FAITH

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1


WHEN I was a little girl, around nine or so, granny was really sick. She had one tumultuous and unhappy stomach. A tumor, hernia, and ulcer all took up residence in there. She often rolled around on the floor in pain.
“Ohhhhhhh Lordie have mercy on my soul,” she’d say over and over as she rubbed her stomach. She didn’t want me to see her that way.
“J, do you promise to be a good girl?” she’d ask me.
“Yes.” I’d answer, thinking God, I promise to be good if you make my granny alright.
“OK. Why don’t you go watch TV.”
Granny usually did not allow me to watch television until I had finished my homework. But, I guess she thought Hill Street Blues would be a better distraction than fractions and decimal points.
What could I do or say to make her feel better? I would open the Bible to the 23rd Psalms or the Our Father Prayer, lay it on her stomach, rub her body with olive oil, and pray. She would drift off to sleep.


I REMEMBER the first time I saw granny cry. It was also the first time I heard the word “foreclosure.” Granny had fallen behind in her mortgage payments and had received a letter from the bank saying it was going to foreclose on our home. The home granny brought me to when I was just 31 days old. The home I had lived in all my life. Where would we go? Were we going to be homeless? Granny prayed for relief in between her tears. A church in Florida took up an offering and sent the money to my granny. Years later, we’re still going strong in our home.


EVERY NEW YEAR'S EVE, granny and I used to write two letters to God – one thanking Him for all the blessings He had bestowed upon us and the other detailing our requests for the upcoming year. I thanked God and prayed for all types of things: granny’s health, a boyfriend, new clothes, good grades, the coveted spot of class valedictorian, admission to the high school or college of my choice, a million bucks, friends, relief from bullies and their impending torture at the hands of Satan . . . .
Dear God, I thank you for letting my mother live to see another year. God, please keep her safe and make her stop using drugs, I’d write every year. She’s still alive, and currently drug-free. We’re still working on her “Just Say No to Illicit Activities” campaign, but hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day.


AFTER my marathon laundry session on Saturday, I found granny standing at the dining room table cutting cabbage, and peeling and slicing sweet potatoes for her candied yams.
“Ahhh sookie sookie. Granny poo is in a good mood tonight! Look at you cooking. You go girl!” I said to her.
Granny was certainly having a good night. She couldn’t figure out how to put her dentures in, but the cooking part of her brain was working just fine.
“J, I forgot how to put my teeth in. I do it everyday, but I just forgot.” she told me while probing at them in her hand as if they were a science experiment. I know as much about dentures as I do about driving space shuttles. Together, we examined the partial, matching up parts of it to spaces in her lower gums. With her teeth securely in place, granny moved on to the larger task of cooking. She moved swiftly between the kitchen and dining room. I followed closely behind her, watching to see exactly how she made her cabbage and candied yams. On most nights, granny says to me, “J, what are we gonna have for dinner?” which is granny talk for “J, I’m hungry. What are you making for dinner?” When she has her “moments,” she often forgets to eat, doesn’t have an appetite, or gets side tracked by conversations and prayer meetings with the invisible people. I found out the hard way that the key to convincing her to eat is to cook her food the way she would make it. Otherwise, she’ll take one bite and just let it sit there – even if your feelings are hurt and her stomach is howling.

While granny kept busy, I surveyed the table and walked into the kitchen to make sure everything was normal. Everything appeared intact. No strange mixtures, no unidentified floating objects in pans. Granny’s macaroni and cheese fiasco a couple of months ago still had me on edge.

“J, the food’s ready!” she yelled up the stairs to me.
My mouth watered and I was ready for some of granny’s mac and cheese.
Upon seeing it, however, I was immediately wary of the soupy, salmon colored, boiled and unbaked macaroni concoction sitting on the table. I didn’t even see any cheese in the pan. Granny had begun eating, just as satisfied and content as she could be. I ate a spoonful, frowned up my face and spit it into a napkin.
“Granny, did you put Thousand Island dressing and relish in the macaroni?”
With her fork in mid-air, she looked at the pan, and said “How do you know?”
Her response was typical of the guilty. Don’t deny or proclaim your innocence. Just see what incriminating evidence exists before incriminating yourself. My suspicion was rising by the second.
“Cus’ the macaroni looks and tastes like a bowl of salad dressing!” I said and laughed.
“Chile, I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry. You don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it. I’ll eat it. ”
I don’t know what she was thinking either. It was just hilarious that she had set the pan on the table, as if it were edible and ready to be served. I ended up throwing it away. I couldn’t let granny eat that. That would have been a textbook case of elder abuse.

