Windows into Grandpa: Part 1

Age had left him to shuffle his feet as he walked across the floor in the duplex he built, the one in which he lived for half of his life. His words were hard for me to understand. It might have been because I was used to hearing Midwestern voices, his the New Orleans accent was too unfamiliar, another language that I strained to hear correctly. But it was really his advanced years, so many years that I, as a child, could not comprehend: So many years that even his wife, official records or any other family member could not be sure how many years it had been. So many years that I was constantly anxious to watch each step, each breath, afraid that he might die at any moment. I was as afraid to lose him as I was afraid that, as a mere child, I was not yet been equipped with the emotional and social tools to deal with such an event if it should happen in front of me. I was afraid of what I would do without him.

Our Grandpa did not always shuffle. As a younger man, and even into late middle age, he was a lean, tall, dark-skinned man with distinctive and strong features in his face and toned muscles that were apparent even under his well-dressed self. And a walk that needed no swagger because it was strong, true and belonged to a man whose beauty struck every set of eyes that were lain upon him. He had the respect of people to whom he gave love, care, and a benign fear of God.

I was afraid of grandpa, not because of what he might do, not afraid of any anger or wrath. As a young child, such a man was a strange sight to me. He seemed bigger than life, and the people who knew him, including my mom and the man who she married, treated him so. But as I grew older, I did not discover the secret to why this reverence persisted. I don't quite know how to explain it , except to tell you a few things that mother would often say about what it was like growing up with him.

Her mother, our Grandma, was a yeller and a spanker. She was larger than life in her own right, big enough to match with Grandpa, maybe his emotional opposite: a woman to fear because of the whippin' you might get if you stepped out of line.

Grandpa never yelled. He never spanked. Mom would say, as many whippins' and harsh words as she got from her mother, she feared nothing more than the possibility that she might disappoint her father. The wince of pain and the lingering fulfilled promise of, “I'll give ya a whippin' so bad, you won't be able to sit down for a week,” from her mom was nothing compared to the deep, dark, empty pang in her heart from letting her father down—a heart to be repaired, soon enough, by the his love and adoration.

Grandpa was a man of few words. Except on Sunday morning. Grandpa was a preacher, pastor of the Second Bright Morning Star Baptist Church in New Orleans, Louisiana.

It seemed like the rest of the week, he read his Bible. Wise eyes peered through large, thick glasses with heavy plastic frames. Quiet in a sea of darting grandchildren and dueling televisions, he sat with the leather-bound Bible, turning the white thin pages with his long, black fingers and thick, ivoried workman's fingernails. I could not imagine when or how this sagacious discipline was cultivated, nor how the dry words of his King James, which I knew well from my days in Baptist Sunday school, could be translated into the rocking sermon that brought the congregation to its feet, caused women to weep and played on well into the afternoon, even on the hottest of Louisiana summer days.

Long, hot summer Sunday mornings. Sermons too long for a small child who had, by a strange happening of fate's logistics, grew up in a sedate, Swedish Baptist church that had services that ended on the hour, leaving just enough time to linger in the foyer with fellow congregants and get home to take the roast out of the oven before it burned.

Grandpa's sermons: too foreign coming from this creature in whose image I was made, Grandpa talking words, like music, that I could not believe were supposed to come out of a human. Sounds so rich and deep, like the most complicated jazz baritone. Too complicated for that small child to decipher.

Grandpa was old, not just in the eyes of a child who could not imagine being “so old.” The years of hard work at a cement factory made use of his long, strong arms, but also consumed his joints and left him with black lung disease. Years of upkeep on the rental properties he owned, the hauling, pounding, digging and mending did as well.

Rock and roll is a powerful thing.  Most people don't know why.  I am not sure, either, but it has more to do with the black church than any of us will admit.  Grandpa was not a fan of rock and roll.  He was not a fan of dancing.  He did not follow Little Richard, Elvis, Bobby Darin or the Beatles.  He did not want to. He did not have to.

