This is a series of essays I wrote for my final senior seminar project which are taken from vignettes my grandmother shared with me during interviews.
Cotton
by Maya Martin, as told by Nancy Chapman Monroe
This project is dedicated to Dorothy Chapman and Nancy Chapman Monroe.
Why I wrote these essays
My project is about death, I think. The project began when my grandfather died from COVID in January. For me, it all centers on sitting in that hotel room with my grandparents after seeing my other grandfather’s open casket feeling so terrified about this unspeakable thing that is out of my control, wanting to hold on to everyone I have now forever. There is nothing fresh or new about the subject of death, of course. Everyone has lost someone to COVID. Perhaps it’s interesting how quilting is a powerful tool for enshrining your own immortality (my grandmother’s words). I know the story matters to me. There was something healing about formally sitting down with my grandmother every morning and asking her to remember. I uploaded them to my computer every night, gave them the appropriate titles, and shared them with my mother. Perhaps ironically, listening to my grandmother talk about daffodil hill calmed my mortality crisis a bit. Daffodil Hill is what she hopes her house at the top of a hill in Bremen, Georgia will become in a hundred years after they both are gone, and it comes from the song “Secret Love” by Doris Day: “Now I shout it from the highest hills / Even told the golden daffodils.” For a while, I’d played with this idea of interviewing my grandmother (my late grandfather’s ex-wife) on tape to capture all of the fascinating and hilarious stories she’d relayed to me from her childhood, but attending my grandfather’s funeral and watching my grandmother battle with recovery from back surgery, catching COVID herself even after she’d gotten vaccinated, and most recently falling from a ladder and breaking her arm, made the interviews feel even more urgent. The pandemic itself made everything feel more urgent, and maybe that answers the question of why this piece matters, and why it matters now, of all times. I’ve always found my grandmother to be a fascinating person. Something unfurls in me to hear her talk about her relationship with God. I’d written the sole poem in the piece a year before, but I found more context for every line in the poem through my interviews, and I offered up more prose not to explain the poem, but as one half that with the poem makes a whole. At a party, my grandmother is the person you’ll find at the center of the circle telling the most hilarious story you’ve ever heard. She’s told me certain stories so many times that I remember them as things that have happened in my own life. My grandparents invited me to join them on a vacation on Jekyll Island in October, and this felt like the perfect opportunity for me to interview them both, so I started assembling questions both easy and hard, and painstakingly categorizing them in my free time— from most important to least important, from lighthearted to deeper. When I found out that I was two months behind on the class that would allow me to obtain my creative writing degree four and a half years after I started college, the idea to write about my grandmother had already been percolating. I liked the idea of having deadlines and an audience for our stories. I liked the idea of having material fodder to work with rather than relying solely on my own fickle memory. Jekyll Island became a research trip.
One interesting nugget that did not make it into the final draft is that in the months leading up to my grandfather’s death, when he was starting to get a bit better, he falsely believed that my grandmother had sent him a slideshow of photos of all the people he loved over the years. My grandmother makes a lot of slideshows like this, so it wasn’t an entirely off-base hallucination. When someone you love is dying, you realize how important those slideshows become. The person in the slideshow playing to the left of the casket will matter more to you than the person in the casket. When I interviewed her, my grandmother said that she was passing the “family historian” role on to me. This collection of essays is inspired first and foremost by her memoirs Earth Calling Heaven–Anybody Home? and Dance With Me, Lord! and from interviews I conducted with her on Jekyll Island and follow-up questions I later sent over text. I also drew inspiration from Poet Warrior and Crazy Brave by Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, whose writing has been inspiring me since high school; Fun Home by Alison Bechdel for its juxtaposition of a family’s past and present; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf for a stream of consciousness style that got me going in earlier drafts; The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, which introduced to me the idea that inanimate objects can have feelings too; the beginning of Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway, from whom I got the idea of introducing a character through a photograph; Broken by Jenny Lawson for setting the best of examples for how to discuss the strangest of family stories in a fun and whimsical way, and Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna for a road map for narrativizing events from before your own birth. The text also makes reference to other texts and media: Father Knows Best, The Patty Duke Show, Jane Fonda’s exercise CDs, The Nightmare Before Christmas, In Cold Blood, In the Time of the Butterflies, The Kite Runner, Fast Food Nation, Switched at Birth, and Doris Day’s “Secret Love.”