I made some chicken and rice to go along with granny’s cabbage and candied yams. A good meal was had by all – her, our invisible tenants, and me!


GRANNY AND I are going to Alaska! Granny’s friend has a son who now lives in there, so we’re going to visit him, his wife and infant son. Alaska, watch out for the granny patrol!
Granny has always been obsessed with the idea of going there.
“Wow, can you imagine it being dark twenty-four hours a day? Lord, I’d love to see that!” she always says.
But, sometimes her memory gets the best of her.
“Ooh chile, I’m going to . . .” she bragged to her friend on the telephone one night. “Where are we going again?” granny asked me in mid-sentence.
“Now look missy, you can’t go somewhere and not even remember where you’re going!” I said with a laugh. “We’re going to Alaska!”
We’re going to have a lay over in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“Granny, maybe we’ll find us a husband in Utah. Maybe you, me and Clara can share the same husband and we’ll be sister wives!” I jokingly told her.
“Ohhhh, wouldn’t that be sumthin? I go to Alaska and get married!” Granny, I was just joking. Slow ya roll lil’ lady! I think I had better watch granny very closely!
Although it’s only December, granny has already gone into preparation mode.
“Thomas said we betta wait till we get there to buy our clothes, cus Alaska’s winters are not like our winters.”
Thomas has never even been to Alaska, so I don’t know why granny would listen to his traveling advice.
“Granny, why would you want to spend your vacation shopping for clothes to wear on your vacation? And we don’t have anyone to chauffeur us around. Chris has to work.”
“Well, his wife will be there.”
“So? What makes you think she wants to schlep us around all day? Besides, it won’t be that cold when we get there.”
“Oh.”
Granny has now caught the travel bug, and is planning future trips to all sorts of random and not-so-random places.
“The Lord said I was gonna travel and that my older days would be better than my younger days!” she told Clara. “I’m gonna go to Rome and Japan too!” Granny, let’s just get to Alaska first. She’s always had an affinity for Japan, because my brother was stationed there while in the military. However, I don’t how she came up with Rome? Was it mentioned in the Bible or something?

My biggest fear is that granny won’t even know where or who she is eight months from now. But, that’s a chance I’m willing to take if this trip makes her happy and gives her something to look forward to.

At the end of the movie The Preacher’s Wife, a little boy tries to convince his father that an angel named Dudley (played by Denzel Washington) exists and once lived in their home. However, the dad does not believe him.
The son responds to his father, saying “Just because you can’t see the air doesn’t keep you from breathing. And just because you can’t see God doesn’t keep you from believing.”
His father replied, “Son, that’s what we call faith.”

HOW I FOUND A HOME AND REDEMPTION

On my way home from a meeting last Thursday night, I passed a Borders bookstore. My meeting had been rather productive and I felt like celebrating. I’m a self-confessed and unrepentant book addict. I buy books when I’m depressed. When I’m happy. When I’m bored. When I want to celebrate. Or, just because I can. I don’t really need a reason to buy books. When I spotted the bookstore, I became focused in the way of the obsessive-compulsive. All of a sudden, there were two books I just had to have at that very moment and I set out on a mission to find them. Once inside, I searched all the displays. The buy one, get one free display. The new fiction display. The Borders bestsellers display. The New York Times Best Sellers Display. The Borders Staff Picks display. I still couldn’t find my books. So, I did the next logical thing: I went to the literature section. There were still no signs of my books. The books I wanted were written by African-American authors. Just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy and that I still remembered the alphabet, I looked for books by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. No sign of the greats. A bookstore without books by Toni Morrison or James Baldwin would be willfully engaging in false advertising. I couldn’t imagine a big chain like Borders risking its reputation in that way. So, I knew there had to be an African-American literature section somewhere on its two floors. I looked all over the first floor to no avail. I then looked at the directory, which did not even mention African-American literature. But, I still held out hope and went to the second floor.

Once upstairs, I still couldn’t find the African-American literature section. Now was the time for drastic measures: actually asking someone for help. I spotted two female sales associates who were venting about some slacking co-worker.
“Do you have an African-American literature section,” I asked the younger one with the Bluetooth in her ear and ring in her nose.
“Downstairs behind the literature section,” she answered quickly before resuming her gossip fest.
Damn. Why do we have to be behind the literature section? How come we’re always behind something or in the back of the bus? I thought. I rode the escalator back to the first floor and glanced at the directory again to see if I had missed the African-American literature section the first time. Nope. My eyesight hadn’t fooled me. So, I searched row by row for this African-American literature section whose existence I was beginning to doubt.

