Makeda (18 page)

In some ways, her religious beliefs from her earlier lives were compatible with her Sunday-morning Christian church worship. But in other ways, they seemed diametrically opposed to one another.

It seemed to me that where they were opposed, the contrasting beliefs very much mirrored the contrasting cultures that encompassed them. For instance, in America,
success
in life is to be found
up,
as in above, somewhere, just as heaven in the Christian afterlife is described as being
up
somewhere. Grandma may have truly believed there was such a place—that heaven was not only
up
there, but it was reserved for the Christian select. With the exception of Lalibela, in Grandma’s three previous African lives, she had believed something altogether different. Her ancestors hadn’t left in death to go
up
anywhere. From the spirit world, they had remained very much a functioning part of their families. They were all around her—in the earth, amongst the trees, on the wind. This just might explain why two African friends of mine at Morgan always seemed, to me, obsessed with doing favors for numberless relatives, immediate and distant. Grandma, since the dreams started, had changed her thinking, I believe in this direction, and people who knew her—especially people at the church—thought this was strange. Thought maybe Grandma was some kind of radical, which she wasn’t. She was just Grandma.

I suspected that she had a few dreams of past lives—like the Lalibela dream she had reluctantly shared just recently on the phone—that she still hadn’t told me about—wouldn’t tell me about. I didn’t know why this was so, but I believed there was more to be learned from her.

* * *

I took the Chamberlayne Avenue exit into the Jackson Ward section of Richmond where my grandmother lived. Much had changed since I’d left the city for college. A discrete downtown black community could no longer be located. The major new arteries that facilitated the city’s daily white flight to the hinterlands had chopped and diced the old neighborhood into a hash of forlorn tenements, walk-up flats, and storefronts.

The city’s retreating trench-cutting white fathers had called this vivisection of the old neighborhood
urban renewal,
while others called it urban
removal
, which it very much was.

First African Baptist had been all but destroyed by the city’s assault upon the neighborhood my grandmother had never seen. Where homes once stood in close vicinity to the church’s large gray stone edifice, sprawling flat weed-blighted vacant lots now reposed in wait of a faceless white city planner’s next impetuous decision. The church congregation had broken out into warring camps over the crisis, with the old stagers wanting to stay put, come hell or high water, and the younger better-heeled and better-educated members wanting to pull away and buy Big Bethel, a newer bigger building in a leafy residential neighborhood on the far north side of town. Old, weary, and spent of caring, Reverend C.C. Boynton resigned his post as pastor and was replaced by the assistant pastor, Reverend James Cross, a young firebrand who Reverend Boynton never wanted in the first place, but was forced to hire by the savvy young Turks who were hell-bent on relocating the church to a distant neighborhood the old, the poor, the infirm, and the disabled would have trouble reaching. The deacons and deaconesses boards, packed by Reverend Boynton and dominated by old stagers, drew a line in the proverbial sand and took the young Reverend Cross and the church proper to court before the young Turks could manage to empty the church treasury to buy a building that had come on the market in just the right neighborhood for just the right price. As the internecine fighting within the church family worsened beyond recovery, tarnishing virtually everyone who was willing to risk an opinion, my grandmother had stopped attending services, with my mother and father (who attended through the years only infrequently in any case) following suit. It was a royal mess that mirrored sadly the dismembered state of the old neighborhood.

Roughly equivalent to what once had been six real city blocks from the marooned First African Baptist Church building, my grandmother’s walk-up white clapboard row house, oblivious to its inevitable fate, took the gold morning sun on its face as I pulled up to the curb and turned off the Corvair. The little engine juddered and died.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

M
akeda! Makeda! It’s Graylon! Come on in here, boy. Don’ ya look a hansum sight. All grown up. Ya grandma tried to hide it, but she is excited as all get out to see ya. Look at ya, willya.”

