, 1912.

I took a purple spray from the bouquet I’d brought for Nella and left it for him. Who would be around to remember him? When was the last time anyone thought of him? Perhaps invoking his spirit might help inform the stories I write about loss and grief, memory and regret.  Marking this forgotten grave with a flower seemed the least this fiction writer could do.

It took me almost an hour to make my way back to the gate at Thanatopsis Road and Jamaica Avenue. I kept making wrong turns that led to dead ends, and also stopping to look at weeping angels and stone maidens. I did not have to wait long for a bus, however, to start the 90-minute trip back home.

Although it had been a nice day, warm but low humidity, I found myself too tired to embark again for a Lutheran church on E. 88th that offers an evening Eucharist. I wasn’t in church today, formally, but I had a deeply spiritual experience, and I would call this a Sunday well-spent.