Drawing My Mother by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval opens her deeply personal flash essay “Drawing My Mother” in a college classroom, where a sixty-four-year-old Kercheval sits, pencil in hand, struggling to recall her late mother’s physical appearance in order to capture an accurate portrait of the matriarch. “I stare at my drawing,” Kercheval writes. “My mother is still looking away.”
Kercheval’s mother continues “looking away” for much of “Drawing My Mother,” even when she assumes forms that aren’t exactly motherly. In one of the essay’s most poignant moments, Kercheval’s drawing class is given the assignment to draw Drunk Batman. Kercheval steers away from the majority of the class’s clichéd interpretations—stumbling and vomiting—choosing instead a Batman incapacitated in bed, his—or perhaps her—face obscured.
These more transcendent details are where Kercheval’s mother resides. Kercheval peppers her essay with small clues as to who her mother was: a ritual glass of bourbon, the embrace of her hand, a favorite joke. What Kercheval remembers about her mother—down to the smell of her preferred cigarettes—is more vital in illuminating the woman she was than simply reimagining her facial features.
In the act of drawing, Kercheval explores the essay’s largest quandary: what it means to reconstruct someone as creative practice. What vulnerabilities does such an act of expression expose you to, and how honest can you be when something as unreliable as memory guides your hand? In her author’s note, Kercheval writes, “Drawing in this essay is also a stand-in for the act of writing.” The portrait of her mother that Kercheval produces is more than the sum of the physical details she remembers. Whether it be pencil lines or keystrokes, Kercheval uncovers what is most important when bringing someone to life through art: capturing their spirit. In “Drawing My Mother,” Jesse Lee Kercheval succeeds at exactly that, leaving the reader with a beautiful, empathic portrait of a complex woman. —CRAFT
My mother’s been dead since 1982, two thirds of my life. Today, I am perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison trying to remember what she looked like so I can draw her. So far, all I have is a pencil line drawing of the side of her face, turned away, cigarette in one upraised hand. She is sitting on a bed at the Holiday Inn on Cocoa Beach where we stayed when we first moved to Florida when I was ten.
I am in the Comics Room because, after years of teaching, I am suddenly a student again. At sixty-four, I’ve started drawing for the first time in my life and Lynda Barry, the Queen of Comics, has magicked me into her class, which is a great gift. “What’s your major?” an undergrad asked me the first day. In class, we use comics noms de plume (noms de brush?). This semester Lynda is Professor Crop Circle. The name tag of a woman near me reads Nearby Lizard. I am Sister Fox. Maybe that is part of what is confusing me. Does Sister Fox even have a human mother?
I stare at my drawing. My mother is still looking away. When my father got a job in Florida, she did not want to leave her job at the treasury department to move and now, it seems, she does not want to be part of my comic. I draw her usual glass of bourbon in her other hand, trying to coax her out. I remember what her hand felt like when she took mine before crossing the street. I remember what her Winston smelled like. Why can’t I remember her face well enough to draw it?
I could say I don’t know how to draw faces. But in this class, it’s a given that everyone is born able to draw. At some point, we’ve all been told we can’t. This class will undo that. I believe this. During class, we circle the room, looking at what everyone has drawn, saying only positive things. We are trying to draw like children again—with joy. Lynda often laughs. There is music playing over the speakers. The spirit is light even when we are asked to draw ourselves as Drunk Batman. I see Batman staggering, leaning against walls, projectile vomiting. Clearly almost everyone in the room has recently been drunk. People laugh. But since my mother died, I find anyone drunk sad. I draw my Batman unconscious, face down on the bed.
My mother was an alcoholic, though no one in my family ever used that word. When we lived in DC, she would come home from work at the treasury, light a cigarette, and pour herself a bourbon. While she fixed dinner, she would tell me stories like the one about a woman in West Virginia who for thirty years walked down the mountain to the nearest store to cash her husband’s Social Security check. How is Ralph? the store owner would ask. Fair to middling, she would answer. When she died, it turned out Ralph had been dead for twenty-nine years. My mother laughed when she told me that story. She admired the widow for taking charge of what life had given her. My mother liked being in charge. But after we moved to Florida, in some way no one ever explained to me, she wasn’t anymore. By the time I was in high school, she was mixing her bourbon with Valium. She spent most of her days in bed. I’ve written about my mother many times, in a memoir called Space, and in countless poems. But drawing her is proving to be impossible.
I erase the pencil outlines of her cheek, the back of her head. I could say I can’t draw her because there are so few photos of her. When she was a teenager, a flood washed away her town of Morehead, Kentucky. Water swept through her parents’ house, carrying away all the family photos. Her grandmother, age seventy-seven, drowned along with twenty-five other people, the youngest only seven months old. I do have a small envelope of black-and-white photos of her when she was in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II, standing in ranks of other women in uniform or at a bar, laughing, a drink in one hand. She served on a ship in the Atlantic that brought wounded soldiers home who had lost limbs or their minds. Every day, she told me, they heard of another ship nearby sunk by submarines. One day, a soldier stole a gun and killed the chaplain. He also shot my mother. Once, in the hospital before she died, she showed me the scar where the bullet went into her shoulder, the spot on her back where it came spinning out.
I close my eyes. The music is still playing. I can hear the scratching of pencil on paper all around me, everyone bent over their pages, drawing. I lean forward on the stool. I imagine putting my hands on my mother’s shoulders. Gently, I turn her around to face me. I open my eyes and draw her eyes with smudged circles underneath. I pencil her lips, slightly turned up in a smile but with deep lines on either side. I pick up a brush and touch them with red watercolor. But then I stop. What color was her hair then? Gray already? Dyed brown? I can’t remember. Then I remember how, when she showed me her scar, she told me she’d always wished she had red hair. Women with red hair, she said, are fearless. I think of the flood and the ships sinking all around her. I think of the widow marching down the mountain to claim that government check. I think of myself with a fox for a mother.
And with a stroke of my brush, I give my mother brilliant, brave, red hair.
JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL is a writer, translator, and artist. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). Her essays and graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review, and have appeared in Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fourth Genre, Image, and elsewhere. She is also the author of the memoir Space (Algonquin Books, 1998), winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association; and the graphic memoir, French Girl (Fieldmouse Press, 2024), named by The Washington Post as one of the Best Graphic Novels of 2024. Find her on Instagram @jlkerche.
Featured image by Ekaterina Kuznetsova, courtesy of Unsplash.