In writing this, I had to contend with some difficult questions. What makes the story of my family unique? How much should my mother appear at the edges of the story? Will I show my writing to my grandmother? What are the ethics of capturing someone else’s stories in writing? Do I write around or through tragedy? How do I use, or avoid using, quotation marks? What do I do when the story writes itself and I just need to get out of the way? My classmates Gracie Johnson, Damara Soto, and Aminah Parris helped me clarify what belonged and didn’t belong in the story, and how I could better write brutal shifts in point of view. After rereading the first draft several times, I realized that the modernist stream-of-consciousness style would not work for me, because my anxiety also enjoys the modernist stream-of-consciousness style, and it will take my writing wherever it pleases. My writing works best when fenced in. Given an open field, I will absolutely write (or talk) myself into a hole. My first draft was a jumbled mess of unhinged emotion, so I had to print it all out, lay it on the library table, and decide what the main sections were. I decided the story was centered around these main topics: quilting and writing, white picket fences and daffodils, and polio and love story. Then I highlighted every sentence of my first draft and rearranged them into their buckets like puzzle pieces. Some of the sections birthed new sections, and some of the sections swallowed one another. Writing a prologue, then, helped me clarify what the story was about and cut away the irrelevant bits. Introducing that photo of my grandmother taking a photo of herself taking a photo of me on the other side of a glass door just made sense. Every time I got stuck, I spent 10 minutes or so chipping away at transcribing one of the eleven recordings, and listening to my grandmother’s voice over and over again reminded me of each important little nugget that I would be ashamed to miss. One challenge I ran into while writing was the question of whether to keep every line cold and concrete like Ernest Hemingway, or go the Yeats route of inserting so much emotion that the reader will want to throw up. I hope I struck the right balance. I learned from a visiting writer, Christine Schutt, that you can only get away with a mushy gushy sentence if all the sentences leading up to it are solid and subtle.
This project feels different from my other creative writing. My writing in the past has been so close to myself that it has hurt me to put it out into the world and receive the world’s feedback. Often, I was convinced that the painful bits of my story were the only bits worth writing about, and so I had to make the healthy decision to distance myself completely from writing unless I had to write a literary theory essay or something. Writing mostly about someone who is not myself was a healthy way to push myself back into writing. First and second drafts of this piece also drifted into various unrelated traumas, and in revising I had to again cut them out and refocus. I’ve found that everything I write does not have to be sharp and hard in order to matter. You can be a little bit more subtle sometimes without totally boring people. Some of the sections here did not make sense when written in my voice, so I had to try on other people’s voices. This is also the longest writing project I’ve ever worked on, which was both a blessing and a curse. I quickly discovered that no section could be longer than three pages without completely losing focus. The sections would have to stay short and sweet. I liked playing around with time and every once in a while giving an inanimate object its own voice. I would hope to peg myself as more of an experimental memoir writer, and there may be more room to experiment with this piece yet. How would it perform if every section were converted into poetry? Art? Fiction?
In the midst of furiously writing, I found that elusive “I” character nudging her way in. Where my grandmother’s stories intersected with my own, I let them. Where the “I” character was obnoxiously taking up more space than she deserved in the story, I shoved her back out. Initially I had not expected my grandmother to share so much with me about difficult subjects like her second husband and her father, and I’m grateful that she did. I wrote “Cotton” on the same day as she had told me the story because I was so overcome by this cinematic image of the napping three-year-old dragged along on the fluffy cotton pick sack. What amazed me was that she remembers in such detail the sound that it made as it was dragged along. I asked her if she ever resented the fact that she grew up in poverty, and she told me about these sweet memories that others would read as not so sweet, memories that were sweet because she was so wrapped up in her mother’s love. After I finished writing the first draft of this section, I wondered how it might sound different in the second person. Putting myself in the shoes of my great grandmother, Granny Chapman, I was also overcome with love for the three-year-old in the cotton field. The images emerged so cohesively in my mind: The toddler’s needlework, the 8-year-old on her knees in church, the 60-year-old planting daffodil bulbs. I just had to put the images together.
