Makeda (2 page)
Imaginative as she was, she never betrayed the smallest curiosity about what she looked like, though once, curiously, she had been heard to say, somewhat matter-of-factly, to her family that her skin was dark like “Ghanaian cocoa.” But no one seemed to know how she had come to learn this.
When and where she was born also remained something of a mystery. She seldom spoke of her early life, not even to her son David, my father, who believed she’d been born on a small scratch farm on one side or the other of the Virginia–North Carolina border. She kept an old nineteenth-century family portrait in her downstairs front parlor and revealed to no one, save me, the portrait’s provenance. Absolving her, my father ascribed her penchant for secrecy to a natural eccentricity that seemingly marked every social belief she voiced and every social behavior she practiced.
No detectable artifice, no affectation marked her bearing. In the most effortless way, she’d seemed to glide above time and space, unaware of, apparently, and uninfluenced by any obeisance to anything much contemporary in taste or fashion. Most of the few who knew her attributed this “queerness” to her never having seen anything through the watery gray fog of her lightless eyes.
Having toiled virtually all of her working life as a hand laundress for six wealthy white families up on Monument Avenue, she was, when I as a small boy came to know and treasure her in the early 1950s, all but penniless.
Everyone but she said that her name was Mattie Gee Florida Harris March. March was my biological grandfather’s name, my father’s father. Mama had met him once before he died in Baltimore some years ago. But Gordon and I never did. When he knew that he was dying, he’d asked my father’s permission to see his only grandchildren. My father had refused his request. At that time I thought this uncharitable of Daddy, but Gordon, who was fifteen and three years older than I, seemed to understand Daddy’s reasons for despising his father, who had, from the little I could gather, left my father and grandmother to fend for themselves shortly after he and my grandmother married at the age of sixteen, somewhere near Richmond.
It is fair to say that I began preparing to give this account of the fascinating events of my grandmother’s life when I was little more than ten years old. By then her arthritic hands could no longer wash the clothes of the rich white families in the big stone-clad houses up on Monument Avenue. It may have been that I spent more time with her then than with anyone else in the world. She told me things she told to no other living person. In turn, I told her things I had told neither my brother Gordon nor Mama nor Daddy, things I thought they might not know how to take. For instance, I remember telling Grandma during a weekend spent with her when I was about five that I believed God was sleeping and that people existed inside the sleep as figments of God’s dreams, figments that would disappear when God woke.
“All of us, Grandma, everybody in the world.”
She gave me a bemused look that turned slowly into a smile. I took this to mean that I had impressed her. I remember at that point she said to me, “Things are almost never what you, with your two eyes, can see them being. Sometimes they are less, but most times they are more. Worlds and worlds more, son.” Saying this, she’d tilted her head slightly to the left. It was an attractive mannerism of hers that usually meant she was sharing some special portent with me—a portent I was being challenged to puzzle out the meaning of on my own.
Even when I was very small, several of her cryptic rejoinders made near perfect sense to me. She seemed to know this without saying so. Early on, I sensed that she had chosen me as a confidante because she believed I was spiritually endowed in somewhat the same way that she was.
From time to time, I’d hear my father, however, say that he did not understand her much at all. “She always seems to be here and somewhere else at the same time.”
Yet there was no doubt at all that he loved her—loved her as deeply as any son could love a mother. From a backbreaking summer job in an ice house where he’d worked when he was fifteen, he’d used almost all that he’d earned to pay for her Braille lessons which were taught in defiance of Richmond’s race segregation policies at a white Unitarian church.
The streets of Richmond were still safe to walk in the early 1950s. From the age of six, I would walk every morning the ten-block distance to Baker Street Elementary School. Usually, Gordon and I would walk together. Gordon was older than I, and his school day as a result was two hours longer than mine. This meant that I would have to walk home alone in the afternoons. Nearly every day, I would detour a block or so along Duvall Street for a visit with my grandmother, whose house from school was about half the distance to ours.
