In Some Languages Grandmother Means Guardian

Amira & Grandma Alice

“It’s scary over here.”
“Are you afraid?
“Yeah, kinda. This is where the dead people live. When I die am I gonna go here too?”
“This is the family plot. My mother, my father, my twin sister, my grandparents, my great grandparents, uncles, ants, cousins, and Hank, your Uncle Hank, they’re all buried here. I guess you can be buried here too but that won’t… I don’t think that’ll happen for a long time.”
“Are you, are you gonna be here? Are you gonna be buried down there one day?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Grandma Alice it’s not gonna be soon that you’re gonna be there?”
“I don’t believe so, but I… we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
“Then I’ll have to come here and visit you?”
“Well that would be nice, but you can also, you can also just talk to me.”
“How can I do that?”
”Well, you can just think about me and you can call me you can speak to me.”
“Like when I’m at my mama’s and I can call and hear you inside of the phone?”
“Well, it won’t be exactly like that.”
“It won’t? What is it gonna be like?”
“Well you can talk to me and… you, you’ll feel the answers. You’ll see them. You’ll see them in things, like little signs.”
“Like a stop sign?”
“Well… maybe. What I mean is, you’ll, well when I talk to my mother she talks back to me… it’s like a game. Sometimes I find coins on the ground and I know that she’s telling me, she’s answering a question, a question I asked her. Sometimes I see her in a dream, or out of the corner of my eye. Maybe something happens, and I just know that she’s there.”
“Grandma Alice, won’t you be cold in that box that they’re gonna put you in?”
“You won’t feel cold anymore when you’re dead.”
“What are you gonna do in there? Is there a light in the box?”
“No there’s no light. There won’t be a light. My body will be what people call at rest.”
“Oh, like a nap?”
“Mm… not exactly a nap, but… a very long sleep. I’ll never wake up but my spirit, the spirit is forever. That doesn’t die. That doesn’t rest. It just keeps moving, forever and ever.”
“What is spirit?”
“Spirit is you. Do you remember when we were in the store and you were singing, you just learned kumbaya at Mrs. Gordon’s, and you were singing at the top of your lungs?”
“Yeah.”
“And remember I told you, I asked you to be quiet but you said that you couldn’t stop singing, so I said sing it on the inside, and I taught you that you could sing it in your head and no one would hear it. Do you remember that?”
“Mmmm…”
“That’s the best way for me to describe spirit. It’s energy. I told you to stop singing that song aloud and to sing it in your head. And what did you do? You sang it, you heard your voice ‘Oh my Lord  kumbaya’, and no one could stop you from singing it, and you could be as loud as you wanted and you could hear it. That’s spirit. It’s energy, it’s your energy and when we die that energy doesn’t die. It’s just our body that dies.”
“Why?”
“Why does the body die? It dies because it wasn’t supposed to last forever.”
“Why can’t we last forever instead of dying?”
“Well, I guess we’re not supposed to be here forever. Everything dies. The stars that we like to look at night, they’re already dead but you can still see them can’t you?”
“In the nighttime I can.”
“In the daytime too.”
“Grandma Alice you’re silly. You can’t see stars when it’s daytime!”
“Yes you can. You see one star, or the light from that star everyday, and that my dear is the sun. The sun is a star.”
“The sun is a star?”
“Yes!”
“I have to tell my mama. Can I call her.”
“Ha ha ha, sure you can guber.”
“Why do you put the flowers there?”
“I come out here to clean and to leave everyone flowers to let them know how important they are to me.”
“When you die I’m gonna put flowers in that box.”
“It’s called a coffin.”
“Coffin.”
“Yes.”
“When I have to, to go in that box I want to bring all of my toys. Are you gonna take your books with you and the word puzzles?”
“Well, I don’t really get to pick what goes in my coffin. I picked the coffin, I have a dress that I want to be buried in. I want you all to sing ‘God told Nicodemus’, and I know what photo I want them to use for my program...”
“Will you hear the music? If you’re dead can you hear music?”
“I think you can… you can feel it.”
“How do you feel music?”
“Music, sound, that’s energy too. You ever put your hands real close to the speakers before?”
“No?”
“Next time we put on some music I want you to try it. I want you to go up to the speaker and put your hand in front of it and you’re gonna feel
something and that’s the music.”
“Okay. I’m prolly gonna forget. Um, will you remind me?”
“I sure will. I’ll remind you.”
“But you’re not gonna die soon? Not before Christmas and my birthday?”
“Well I don’t know. I feel okay, I’m not that old but I hope I’m around for Christmas and your birthday. I do need to stop smoking, but I’m trying. I want to at least see you graduate high school.”
“High school? I’m gonna be real old I guess.”
“But remember, no matter hold you get, I’m always gonna be older.”
“Grandma Alice you always say that.”
“Because it’s true guber. It’s true.”