Introduction
There is a photo that hangs in the “girls’ room” upstairs in my grandparents’ house of a three-year-old me in white overalls reaching for the handle of a glass door. There are three layers to this picture: One, a toddler facing away from the camera, the door handle just beyond reach, unaware that someone who loves her is behind her performing a magical act that will suspend her there in time forever; Two, the reflection of the young brown-haired grandmother behind her with a Nikon obscuring her face; Three, the translucent blue sky trapped in the glass of a white-framed door. And, perhaps, a fourth layer: My ever-changing face reflected back to me from the glass frame that three-year-old me is trapped in. For so many of the photos that live on the walls of this house, my grandmother is the one behind the camera, taking film to Wal-Mart to print out, or uploading so many photos that every computer she’ll ever buy will crash. But this is the only photo where we get a peripheral, fleeting glimpse of the figure who’s appointed herself as this child’s own personal paparazzi, like the grandmother of three seconds before the photo was taken is taking a photo of herself taking a photo of her granddaughter. She calls herself the family historian. “For posterity,” she jokes every time she snaps a photo. Her children’s childhoods are also well-documented not only in film but on paper, too (in the past, my mother has expressed to me both her amusement and chagrin that a chapter of her mother’s memoir Earth Calling Heaven: Anybody Home? tells the story of the conversation that followed her getting her first period). My childhood is well-documented, too, from the pigtails to the first day of pre-K to our visit to my college bookstore for merch. As a young kid, I ignored the camera, but when I noticed it, I was fascinated and wanted to hold it myself. As a teenager, I turned away the minute before the photo was taken. Now, I’ve stopped accepting friend requests from people I know because accepting the requests will mean that friends, coworkers, and classmates will now have access to every single bad photo she tags me in, but I don’t have the heart to ask her to stop posting them. She has never seemed embarrassed by my acne or my terrible eyeliner or my morning hair; she has always seemed to find me a subject worth sharing with her hundreds of Facebook friends as often as possible.
I don’t remember the first time I turned the camera around. But I know the picture I love the most. It was 4am. We had boarded a plane from Seattle to Atlanta with a layover in Los Angeles. Undoubtedly, in a few hours she would capture the 14-inch chocolate pancake I ordered at the LA diner and my wide eyes above it. But as we traveled that belt of sunrise between sky and earth, above a Pacific Ocean that from this distance looked like blue carpet, I raised my phone to take a photo of her, makeupless, camera-less, uncaffeinated, blissful, a strip of soft orange alighting on her large eyes. When I showed her the airplane photo later, she would say, “goodness, I’d forgotten what I look like without makeup on.” It would perplex me, like it might perplex her if I ever pointed out an imperfection in a photo she’d taken of me. To criticize yourself in a photo that someone you love has taken of you is as much a criticism of them as it is of you. She is dark, tan, with large brown eyes and freckled arms and translucent hands with veins that jump out at you. When I was a kid, she admired my long “piano fingers” and the unblemished brown skin on my hands. She enrolled me in piano lessons and bought me pearls. She had this grand vision of me sitting at a piano on a stage in a black dress and those pearls and letting loose a symphony. Then we moved away, and I stopped playing piano.
We wrote each other letters. She told me funny anecdotes about her eleventh-grade AP English students, and I told her about my Arabic teachers. When we were together, I said, “Grammy, let’s go sit at the picnic table outside and give each other writing prompts and write.” She’d write about the squirrels. I’d write about the witches. She would write cursive comments in the margin of the fantasy book I wrote on wide-ruled paper collected in a binder. Then in my diary at home, I’d write about her, that funny thing she had said, or what I’d heard my parents saying about her. After my grandfather’s funeral, I dug through my mother’s basement trying to find him, and I found a copy of Dance With Me, Lord! with a note in the front jacket: To Maya— to play with. I LOVE YOU! Grammy, 9-2-01. There are scribbles throughout the book where I left my own profound annotations. My writing continues to make fanfiction of her Christian memoirs, challenge it, what it doesn’t say, that terrifying thing that she’s afraid to put into her books, the reason I can’t ever show anyone in my family any of my writing. Write about me, and I’ll write about you. Love me, and I’ll love you. It’s both a promise and a threat. It’s hard to be the family member of a writer, goes the saying in our family.
