BETH BROWN PRESTON

Got the Spirit

I remember my grandmama as if she were still alive today. She possessed all the virtues of a kind and patient African-American woman whose spirit had been tempered by all manner of hardship. Her mama, Virginia Holmes, was born into slavery in Alabama, and her family remained in bondage until Virginia was five years old. Once freed, the Holmes family were sharecroppers on a farm near Montgomery, Alabama, where Grandmama Lucy was born and raised. She met a strong and courageous man, Peter Glover, a day laborer. She married him. Lucy and Peter together birthed five children: Jeannette, Willliam (AKA "Bubba"), Joseph, Seaburn, and Alice. Peter moved his family north to Cleveland during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century. He was looking for steady work up North and an escape from the racism of the Jim Crow South.

Lucy's eldest child was Jeannette, my mother. Mama became the first in her family to graduate from a university. She met my daddy, James Oliver, at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. James courted my mother for twenty years while he worked menial jobs, taught in schools, and joined the Air Force during World War II. He enrolled in graduate school with money awarded him from the G.I. Bill, earning his master's degree at Boston University, and a doctorate from the Universite de Montreal. In those times, achieving higher education was difficult, if not impossible, for Black people. The world of academia was lily white. Both of my parents became teachers. Mama taught in an elementary school in Cleveland. My father with his new doctorate degree taught college English.

My earliest memories of our family life in Cleveland were of a small apartment crowded with old furniture on Kinsman Road. My mind recalls the flashing lights of an artificial aluminum Christmas tree fancily decorated and sitting on a table near my crib. I believe our apartment was one large room. And I could see the shadows of my parents dancing to records playing on an old-fashioned Victrola. I could near the muffled whispers of their voices as they shared some romantic secret.

In the next vivid memory, I am three or four years old. It is Christmas time again. Daddy is home for the holidays. Daddy and Mama bought their first house at 3323 East 139th Street in east Cleveland. Grandmama Lucy moved in to live with us. She was retired from her work as a housemaid. She had worked for wealthy and prominent white families uptown on Euclid Avenue, in the section of the city where Black peeple were forbidden to travel, shop, visit, or live. Back in those days, the only reason you went up on Euclid Avenue was to work hard in the homes of the rich white folk. My grandmama was hired out as a maid until she turned sixty-five when she got too old and tired to stand up on her feet. She moved out of my Aunt Alice's house on 138th Street and came to live in our house to help Mama with my little sister Alice and me.

Of course, taking care of two little children was hard work, too. Those were the days of cloth diapers and washboards. During the serene spring and summer days, I loved sitting on the back step to watch Grandmama hang the laundry on the clothesline stretching between two poles in our backyard. Or I would try to help her by choosing items of wet clothing from the large straw wicker laundry basket and handing them to her with two wooden clothespins. She did not believe in letting me grow up lazy. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop," she warned me as I sat innocently on the back stoop doing nothing wrong.

On Saturdays, laundry day, there was always a friend of our family in the neighboring backyard sitting out in her lawn chair just waiting to share gossip with Grandmama. Our backyards were separated with a wire cyclone fence. The fence was overgrown with pink and white trumpets of morning glory blossoms, honeysuckle vines, forsythia, and roses tangled between the wires. I always recall my childhood with the scent of roses in full bloom.

Daddy taught English at colleges and universities across the country at Texas Southern, Northwestern University, and Fisk University. When we bought our house on 139th Street, he was hired as a Professor of English in the department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. He accepted the job with a proud and enthusiastic letter to the administration. He was assigned a living space, a small room on the campus during the academic year, and he was given only two short, two-week breaks, one in winter and one in spring, to visit with our family. He bought a used car, an old, grey Plymouth Savoy he named "Betsy." One fall day, he embraced us all, said goodbye, and drove the long, lonely highway south to Nashville.

He wrote frequent letters home to Mama. One of his letters she read out loud to me. In that letter, he wrote to us about his colleague in the English Department at Fisk, the illustrious poet Robert Hayden. My father joined the faculty at Fisk in 1956. Hayden had been on the faculty there since 1946 and was determined to train my daddy to be a fine teacher. In a letter that followed, Daddy described the segregation in the city of Nashville, the separate facilities for Black people at the bus station waiting rooms, restaurants, toilets, and water fountains. He spent most of his time, when he was not teaching or grading papers, in intense conversation with Professor Hayden about the need to instruct their students with lessons from the African-American literary canon: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston.

While Daddy was away at Fisk, Mama taught elementary school in Cleveland while Grandmama took care of the daily needs of my sister and me. She prepared all our meals, washed and folded our laundry, and cleaned house. And she was the one who punished me. She was tough and strict about my manners, or lack of manners, at age four or five. Her punishments were more severe as I grew older, from paddling my behind with her bedroom slipper, to hard whacks with a hairbrush, to stinging my legs with green leafy switches cut from the forsythia bush in our backyard. The sting of the switch I always feared since my legs would itch and burn for hours, yet it was because of her rewards and punishment that I learned the difference between right and wrong.

Grandmama was a deeply religious woman whose fundamental beliefs were founded on her steadfast Baptist faith and on the Bible. She read the Bible, although she could not read well nor write more than her own name. But she knew the Bible and kept the Good Book on a night table beside the bed under her lamp. When I cried, as I often did cry for no real reason, she would comfort me by singing gospel hymns: "It is Well with My Soul," "The Old Rugged Cress," "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," or "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." The sound of her contralto voice was sweet and warm as the maple syrup she poured over our pancakes in the morning. These hymns were my first lesson in the traditional music of our African-American heritage.