Amira & Grandma Alice

“How many times have you watched this movie grandma Alice?”
“I would say five hundred seventy-eleven times.”
“Grandma Alice you’re so silly.”
“I have to be. You have to be a little bit silly, some of the time.”
“Why do you like this movie so much?”
“Hm… I like the story.”
“You like the story? It’s so sad.”
“But it has a happy ending. Miss Celie finally sees Nettie and then she sees her children again.”
“But you always cry at the same parts.”
“They always… the same parts, always make me sad.”
“But you already know that they’re coming.”
“Hmph, yeah… and I still caught up in all of my emotions.”
“My mama has the book but, she won’t let me read it.”
“Why not?”
“She said it’s too, it’s too adult.”
“Let’s go to the library. Let’s go after lunch and see if they have it. You can read it here. We can read it together and your mother will never know.”
“Really?”
“Well are you gonna tell her?”
“No! I like reading books that get turned into films to see the difference. The books are always better.”
“Sometimes the good thing about the movie is, it makes people curious about the book. Or sometimes people who don’t read, or who don’t like to read get a sense of a, of an important story that they might not get from reading. As long as you wanna read something, I’ll get it for you.”
“Why?”
“Well because I want you to read! And also it’s a family, maybe like a family tradition. My mother and father really cared about education and, they were both readers. They loved reading. We still have some of their books here.”
“I want to see how the book is different. Like the part where um, where Miss Celie kisses Shug Avery. I wonder if that’s in the book too… because that was a, that was a weird part.”
“Well I heard that there are things like that in the book. I think some people are scared and not for the usual reasons, or not just that.”
“The ‘usual reasons’, what’s that?”
“Well… you know we follow the bible and what the bible says about it, about man and wife but… but, in the movie there’s a reason why, I think it’s Shug Avery who kisses Miss Celie. Not the other way around. But she kisses her because she wants to embrace Miss Celie. If you think about it, no one who loved Miss Celie, and that’s only Nettie as far as we know, no one has even taken Miss Celie in their arms. In a loving way. People took a lot of things from Miss Celie, from Miss Celie’s body. They took her children, they took her sister away, and then the things that Mister does to her. He takes from her too, so Shug, she wanted to give something to Miss Celie. That was the kiss. She wanted to make Miss Celie feel good.”
“When I watched it with my mama and my gramp, he told her, he told her to fast forward at that part. He told her do that too at the end when they’re all having dinner or something, when Miss Celie says, ‘Everything you did to me, it’s gonna happen to you’, or something… he told mama to fast forward that, to fast forward that part too.”
“What do you think about that guber?”
“I, I think why is he doing that, I think… I don’t know…”
“Well some people, and I’m not saying your gramps is one of them, but some people don’t want to see women who can take care of each other. They don’t want to see women protect themselves or each other. It’s usually men, but not always.”
“After we finish the chicken, can we watch that movie where the people talk like you and Mrs. Lafayette do sometimes? That movie is kinda like The Color Purple, a little bit. The one you stole.”
“I did not steal “Daughters of the Dust”, I said, that I lost it and I paid for it. That’s not stealing!”
“If I did that I would get in trouble.”
“That’s because you’re a guber and I’m a grandmother. I can do lot’s of things that you can’t do!”
“Can you talk like you do to Mrs. Lafayette?”
“I’m not a parrot!”
“I just wanna hear you do it grandma Alice. Please?”
“I’m gonna tell you something my grandma used to say to me. “Come to me all oona wa weary an da tote hebby load. Come an A gwine gii oona res.” Mathew eleven verse twenty-eight.”
“You sound Jamaican when you do that.”
“It’s not Jamaican. It’s our language. I used to speak to your dad and your uncle in Geechee but, but your papa didn’t like it. So I had to stop.”
“Why did he tell you to stop?”
“Because he said that it didn’t sound right. It didn’t sound educated, so I stopped.”
“I kinda understand some of it, when we’re watching the movie even if the words weren’t on the screen, I kinda understand it.”
“Maybe I can teach you some while you’re here. It would be nice for you to learn a little bit. You’re right it is stealing. I had to steal it. I couldn’t find it anywhere else and I never thought I would see a film where we were in it.”
“I wish I could just run to the beach and eat all the food they have in the movie.”
“Well why don’t we make some of it.”
“You can cook that grandma Alice?”
“Guber? You know I can cook anything and I’ll teach you how to cook too. All of my recipes are yours, but we have to go through them together so that eventually you won’t need them.”
“You’re gonna teach me how to cook grandma Alice?”
“If you want to learn, if you really want to learn, I’ll teach you.”
“Daddy says you never give him the whole recipe.”
“I can give you the recipe but it’s better if I show you. Then you really know how to do it. Your father’s always asking me why things don’t taste the way they do when I make them. I don’t know what to tell him. He had his chance to learn but he was scared about what his friends were gonna think. Now he can’t even make red rice!”
“Ew. He tried to but the rice was too hard.”
“You won’t have that problem. I’ll show you everything.”
“I want to learn how to make things like you. Like the medicine and stuff.”
“Ooh that’s gonna be difficult. You really have to learn about all of the plants, and roots, and herbs but you can do it. It’s just gonna be hard because, because you learn different when it’s all around you. I only get you every now and then so you really have to try to remember.”
“I can remember.”
“I hope so.”
“Grandma Alice?”
“Yes guber?”
“Can we get another book from the library that I heard about?”
“Of course we can. I just hope they have it. What’s it called?”
“It wasn’t a movie but it was a, a mini series I think. It’s called ‘The Women of Brewster Place’. I saw some of it but gramp wouldn’t let me watch the rest of it. I wanna know if, if the book is different than what I saw.”
“Well let’s look for it too. Now, you said you wanted fried chicken and I taught you my secret recipe. Now we’re gonna fry this bird. Come on over here. Come on.”
“Okay.”
“‘The Women of Brewster Place’, now what is this book about?”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021