Sun is Sky

Inside Grace

The night my baby died, Gram and I mourned together, bent by communal regret. The next morning, I witnessed her sorrow transform into loathing, abject hatred for the ruinous effect she believed my mother's foreboding had inspired. Like Momma alone had ordained my baby's demise into being. Had squashed the life from her tiny body.

I didn't know to hate, but I eventually realized that's what was rooting itself inside me. I just as quickly rid myself of those feelings. But Gram's hatred was inconsolable. She consumed herself with guilt. Conjured ways not meant necessarily to bring my baby back, but to give me another one. It seemed in part to ease my pain but mostly to spite my mother, to goad her into another bout of wills so she could crush my mother's obstinacy with a force of her own. Gram's concern for my well-being, however genuine, became so intertwined with rage it was hard to discern her aim-to aid me or annihilate the person she believed had harmed me.

Patent Ignorance -

I had yet to determine my aim. Nearly making that baby with Curtis was the best thing I had ever done. When my pregnancy failed to produce a child, I all but lost the will to go on. It's all I could do to return to school at the start of the next term. Even then, it took summer school to fulfil my freshman requirements.

Miss Webster, my English teacher, spoke to me for the first time since having discovered I was pregnant. The skin along her cheekbones was oat brown, her eyes two shiny pebbles lost beneath a runaway bush of eyebrows. She held her lips pressed tight to keep her teeth from ever attempting a smile. Were she to smile, her lips would remain pursed, denying her teeth the chance to take part in the endeavour.

"It doesn't matter where you come from, but around here a girl has to make her own way," she said my first day back, her eyes peering out from beneath her heavy brow. "The sky has granted you the opportunity to do it over again, when you're ready. Until then, I want to see you fill your head with books. Not boys." Her lips swallowed up a woulda-been smile, her teeth making every attempt to shine through.

I listened as the words spilled over me, but wasn't ready to embrace the sentiment those words were meant to convey. The one thing I could say that I had truly done had slipped away, slid through my fingertips. When the love of my life up and blew away, I came away with the belief that finishing high school would require a willpower I could no longer muster. Gram convinced me otherwise.

"There are two kinds of heartache in the world, Penny," she offered into the darkness filling the front room. "The kind that endures and the kind that fades away. Eventually, one makes its way over to the other. If you allow it to."

She didn't stop to ask whether I was listening. She said what she had to say then pulled her bedroom door shut between us. The next evening, Gram met me at the kitchen table, another day having been frittered away, heavy window coverings keeping the sun at bay. She told me my mind is the one thing no one can ever take from me. Education was like religion with Gram. I could lay up in the front room with all the curtains drawn for the rest of my days if that had been my wish. But I was going to school. There was no questioning that.

She shared how at a time she had wanted to be a schoolteacher. "I was in desperate need of something to make my momma's spirit take notice. I am living proof that no child should be left to learn all she needs to learn from someone who herself hasn't learned half of what this child knows already. Not any child who looks like you or me.

"I prepared to take the state board exam, never telling a soul my ambitions to teach school. But the turmoil surrounding different kinds mixing in the same classroom made it impossible for a young black girl to get a teaching certificate in Mississippi.

"Moulding a fresh mind is like painting a picture whose colours won't dry for several years to come. Like helping shape the direction the world might take, one precious dot at a time." Her eyes flickered with light. I imagined the students' tender eyes trained on her with equal shine, like each dot mattered. To Gram they did.

She shook free from her daydreaming and got back to the lesson she meant for me to hear. "Kids aren't slow like grown folks to embrace new ideas. They hunger for knowledge. And so sweet, always quick to double back whenever they've caught someone beaming at them, never letting a smile directed their way go unrequited."

She then settled on the less rousing certainties of her everyday life. "I could have fought the system. At first, I did. That was before the boycott-the school board's response to a nationwide mandate to desegregate the school system. Couldn't have made a bigger mess of things, their aim seeming set instead on no one getting an education." She sucked something between her teeth. "Like throwing out the Christmas goose to avoid sharing with your neighbour, never mind that both of you might starve to death. I recognised then I could never be part of a system so fouled up in its understanding of the value in education. I resigned from the idea of ever teaching school, the State of Mississippi in its patent ignorance be damned."

You'd think she was mourning a decision made just days prior. But this was a sorrow easily decades in the making, the passion behind which had only intensified with age. "Education isn't a privilege reserved for the chosen few. It's a God given right to be denied no one. That's what Martin Luther preached before they dusted him off. Medgar Evers had been around this way carrying the same message of equal for everyone. Oh, what they did to Medgar." She clapped the air with the open palms of her hands to release their anger. "Struck him down in his own driveway, for all his children to see."

She wrinkled the corners of her mouth like the taste of their murders was still foul in her memory. "I don't know when things are going to change. Not in my lifetime. Perhaps in yours. With any hope, your grand-babies will live to see the change we've been waiting on."

The memory of lost ambition washed her face in sadness. Her whole body folded in on itself. "It has taken a lifetime of helping people in other ways to even approximate the kind of joy being a schoolteacher would have brought me," she sighed. "Life can present an endless string of doubt and disappointment. What I'll tell you is to never give in to outside force. Let no one and nothing shake you from your dreams. After all, what are we without dreams to pull us along in the world?"

I believed at that point in the awesome power of Gram's presence. I felt the state of Mississippi had done itself a great disservice denying its children access to the likes of Evelyn Combs with her ability to shed light on things that should have been evident in the first place. Everyone should know Gram, should touch her circle if only for a moment.

She stayed on me about returning to school. "Take the worst situation you've known, consider how helpless you felt. Now imagine that feeling persisting the rest of your days. How helpless you'd be then. That's the existence you'll be left to endure without a proper education."

She was straightening my hair by the stove. The path of spent gas fumes plus the smell of hair burning had me light headed. Gram pressed on as lucid as I had ever known her to be. "There's nothing we can do to never feel helpless, but only a person who takes command of her own fate can avoid being rendered forever helpless."

"Some of us can't help but be helpless," I muttered, the side of my face hidden by an errant tangle of hair. "Some things are just meant to be that way."

Gram set the comb down on the stove, the teeth glowing bright orange at the edges and blue-green closer to the source of the flame. She leaned past my shoulder, looked me in the eye to measure the depth of comprehension for what I'd just said.

She took a seat next to mine, her body turned partway to face a distant window. "I didn't realize she had beaten you down this far." The words caught my full ear. It had been ages since anyone placed physical hands on me, but I was down as far as I felt I could go. That I had never really been up only served to conceal how far I had fallen.

Come What May -

We ate supper that night in silence, one side of my head still full of kinks and knots. After clearing the table, Gram and I stood at the kitchen sink doing the dishes: Gram washed, I dried.

As I set the last of the silverware out on a clean dish towel, I asked why she never says grace before a meal. "I say an inside grace," she replied, her hands never breaking rhythm beneath a mountain of soap suds.

I stood staring at my grandmother's shimmering reflection, just made visible against the sky growing dark outside the window. It was sometimes hard to tell whether Gram believed the things she said or simply said the things she believed I needed to hear. "God knows I'm grateful for all I've been given. From my lips to God's ear. Ain't that how folks in the church tell it? I just skip the part that passes my lips. No one else need...