Once I consider my mother’s blue Volvo 240 station wagon, I recall a sweltering spring day within the mid-Nineties. The car’s air-con was struggling towards the Florida warmth. As sweat made the underside half of my physique stick with the cognac leather-based seats, my innards had been in shambles.
Not too lengthy earlier than my mom had gathered my brother and me from faculty, I had managed to win the Easter egg hunt. The eggs, nonetheless, weren’t plastic and crammed with treats. They had been actual hen eggs, hard-boiled after which overlooked within the warmth of the day. And I ate all of them.
About 5 minutes from residence, I cautioned my mother to drag over. I then proceeded to throw up everywhere in the inside of my mom’s treasured station wagon, nicknamed Denise.
I remembered Denise lately once I binged the Showtime sequence “Your Honor,” which spent the final seven weeks amongst Netflix’s top 10 shows in the U.S., racking up thousands and thousands of viewers. The thriller facilities round dad and mom and youngsters who encounter an old-school Volvo 240 station wagon with a blue hue barely lighter than that of my mom’s outdated automobile.
This wasn’t the primary time I’d seen that make of Volvo on TV. I started to marvel why it appeared to seem all through movies and exhibits because the “it” automobile of the white higher center class. And I questioned why once I was rising up, my mother, a Black lady, was the one particular person I knew who drove that automobile. What I’ve come to grasp is that each Hollywood and my mom envisioned the Volvo 240 because the embodiment of a really particular and illusory American dream.
Variations of my mom’s Volvo have appeared greater than 2,000 occasions onscreen, prompting Reddit customers to observe that “there’s a Volvo 240 in virtually each film.” The box-on-wheels has appeared in such main characteristic movies as “Spider-Man,” “Beetlejuice” and “The 40-Yr-Previous Virgin” and in critically acclaimed sequence resembling “Scrubs,” “Six Ft Beneath” and “The Sopranos.” The Volvo has even been dubbed “Sweden’s greatest film star.” The 240 specifically is known as one of many firm’s most popular models of all time, and you may nonetheless purchase one at this time, although it’ll take a bit of labor.
The automobile producer might have initially constructed its reputation on safety with its institution within the Fifties of three-point seat belts. However that sense of reliability grew into cultural cachet: As one supplier put it, the Volvo 240 is “the elbow-patched sweater of the automobile world.”
It’s a vibe that matches the progressive stances, presumptive wealth and prestigious careers that the now-iconic Volvo 240 conveys about its house owners in “Your Honor” — a milieu of refined cocktails, intellectual debate and unique holidays. However that couldn’t be farther from the reality of who my household was earlier than, throughout or after the time when my mom owned her Volvo. Trying again, I think it was who she wished to be, or needed individuals to consider we had been — or perhaps who she willed us to develop into sooner or later towards all odds.
In actuality, the evangelical Christian residence the place I used to be raised allowed no consuming of any sort, and nobody in my nuclear household had ever left the nation. Cash was obtainable however not considerable. My father, a second-generation Italian immigrant and registered unbiased with conservative leanings, labored as a metropolis authorities worker my entire life. My mom had escaped the grasp of Jim Crow, childhood poverty and excessive hardship to develop into the primary particular person in her household to graduate from school. Her father was unable to learn or write his personal five-letter title.
However because the story goes, practically 4 a long time in the past, my mom walked right into a Florida Volvo dealership and noticed Denise glowing on the showroom ground. She says that, closely pregnant with me, she squeezed her method behind the wheel and determined that we match completely. Having labored to ascertain herself as an agent for a nationwide insurance coverage firm, and along with her oft-dreamed-about child woman on the way in which, my mother wanted a high-quality automobile that will challenge success and assure the protection of her most respected cargo. That’s exactly the promise of the Volvo 240, each onscreen and off.
Once we received again residence after the Easter egg hunt, my mom wiped away my tears together with the mess inside her station wagon. To my shock, she wasn’t mad that I had desecrated Denise.
Possibly she hoped that sooner or later, my real-life résumé would come to reflect Hollywood’s common depiction of a profitable, Ivy-League-educated lawyer. She couldn’t have recognized that the pedigree wouldn’t be a salve for society’s cruelties towards Black daughters or think about the life I’d go on to steer even after we’d grown aside.
Regardless, my mom stored on driving her blue Volvo 240 station wagon till the ability steering went out.
Anika Collier Navaroli is a senior fellow on the Tow Middle for Digital Journalism at Columbia College and a public voices fellow on expertise within the public curiosity with the OpEd Undertaking in partnership with the MacArthur Basis.