The Sunday morning sermon was not the fare of the 17-year-old "Me Generation" teeny-bopper, on the first slope of adolescence, first taste of love's desire, barely off her parents' good-girl leash.  My not-so-vague notions of what whipped girls into a frenzy moments before and after Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles "I Wanna Hold Your Hand;" or the swiveling hips of Elvis that the camera was only allowed to leave to the imagination of the television audience, pale in comparison to the rocked emotions of a dozen women wearing white in the front pews each Sunday whose lives had already lived bigger sparks of excitement, toil, tears and care than the Sullivan girls would ever feel, even into their old age. 

Sunday morning was not teeny-bopper tame.  Against a backdrop of furniture dressed in Jesus' royal red velvet, behind the pulpit, before the choir, with sunlight streaming in the east windows, Grandpa would rise, dressed in a the sharpest of suits draped over his lean and angular frame.

The sermon—the whole spectacle was hell-defying. It had to be. I did not know at the time, how much even there, in that church, in that neighborhood where if felt comfortable to be black, and at the same time, uncomfortable to be not black enough—that the people who toiled in that sea of humidity, heat and racial strife where profoundly aware of all of this at every moment. The songs, the preaching had to be potent enough to at least hint at some well of salvation and freedom from the present day, heart-hardened Pharaoh.

If Grandpa could defy hell and the apartheid under which his reign dwelt, it would be no problem to move the emotion of more than a few women, no problem to make them “fall out” in their pew, or save them, if for no longer than they could sit in their Sunday best for those few hours each week.

These were attentions that Grandpa would mostly ignore, but Grandma—she would not.

It is said that jazz is that thing that came to birth when European instruments got into the hands of the African diaspora.  It lead to the blues.  It lead to rock and roll.  It lead to a Godawful fear about what was going to happen to the piano and horn lessons that were given to the nice children of middle America: a Godawful fear that this dark music would make their children forget their fear of God.  So it is with the King James Bible.  European instrument of Protestant politics, corrupted in the hands of the Diaspora, what would it sound like?

In the hands of grandpa, King James did not sound as the King intended.  He sat in quiet, most afternoons, with the Bible on his lab, gently turning the onion skin pages, thumbing through the Exodus, the temples, the acceptance of Ruth, prophet after prophet, angle's visit after angel's visit, a birth, life and death, rise from the dead, redemption, sweet redemption.  

[Leave comments here or at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/window-into-grandpa-part-1/] 

Home, Part 3

This is the last of a three part series.  See “Home, Part 1” and “Home, Part 2” in the previous two posts.  Wishing all of of you, whether I know you or not, a nice home weekend.

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What does it mean when our lover puts a toothbrush in the bathroom for us? What does it mean when we give them a key, and how is that key different from the key we leave with our neighbor for safe keeping? I remember a friend’s exclamation when her boyfriend gave her a drawer for her clothes at his house. Welcome. Trust. Love. Knowing we belong.

What happens when seeing that toothbrush in the morning is no longer a welcome site, or anything else that goes with that love, spouse? Years ago, a friend said, “I just need to get alone.” At first, we thought she was telling she needed a loan. “No,” she said, “I need to be alone.” She needed to move out of the apartment she shared (secretly without her parents knowing) with her boyfriend. 

What happens when we lose his or her trust or lose that trust in them? What happens when we fall out of love?

Maybe nothing. How many toothbrushes are sitting in the house, memories too precious to throw away and not willing to institute the insult of using them to scrub nooks and crannies? A found key: I know whose P.O. box it belongs to. No use giving it back; of no use in any way. A key. A toothbrush. A found sock.

A stack of strawberry soda that my grandmother used to keep in a room just off her kitchen. 

It was a mountain that never seemed to dwindle. The endless supply was meant not so much to lure her grandchildren as it was a message to her daughter that those grandchildren should spend more time with their grandmother. Even though we spent three weeks most summers of our childhood in New Orleans, grandma wanted mother to send us for longer, extended stays, long enough to make a dent in her proud pile of red “cold drink.” It was more than a hint. It was “proof,” of course, that we, her grandchildren BELONGED there, with her, the right of her grandmotherhood. 

That visit would never happen. Grandchildren grew into young adult grandchildren and then into adults. They became too busy to take a near month-long chunk out of their summer and then too old to really care about red cold drink. I don’t know if she, little by little, gave the soda away to the neighbor children, if they were slowly pilfered by the one son she had who never really got his life together or if a large pile of soda was her only company when she was stricken by the stroke that would, in little time take her life. 

