When I first saw my mother, Daughter of the American Revolution, the day I was born she was all glistening and naked. On her brow was a watery crown made of tendrils of silvery hair and sparkling gemstones. She was a delicate, soft creature with damp gossamer wings, half-folded, spent. As she lay on the hard board-and-metal contraption, witness to her long exertion, her feet were imprisoned in shining silver shackles. The luminous belly between them dripping red roses, heavy with moisture, glowed like an immense crystal beginning to dim, encased in jeweled monstrance brought out once a year at Winter's Solstice to rekindle the sacred fire.

A shining pearl rolled slowly from one of the two pale pink buds above her belly, and I wanted to capture it with my lips, on her shining breast. Strange beings in white hovered about, and one of them bound me tightly in a white rag. I wanted to reach out and comfort the creature, pitiful in its spent condition, that stirred when I came near. She smiled at me like the rising full moon, the silvery-golden beams, for me only, bringing gentle reflected light into my confusion. For I knew not where I was. I wanted to immerse myself in her bosom, but I was whisked away, my arms tied down. It was for several long days that they took me away, so she could get her strength back, they said. That was what they did, then, in hospitals. They didn't understand anything. All my life I've been trying to get back to her.

When I was a little girl my mother consorted with fairies and elves, that normally only she could see--I saw them some of the time, when she showed them to me.

It was our secret. She spent most of her time making a garden in a desert land in northern Mexico, where she talked to animals and plants, and they talked to her. The plants worked hard making flowers for her, and the birds sang songs of faraway places. She planted trees in the desert and watered them by hand, carrying heavy buckets of water in the moonlight, and they talked to her about the aeons gone by.

I played endless hours with dolls, dressing them and making little rooms for them in palaces on the shelves in my closet and in the drawers. My clothes mostly, I kept in piles on chairs and on the floor. But the doll I wanted to play with most was always my mother. Often, she allowed me to do her hair and dress her up in velvet, silk, chiffon, her feather hats, and that was ecstasy.

Only, she didn't fit into the little rooms.

Helma was her name. She had a degree from Parson's in interior design, and the house we lived in were considered daring, a combination of modern furniture, some of which she designed, and a lot of antiques. There were brass candelabra and large gilded mirrors and Mexican silverware. One place we lived was a gray-stucco Spanish Colonial with floor-to-ceiling arched windows of cut crystal panes that went all around the ground level, and a white marble Plateresque entrance. My mother was a colorist, and inside, the two-story hallway with a curved staircase was shocking pink, the living room royal purple and the dining room pale pink, with turquoise cushions. Upstairs, my room was sky blue, my father's, pale chartreuse and my mother's room, lavender. While upper-class Mexicans preferred to do their houses in tans and beiges, the Indians of the south, I was well aware, used all my mother's favorite colors in their art.

My mother was a Daughter of the American Revolution. Her ancestors began settling Virginia in the early 17th century. They came from Yorkshire, and although they were aristocrats by birth in northern England, they chose to leave all that behind. In the 18th century they participated in the building of a new system in America which would do away with inequality of opportunity, inequality before the law. Among those Founders who were ancestors and kin to the Mallorys--my mother's family--was George Wythe, who founded the law school at William and Mary.

He signed the declaration of Independence.

Widely consulted by the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Wythe also freed all of his slaves. This was an institution that the newly independent nation had inherited from the British, an institution they would trouble freeing themselves of for ever and ever; it would bring a great deal of grief, Amen. All this is what my Photoboxes are made of--Helma, that magical creature from another dimension and a daughter of the Garden of Eden, Daughter of the American Revolution. Hallowed be thy Name, world without end. In the beginning, it was.

Nita Mallory Renfew
New York, December 21, 1996 (The longest night of the year)