My mother’s mystery

Michele Filgate, editor of the gorgeous anthology What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2019), included this essay about my mother and her intense “friendship” with the abstract painter Haywood “Bill” Rivers. My mother knew Rivers before she met my father, but she spoke of him to me through much of my life.

I think she concealed as she much as she revealed. Including the ending. And her regrets.

And it may have mattered, for the end of her 1950s-era story, that she was white and Bill Rivers was Black.

Soon after this essay appeared in the antho and here on longreads.com, a researcher mailed me two typewritten letters he’d found in an archive from my mother to Bill Rivers. Reading them, I could feel how she’d loved him, despite her sparky tone; I could see that this “friendship” was in truth an affair.

It’s no longer new. But I’ve been thinking about it lately because Michele is doing a new antho, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About. If you follow the link,  I hope you enjoy the work.