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Published on April 29th, 2024 | by Jaclyn Moyer

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You Must Give Her Freedom: An Excerpt from ON GOLD HILL

A few days before the start of spring 2015, my daughter was born.

Indy came into the world alongside apple blossoms and wild lupines, into a season brimming with new life. My grandmother called a few days after the birth to ask how the baby and I were doing. Indy lay asleep atop a sheepskin spread out beside me on the couch, and I traced my fingertips along the curve of her head, through wisps of dark hair. I thought of the birthing room my grandmother had shown us in Punjab and told her we were both doing just fine. My grandmother asked if Indy was eating enough and I assured her that she was. Satisfied, she said goodbye, then added, “Congratulations.” If my grandmother was disappointed that I’d had a girl, she let no hint of that into her voice. Over the following weeks she called often to check in on Indy and me. If Indy was bothered by gas, my grandmother advised me to grind a pinch of asafetida into a paste and feed it to her. If the baby was plagued by hiccups she assured me it was only a good sign that she was going through a spurt of growth. 

Consumed with the demands of a newborn, I spent the first few weeks of that spring breastfeeding, washing diapers, and walking my daughter to sleep. Friends and family came to help with the farm, planting seedlings, rolling out irrigation lines, hoeing the eruption of spring weeds. I set up a crib in the greenhouse so I could seed flats while the baby slept. If the weather was clear and warm, I carried a blanket out into the fields and laid Indy on her back while I worked, watched her track the geese flying overhead, clouds bunching and stretching across the sky.

Now, as I recall those days of harvesting cut flowers with the baby on my back, of pulling young carrots from the field for her to gum, I try to remember the particular moment when I first seriously considered giving up our farm. When did the stray musings calcify into a pressing, specific desire? I can locate neither. The shift happened the way the mulberry trees lost their leaves each autumn: I’d never see the first leaf fall, not the second or third, but one day I’d notice the ground covered in yellow and look up to find the branches already half bare.

Beacon Press

By the time Indy was two months old, the thought of leaving was constantly on my mind. I found myself once again perusing the internet in search of other options. At first I looked only for local work, a job I could take outside of the farm to supplement our income, a part-time gig as a substitute teacher or an adjunct community college instructor, or something for the state park down the road. But at some point my search criteria expanded until I was looking at full-time positions, then jobs in other states. Ryan, too, found intriguing possibilities across the country and every few weeks we’d get excited about something and start putting together the materials to apply. But a day later I’d be harvesting flowers at sunrise with Indy asleep in a carrier on my back, the sky over head ribboned with coral-colored clouds and rows of chest-high zinnias on both sides, and the thought of leaving this place would seem utterly inconceivable.

On my computer desktop, adjacent to a folder marked “Resume/Cover Letter,” our proposal to lease more acreage for wheat waited, ready to send off to the conservancy.

*

One late spring morning, my mother came over to watch Indy for a few hours while I harvested for a wholesale order. I squatted next to a row of carrots, attempted to pull up a bundle by hand. This was usually an easy task this time of year, but that morning the tops snapped off and the roots remained clenched in the hardened soil. I used a digging fork as I did in the summer months to pry the roots up from the dry ground.

In the back section of the farm our Sonora had grown to its full height, finally abandoned by the flocks of geese. But the damage had been done: the field was thick with star-thistle. Even from a distance I could see the blue hue of their stems woven through the bright green Sonora stalks. When a breeze washed over the farm, the wheat did not ripple gracefully like the surface of a lake as it had in past years.

I didn’t know if it was harvestable at all. The thistle would jam the combine—I had witnessed that already, and knew the thickest patches would have to be relinquished. But in some places the thistle was thin, in a few sections absent altogether. Perhaps a few hundred pounds could be salvaged still?

When I returned to the house with a bucket of carrots too small for the order but perfect for roasting, I heard my mother cooing softly from another room. At first her words sounded like baby talk, just nonsense babble, but after a moment I realized she was speaking Punjabi. I stepped into the room to find Indy lying across my mother’s lap, looking up at her. At the sound of my footsteps my mother startled. She flashed me a brief glance, then returned her attention to the baby and announced that she’d resolved to speak only Punjabi to Indy. “That way she’ll just pick it up, you know?” My mother stroked a finger across Indy’s cheek and continued muttering lulling sentences, the words falling so effortlessly from her lips. “And then,” she added without meeting my eyes, “you can learn with her.”

I leaned against the doorframe and listened. Indy stared up into my mother’s face, her brows two crescent moons above blue eyes held wide open. I closed my own eyes, focused on the words coming from my mother, trying to pull some meaning from the sounds. At last I recognized something: Kheth, farm. Gajar, carrot. Kaanakh, wheat.

