When I think of my mother’s blue Volvo 240 station wagon, I’m reminded of a sweltering spring day in the mid-90s. The vehicle’s air conditioning was fighting the Florida heat. Sweat was making the lower half of my body stick to the cognac-colored leather seats, and my insides were shredded.
Shortly before my mother picked my brother and me up from school, I had managed to win the Easter egg hunt. The eggs weren't plastic, though, and were filled with goodies. They were real chicken eggs, hard-boiled and then left out in the heat of the day. And I ate them all.
About five minutes from home, I warned my mother to pull over. I then began vomiting all over the interior of my mother's beautiful SUV, nicknamed Denise.
I was reminded of Denise recently while binge-watching the Showtime series “Your Honor,” which has spent the past seven weeks among Netflix’s favorites. Top 10 programs in the United Stateswhich has garnered millions of viewers. The thriller centers on a couple of parents and their kids who come across an old-school Volvo 240 station wagon that's a shade of blue slightly lighter than my mom's old car.
It wasn’t the first time I saw that Volvo brand on TV. I began to wonder why it was featured in movies and shows as the fashionable car for the white upper middle class. And I wondered why, when I was growing up, my mother, a black woman, was the only person I knew who drove that car. What I have come to understand is that both Hollywood and my mother imagined the Volvo 240 as the embodiment of a very specific, illusory American dream.
Versions of my mother's Volvo have appeared more than 2,000 times on screen, prompting Reddit users to notice that “there’s a Volvo 240 in almost every movie.” The box on wheels has appeared in such major films as “Spider-Man,” “Beetlejuice” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and in critically acclaimed series such as “Scrubs,” “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos.” The Volvo has even been Bent “Sweden’s biggest movie star.” The 240 in particular is acquaintance as one of the most important companies popular models of all time, and you can still buy one today, although it will require a little work.
The automaker may have initially built its reputation in security with the introduction of three-point seat belts in the 1950s. But that sense of reliability turned into cultural cachet: as one dealer put it, the Volvo 240 is “the Sweater with elbow patch from the automotive world.”
It is an environment that coincides with the progressive positions, the presumed wealth and the prestigious careers that… The now iconic Volvo 240 “Your Honor” tells the story of its owners: an atmosphere of sophisticated cocktails, intellectual debates and exotic vacations. But that couldn’t be further from the truth of who my family was before, during or after the time my mother owned her Volvo. Looking back, I suspect it was who she wanted to be, or wanted people to believe we were, or perhaps who she wanted us to become one day against all odds.
In fact, in the evangelical Christian home where I was raised, drinking of any kind was not permitted, and no member of my nuclear family had ever left the country. Money was available, but not abundant. My father, a second-generation Italian immigrant, registered as independent and conservatively inclined, worked as a municipal government employee all my life. My mother had escaped the clutches of racial segregation, childhood poverty, and extreme hardship to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her father could neither read nor write his own five-letter name.
But as the story goes, nearly four decades ago, my mother walked into a Florida Volvo dealership and saw Denise glowing in the showroom. She says that because she was heavily pregnant with me, she got behind the wheel and decided we were a perfect fit. Having worked to establish herself as an agent for a national insurance company and having her dream baby girl on the way, my mother needed a high-quality car that would project success and ensure the safety of her most valuable cargo. That is precisely the promise of the Volvo 240, both on and off-screen.
When we got home from the Easter egg hunt, my mother wiped away my tears and the mess inside her truck. To my surprise, she wasn't angry that I had desecrated Denise.
Perhaps I hoped that one day my real-life resume would reflect the popular Hollywood image of a successful, Ivy League-educated lawyer. I couldn’t have known that my pedigree wouldn’t be a balm for society’s cruelties toward black daughters, or imagined the life I would continue to lead even after we grew apart.
Anyway, my mother continued to drive her blue Volvo 240 station wagon until the power steering broke.
Anika Collier Navaroli is a senior fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a member of the OpEd Project's Public Voices on Technology in the Public Interest group in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation.
