Makeda Read online

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  In 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.

  After I turned fifteen, something conspicuously different was added to the little parlor’s generally cheerless décor. On the long interior wall of the room that ran along the other side of the hall that carried through the house from front to back, hung a huge cream-colored coarseweave cloth on which a symbol of some sort had been printed from a woodcut. I had been with her the day she was given the hanging by a man we met at a market, but I hadn’t gotten a very good look at it then. The natural fiber weave had several rents in it and appeared to be very old. The thick-membered design seemed to be printed on the cloth with what looked like a natural pigment of red ochre that over time had grown dark and veined with razor-thin crisscrossing fissures. The handcrafted design was perfectly symmetrical with quadrants of roundish loops which joined in the center of the symbol to a single straight line that assembled the design’s four elements into a unified statement.

  It was stunningly out of place in the little room. At the same time, it was its very incongruousness that seemed to give the exotic hanging its light, lift, and power over what was otherwise a dreary and tenebrous space.

  Riveted by the old painting, I asked my grandmother what it meant.

  “Sometimes it’s best to simply feel,” she had said cryptically.

  The happiest times of my life were spent with her in the little front parlor on Duvall St
reet with the mysteriously exotic wall hanging.

  “Why did your mother name you Makeda?” I once inquired of her.

  “I asked my mother that very question and all she would say to me was, ‘You are Makeda,’ and that was the end of it.”

  “Where did the name Mattie come from?”

  “My mother said that folks would not hire someone named Makeda, even to wash their clothes, and that I should call myself Mattie, but that I was never to forget that I was really Makeda.”

  It was the only time that she ever spoke of her mother to me.

  On Sundays my grandmother wore to Reverend Boynton’s First African Baptist Church the frill-free white dress of the deaconess that she had been wearing virtually all of my life. But the decorous deaconess who toiled during the week in a laundress’s uniform wore flowing colorful tie-dyed muumuus of African inspiration at home. The muumuus had been acquired at my grandmother’s request from a Nigerian woman who served with her on the church deaconess board. This—the wearing of muumuus, that is—was quite unusual in the 1950s for black women of late middle years in a place like Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, it was more than unusual. It was all but unheard of. My grandmother, who seemed not two but three people, unsurprisingly had more than her share of detractors, blithely ignoring convention, as she faithfully did, as often as not.

  Though she would never have confessed to it, I suspect that my unremarkably conventional mother did not always approve of my grandmother who in any case would hardly have noticed.

  It was from that chair in the little poorly lit parlor that I confided to my grandmother when I was fifteen that I wanted to be a writer. She had not washed other people’s clothes for five years by then. She turned her face toward the window so that she could feel the warm bath of the early-autumn sun and answered as if she had not heard what I said.

  “Do you ever talk to your mother or father about Gordon?” I did not answer and we sat together in silence for a time. “How is Gordon? Is he all right?”

  “Yes, Grandma. Gordon is fine.” Questions about Gordon were always asked with an urgency that I did not understand.

  Moments passed.

  “So, you want to be a writer.”

  In the early days, we would sit much as we were sitting now and discuss the progress of our lives. Even then she appeared to be looking without seeing, as if she were watching in her thoughts a screen of past experiences. The movement of her occluded irises would tell me when they were off to some far place, when she had divided herself between here and there. Owing, I think, to her ability to perform this trick of simultaneous presences, her irises would move in small lateral darts as if they were being operated by two separate selves.

  Upon greeting me and others, she would bow slightly in a most uncommon fashion, as if she were not offering a courtesy but responding to a courtesy a lesser had rendered first to her.

  Some twelve years or so ago, around 1958 or 1959, I calculatedly asked her the question I thought would stir in her the fascinating otherworldliness that I found so compelling.

  “How old are you, Grandma?” Her eyes were wide, seeing virtually nothing. She seemed not put off by the question but rather to be waiting along with me for the answer.

  “I think I was born around the turn of the century. I suppose you will calculate that to make me about sixty years old.” A vague smile followed. “But who knows how old one really is.”

  Once she told me that she thought she and her family had “come from the Moores.” When I asked my father about this, he said he knew of the Harrises, but not of any Moores that we had come from. When I told my grandmother what my father had said, she replied in what I thought to be her deaconess voice, “Well, young man, by and by, we all come to know that the soul travels light.” As with much of what she said, I did not know what she meant by that. I was very young and she was very strange. But wonderful still, and I loved her more than I did anyone in the world.

  “So you wish to become a writer. Well, I suspect that you will have somethin’ to say. That is the most important thing. Now all you have to do is learn to write.”