*

Later that spring, when Indy was not yet three months old, my grandparents made the trip to El Dorado County to meet her—their first great-grandchild. Ryan and I drove with Indy over to my parents’ house to join them for dinner. From the driveway I could already hear voices on the back porch, the crackle of something simmering on the big pro pane burners. With Indy in my arms, I followed the voices into the yard.

For a moment, no one noticed me approaching and I watched the scene from a distance: My grandmother sat in a plastic chair and sliced an onion over a bowl in her lap, my mother swirled a spoon over a cast-iron pan, my aunt rolled out balls of roti dough. A chatter of Punjabi bounced between the three women, their voices hardly distinguishable.

My grandmother looked up and her face split into a grin. She put the onions aside, then flung the tail of her silk scarf over her shoulder and stood. “Ah, the baby is here,” she said and held her hands out toward me. I placed Indy in her arms.

My grandmother cradled the baby close against her chest, then held her out to take in her face. She spoke to Indy in English, told her how beautiful she was, what fat cheeks she had. Lowering her voice to a near whisper, she murmured, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I cannot talk to you. I don’t speak much English, you see.” My cheeks swelled with heat and I glanced away. I wished I could pluck my grandmother’s words from where they hung in the air, expunge her apology. I wanted to tell my grandmother the depth of my regret over the fact that I’d never know what she sounded like when speaking her own language but knew her only in translation, her thoughts squeezed into ill-fitting containers. I watched my grandmother cup my daughter’s head in her palm, then said, “Speak to her in your language—she’s learning. Speak in Punjabi.”

My grandmother turned to her husband and carefully passed him the baby. The two looked like a set of opposites: My daughter, brand new, all creamy skin, blue eyes, and chubby cheeks. My grandfather in what would be the last decade of his life, skin wrinkled and thin, dark eyes pillowed in bags, the bones of his face unconcealed by extra flesh. Indy stared up at her great-grandfather and he looked down at her—two pairs of eyes locked on each other.

When he spoke his voice was a near whisper. “Hello gol gappa,” he murmured, calling her the name of an Indian snack, a ball of deep-fried dough filled with tamarind juice. My daughter smiled, let out a soft coo. “Hello little gol gappa,” he said again, and a smile curled the corners of his own mouth.

I could not, on that day, imagine my grandfather decades earlier, young and strong and ready to murder my parents—could not reconcile that figure with the man standing before me, those big hands so full of gentleness. Nor could I imagine how, in the coming years, my daughter and my grandfather would come to adore one another, that I would watch her place a doll into his lap so he could pick it up and stroke its plastic head, that I would see him pretend to eat a roti she’d made from play dough, or that he would call her gol gappa until she was old enough to say the name herself.

*

When I said goodbye to my grandmother that evening, she handed me two Tupperware packed full of leftover okra and dal and a stack of roti rolled up in aluminum foil. Then she slid two bills into my hand, $21— always an odd number, for good luck. I tried to refuse the money but my grandmother insisted. “It is for Indy,” she said. I relented and put the bills in my jeans pocket. My grandmother placed her palms on either side of Indy’s face and kissed the baby’s forehead.

“Jackie,” she said, her voice quieter now. “Let me tell you one thing.” She paused, then apologized for her inability to express exactly what she needed to say in English. For a moment I thought she’d given up, but she cleared her throat and began again. “You must not tell your daughter ‘you can not do this’ or ‘you can not do that.’ Do you understand?” Her right hand clutched my elbow and, without waiting for an answer, she continued. “You must let her have . . . how do you say? Freedom? Yes, freedom. Give her freedom.”

Surprised by the force of her words, I could manage only a nod. For a long moment she kept her gaze on me, scanning my expression as if searching for some assurance that she had made herself clear. “You must give her freedom,” she said a last time, then released my arm. She kissed the baby again on the cheek. “OK, OK, goodnight.” Her voice was soft and cheerful again, and she tucked a wisp of hair behind my daughter’s ear before stepping past us and down the hall toward her room, the tail of her chunni trailing behind her.

Excerpted from On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California by Jaclyn Moyer (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

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About the Author

Jaclyn Moyer grew up in northern California’s Sierra Foothills. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, Salon, Guernica, Orion, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She has been a Fishtrap Fellow, a Sozopol Literary Seminars Fellow, and a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize. She has worked as a vegetable farmer, bread baker, teacher, and native seed collector. Moyer lives with her partner and 2 young children in Corvallis, Oregon.



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