As we stood on the damp grass of the military cemetery waiting for my mother to arrive in the funeral procession and watched cars whiz by on a highway towered by department stores, my grandmother reminisced on long drives down a little road in a blue stick-shift Pinto with her sweet high school boyfriend Larry. Us memoirists tend to keep one foot in our lives and one foot outside of them. That is to say, I wrote a poem about my great grandmother’s death six months before it happened. That is to say, in her hotel room after the viewing of her ex-husband’s body, she said maybe she would write about this someday, and I thought, me too. In my diary after I got home from Alabama, I wrote down every detail I could remember about the funeral and our conversation in that hotel room. I don’t want Grammy to die, I sobbed to my mother. We went up to her and my other grandfather’s hotel room and I ran to my grandmother and hugged her tight. My brother and I sat on their bed, death hanging over us, an unspoken thing finally voiced. Poppa Wayne (her husband since before I was born) was using this moment to think out loud about the benefits of a military cemetery and the plots he and my grandmother will go in, covering his fear of death, I suspect, with a surgical matter-of-factness. I wanted him to shut up. I wanted the four of us to sit in that hotel room together for the rest of time.
The reason my grandmother takes endless photos of me, she says, is because she wishes she had more photos of herself as a little girl, as a teenager, as a young woman. I look at the photo of my grandmother taking a photo of myself at three, and I try my hand at stepping behind the camera to reconstruct the other three-year-old in the picture.
Cotton: To my great grandmother, who died when I was two
When filled with cotton, a pick sack can make a soft bed for a three-year-old. The cotton will love the feeling of her weight. If you carry one along with you into the cotton field, she will fall soundly asleep on it. She will always remember the sound of the ground below her as you drag her along. This sound will be her earliest memory. If you grew up with polio, you may walk on one strong leg and another leg that stopped growing when you were a child. Your foot may have bent so far forward that you walked on top of it when you were a teenager. You may have never run. You may envy your three-year-old. You may feel embarrassed when the neighborhood boys fall into their own exaggerated limps and snicker at you. Your daughter could be watching from the porch and you would never notice her own embarrassment too. You will break your back picking cotton. You will always love your daughter for turning the field into her own personal playground. She may awaken from her nap on the pick sack to watch the long lines of fluffy white with fishbowl eyes. A cotton boll, so fat and soft and full of fluff, is the stuff of a toddler’s dreams. The adults will laugh at her if she happens to painstakingly pick the seeds out of every boll so that it looks pristine when she places it into the tiny pick sack you will make for her. At the end of the day, when the back of the truck is halfway filled with workers’ cotton and packed down to make room for more, it will feel like heaven to her to roll around in them, but you will know when it becomes hell for her asthmatic lungs. Could you imagine then the pocket-sized inhaler that would release sterilizers into her system ten years into the future? How would you keep her alive in the winter? You will bury Nancy and her big sister Liz under layers and layers of quilts. When the attacks come, you will apply Vicks vapor rub to her chest, rub her back, and pray.
Beware of exposing an impoverished and fatherless child to TV sitcoms like Father Knows Best and The Patty Duke Show. She may begin to dream of white picket fences and fathers who bring presents for Christmas. Avoid workplace shows too, and particularly That Girl. She may begin to dream of restaurants with real tablecloths and a waiter at her elbow. Love her, and she will never know resentment’s name. If she comes home from the second grade with tears streaming down her face because a neighborhood boy tells her his momma said Liz isn’t really her sister and she doesn’t have the same daddy, tell her it’s true. She may become the family comedian. She may make you laugh every day. That Nancy Fay. Is she better off if you leave her? One day she will play in a sandbox with an older girl named Fay with large eyes and dark hair and everyone will say the two look uncannily alike. Where did she come from, this daughter of yours, so rabble rousing in a family of quiet women? In forty years she will be exercising to a Jane Fonda CD with her cousin Christine and the phone will ring and the voice at the end of the line will say, my name is Bill Garrison, and I think you’re my little sister. Nancy Fay with the large eyes and dark hair and rich inventory of knock-knock jokes.
If given dolls, she may choose to sew them outfits. When sewing the dolls outfits, she might imagine the cute little dress or tuxedo she will make for her first child. The Barbie will feel fabulous in her new overalls and dresses and pajamas. You will spend weeks at the treadle machine patching up the eye of a gifted teddy bear and sewing him a flannel and overalls to delight her when she comes home from school one day. You’ll tell her you think she and her sister would be better off without you. You’ll tell her you think she and her sister would be better off without you. You’ll tell her you think she will be better off without you.
