Writing About Lives

On a recent Sunday, a friend and I attended a very ecumenical church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were sitting in the balcony and my friend pointed out a lovely older black woman with a full head of white hair. “Isn’t that Lorraine’s grandmother?” I squinted trying to see her but wasn’t sure. Throughout the hour-long service we both kept our eyes on her. When she got up and helped collect the offering, my friend leaned over to me and said. “I’m pretty sure that’s her.” Once the service ended we dashed down to the main lobby and greeted her. When she saw my friend, the older woman screamed my friend’s name and embraced her warmly. The woman wore a svelte red sweater with the most ornate collar that lay gently across her upper torso. The woman indeed was who we thought she was, the grandmother of a colleague of ours at Columbia University.

She looked ever so elegant with her tall, lean frame, appearing to be in her 70s or early 80s. There was something majestic about this woman, who smiled and carried herself as if she was a dignitary. When she spoke, words of beauty, kindness and gentility flowed from her lips. She had been involved in that church for years. She was waving and speaking to a lot of people as they exited that day. We were boasting of her beauty and gracefulness, which seems to defy age. She then told us she had been waiting in line at pastry shop a few days prior when a woman leaned over and said: ‘You know you look like you are just the embodiment of goodness that I am going to buy your pastry for you today.’ She lives on the Upper East Side, which has a certain upwardly mobile connotation to it. And she is not a maid, but rather involved in fundraising for charity and art. Dainty. Delicate. Tasteful. When I close my eyes and imagine the very image of an African-American grandmother, I get the image of Lorraine’s grandmother, someone who would bake cookies, wear reading glasses or knit scarves for people. But when I open my eyes, I will have to reckon with my very own is just the opposite of this woman. We call her Madea, an abbreviation for Mother Dear. She’s a lot more akin to Tyler Perry’s character Madea, the gun-wielding, big purse-carrying caricature than not.

One of the very first things I remember her saying when I was a small child visiting her in rural Arkansas was this. “Go to the yard and pick which switch you want me to beat your ass with.” For eight consecutive summers beginning in 1974 until 1981, my mother sent my sister and me away from our comfortable home in St. Louis 500 miles away to Grady, Ark., to stay with our maternal grandparents, Madea and Granddaddy Roy. This was a rural place where hogweeds and sunflowers were plentiful. We called it “going down south.” Granddaddy was gone all day working. We were forced to spend it with her, a frightening woman who sometimes locked us out of the house, with the flies and mosquitoes so she could sit quietly and watch soap operas, eat ice cream and use her sewing machine. “Chillun don’t belong in the house all day. Get your asses out there and play,” she would blurt out as she slammed the screen door shut. Even if we mashed our faces up against the window, she ignored us keeping her attention on Luke and Laura or Mrs. Chandler.

Madea is a church going woman, too, who often made us go accompany her to the Baptist church most Sundays. The services felt more like a funeral than celebration of life and victory. I remember once a woman named Ms. Dorothy was up testifying, which means sharing a story with the entire congregation in her Sunday best. Madea thought Ms. Dorothy was taking too much time. “Sit down Dorothy quit lying!” Madea blurted out. Dorothy sat down immediately.

When I was 12 years old, I stepped on a nail, which actually pierced my foot. I walked all summer with a limp. Meanwhile, King, my cousins’ German Shepherd had bitten my ten-year-old sister rather viciously. Fortunately the dog did not have rabies. My grandmother was sitting down watching television when I hobbled by leaning my weight on my left foot. My sister limped by nursing the wounds from the dog bite, when my grandmother spit out: “I don’t know why in the hell Elizabeth brings these lazy ass, no account, St. Louis chillun down here every year.” I thought it was a heartless, cruel thing to say. I came to hate my grandmother harsh ways and words enough to stay away for years. And I wasn’t the only grandchild who felt the adder’s sting.

My grandmother, now 87, has a severe case of osteoporosis that causes her to bend over as if she is about to touch the floor. She can’t navigate very many stairs at all. Yet her tongue remains as tart as hot peppers. It has taken me turning 40 years old before I could began to understand my grandmother. The fact is this, she was born in 1920, never had any schooling beyond the eighth grade, grew up in the Deep South as the mother of eight children and a infidel of a husband gave me a new understanding. She feels justified in spewing out bitter words. I can see now how the forces that have shaped her life have embittered her and it is pointless for me to begrudge her. In recent years she has been putting out the word that she wants to hear from her grandchildren before she dies. Few responded. I called her about a year ago. Unfortunately she has lost almost all of her hearing and refuses to wear a hearing aid.

“How you doing Madea?”
“Huuuuuuuuuhhhhh? Who is this on this phone?”
“Can you hear me? It’s Elizabeth’s son, Anthony?”
“It is? Boy how come you are mumbling on this damned phone?”
“Can you hear me now? Is this better,” I yelled into the receiver.

The phone conversation ends abruptly when she hands the phone to another person in the room and complains. I hear her mumbling in the background that she wishes that “crazy ass boy would speak like he had some sense.”