A Dingy White Mug

Holding on to my Nashville childhood

Emily Bernard

“Coffee Stains” by Nat W is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

In Objects of Desire, a writer meditates on an everyday item that haunts them.

it’s the most valuable thing I own: a dingy white mug bearing the term Monistat, the brand name of an antifungal medication often used to treat yeast infections. The mug is at least fifty years old. Among its stylish, whimsical, and colorful neighbors in my kitchen cabinet, it sticks out like a sore thumb, like a fungal infection itself. Right now, it sits by my side.

The mug is made of hard plastic—a modern material—but it’s a relic from a long-ago era. A time when pharmaceutical companies arranged house calls at doctors’ offices to peddle their wares. My father was a doctor. His office and our home were full of detritus from these individuals, whose sales pitches included gifts of embossed coffee mugs, notepads, and pens. I picture the reps, a series of men, probably white, who made pilgrimages to my father’s practice, which was housed in a small white brick building on Buchanan Street in North Nashville—what used to be Black Nashville, located squarely on the “wrong” side of town, according to the American system of redlining.

I was a kid when this relic was proffered to my father. (I can still see him sitting behind his dark-brown metal desk in his bright-white coat, “Harold O. Bernard, OB/GYN” stitched in embroidery thread over the left breast pocket.) Nashville felt like a small town back then. The home of country music, yes, but to most Black citizens of Nashville that I knew, Music Row was a strip to avoid, not a tourist destination; it was the setting for seasonal parades of the local Ku Klux Klan. One summer afternoon, when I was about fifteen, my mother and I drove past a line of men in white robes and hoods walking slowly and silently along the sidewalk. My mother pointed them out: “There’s the Klan,” she said flatly. “Roll up your window.”

As a Black kid growing up in the slowly desegregating South, I was taught that the Klan was something you just had to live with, like a virus, like American racism itself, much like Black characters view white people in Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula. You had to endure them and do your best not to provoke them, like they were wild, unloved animals encountered on the street. If you were a Black doctor with a private practice designed to care for poor women, they were a succession of white pharmaceutical reps trying to hypnotize you with their pearly white teeth. In the Black world where I grew up, encounters with white people rarely did us much good.

My dad received this mug at a time when plastic was something one threw away without a hint of anything resembling guilt. It’s amazing, now, to reflect on all the things we didn’t know then. My parents were practical people. (To call someone “practical,” as opposed to “fanciful,” was among the highest compliments they could give.) I keep this objectively unbeautiful utilitarian object and drink coffee from it nearly every morning—expressly to remind myself that no matter how smart I think I am or how many degrees or titles I collect, I am also always living inside some kind of ignorance I cannot currently perceive.

my father, dr. harold oswald bernard, was born in Trinidad and educated in the Caribbean, Canada, and the U.S. He was a learned person, but he was not an intellectual. I never knew the man to read an entire book, much less lose himself in one, like my mother and I did. However, volumes and volumes of medical journals seemed to reproduce in our home, where they were piled high on top of our ever-crowded kitchen table, alongside correspondence, newspapers, and articles that my mother xeroxed at my father’s office (where she worked as his manager)—articles about the dangers of, say, aerosol, mercury, and plastic. She sent them to me once I went off to college at Yale, as soon as that information made its way into the news. My father was not an intellectual, but he was, like my mother, deeply interested in the world around him and generally unsurprised when things that he had been taught to believe were safe and good turned out to be lethal—America itself, for instance. Still, Dad was never one to shake his fist. When he could not control or change outcomes to suit him, he simply adapted to what was. This is something I learned from him: acceptance.

Among the things I inherited from my father was his very convincing poker face, which I learned about from one of his colleagues, another Black physician in Nashville, on the day of his funeral. They used to play poker together. The doctor smiled broadly as he referenced it— Dad’s poker face—and I could instantly conjure my father’s own pearly whites, his soft, trailing laughter, and the steady but faraway look in his eyes when I asked him questions that he had no intention of answering, such as “Dad, what was your childhood like?”

“you are in charge of the paper,” one of my brothers generously dictated after my father died and it was time to empty our childhood home (my mother had died seven years earlier). Cleaning out the paper taught me two things: One, my parents were basically hoarders, but it didn’t look that way because they had a place for everything. (“A place for everything / Everything in its place,” my mother used to sing annoyingly whenever she commanded me to clean my room. I can hear her voice today when I similarly instruct my own children.) And two, it’s really hard to get rid of things when you believe they have so much left to teach about the world in which they were produced, which is also the world we live in now.

There is a third thing I learned: hoarding may be inherited. I do not have the square footage my parents possessed, but if I did, I am sure I would come up with enough stuff to occupy every inch of space. That is to say, I understand hoarders, collectors. For instance, all the papers on my parents’ kitchen table currently live in my house, which is located more than one thousand miles north of my childhood home in Nashville. I don’t have room for them, and my parents would have tossed out much of this stuff anyway, if they had lived long enough. They died still wondering at a world that was rapidly transforming around them, outside the secure walls they built for me and my brothers, even in the slowly desegregating South of my childhood.

The Klan doesn’t parade on my block, nor on any other blocks in the city where I currently reside—at least not so far. I doubt many pharmaceutical reps still make regular pilgrimages to the solitary offices of lone physicians in private practice. That time in American life is over, just like the long moment in which we threw away mass-produced objects without a thought for our future.

The mug is holding strong. Good plastic does not die. That’s the problem with it; that’s the virtue of it. My parents were good people, strong individuals both, in their respective fashions. But I am sure they had no idea their lives would end before they had a chance to figure out all that had happened to them—all they had witnessed, endured, survived, and experienced. I imagine they kept collecting stuff, hoping, perhaps, that the things they kept would come together into a great puzzle, and all of it would finally make sense. It would coalesce naturally, ultimately, into one sensible and meaningful story. I am sure I am the same, and that I will meet the same fate. Probably my daughters will come across this mug once I am no longer alive and wonder why I held on to such an unattractive item for so many years.

Collecting is a solitary, private, and very personal act, an addiction of sorts whose genesis and contours are difficult to grasp or articulate when you’re in the middle of the compulsion—like writing. I certainly don’t have the right words for my daughters now. When they are confronted with the detritus of my own life, I won’t be around to explain to them about how no one used to care very much about trash, at least not in the way we do now; about the Klan and the little pinprick of terror I sensed beneath my mother’s blasé instruction to roll my window shut; about my father behind his public grin, navigating the racial, social, and class dynamics of a foreign country in which he thrived despite regular reminders that he was not wanted; and about their daughter, who tried desperately to keep their memory alive by holding on to their things and lessons—even though, at times, it was nearly impossible for her to distinguish her home from her history in a place she once had every intention of leaving behind.

Emily Bernard teaches English at the University of Vermont and is the author of five books, including Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine.