Toward the end of my senior year in high school, my family moved into a motel room. I refused to go.
It was the spring of 1971, and for the previous few months my parents, my seven younger siblings and I had lived in a ramshackle wooden house bequeathed to us by our church. My father was broke, again, and someone in the parish knew of a house that was sitting empty. The owner had died; her son was in Vietnam. Their misfortune was our good luck.
I liked that little wooden house. I liked the smell of the shaggy old trees in the big dirt yard, a smell I imagined pervaded all of Phoenix before the subdivisions came.
I liked the peeling wallpaper next to the bed I shared with my two little sisters. I liked sensing the desert air while I showered next to an open window in the tiny bathroom. I liked being 17.
Then one day the dead woman’s son came home from Vietnam. He wanted his house back.
On the day my parents loaded up the old red Comet station wagon, preparing to head to the Motel de Manana, they must have been scared. I must have been scared. But the only thought I remember having is this: I can’t go.
We’d moved several times in my childhood, from town to town, from house to house, school to school, from Georgia to Arizona. Sometimes we had enough money, often not. My father drank.
There were phases when we relied on the church and relatives for food, times when the heat and water were cut off. I learned at an early age that the trick to feeding a lot of people with a small amount of hamburger was to knead Saltine crackers into the meat. Once, a couple of apologetic cops came to the house to arrest my mother for bouncing checks at the grocery store.
When I was in eighth grade, we began going to Sunday Mass at the one black Catholic church in Macon, Ga. We were the only white people in the pews besides the nuns, and I was never sure why we went there. I like to think it was because my parents wanted to counter the bigotry of the surrounding culture, but I sometimes wonder if it’s because my father felt less self-conscious being broke in the little black church than in the fancy white one.
As I write these things down now, my growing up sounds chaotic, but I didn’t see it that way then. Life on the brink was just life.
If I chafed against the family tumult at all, it wasn’t because it was hard but because my life felt too ordinary, too small. I was a novel-reading girl, and even without knowing how to name my desire, I knew I wanted some of what I found in those stories. Big ideas, and subtle ones. People of all kinds. Exotic places. Words that could set a mind on fire.
I wasn’t afraid of a difficult life; I was afraid of being trapped in a small one.
On the day my family moved into the Motel de Manana, I committed my first act in pulling away from that life: I told my parents I wanted to go live with my friend Marge. My father, who viewed our family like the army, as a unit that demanded endurance and loyalty through thick and thin, was wounded, but he said okay.
For the rest of that summer, I slept in Marge’s bedroom at night. Often, during the day, before I put on my orange uniform and went to work the candy counter at the Cine Capri Theatre, I went to the motel.
The Manana, as we called it, was on Van Buren Street, a strip of seedy old motels that by 1971 were havens for ex-cons and prostitutes and people in assorted trouble.
In a single room, my parents shared the only bed. My siblings slept on the floor or on stacked boxes. They cooked on a hot plate. My father volunteered to paint the motel in lieu of payment. My mother, a saintly listener always eager for a good yarn, was fascinated by the stories of her new neighbors.
Then the summer was over. I left for college. In the months that followed, my parents moved from the Motel de Manana to the Mission Motel to the Lone Star Motel until, eventually, they could afford a small rental house. After that, when I went home, it was never to a house that meant anything to me.
Years later, when I’d found a place in the big, exciting world – meaning in newspapers – my friend Marge said something that has stuck with me.
“I’ve always had an image of you trying to get away from your family,” she said, impersonating a prisoner shackled by a ball and chain, “but always turning around knowing that you couldn’t.”
She was almost right. I had wanted to get away physically, but I’d never wanted to detach emotionally and never did. Once I found journalism, I didn’t need to.
Journalism rescued me from my fear of living small and disconnected, gave me a way to feel useful, and I came to understand how my family prepared me for the work.My family was my journalism school.
What I learned growing up has shaped most of what I’ve written, which has often involved race, poverty, disability, struggle in its many forms, the durability of love. Through my family, I came to understand the wide range of normal.
Occasionally, I’ve written directly about my family, trying to be careful of when and how, aware that we don’t own other people’s stories.
The day after I won a Pulitzer, my youngest sister, Gina, called me. A column I wrote about her was in the collection my editors submitted to the judges. It was a story of how, despite the mental disabilities and other afflictions she has wrestled with since childhood, she had survived her greatest fear, the death of our mother, with whom she had always lived.
“Mary,” she said when she phoned, “Joe told me you won a prize. What’s it called again?”
I told her, and then I told her, “You won that prize for me, Gina.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m so proud of you.”
It was the only thing anyone has ever said to me about that prize that made me cry. And I cried because I knew how much I owed to her, to every member of my family, that they gave me the solid emotional ground from which, in the name of journalism, I could go exploring.