  I had come to the house on Duvall Street after school that day in 1960. It was chilly in the parlor. Late-autumn shadows lengthened across the darkening room. A single thin shaft of gold light cut diagonally through the symbol on the wall hanging, making it resemble a sun dial.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Almost half past four.”

  “You’ll have to run along home soon. I know you got your work to do.”

  “I’ve got some time, Grandma. What is it? Is something wrong?”

  “No, Gray, nothin’s wrong.” She paused and turned her face away from the low sun and toward me. She seemed to see me, just briefly. It startled me.

  “Gray,” she began, and stopped.

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “Do you have pen and paper with you?” Her voice was flat, uninflected.

  “Yes.” I retrieved a black-and-white-speckled notebook from my book bag and took a pen from my inside coat pocket. “I have a pen and paper now, Grandma.”

  “I want you to take down what I tell you and do what you see fit with it later. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “But never let the record of what I’m goin’ to tell you out of your possession. Do you understand?” Her usually soft voice rose and hoarsened slightly.

  “Y-yes, Grandma, I understand.”

  “You will not understand what I am goin’ to tell you. Just take it down and put it away until you are grown. You will come to understand later. Will you promise to do this for me?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “I know things that have been lost to us.” I did not know what she was referring to. Nonetheless, I began to write. Her eyelids flickered once and then closed slowly.

  The blood appeared to drain from her face which took on the starched, untroubled countenance of a pale death mask. I was frightened by the look of her and became as still as she. Not knowing what to do, I remained motionless, fearing that the smallest movement from me would worsen matters. My thoughts raced themselves into a maddening tangle. Panicked, I began to cry silently. I looked at her. For how long I can only guess. I prayed. Even though, unlike my grandmother, I did not believe in the efficacy of prayer, I whispered, “Please, God, don’t let her die.” Her right foot jerked ever so slightly in its sandal. Then she was still again. Involuntarily, as if they belonged to someone else, my lungs emptied themselves of air. In desperation, I glanced around the room for something—anything—that would help me. For a brief moment, I raged at the telephone that she would not have. I feared to leave her, even though I recognized that leaving would be the only way to get help. I thought she might already have died. I considered trying to feel for a pulse, but I had no notion of how to do that. I looked up with terrified eyes at the large symmetrical symbol on the wall hanging to appeal to it for help.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A charge seemed to arise in what little air there was left in the shadowy parlor.

  It was then that her eyelids again flickered—once, twice—before closing again slowly. Her chest rose and fell beneath her elaborately embroidered gown.

  When she spoke she seemed a different person.

  At first she spoke softly in her own voice and idiom. “I have lived in many places.”

  “Grandma, I—”

  “Please, Gray, have patience and listen. I was there.”

  “Where, Grandma?”

  “Gray, you are a smart boy. One day you will have a chance to study and prove what I tell you. That’s why I want you to write it all down now. Just hold your horses for now. You’ll see in time.”

  I said nothing to this and she continued. I would not interrupt her again. I would suspend judgment and write down in my notebook as much of what she said as I could. She helped me to do this by speaking slowly, although I am sure that had nothing to do with why she spoke so.

 
; Her English now bore an accent I had never heard before and was marked by an inventiveness that did not mark her normal speech.

  I only knew that she was still aware of my presence when she said, “I have dreams that are different from ordinary dreams, dreams that are as real as the life we are living now, Gray, dreams in which I travel to far-off times and places. The dreams are of people I seem to know. People of all stripes. Dreams of past mothers and past fathers. Members of foreign villages and towns and courts. Law-givers, tin-makers, filigree artisans, muezzins, scribes, goat herders. And loves. My children’s, theirs and their children’s.

  “These are dreams like none other. Dreams of vivid colors, shapes, and dimensions, dreams of all manner of tangible appointment in which I turn as I would in this world to discover a glorious manifest of nature’s art wrapped around me, the breathing Earth alive beneath my feet, the sky a soaring blue dome pearled by floating cumulus sculptures. Sounds and scents whither to bathe amidst palm fronds clicking in the wind, mimicking the voice of light rain. The feel on my fingers of the textured, long, oval hanging fruit of the giant baobab tree. The taste of tea from the leaf the Berbers call adil-ououchchn.

  “It is so different from an ordinary dream which is flat, half-rendered, and knows itself to be just a dream. No. What I have seen, where I have been, is different. So you see, I call these experiences that are mysterious even to me dreams, but nothing so real could be dreams, nothing so indistinguishable from common reality, nothing of such unmistakable meaning in the conscious sense.”

  I was dumbfounded. This was my grandmother with me, recognizing me, but speaking from another realm, and in a grammar I could not recognize as belonging to her.