Great Grandmamma

“My great grandmamma gave me this little scrap right before she died.  She come up from Georgia –escaped an old mean master—with her two bitty babies.  Twins.  My grandmamma  was the girl.  They was no more than a year and a half.  The boy—he died one night in the corner of an old barn someone let ‘em sleep in along the way.  Not enough food.  My grandmamma grow up strong.  She and her mama built a little house just off in the country.  They sewed and cooked for the white people in town.  They were so happy when my momma was born—named her Miracle.  Years later when my momma died birthing me and then my great grandmamma died, my grandmamma raised me on her own.  This scrap came off great grandmomma’s apron.  She said it was all she had left of her time in Georgia and she pinned it on her clothes every day to remind herself of how far she travelled.” 
Eleanor, the cook,  told me this story on one of the evenings that I was invited to our philosophy professor’s house for dinner.  These dinners, to which only a few were invited,  took place weekly in 1971,  my senior year at a small college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  I did not have a grasp of philosophy and grew weary of the talk very quickly.  My interests ran more to people and stories, but my friend was the top student and he always brought me as his guest.  One night I met Eleanor in the kitchen while I was making a wrong turn in my search for the bathroom.  She was taking a sweet potato pie out of the oven and her old, wrinkled hands almost failed to hold it.  We both giggled at her close call and I told her my relief that my favorite thing of the night wasn’t ruined.  “They talkin about great thinkers in there again tonight?” she asked.  “Yup,” I replied, “tonight it’s all about Spinoza and how you’ve got to study the past if you want the present to be different.”   “Well, Honey,” she drawled, “he ain’t wrong.”  She showed me the scrap of cloth safety-pinned to her apron and told me that story of her great grandmother’s escape from slavery.  From then on each week I looked forward to slipping away from the heady talk and hearing more about Eleanor’s life.  About her work and the people she knew and her family—about her daughter who disdained everything about their meager and hard life and finally ran way to “Californa—imagine that?  She said she was going to be a star.  Haven’t heard from her since she left almost 16 years now right after her baby, Marilyn, was born.  I been raising that sweet little girl all these years.”  She reached in the pocket of her apron to show me a tattered photo.  “One day she’s going to go to college and learn about these thinkers.  I got a bank account and I put money in every week.  She gonna go.”  No husbands were ever mentioned and one time when I asked she made a dismissive wave of her hand.  “I’ve been a fool, but I learned what matters.  Ain’t no fool no more.  Who they talkin’ about tonight?”  “Nietzsche,” I told her, “he says that life is suffering but to really survive you have to find meaning in the suffering.”  “Oh, lordy,” she exclaimed,  “he ain’t wrong. No.  He ain’t wrong at all.”  At the end of the year, Eleanor baked me special little pies to take with me on my travels back to my New Jersey home.  She wrapped them up and gave them to me on Schopenhauer night.  Our professor quoted him: “Every parting gives a foretaste of death,” as we raised our glasses  solemnly at our last dinner together. 
After graduation I moved to NJ for a year and when I moved back to our Eastern Shore college town to start my teaching job one of the first things I did was try to find Eleanor.  The professor said she had gotten sick and was too old to work but he gave me her address and I quickly drove out to her tiny one-room shack off a dirt road on the edge of a barren field.  I knocked on the door and  Marilyn came to the door.  “Granny is too tired for visitors,” she said tearfully.  “I can’t even get her to talk much.  She used to try to tell me stories but I was too stupid and angry to want to listen.  Now I ask her but she’s in too much pain.”  I left, telling Marilyn my new address in town, respecting her wishes, offering my help, and  feeling sad beyond measure.  
A week later Marilyn came to my door.  Sobbing she fell into my arms:  “Granny died yesterday.  And I never listened and I never cared and now I’ll never understand.  But, when she heard you were back she asked for me to get this raggedy old piece of cloth from her apron.  She told me to bring it to you.  That you’d understand what she wanted,” and with a shaking hand she showed it to me.  I held it, sat her down, took her hand, and started:  “Your Granny’s, great grandmamma escaped from slavery in Georgia…”

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