My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, was born in 1940, delivered by a midwife. She shared her mother’s womb with a twin who was stillborn, named Shirley Temple, who did not survive her entry into this world. Baby Shirley came out of my great-grandmother Mary with a deep indenta-tion in her forehead, and she never breathed. Later, my great-grandma Mary told my grandmother Dorothy that she felt guilty for her baby’s death. Mary had worked hard through her pregnancy, scrubbing and washing and weeding and harvesting, and once, she said, she picked up a metal tub full of washed clothes, heavy with water, and the rim hit her pregnant belly. When my great-grandmother saw the indentation on the infant’s forehead, she thought: My fault.
Shirley was buried in a segregated graveyard under live oaks, on a bayou. My great-grandparents buried her in a shoe-box. My great-grandmother Mary was so despondent at the death of my grandmother’s twin that she shrugged Dorothy off, didn’t even put her to breast, and said: Put her in the drawer. She’s going to die, too, and then she turned her face to the wall in despair.
But my grandmother Dorothy did not die. She fussed and stirred and cried in the chest of drawers, in her makeshift crib. She grew up, rose stout and roped with muscle, eating beans and rice day in and out, weeding and pulling vegetables in her father’s fields. When she was a grown woman, she could work like a man. She was five foot three and could pick up a whole hog and throw it over her shoulders. By the time I came along in 1977, my grandmother had worked as a housekeeper, a health aide at an elder-care facility, a hairdresser, a seamstress, and finally, as a worker in a pharmaceutical bottling plant.
But my grandmother Dorothy wasn’t all fight. I don’t want you to think that. My Dorothy was a storyteller. When our family gathered, she told us the story of her birth, gold tooth gleaming. She told us about her toil in the fields. She told us about how she stopped schooling in the eighth grade because she had to walk to school, and the Black secondary school in the next town over was too far away for her to walk to. She told us about how her father, my great-grandfather, was half white, and when she visited her grandmother’s white sister in the sundown town next door, they left before sunset, and she and her brown-skinned siblings hid in the boot of the car. She told us about throwing hogs, about doing hair, about sewing herself the most beautiful dresses and wearing them to Tina and Ike Turner concerts and whirling on the floor, whirling, turning so fast she grew dizzy, but she was so alive. She told these stories with a glass of iced Jack Daniel’s in one hand and me in the other. Her chest was soft and smelled like jasmine perfume. I called her Mama.
My Dorothy was the first storyteller of my life. One of the most important lessons she taught me about life and story was this: Tell it straight. Tell it all. Talk about the indentation in the baby’s head, about how that velvet-skinned infant slid out blue, but tell the tale of its sister, too. Talk about how she fisted the air and kicked, soft and gasping, in the dresser drawer. When you tell the story of the childhood visits to the white auntie, talk about the dense, gasoline-infused trunk, the fishhook jerk of terror in a child’s neck at every other car’s headlight, at every fire burning in the distance, but also talk about how those same children played in the dirt when they weren’t working or schooling, how those same children spun games out of thin air where they competed one with the other to create the prettiest, best-decorated grave. How they made crucifixes from oak twigs, crafted flowers from pine needles. How showing love to the dead meant winning. How my grandmother knew from childhood that love and loss were twins in life. How beauty and sorrow kept company, but you could wrest joy from the pairing.
Courtesy of the publisher.
‘On Witness and Resapir: Essays’ by Jesmyn Ward
Sometimes, I wish I could write easier stories. Stories where generational trauma doesn’t haunt teenage boys. Stories where hurricanes don’t bear down on teenage girls and raze. Stories where brothers don’t die. Stories where thirteen-year-olds aren’t re-enslaved in Parchman prison.