In the quarter century since her passing, I have wondered who else would sit all day on the front stoop waiting for me come arrive in a place that was especially for me. I wonder for whom I will sit on that stoop. Is the extra toothbrush in the linen closet just another pile of strawberry soda sitting in the back room?

Like grandma, we sit and imagine the object of our love. We wait with toothbrush, special tea, special cereal, whatever white or colorful noise helps them sleep. We want to create a space that will prompt someone to ask as that love ventures without knocking to cross our threshold, “Do you live here?” We look to have such a place of our own; we long to find other places were those we love make us belong.

On that late spring afternoon, I walked into Mary’s house, as I had so many other days, like I lived there. On that or any other day, another friend might have walked through the unlocked door and waited for Mary, sitting on the day bed on which that they would not have guessed—or bothered to think that she and I had made love. 

Others would walk into the kitchen and wait for her and wait for one of the many important discussions we had there that could change the world, if only it would listen. That John walked in with me and that a dozen others would soon follow, I confined the two of us to the living room, bathroom and kitchen. We waited. Other days, I waited: waited on that day bed; waited in the kitchen; waited with open cupboards as the contents of those cupboards waited for me; waited in the quiet white walls and no noise in the bed of the farthest back bedroom, free, welcome and wanted. I was free to fall asleep, lie awake, make myself at home.

(Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/home-part-3/)

Home, Part 2

When we were kids, our grandma and grandpa had a television in every room (except the bathroom). They never moved from the side-by-side, shotgun duplex, the last of the properties of several they had owned and grandpa had tended over the years. The background squawk of the TVs was as constant as the simmering pots on the stove.
I don't know what grandma's favorite show was or even if she paid attention. White noise. Colorful noise, maybe blunted by the power and color of her personality. It mostly played in the kitchen, toward the back of the house, much of which had been built by grandpa. At one point in the house's history, the kitchen was the back of the house. Mom told tales of trips to the outhouse, even as inner City of New Orleans dwellers.

Whatever grandma's favorite show was, grandma knew that all of the people in them had indoor bathrooms, just like her, and likely had more than one color TV—maybe in every room, just like her. Toward the front of the house, the televisions rarely played. Instead, the sound of a bar across the street often filled the air. An ironic coexistence, given that grandpa was a Baptist preacher and did not set foot in the establishment. It was an ironic coexistence with his step son who lived in a tiny living space upstairs with its own entrance who regularly stepped into that establishment.

Ironic? Uneasy? Maybe neither. All these things belonged. Was it a sense of humor or a load of tolerance—or maybe an exercise of non-judgmental Christian love—a test of the church's Great Commission playing itself out, a world across the street that begged the preacher man to save then; and a man who was more willing to open that door than his wife was eager to accept.

Or a test provided by grandpa's eldest granddaughter who, on a Sunday morning, dressed finely for the good church people to see, one of four shiny, cared for grandchildren of whom he was much too proud, would peer into that magic TV box at American Bandstand, full of gyrating young people running afoul of the expectations of that sacred day and afoul of young Christian lady conduct in general.

But she loved to dance. She loved dance, a student of people moving to music, to the beat and of their hearts' desires, still too early in life to have an understanding of what all those desires were, but knowing of them—enough of them to watch, not getting to close and knowing that she could watch because she was her grandfather's granddaughter.

The TV would be turned off not from disapproval, even as my mother and I lived moments of uneasiness, appropriately worried about hurting grandpa's sensitivities, feelings or the equilibrium of moral order. The TV was turned off because it was time to go to a church service at which grandpa would preach, that would last hours and would be capped off with a score of fawning middle-aged women who had to meet grandma and grandpa's beautiful grandchildren.
Those three-week summer visits were punctuated on the front end by grandma's vigilant wait on the front stoop for a weary carload of Minnesota kids to show up at the house on Roman Street. We would arrive as new-again strangers who would ease into the growing familiarity that, at some point, devolved into mostly-hollow threats from grandma saying that if we did not behave, we'd get a whipping so bad we would not be able to sit down for a week.
 
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Next week, the final installment (I think) of “Home.” Be sure to check out the first installment at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/home-part-1/. In the mean time, tell the rest of us what home means to you.