She might be the last breath of a dying man. That breath might say, you have a little sister in Oneonta, Alabama and her name is Nancy Fay. If you allow her father to visit her now, she won’t remember him later. She will try to reconstruct the figure in her mind, but the image will always print in the figure of one of the characters from her sitcoms.
If you tell her you think she and her sister would be better off without you, she will beg you not to go. She will try everyday to make you smile.
Sew stitches in front of her. Let her become mesmerized. Hand her the needle. Let her run her stitches zig zagged and looped and skipped and curved. Leave the needlework enshrined for the rest of time. She will have been there. She will have touched the fabric you touched.
My grandmother answers a question about times she started to see her mother as a person
As told by Nancy Chapman Monroe
I was already in my forties the day that I had the realization that every child has at some point in her life that my mother was a person and not just my mother. I was visiting her at her home in Oneonta. I was writing down something. I had on a pair of shorts. I was leaning over and my legs were prominent, I guess. I didn’t realize she was looking at my legs. I heard a voice behind me and she told me then, you’ve got the prettiest legs. I heard her on a different level that day. I had this sudden flash of the 10 or 12 year old whose foot was turned all the way over and had just stopped growing for all intents and purposes for the rest of her life. I remember a mean old neighbor boy, Kenneth Baldwin, walking by the house and Mama out in the yard working and he started limping like Mama limped as he was walking down the road. He and his cousin were laughing and pointing at Mama because she walked with a limp. That broke my heart that day. There was a young 18 year old woman there in that house in Oneonta looking at my legs, who wanted to be pretty, attractive, shapely, but she had this imperfection. This 18 year old who dreamed of marriage and children and being in love and someone in love with her who could love and cherish and admire her beauty. She had always been just Mama, whose eyes lit up when I came into the room, who asked me to sit down and stay awhile, when I always had somewhere to be.
Before she got really disabled and was still living in an apartment in Oneonta, she started talking a lot about someone named Bill. Bill was a neighbor in his late 70s or 80s, and he had a car, and he would go to the market and buy turnip greens or collards. He’d come by and say, Dorothy, do you want to cook these? and she would have him over for lunch. I began to realize that she talked more and more about Bill. I lived in Lake Oconee or Marietta at the time. It took me a while to catch on. This was a time in her life when she would walk every day, and she didn’t have the responsibility of parenting or the upkeep of the family place, or milking any cows or feeding any chickens. Bill came into her life. I realized that she loved this guy, and he loved her. They spent a lot of time together. He took her to town and to the grocery store and to the farmer’s market, and I was so thankful for him. For the first time in my life, my mother had a boyfriend. I encouraged it and said, y’all enjoy life, just enjoy one another, just enjoy it. One day I met him. He was so tall, well over six6 feet, and he wore a fedora.
Listen: We all live with every version of ourselves in our mind. At 3 years old, at 6 years old, at 15 years old. You have to take care of the children inside of you. If you don’t remember anything else that I’ve said, remember this.
I wish I had that again. I wish I could sit with her in that moment and say, I have questions for you. On October 7, 2002, I sat in the cafeteria with my mother-in-law and chatted and laughed and when I went back upstairs to my mother’s hospital room, all my aunts and uncles were coming and going. They said, your mama’s been asking for you. I went to Granny Chapman’s bedside and Granny Chapman kept throwing the sheets off and I kept telling her to cover up or she’d get cold, but Granny Chapman kept throwing the sheets off and that’s when I realized she was trying to hug me. But it still didn’t hit me. I didn’t know that she was going to die today. And I don’t know if I wish that I had known that or not. So when it finally struck me that this was the end, I leaned in close and said, go dance across heaven today with Jesus, Mama.
Let’s stop right there.
