Theme Song: Sadie by the Spinners
“Sadie, don’t you know we love you sweet Sadie? Place no one above you sweet Sadie Living in the past If there’s a heaven up above I know she’s teaching angels how to love”I remember when she died.
My great grandparents traveled up north to Cincinnati for the funeral. When they returned they came back with what few belongings she had: two hats, a few dresses, some perfume, and some jewelery. Maybe Anna could wear those things and they would be handed down to her. It was the sight of those clothes that set my mother’s mind free. Her four year old mind could finally grasp the meaning of death. “She’s gone! She’s really gone!” she screamed as she ran out of the house and into the fields, as if she ran fast enough and hard enough she could change the reality of the death or at least be where her mother was.
“Why do you call Grandma ‘Grandma’ but Aunt Anna calls Grandma ‘Mama“?” I asked my mother when I was about the same age she was when her mother died. There seemed to be a step missing in the family connections, but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was. I discerned problem had to be the reason why my mother didn’t call Grandma “Mama”.
“That’s because she’s not mother, she’s my grandmother,” my mother said.
“Where’s your mother?” I asked.
“She’s in heaven.”
Heaven? With Jesus? Why is she in heaven? How did she die? I had too many questions for my mother who never had to field them with my four older brothers. Yes she was in heaven with Jesus, she died from TB. I had more questions, but she didn’t want to answer anymore.
I must have been a nuisance as a child. I must have asked several times what she died of before it finally sank in that it was from tuberculosis. I wanted to know what she looked like. My mother told me that my Great Grandmother Cynthia had a picture on her dresser of Fannie. When I used to go for visits I would stare at the picture. She had a lazy eye, the left one was turned in a bit but that didn’t stop her from having a big broad smile. Her hair was perfectly coifed, she had big apple cheeks and a nose that looked like it may have had a hook like I sometimes attribute to native americans. She also looked very pale in the black and white photo.
“Was she white?” I asked my mother.
“No, she wasn’t white,” she seemed irritated that I would ask such a question.
“Then why was she so pale?” I asked. She said it was just the way the picture was taken. All of Fannie’s siblings where a deep chocolate hue. Why didn’t she have a picture of her mother, I wanted to know. She didnt’ know. No one gave her one, so she just didn’t.
When Grandma Cynthia died when I was 13 I thought my mother would receive the photo then. I was anticipating having the photo in the house. For some reason I thought it would give me some answers, as if seeing the photo could help me put the pieces together about my family; maybe it could tell me why my mother was the way she was; why we all seemed so distant from one another although we were in the same city. I wanted to know why Fannie left her two girls behind with her mother and was that the reason why my mother seemed to have this eternal sadness in her. My mother was always fearful and always overprotective of me, although not of my brothers and sister in the same way. My mother was also superstitious. She has a sixth sense that picks up on when company is coming or if something is unspoken is wrong with her children. I have that, too. Once a guy I was dating called me in the middle of the night and I had a conversation with him about how my sister was going to have a baby. My sister called me the next day from 500 miles away and told me she was pregnant. I called the guy I was dating to tell him the good news.
“You already told me this, remember?” he asked.
“How can I remember this? I just found out and then I called you.”
“You told me last night when I called you at 2am. You said Wanna is pregant.”
“You called me last night?”
I wonder if Fannie could do that, too? I missed her more than I missed Pearl. I expected Pearl not to be around because I knew my father was old. Well, older than most fathers and it was always a death watch because he had a bad heart. But for Fannie to be gone just seemed unfair that I could miss out on not having one Grandmother.
I have been trying to piece the puzzle together on who she was, how she lived, what she was like. But no one knows. All of Fannie’s siblings who are living were born after she was “kind of ” grown and were just a little older than my mother when she passed away. My uncles are old and don’t remember much; my Aunts are old, but a lot younger than she would have been if she had lived. How can someone just forget their sibling? How can she not be talked of or remembered?
“Aunt Geneva, do you remember the day your mother died?” She is my mother’s older sister. About 3-5 years older (I can’t remember how old). My Aunt Geneva doesn’t like to remember thing she would rather forget. She doesn’t remember, she says. “I was just a child, really young when it happened.”
“How old do you think you were?”