I had never heard anyone call my grandmother by the unusual first name that her mother had given her. Mrs. Grier, tittering and bustling about me, drew me into the vestibule and pulled off my flannel blazer. Mrs. Grier was quite elaborately overweight. When she laughed, which was often, she jiggled, and when she walked, she waddled and wheeled her girth. “My God, Makeda, he’s a sight to see, I tell ya. She’s so happy ya come home, son.”

“Gray. Is that you Gray?” It was my grandmother’s voice—softer and weaker than I remembered it—coming from the little parlor just off the tiny vestibule.

“Yes, Grandma, it’s me.” I walked into the room. She was sitting in her old upholstered rocker. The little armchair I sat in to take notes when I was a boy had been placed near her by Mrs. Grier at my grandmother’s direction. The remembered and forgotten room registered with me as close and overstuffed, although there was, save for the wall hanging, nothing in it that had not been there for thirty years, and maybe even longer than that.

“Come over here, Gray, and let me hug you.” I felt her cheek wet against mine as I bent to embrace her. The touch of her dispelled the shaming thought I’d had, upon entering the room, about Jeanne and not wanting her to see this place I had come from.

“How was your drive?”

“Fine, Grandma, fine.”

“Have you eaten?” Not waiting for an answer: “Gertrude, get Gray some of those pastries he likes—you know, the apple ones—and bring some of that Welch’s I use to give him to help us clean up after communion. You know where to find everything. Of course. Of course.”

“Is it okay, Grandma, if I open the drapes?” I was feeling mildly claustrophobic. The dark drapes were heavy and lined and permitted no passage of light.

“Yes, yes. Go ahead. I tend to forget whether they’re open or closed.”

We spoke of small gossip for a while. Catching me up, she did most of the filling in. I had moved away and little about my new life would be of interest to her. She spoke at length about the church crisis and how it had brought out the worst in everyone involved. She said that before he resigned, Reverend Boynton had lost sway over much of the congregation and without it seemed a smaller and different man. She told me of weddings and deaths and births in a host of families, some I knew, or at least knew of, and others I did not.

“Does Daddy still come by every day at noon?” The room seemed then to slow and grow smaller.

“Yes. I expect he’ll be along today before too long.”

“D-does he ever talk about me?”

“Sometimes. Yes, sometimes he does, but it’s very hard for him to do. Would you like to stay and see him when he comes?”

I sputtered a response: “I’m sorry, Grandma, I really can’t. I’ll come back later and stay the night.”

“Gray, you and your father are the two people I love most in the world. The two of you will have to one day deal with this thing, face it and put it behind you.”

I did not respond to this.

“Do you hear from your mother?” she asked.

“She calls me on my birthday and Christmas. I haven’t seen her since I left. I haven’t seen or spoken to Daddy in seven years.”

“That’s a sad thing, son, a sad, sad thing.”

“Well, it wasn’t my fault, Grandma.” My voice shook and was louder than it should have been. “He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything about me.” The seldom spoken words fed upon the anger I had long stowed.

She answered mildly, “It could be that you, through no fault of your own, don’t know him either.”

“He never liked me, Grandma, and he never loved me.”

“That’s not true, Gray.” I started to interrupt her and she held up her hand, palm forward. “Hold on a minute, son. I think maybe I should tell you some things about your father that you may not know.”

She heard me inhale in a long draw to gain control of myself. She lowered her hand and laid it gently folded into her other hand upon her lap. Her hair, nearly white by then, was drawn back from her prominent forehead in a low bun that rested against the nape of her neck. She wore an elaborately embroidered white gown that had been selected for her by her Nigerian friend who served for years with her on the First African Baptist Church deaconess board. Although she was in her early seventies, her dark rich skin was unwrinkled and free of blemish. Her erect bearing was marked not by hauteur, but by an ineffable kindliness. When listening, she endeared with a subtle tilt of her head and ear in the direction of the speaker. She never hurried her own speech. Nor did she unnaturally slow it down in an affectation of vanity. She was, simply, what she was, and pleased enough with that, without dwelling upon it.