I answer a question about times I started to see my mother as a person
Once when my mother was 7 she spent a week afraid that an airplane would fall out of the sky and instantly kill her immediate family. Seeing her dad go off to work or her brother playing outside on his bike ramps would inspire an onslaught of tears. For a week when my mother was 7, anxiety pinned her to the floor. At the end of the week, something broke, maybe, and the anxiety passed as quickly as it had come. My mother stubbed her toe a lot as a kid. She bumbled around the house at high speed like any kid would, until the edge of a chair or ottoman swept her off her feet and took her breath away. The trees she fell out of looked like huge blurs of green and brown when she squinted at them from her place on the ground. She was blonde. She had strawberry-shortcake pillowcases. She loved to play in the creek that is now in an open field across the street from the nursing home where my great grandmother died of COVID on the other side of a pane of glass. Oneonta is a mountain town. She wrote a poem about grasshoppers once that her stepfather accidentally threw away decades later. She tucked her stuffed animals into bed every night, and she tucked the ones who couldn’t fit on the bed into a quilt on the floor, and she cried for the ones on the floor who must have felt so excluded. She spent months inside her room watching the world from her window after a high school boyfriend broke up with her. She moved into a house in a forest by a river with a cat and bought her own medicine when she was sick. She watched a beaver swim by her window when the river flooded. She met a tall charismatic Black man at an iHop and fell in love. She got pregnant.
When did I realize that my mother was a person? When she handed me a river stone when I was 4 and afraid of monsters under my bed and she said it protected her during a low time in her life and it would protect me too. When I asked my grandmother about why she stubbed her toe so much as a kid and my grandmother cried and cried, “I should have known she needed glasses.” When I read about her blonde hair splayed over her strawberry-shortcake pillowcases as she cries silently in the middle of the night between the pages of my grandmother’s memoir. When we visit my great grandmother in a nursing home across from a creek. When I learn that my mother was a writer too. When she empathizes with Bella in Twilight sitting somberly at the window as the seasons pass. When she takes care of me when I’m sick. When I look in a mirror.
The Featherweight
My grandparents invited me on a long trip to Jekyll Island, an island off the coast of southern Georgia, this October. The idea to interview them had already been percolating in my mind ever since I watched my other grandfather’s baby-blue coffin sink into the ground. Did the idea of the apocalypse scare you when you were a kid? What is your earliest memory of feeling loved? What was it like to care for a growing grandbaby and a dying mother at the same time? What is it about daffodils?
Jekyll was marshy and haunting. We often had to pause the interviews when the lights in the background of our rental home started flickering, a sign that the deer had come by to eat bread out of our hands. My grandfather had high hopes of taking me on a bicycle tour around the island, but it was hot, and I was content to stay inside and chat with my grandmother as she stitched things together. In the so-called “Jekyll room,” we sat in wicker chairs and I watched her loop a needle through a small patch of green Christmas fabric pinned into a plastic frame. She was making a Christmas tree with bunched-up spirals of this fabric lined around a green styrofoam cone. They were called yo-yos. It was mesmerizing to watch. In the dining room, she had laid out the beginnings of a fall quilt assembled from small squares of forty pieces of fabric that told stories of pumpkins, Peanuts characters, turkeys, leaves, and wind. Her basement is like the scene in The Nightmare Before Christmas when Jack Skellington finds a forest seemingly outside of the bounds of time where if you walk through one of the doors, you are transported into a world of townspeople who live in an eternal Christmas, or an eternal St. Patrick’s Day, or an eternal Valentine’s Day. She is always making something for somebody.
For Savannah, a pink and white dresden quilt. For me, a pastel green bow tie quilt and, after I was born, a pink fan quilt for me to crawl over. For Traistan, a science quilt to celebrate his studies at the University of West Georgia. For Asad, a railroad quilt that took seven years to complete. For Joseph a baseball quilt, for Emily Sunbonnet Sue, for her newest granddaughter Gracie a Disney babies quilt put together with pink sashing with a background of little pink hearts.
“Why do you make something different for every season of every year?” I asked. The day I asked this was the anniversary of the date of her mother’s death, October 7.
“Life is short,” she said. “People die. You have to celebrate your people.” Granny Chapman’s eyes lit up every time Grammy entered the room.
“Don’t you resent the people who made fun of you when you were a child?” I asked. “Wasn’t it hard to grow up so poor that you had to pick cotton every summer break during elementary school in the hot Alabama sun?”
“Life is short, people die, kids grow up,” she said after pondering the question for a while. “We are vapor and we pass away.” But you’ll never do that to me, will you? I think. Granny Chapman’s eyes lit up every time Grammy entered the room, and that is what she remembers the most. I keep asking her to write another book. I don’t realize that she’s telling a story with every stitch.