“Oh, I don’t know, five or six,” my Aunt said. What she does remember are things my mother didn’t. That my grandmother took my mother to Cincinnati with her and left her behind in Alabama with Grandpa Jack and Grandma Cynthia. She remembers when one of my uncles brought my mother home to Rogersville because Fannie was too sick to take care of her.
“Anything else?”
“Its so long ago, Nay, what am I supposed to remember?” she asks me pointedly. I don’t know.
With that little bit of information I go to work at the library and ask for my friend to help me find her. I got a copy of her original death certificate. I found her under her married name of Shoulders in the city directory. She was working at a drycleaners. She died January 5, 1947 a few days shy of my mother’s 5th birthday.
I go back with the copies for my Aunt and show her. “So you were about eight when she died, right? You dont’ remember anything? Do you remember anything about her?” Not a clue.
My grandmother Fannie was a young mother. Now we would consider her a teen mother, but back then it was normal for young women of meager means to marry young. They were sharecroppers and Fannie was the second to the oldest, I think. Maybe the third, I know the oldest died young. She had my Aunt Geneva at about 13 and my mother at 16. She didn’t marry either father. I dont’ know if she even loved them. My grandfather, Risted she could not have married because he had a wife at the time.
“You were married?”
“Yeah, I was married,” my Grandfather said nonchalantly.
“Then why did you get with her? Why did you talk to her?”
“She looked good,” my Grandfather sounded easy going and I could hear some of the charm I could tell he evidently used on women. He reminds me a lot of my youngest brother. “I saw her and thought, ‘She has a big butt’” we both laughed but I dropped the conversation right there. I wanted to keep the naive image of the 1930s with me, where men were chivalrous with less lechery.
At sometime she did marry, though, to a guy named Robert Shoulders. I don’t know who he was or why she married him. My family didn’t like him, so my Aunt Anna tells me. The first time I asked her about him she said she thought she saw him a while back but turned her head because she didn’t want to see him. The second time I asked, when I really thought I might go searching for him to find out more about Fannie, she told me she heard he was dead. He actually lived a few years after the conversation. My Aunt Anna told me the family blamed Bobby for her death. He had her working hard while he was a layabout, she said. Don’t nobody want to talk to him, don’t nobody want to see him, she said. Daddy didn’t like him, nobody liked him. You won’t learn nothing from him, child.
So my grandmother came to Cincinnati with her husband and child. No one in the family liked him and according to them he didn’t work (or hardly worked) leaving it up to my grandmother to take care of herself, her child and, perhaps, a no-account husband. My uncles were here in Cincinnati with my grandmother. But they weren’t the ones to sign her birthcertificate, neither did her husband. It was my grandfather Jack who, with his wife, left his farm in winter to come and bury his oldest daughter. A few years later they bury another daughter, Beulah who lives close to home.
I still don’t know her but I know her. All the little bits and pieces that make a life still aren’t coming clear to me. I have to deconstruct in order to make her real; stand far away from her and disconnect myself to try to get to who she was. It wasn’t until I was holding the death certificate in my hand that I realized how young she was; she died at 21 and I was just having my daughter at that age. She could never have imagined me or her other grandchildren or her great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. At 21 all she could see was what was before her: the necessity to work to make a way for the daughters she had. I wonder if she knew how sick she was or realized that she was going to die.
“She’s really pretty,” my daughter said as she held a copy of Fannie’s picture in her hand. We took my Aunt Geneva’s pic to scan it onto the computer. One of my uncles finally realized that neither of Fannie’s daughters had a picture of their mother and had a copy made for them. My daughter was mesmerized with Fannie’s pic also. She sometimes brought it up onto her computer to scrutinize it.
I can see Fannie in her and I tell her so. “You look a bit like her, around the cheeks and the shape of your face,” I tell her. I see Fannie’s other features in my sister Wanna, my cousin Nikki and her sister Tiffany, who also died too young at 21. Looking back I see some of her in her mother Cynthia and I wonder why I never saw it there before.
Grandma Fannie won’t leave me alone. She won’t talk to me and tell me what I need to know, but she won’t leave me be to forget her like the rest of the family has. She hasn’t done anything wrong; how can we go on with life with nary a thought of her? She never got to hear MLK’s speech, cast a vote or hold her grandchildren in her arms. She will never be 80 and never know what life could have been and have regrets. She is forever 21 and young and black and beautiful.
