JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 1954: Sometimes I’ll forget. I’ll be riding the subway or in the darkroom or climbing the stairs and it’ll suddenly occur to me, like a new idea, that I’m pregnant. Every time that happens, a warmth starts in my belly where you are and spreads to my chest and arms and down through my legs. It’s like we’re having a conversation, a very special private conversation.

Lillian took a picture every four weeks for the next five months (I arrived early) and collected them in the only photo album she ever made. On the cover, she painted the words Book of Samantha. We looked at the photos a lot when I was little. Whenever we did, she’d compare my size inside her belly to a piece of fruit. In this one, I am a mango. Even during the bad old years, Lillian made a fruit salad on each of my birthdays. No matter what else was happening between us, we’d eat it and not fight. Apples, oranges, and bananas were givens, but we could be behind on rent and Lillian would still somehow manage a peach or a pear, a coconut or a watermelon, an especially impressive feat considering the day of my birth landed, quite untropically, in March.

This brings me back to the difference between being unplanned and being unwanted. By now it should be obvious that I began as both. Thanks to Mommy is sick, I knew what an abortion was years before I knew my multiplication tables; yet despite this, I never once wondered about abortion and myself in the same breath. Why didn’t you just abort me? What kept me from saying that when I was so busy saying so many other vicious things I now regret? And what kept my mother from slinging Canarsie at me in response to my lavish viciousness? It took reading my mother’s journal, eleven years after her death, to learn of my own near-elimination inside a walk-in closet in Brooklyn. I don’t think Lillian started loving me during the subway trip back from her averted abortion, but clearly something changed between blueberry and mango. From this portrait on, her fierceness has transformed into something radiant and calm. The battle has been fought: love has won.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: Renaldo started bringing Lilly things from the natural foods store—herbal tea, dried beans—and, one Tuesday, two books on natural childbirth and breastfeeding, which Lilly snatched as if she were spring-loaded and read by the window for the rest of the night. Cass knitted Lilly a hat that reminded me of a white angora sweater I’d stopped seeing Cass wearing around the same time. Judy quit lobbying for us to spend equal time at her place and started dropping by Lilly’s on the way up to see me.