Aha! I had finally found it! Two rows and a side shelf made up the African-American literature section. I finally found the two books I had had been searching for by Daniel Black and Bertice Berry. Now that my first mission was complete, I could focus on the next task at hand: finding out why there was even an African-American literature section. Members of one of the online communities I frequent have been discussing the ways in which African-American sections in bookstores contribute to or impede diversity. A poster challenged each of us to actually visit bookstores and ask why there are separate sections for African-American literature.

I went back upstairs to ask the woman who had directed me to the section in the first place, but retreated when she gave me that “Don’t you see I’m in the middle of a bitching session and am trying to put these books away before we close in 30 minutes” look. So, I went downstairs and looked around. The only sales associate in sight was a thirty-something year old black male helping a young black woman with an English accent.
“I’m looking for books written by black women, about women or men, that make you think” she said to him.
Yea, that narrows it down, I thought. Since I’m a book lover and nosy, I had to add my two cents. I noticed that her arms were weighed down with books written by Eric Jerome Dickey and Zane.
“You want books that make you think,” I asked, wondering what epiphanies one could have from reading books like Naughty or Nice, The Other Woman, and Gettin’ Buck Wild: Sex Chronicles II.
“Yea,” she answered. OK, this might be a long night, I figured. I shouted out book titles as the sales associate ran back and forth pulling books off the shelves.
“In London, the Black literature section only takes up two rows,” she said. She was visiting New York and intended to take back as many books as would fit in her suitcase. “The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah. Have you ever read that?” I asked her.
“Yes, I loved it,” she said.
“Oh, you have to read some Toni Morrison,” I told her.
“Is that Mary B. Morrison’s brother?” she asked. Ok, we have a lot of work to do with sista gurl.
“No, they’re not related,” the sales associate said.
“Toni Morrison is a woman,” I added.
“Oh.”
“Start with this,” the sales associate said as he handed her Beloved by Toni Morrison.
By this time, it had become clear that he was only interested in giving her as many books as possible to fatten his pockets and get her out of his hair. He obviously had not given any thought to the types of books he was recommending. This woman thought Toni Morrison was a man and that books by Eric Jerome Dickey made people think. I was skeptical about whether she was even ready for Toni. But, to pick one of Toni’s most confusing, difficult, and symbolism-ridden books might have made this poor soul slit her wrists.
“Don’t you think that’s a lil’ too heavy?” I asked the associate. “Maybe she should start with The Bluest Eye.” Then again, maybe that might be too much. He picked out The Bluest Eye and handed it to Ms. Tourist.

After the young woman had gathered as many books as she could carry, she sat on a footstool and sifted through her finds. The sales associate darted off to the customer service counter, free at last. Not so quick buddy.

“Hey, I have a question for ya.” I said to him.
“OK. I hope I have an answer for you,” he replied.
“My friends and I were having a conversation about why some bookstores have a separate section for African-American literature, as opposed to just including African-American literature in the literature section.”
Although a white male sales associate stood beside him at the counter, he conveniently ignored our conversation. The look on the white associate’s face reminded me of Mike Myers when rapper Kanye West stood next to him during a televised Hurricane Katrina fundraiser concert and said “Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The black associate twisted his face, frowned, took a step back and stretched his arms forward as if about to launch into an hour-long conversation about his promiscuous sexual history.
He then laughed and said, “Ya know, other customers have asked me this same question. I’ve had this exact same conversation before in this store.”
“Really?” I asked like a clueless damsel in distress.
“Yea. Do you want my opinion or the real reason?”
“Gimme both” I answered.
“Well, it really comes down to money. It’s not about race or anything like that. Black literature has really blown up in the past ten years. Ten years ago, all you had was Toni Morrison or Terry McMillan. Publishers didn’t wanna take a chance on us. Now, you’ve got Zane and all these other Black authors. So, it just makes sense to put them all together so that people can find them and bookstores can make more money off of the flourishing Black literature industry. Having a separate section really helps out the lesser-known authors, whose books would probably get lost in the crowd if they were in the literature section. What’s better? Not getting read at all, or being in the African-American literature section?”
“Ok, so is that the real reason or your opinion?”
“Oh, that’s the real reason.”
“Well, now I wanna hear your opinion. Why do you think black authors are in a separate section?”
He then bent over and whispered to me as if we were two slaves conspiring to overthrow the massa.
“If ya ask me, we ought to be glad we have our own section.”
Ok, he was afraid of the massa and other Blacks folks hearing him.
“Today, we have more authors getting published and getting exposure, and readers have more to choose from. You know how much it took for us to get to this point? Ten years ago, publishers weren’t taking a chance on us unless we were Toni Morrison or Terry McMillan. Now we wanna go back to being in the general literature section. Nahhh, I don’t think so.”

