Bangles and
Colorful Cloth for Ma…#316
“Prose Dedicated to my Great-Grandmother”
When I was born,
you were a young ninety-years old,
your hair pulled
tight at the nap of your neck, still
black and bold. At night, you let it down to braid before
you went to bed;
it almost fell to the floor; at first, I would
watch in silence
from a crack in the door.
The night you
caught me I was six, you called me into the
room…asking that
I bring you a single broomstick.
I quickly plucked
it from mother’s broom, and rushed
back into the
dimly lamp-lit room. You showed me how
to
break it into
small pieces; when I looked bewildered your smile
showed all of
your dark wrinkles and creases.
It was then that
my eyes opened wide as you put the stick right
through the lob
of your ears, it's magic I thought; but this is my
Great-grandmother
I have nothing to fear. As a child, I
did not
realize that
there was a hole, because when I would touch the
bangles on her
ears, she would quickly scold.
Just like the time when I tried to sneak a peek at her button up
shoes by raising
the hem of her long dress, she did not have on
shoes, there were
moccasins on those tiny feet…who would have
guessed. Yes, I was a child without a care, and I
spent many
hours sitting at the foot of her old rocking chair.
I never tire of
the stories she would tell, sometimes we cried together
and now I can
say, as a child she lived in a white man’s world, she
called it
“hell”. Her parents had walked on the
“Trail of Tears”, proud
and strong, with
every step wondering where they had gone wrong.
She help raise me
and she taught me “The Way”. When her mind
begins
to wander in
those later years, I was sad when she would tell her stories
that she only
remembered the bad. This grand old lady
dressed in bangles
and cloths of
many colors, long braids, and black hair; a great-grandmother
like no other.
She died a few
days before her birthday; she would have been one-hundred
and five. My daddy said, Ma as we called her would have
scolded you saying
don’t you ever cry? I was fifteen-year-old and the world was
bright and
colorful with the
artwork of fall, a befitting day to bury a beautiful and
proud
Chickasaw.
[Repost]
Copyright©2012.elizabethannjohnsonmurphree