In the early years, she was the only grown-up I knew who did not relate to me in child-speak. I was inflated by this. Still, much of what she said to me flew swiftly over my head. In some intuitive way, however, both of us recognized, I think, that we were joined by some special ageneutral medium of kinship that was paramount to all others and had little to do with blood.
She once said to me during one of my after-school visits, “Son, most people, and I mean
most
people”—she usually referred to this massive chunk of humanity as the
counters
— “have eyes but cannot see. Oh, they look at things, but the things they look at get in the way of the worlds they cannot see. Do you understand, Gray?”
Had she been sighted, she’d have known from the look on my face that I was uncertain of what she meant by this.
“I think I do, Grandma.”
She’d laughed then. It was a deep round laugh that originated low in her chest.
“Of course you don’t, but you will.”
She would then stretch out into one of her easy silences that I had long since learned to rest in. Then, she would start again as if I had been listening somehow to her ruminations.
“They think that if you can’t feel it, touch it, count it, it’s not there. But what do the counters know, Gray?”
I had tried to feign comprehension, the failed attempt at which she’d laughed rosily, and I had joined her.
“
They’re
the ones that are blind. Not me. How’s that, Gray?”
We had then laughed louder than before.
“Just the other night I was listening to WRVA on the radio. They had a professor on there from the University of Richmond who said he was a Christian, talking about philosophy. The man said that ‘the problem with life is the destination,’ as if he knew what he was talkin’ about, tryin’ to be funny. He was just another counter, blind as a bat.”
She’d paused then and raised her face to the room’s ceiling as though she could see through to the sky above. Then she smiled from far away and said, “But you’re different, son. You’re my spirit child.”
I had no complete idea at the time just what it was I would come to understand, or, for that matter, what it was she had been talking about that day. Still, I felt that I had been
selected
. This, though I was still very young, made me feel quite special. I had felt, even then, her spiritual force and sensed its compatibility with my own.
Quite a few people in our small black church community, despite liking my grandmother, thought she was, to put it generously,
different
. Mama and Daddy, and maybe even Gordon as well, may have felt this way. But I never did.
There were occasions, however, when I thought her unrealistically virtuous. Much of this instinct I had mistakenly ascribed to her blindness. In any case, virtue alone would have been too simplistic a basis for her strong views. Unlike others, I knew even then that she was more than the sum of her platitudes and sayings. I was thirteen at the time of the discussion about the University of Richmond professor, and I had just become interested in girls. Claudette Benson, two months younger than me, went to our church and came from a good family. She was very sweet and my grandmother liked her very much.
During one of my visits, my grandmother asked me, “How do you like the Benson girl?”
“She’s nice, Grandma.”
“But I mean how do you
like
her?”
“You mean like a girlfriend?”
My grandmother smiled as if she were teasing me.
“She’s not too pretty, Grandma.”
“Hmm. Well you know, boy, pretty is as pretty does. Look beyond what you can see with your eyes. Do you understand, Gray?”
“Yes, Grandma.” By the age of thirteen, despite not always following her cryptic advice, I had come to believe most of what she told me.
Somehow, I could never imagine my grandmother in the waitress-like costume she’d worn to work, leaving home in the early light to catch the number 27 bus and then the number 43 bus that would get her to the first of her day’s washing stops by seven. She’d worked every day save Thursdays and Sundays. She’d refused to work on Thursdays and had gotten away with it. Why Thursday was so important to her I would wait to learn many years later.
Whenever I’d tried to picture her in a washerwoman’s role, I would have to rive her into two completely and incongruously different people: the transcendent pillar of vision that I knew as no one else did, and the subservient menial who answered to an impersonal bell on a big house laundry room wall. I knew a lot of people who’d had to live like this for all of their working lives. But only in my grandmother’s case had I gotten to see with my own eyes the higher face of a double persona.
Mr. George C. Crump, for instance, was chairman of the deacons board at our church, First African Baptist. On Sundays, in his three-piece black serge suit and stormy style, he would cut a figure of considerable notice, second in line only to the Reverend C.C. Boynton whose greatgrandfather had founded the big church on St. Peter Street. Everybody knew that on weekdays, Mr. Crump, who was light-skinned enough to be mistaken for white, wore a barber’s tunic and cut white folk’s hair in a way-off neighborhood that no one else in the church had ever seen. Though such was hard to visualize, much the same sort of duality would have described well enough the existence of most of the members of the church.
