Lyrics
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
Grandma died the day the doctor MADE her stop eating cornbread. After all, what was life without cornbread crumbled in buttermilk, or "pot licker" from the collard greens, with salt pork floating in it.
Looking at Grandma, sitting on the bookshelf
there in the oval silver-embossed frame,
I hope that I will look just like her - that is,
if I make it to 84 without driving off the bridge.
The picture was taken just before the fall.
The big one that put her in the hospital
where she did not want to go.
"Let me die at home, please," she'd begged,
so many times, but, handwringing daughters had sent her off into the screaming autumn night.
She left us, finally, on Christmas Eve.
I remember the last time I saw her there in that vomit-green room, skin translucent,
blue veins so tiny, needles attached to tubes hanging out, fragile arms bruised from yesterday's all the yesterday's needle punctures,
imploring me through labored breath.
"Pinksie Doll, would you please get me some cornbread and buttermilk?"
But tonight, in the oval frame, Grandma wears her Mona Lisa smile; the one she would use when she would call me Pinksie Doll. I would wail how I hated it, but Grandma, I always knew I was special
when you would call me Pinksie Doll.
In the picture, I look into clear eyes, hazel like mine and my mom, Lila's. At least, that is what I'm told.
I never got to know Lila from the outside, only the inside, and one tintype, her senior class photo.
But, somehow, Lila, I know that if you had been there, you too would have known that when your mother had to push white bread around her gums, the end would be near.
"Store-bought bread tastes like cardboard," she'd say, as she flipped her hoecake.
Memories of Grandma come in little bits and pieces: the kerosene stove, how it looked, black and white enamel, how it smelled; flat irons holding back the door or sitting ready next to the speckled blue-enameled kettle on the pot-belly; a pungent smell, lye soap bubbling in the Number 10 washtub there in the backyard Grandma shared with her two remaining daughters.
Her biddies who would not stray far from the yard - frail widowed Aunt Alma (husband hit by a north-bound freight over on the Seaboard track line, leaving her with five rough boys and one scrawny girl), and Aunt Eva.
The only memory I have of Eva was a shy, round, smiling woman sitting in front of the teevee, doughnut in hand. After Grandma died, this is pretty much all Eva ever did. She was lucky she
found sweet slow Johnny to marry her in the late summer of her old-maidness. Johnny, who lovingly trudged off every day to work for the city to make the money to buy those doughnuts.
I heard that at her funeral Johnny read a poem he'd written his beloved Eva.
But, of Grandma I remember a cotton apron against my cheek wiping a tear, scrubbed soft on a tin board with lye soap, and lunch money or coins for Sunday School tied up in lace-trimmed handkerchief, equally soft from countless scrubbings.
I remember how, when a summer squall came up, I would wait to see how long it would take Grandma to spot the cloud.
"Don't you use the phone, or take a shower, or wash dishes now, Miss Smartypants!" she'd reprimand after I'd come in from walking in the wind, or sitting on the porch swing watching a summer lightning show (there will never be a laser show that can match a storm coming in over our bay). I would breathe in the power of the thunder. I think Lila would have done this too, and that she would have listened when Grandma begged, "Let me die in
my own bed."
Lila -- the only one of Grandma's girls with a graduation picture. She actually went to college! Sweet Lila who worked in the five and dime to pay her way. Lila, who chose to have this child, knowing full well the sacrifice.
My mother talked to the angels, I am told.
They were there at the side of Lila's bed,
as I lay swaddled in th