I was not gifted with my grandmother’s remove from worry. She did not squander precious stores of energy against rocks that could not be moved. Nor was she given to puffy tautology, or to the love of her own voice or person. She did not grind away fruitlessly over what she knew would eventuate to a foreordained result that she saw with uncelebrated ease.

Unlike my grandmother, I had been
trained
to think, but only within the delimited Earth-bound space endowed naturally to me. Like the similarly privileged, I could affect with my training a certain cleverness to bedazzle those I would leave behind, but beyond the walls of my endowment, all was empty show. I worried about nonsense, I think, because I knew just enough to know how little I would ever know about the logic of human events. For instance, I could not escape the morose belief that we are born alone and will die alone, and, in the space of our quite separate awarenesses, live alone, never quite understanding what we see, what we do, or why we are doing it. Thus, we spend our lives only appearing to do something when there is no something to do but wait.

My grandmother saw the absurdity of such depressing school-house gobbledygook because she was produced of an immortality from which to know better. On the other hand, I had little choice but to accept the finite box of mortal experience as my lot. I could not hope to outlive the ugliness meted out to
us
in this world, but she could and would. I suspect that I was not unlike most contemporary black people. The world had acted upon us and we had no real workable conception of how it might be possible for us to act upon the world. Hence, I was bitter, while my grandmother, having seen better times and knowing more were to come, was serene. Living in this ageless light of hers, however, did indescribable wonders for me.

“I think you see your father to be a hard man who always wants things his own way.” I gave a nod that she could not see. “He has been unfair to you and I have told him so. Deep down, I believe he knows this, but he is a weary and beat-down man who has been trapped by this life.

“You are young and the young tend to judge. They tend to judge without knowing much. When I was young I did the same. When you look at some folks, you see only what they are now, not what they once were. It’s that way with your father. You’ve been alive for just half of his life. How’s it you know what he has gone through and why he does and says the things that you see now. All you can do is
see
him. You cannot
know
him.

“You are young. You are not tired. You are not scared. And you are not ashamed of yourself
because
you are scared.

A man and scared.”

“What’s he got to be scared of?”

She took the full meaning of what I’d asked with a measure of scorn. She sighed and said, “Oh son, oh son, please try your best to grow up a little today. In life
why
is bigger than
what
.”

I decided it best to say nothing and hear her out.

“I know you thought less of him when he didn’t want you and Gordon gettin’ involved in the sit-ins and demonstrations. He knew how you felt. He knew you didn’t respect him. And it cut him, cut him deep.” She heard me turn in my chair. “Come now, Graylon, if you owe me nothin’ else, you owe me, at least, a little patience. He wasn’t scared for himself. He was scared for you and Gordon.”

“But that’s a cop out, Grandma.”

“You know I hate that common street talk. It has no place in my home.”

“I’m sorry, Grandma, but—”

“Did you know that at the beginning of World War II, when your father was about your age now, he went to prison for a year for refusin’ to fight in the war. He told the government that he would not fight over there for segregation over here. It was why he couldn’t go to college. After he got out of prison, no one would loan him money and the government wouldn’t help him. Did you know that, Gray? Over 2,000 Negro men went to jail for doin’ what your father did before you were born—before you ever saw him. It changed him. God knows it changed him. He thought that Negroes would love him for the stand he took, but Negroes didn’t love him for it, they ran away from him, even some of the church members. They stopped speakin’ to him. They stopped speakin’ to me. They stopped speakin’ to your mother who had just married him. That was when your father stopped goin’ to church and only began to go again a little when you and Gordon were small.

“Those were terrible times back then when the country started draftin’ Negroes to fight the Germans. Even as soldiers on their way to die, they were treated as secondclass citizens. They got second-class trainin’ and even traveled over there segregated in the second-class parts of the ships. And the men that survived came home to face lynchings in the South and segregation in the North.”

She started to rock slowly while humming a vaguely spiritual melody that was tonally foreign and belonged to no American black Baptist tradition that I knew of. She closed her sightless eyes and began speaking, it seemed, largely to herself.