Well, I got my answers. I got my books. I was done for the night.
“Thanks so much for answering my questions. Those were pretty interesting answers I never thought about.”
“You’re welcome,” he said as he reached out his hand to shake mine. “What’s your name?”
I told him my name and asked him for his.
“Jeremy. I’m the assistant manager here.”
Well, just groovy. I got my answers straight from the horse’s mouth!
I found the cashier and purchased They Tell Me of a Home and Redemption Song. I left the store with the feeling of relief and satisfaction a drug addict - or a book addict in my case - feels after a hit. I had to go all the way around the mulberry bush and back down to the African-American literature section, where I finally found a home and redemption.

MACARONI AND CHEESE

If I were at church with her on that Sunday, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen and hit her head. Falls have always preceded bad things in granny’s life. She once fell into a grave. I have no idea how that happened. She couldn’t walk for a month after that fall. While in Pathmark many years ago, she tripped over one of those contraptions used to carry boxes. All she got from that fall was five hundred lousy dollars and one shoulder that ended up being higher than the other one. Then there was her fall on Pitkin Avenue during my senior year of high school. She fell so hard that people heard it down the street. That fall led to her onset of seizures. And then there was this latest fall. She tripped and fell in church a couple of months ago. She says it felt as if something picked her up into the air and threw her down. I think her recurrent clumsiness was the real culprit. She says she doesn’t think she hit her head. But, her recent stories about people entering our house through keyholes and naked people defecating in our backyard leads me to believe otherwise.

I’m scared. It frightens me to think of what’s happening and what may happen to my granny – almost to the point of paralysis. My chest feels tight. It’s hard for me to breathe. Maybe I’m just too scared to breathe. Paralysis – too afraid to come home because I don’t know what I’ll face, how she’ll be, what state of mind she’ll be in, or what kind of night she’ll have.

As I walk through the yuppified streets of Forte Greene, I envy the young, fabulous, carefree, college-educated people who block the sidewalks as they smoke their cancer sticks. I envy them as they recount trivial arguments with their roommates, enjoy their outdoor meals at over-priced restaurants, and make their way to nearby bars and lounges. I envy them, as I smell their perfume – or maybe it’s that fruity smelling shampoo all the college kids use. I envy the girls in their sundresses, shorts and tank tops. I envy all of them because they are headed for a night of carefree fun, while I am headed home – to what I do not know. To a granny who is losing her mind, but does not know it; refuses to accept it.

Granny is the only person I have in the world. The only person who has always loved me. Without her, I will be alone in the world. Truly forced to fend for myself. I now know how a college friend felt 9 years ago in Hewitt Dining Hall. She burst into tears at the mere mention of her ailing grandmother – the grandmother with whom she had lived all her life. I now know how a family friend felt during her adoptive mother’s sickness. Perhaps I’ve spent my life largely detached from the others. Ignorant of loss, or the sense of impending loss. I guess I’ve learned what empathy really means.

Although my granny has been sick before, I am faced with her mortality in a way in which I have never been. She has always bounced back before. I am hoping she will bounce back this time. I am praying. If there was ever a time I needed to pray and believe in a power high than myself or fate, it is now. I’m faced with the possibility of life without her – or life without her as she has always been – strong, fierce, independent, caregiver. I guess prayer provides hope that things will get better. Prayer eases the heart and the mind.

When I was in the sixth grade, my class had a potluck party and each child had to bring a dish. My granny made two pans of macaroni and cheese. My teacher, Mrs. Steinberg, loved my granny’s mac and cheese so much that she took home one pan for herself. Granny and I still laugh about ole greedy Mrs. Steinberg. I’m the world’s most horrible cook, but granny taught me how to make macaroni and cheese a couple of weeks ago. She actually liked it and bragged about it to her friend. I’ll continue to savor the lessons she’s taught me, and the love she gives me. I’ll continue to make my granny some macaroni and cheese.