Makeda Read Free Page B

razor-thin crisscrossing fissures. The handcrafted design was perfectly symmetrical with quadrants of roundish loops which joined in the center of the symbol to a single straight line that assembled the design’s four elements into a unified statement.
    It was stunningly out of place in the little room. At the same time, it was its very incongruousness that seemed to give the exotic hanging its light, lift, and power over what was otherwise a dreary and tenebrous space.
    Riveted by the old painting, I asked my grandmother what it meant.
    “Sometimes it’s best to simply feel,” she had said cryptically.
    The happiest times of my life were spent with her in the little front parlor on Duvall Street with the mysteriously exotic wall hanging.
    “Why did your mother name you Makeda?” I once inquired of her.
    “I asked my mother that very question and all she would say to me was, ‘You are Makeda,’ and that was the end of it.”
    “Where did the name Mattie come from?”
    “My mother said that folks would not hire someone named Makeda, even to wash their clothes, and that I should call myself Mattie, but that I was never to forget that I was really Makeda.”
    It was the only time that she ever spoke of her mother to me.
    On Sundays my grandmother wore to Reverend Boynton’s First African Baptist Church the frill-free white dress of the deaconess that she had been wearing virtually all of my life. But the decorous deaconess who toiled during the week in a laundress’s uniform wore flowing colorful tie-dyed muumuus of African inspiration at home. The muumuus had been acquired at my grandmother’s request from a Nigerian woman who served with her on the church deaconess board. This—the wearing of muumuus, that is—was quite unusual in the 1950s for black women of late middle years in a place like Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, it was more than unusual. It was all but unheard of. My grandmother, who seemed not two but three people, unsurprisingly had more than her share of detractors, blithely ignoring convention, as she faithfully did, as often as not.
    Though she would never have confessed to it, I suspect that my unremarkably conventional mother did not always approve of my grandmother who in any case would hardly have noticed.
    It was from that chair in the little poorly lit parlor that I confided to my grandmother when I was fifteen that I wanted to be a writer. She had not washed other people’s clothes for five years by then. She turned her face toward the window so that she could feel the warm bath of the early-autumn sun and answered as if she had not heard what I said.
    “Do you ever talk to your mother or father about Gordon?” I did not answer and we sat together in silence for a time. “How is Gordon? Is he all right?”
    “Yes, Grandma. Gordon is fine.” Questions about Gordon were always asked with an urgency that I did not understand.
    Moments passed.
    “So, you want to be a writer.”
    In the early days, we would sit much as we were sitting now and discuss the progress of our lives. Even then she appeared to be looking without seeing, as if she were watching in her thoughts a screen of past experiences. The movement of her occluded irises would tell me when they were off to some far place, when she had divided herself between here and there. Owing, I think, to her ability to perform this trick of simultaneous presences, her irises would move in small lateral darts as if they were being operated by two separate selves.
    Upon greeting me and others, she would bow slightly in a most uncommon fashion, as if she were not offering a courtesy but responding to a courtesy a lesser had rendered first to her.
    Some twelve years or so ago, around 1958 or 1959, I calculatedly asked her the question I thought would stir in her the fascinating otherworldliness that I found so compelling.
    “How old are you, Grandma?” Her eyes were wide, seeing virtually nothing. She seemed not put off by the question but