Early one spring morning on a Sunday, when I was five, she woke me and made breakfast. She dressed me in one of my party dresses with a crinoline "stand-out" petticoat under my dress and clean white underwear. She polished my patent leather Mary Janes with grease from a jar of Vaseline, and I wore my shoes, gleaming like new, over a pair of white lace anklet socks. My long thick hair was parted in the middle, and braided into two plaits, one on each side of my head, decorated with colorful ribbon bows.

"Grandmama," I asked, "where are we going?"

"I'm taking you to Reverend Fitten," she replied.

"Reverend Fitten?" Childish curiosity overcame me. The word "reverend" was new to my
vocabulary. She gave me a light blue wool spring coat to wear with my dress.

"I'm takin' you to church, chile!" She handed me a light blue wool spring coat to wear with my dress.

We rode the city bus to my Aunt Aliee's house where I was preened, praised, and blessed by my aunt and uncle before church. I recall it was only a few blocks from 138th Street to the church where my grandmama worshipped on Sundays. The shouts of the choir and the thunder of the church organ greeted us. To enter the wide wooden doors of the Trinity Baptist Church that Sunday was like joining a celebration of Christmas in the spring. I held her hand tight as we walked up the center aisle to the front pew and kneeled before the pulpit.

"Praise the Lord, Lucy, you're here!" a woman shouted. "And who is this precious little one?" The woman leaned over to pinch my cheeks. Her breath smelled of peppermint candy, and her perfume filled my nose with an exotic scent. I was surrounded by the deacons' wives in their starched white uniforms, white stockings, and thick-soled nurses' shoes. "Lucy, is this your granddaughter?" Grandmama introduced me to the wives one by one, and I was kissed so many times that I grew dizzy with happiness at so much affection. I sat alone in one of the front pews while she made her rounds greeting all her friends.

What I really loved was the thunder of the organ as the choir director commanded the group to stand. The choir was thirty or forty strong — men and women wearing long blue robes with sparkling white collars. The organ rolled out gospel hymns familiar to me from grandmama's songs she sang as she ironed our clothes at home or sat alone inside her room in communion with her God. At that moment, I knew why she stood up and shouted: "I got the spirit!"

Reverend Fitten was a regal, impressive, handsome mulatto who stood in his pulpit with arms opened wide as if to embrace and bless his entire flock. I could not yet read. Neither could my grandmama. But I grasped in my white gloves the program printed with the order of the morning service, and I kept looking down at the pages. The organ played a Call to Worship and my very first church service began.

After the service ended, and the organ was playing the recessional, Reverend Fitten stepped down from his pulpit and came over to greet us. He shook Grandmama's hand and crowed: "To God be the glory!" He removed my hat and placed his right hand on my bare head bestowing on me his blessing. I felt a love for that preacher man equal only to the love and fear I held for my own father.

Our family was seated around the dinner table one evening in Cheyney when we heard the telephone ring. The year was 1959. Daddy had accepted a teaching post in the English Department at Cheyney State College. We had purchased a second home. Mama taught elementary school at the George Gray School in racially segregated Wilmington, fifteen miles south in Delaware. She had been denied an opportunity to teach in the nearby local school district of West Chester. Despite both my parents working, our family was still struggling. When Mama hung up the telephone, we knew she was bearing bad news.

The day Grandmama Lucy died, Mama did not weep. During my young life, I saw my mother break down and cry only twice. She wept one night after a quarrel with my daddy when he threatened for no apparent reason to leave us. But the quarrel had ended that same night, and my mother immediately stopped crying. She did not weep at the news of her mother's death. Instead, she quietly made her plans. She would take me with her on a Greyhound bus bound for Cleveland, and leave Alice, my younger sister who did not understand the meaning of God nor death, at home with Daddy.

In Cleveland, Mama and I stayed at Aunt Alice and Uncle Nate's home on 138th Street in their spare guest bedroom. We arrived in Cleveland on a Friday evening. Grandmama's wake took place on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, the funeral was held at Trinity Baptist Church where Reverend Fitten preached the eulogy to a crowd of family and friends.

Later, at the wake, the air inside the funeral parlor was icy cold and drops of cloudy water trickled down the damp, clammy walls. Although her coffin lay open, I was not allowed to enter the room where Grandmama was laid out. I wandered around the foyer of the funeral parlor gathered into the strong arms of many embraces, hugged against the silk skirts of the women and the sharp creased trousers of many men. There was no music. There was no weeping. But I was overcome by grief in that place of death. For the first time, I felt how much I would miss my Grandmama — the stories she told me, her gospel music, and her spiritual life.

On the way to the cemetery, I rode in the sleek black limousine in the seat next to Mama. She was veiled and, finally, weeping. That was the second time I saw my mama cry. And that was the last time in my entire life. She was a strong, brave woman like Lucy, her mother. I sat in the limousine to stay warm while the coffin was carried to the burial plot. And I peered out of the window to glimpse Grandmama one final time. She was encased in a large, burnished silver coffin with gold trim. The coffin was lowered into a huge deep hole in the ground. A few strong men bowed their heads in prayer over the grave. They climbed back into their limousines and cars. Then we drove as quickly as we could back into the city, away from that place of mourning.

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