Still, with my grandmother it was different. The space between what she
was
and what she had done for a living was a thousand-fold larger than it was with Mr. Crump or anybody else that I knew.
I am twenty-five as I write this and have scarcely begun to understand my relationship with my father. We have been estranged a good while. There is more. He himself had suffered a rough draw of fathers. His natural father, he believed, had abandoned him in his infancy, although the truth was a bit more complicated than that. Or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t really be sure, inasmuch as my father never talked about his childhood, and what little I came to know of it I’d had to extract from my mother who was chronically phobic about conveying the smallest information that may have seemed unpleasant. My father, when he did speak, spoke forth opinions that often landed like boulders on new grass. He was indeed something of a categorical man who erred with his certainties usually toward the general good and away from the varietal risks of gray. His childhood had been very nearly too complicated for him to survive. To do so, he’d had to simplify the world. To flatten out or make uncomplicated those against whom he had too few resources to spend in routine defense. Thus, he deemed people good or bad. Done. This worked quite well enough for him.
My mother, however, was smarter, and in some interior way more secure, but otherwise less brave than my father. She liked peace and always looked for it somewhere in the middle of all disagreements, real and theoretical.
“Your grandmother says that she needs to see you. That she needs to talk to you about her recent travels.” She paused. “We also need to talk about whether at her age and disability we should let her continue on by herself in the house on Duvall Street.”
I thought my mother’s view here may have been colored by what my grandmother had said about needing to talk to me about “her travels.” My mother hadn’t understood, but nonetheless had reason to suspect what my grandmother meant by this and, consequently, may have taken it as a sign that my grandmother was becoming senile, which, I suppose, was a reasonable assumption since my grandmother had not traveled anywhere to speak of in the seventy-two years of her life.
Only I knew what my grandmother meant by “travels,”
and I was greatly interested in hearing about them. My grandmother had never owned a telephone and had steadfastly resisted our entreaties to have one installed, even after we insisted upon a phone as a safety device. She had always believed that the telephone and what she called “other needless modern things” were among the blinding distractions that “shrank the souls of the counters.” I would just have to wait or reach her through Mrs. Grier, a next door neighbor and friend of my grandmother’s who owned a phone.
“Tell her that I’ll be there by tomorrow evening.”
I
n 1955, 15 years ago, when I was ten, my grandmother said to me in a quiet voice, “My name is not Mattie Gee Florida Harris March. My real name is Makeda Gee Florida Harris March.”
The discussions I had with her upon which she would intently train her attention are fixed clearly in my memory from the age of five. Daddy would drop me off at her house on Saturday evenings and she would bring me with her to church on Sunday mornings. Gordon would visit her as well, but not nearly as regularly as I. My conversations with my grandmother always took place in the downstairs parlor at the front of her little row house. The room was usually dark, even at midday. The furniture was baroque and heavy. What little natural light the narrow space afforded could not overcome the dark velvet drapes that crowded across the room’s two small windows. Doilies and bric-a-brac coated every horizontal surface except the top of the big oil space heater that dominated everything around it. The bric-a-brac had been given to her years ago by a church member. While it may have seemed an inappropriate gift for a blind person, my grandmother liked to run her fingers over the smooth soft-paste porcelain figures. She always sat in her wine-red upholstered rocking chair by the window. I always sat in a side chair which I positioned four feet or so away from the front wall and into the room toward the middle. In a corner across from my grandmother’s chair was an ageless Emerson radio with a big circle dial that was housed in a waist-high oak wood console. Save for a picture of my father as a boy posing on a spotted pony, the cloudy photographs that sat about hickly-pickly were all of distant relatives who had died long before I was born and whose names meant nothing to me. Although she could not see the photographs, she wanted them there, she said, to keep her company.