Makeda Read Free Page A

grandmother says that she needs to see you. That she needs to talk to you about her recent travels.” She paused. “We also need to talk about whether at her age and disability we should let her continue on by herself in the house on Duvall Street.”
    I thought my mother’s view here may have been colored by what my grandmother had said about needing to talk to me about “her travels.” My mother hadn’t understood, but nonetheless had reason to suspect what my grandmother meant by this and, consequently, may have taken it as a sign that my grandmother was becoming senile, which, I suppose, was a reasonable assumption since my grandmother had not traveled anywhere to speak of in the seventy-two years of her life.
    Only I knew what my grandmother meant by “travels,”
    and I was greatly interested in hearing about them. My grandmother had never owned a telephone and had steadfastly resisted our entreaties to have one installed, even after we insisted upon a phone as a safety device. She had always believed that the telephone and what she called “other needless modern things” were among the blinding distractions that “shrank the souls of the counters.” I would just have to wait or reach her through Mrs. Grier, a next door neighbor and friend of my grandmother’s who owned a phone.
    “Tell her that I’ll be there by tomorrow evening.”

C HAPTER T WO
    I n 1955, 15 years ago, when I was ten, my grandmother said to me in a quiet voice, “My name is not Mattie Gee Florida Harris March. My real name is Makeda Gee Florida Harris March.”
    The discussions I had with her upon which she would intently train her attention are fixed clearly in my memory from the age of five. Daddy would drop me off at her house on Saturday evenings and she would bring me with her to church on Sunday mornings. Gordon would visit her as well, but not nearly as regularly as I. My conversations with my grandmother always took place in the downstairs parlor at the front of her little row house. The room was usually dark, even at midday. The furniture was baroque and heavy. What little natural light the narrow space afforded could not overcome the dark velvet drapes that crowded across the room’s two small windows. Doilies and bric-a-brac coated every horizontal surface except the top of the big oil space heater that dominated everything around it. The bric-a-brac had been given to her years ago by a church member. While it may have seemed an inappropriate gift for a blind person, my grandmother liked to run her fingers over the smooth soft-paste porcelain figures. She always sat in her wine-red upholstered rocking chair by the window. I always sat in a side chair which I positioned four feet or so away from the front wall and into the room toward the middle. In a corner across from my grandmother’s chair was an ageless Emerson radio with a big circle dial that was housed in a waist-high oak wood console. Save for a picture of my father as a boy posing on a spotted pony, the cloudy photographs that sat about hickly-pickly were all of distant relatives who had died long before I was born and whose names meant nothing to me. Although she could not see the photographs, she wanted them there, she said, to keep her company.
    After I turned fifteen, something conspicuously different was added to the little parlor’s generally cheerless décor. On the long interior wall of the room that ran along the other side of the hall that carried through the house from front to back, hung a huge cream-colored coarseweave cloth on which a symbol of some sort had been printed from a woodcut. I had been with her the day she was given the hanging by a man we met at a market, but I hadn’t gotten a very good look at it then. The natural fiber weave had several rents in it and appeared to be very old. The thick-membered design seemed to be printed on the cloth with what looked like a natural pigment of red ochre that over time had grown dark and veined with