I never really took to sewing, perhaps because I stepped on a pair of sewing scissors while attempting to make aprons with my mother and grandmother when I was 13 years old and sliced my foot open. I liked the idea of sewing. I liked the idea of making my own clothes. The math, the cutting, the patterns, the patience of sitting at the machine, I did not like. Why would I sit with my mom and grandmother in the basement and sew when my little brother was outside with my step dad and grandfather riding four wheelers up and down the deep hills of Bremen, Georgia? Even then, I felt like the blunt end to a long tradition of women in my family who sat up in cold rooms, even before sewing machines, quilting by hand so that everyone could stay warm at night. Because when I stopped at the top of the stairs to the basement, heading out to go ride four wheelers, I heard Grammy say softly, “She doesn’t seem all that interested in sewing, does she.” My mother said, “Give it time.” But I was relieved years later when my 8-year-old cousin Emily began drawing patterns for my grandmother to sew, until eventually Grammy taught her how to do it herself and bought her a real sewing machine. My mother has had a blue and green geometric quilt in a frame in the corner of her room for the past 8 years. She had wanted to keep it in the living room, but she never did finish. She crochets, though. When the weather gets cold, she talks about this itch she gets, an evolutionary shiver that runs through her to get to stitching or crocheting something. I would sit beside her, beginning a scarf or a blanket that would be abandoned as soon as the episode we were watching ended.
My grandmother made me a book quilt with all of my favorite books and the books that at 17 I hoped I would one day write. Lines and Emptiness, it would be called. While I could not bond with her over quilting, we would always share writing.
I never really took to sewing, though. I tried embroidery for a few weeks or so, but quickly grew tired of needle-threading. Chalk it up to our generation’s shorter attention span. But writing, I could always do. She gave me heavily annotated copies of books she taught her high schoolers: In Cold Blood, In the Time of the Butterflies, The Kite Runner, Fast Food Nation. Each of these books is violent in its own way, and I suppose they influenced my own writing about werewolves and dragons. She encouraged me to take note of my dreams, my letters, funny things my little brother had said. I would be the next family historian, so I needed to record everything, in case I forgot the most crucial parts later. Her almost-nonexistent lips, her brownish freckled skin, her hazel eyes. What it was like to be young and loved.
Grammy found a tiny 1952 featherweight sewing machine with old black steel and a Singer emblem and bought it right away. She brought it with her to Jekyll. It was made for children and it doesn’t have the fancy tricks of her 2020 Brother machine. She says, “it does not embroider, it does not zigzag, it does not automatically thread the needle. But it is solid and steel.” My grandmother was born in the last hours of 1952, so the featherweight is like a long-lost twin to her. She says, “when I touch it, I’m touching 1952. Someone in 1952 bought the machine straight off the assembly line and marveled at its beauty. Thought, I have a sewing machine. What was made on that sewing machine? What clothes, what quilts?” She touches this machine and feels the warmth of every person who has ever touched it. The sewing machine feels her warmth, too. It breathes, it shivers, it sings at her touch. She named it Dottie, after her mother Dorothy Chapman.
I never really took to sewing. But I imagine one winter, when it’s cold and the heat is out and we’re out of food and the kids are sick, maybe I’ll feel that itching in my skin. Make something. Grab a needle, grab a hook, grab a pattern. Let the generations of women before me guide my fingers. Cut the thread at an angle. Lick it to give it weight. Hold the needle to a magnifying glass. Insert. Make a knot at the end. It is time to begin. Make something, sew something, and survive.
Secret Love
I don’t ask about her father. Can you miss someone that you’ve never met? What was it like to be the child of an affair in rural Alabama in the late 50s? For many of these questions, I know the answer. You can miss someone that you’ve never met. If you’re the child of an affair in rural Alabama in the late 50s, your aunt will treat you like the dirt off her shoe. But I’ve never missed my biological father, I would say. I’ve never wanted a father. She would say she’d found a father in God. And— when she was little, sometimes this strange man would come visit to check in on her. No one bothered to tell her who he was and why he was so interested. Maybe he was the last person she’d seen loving her mother until the charming neighbor with the fedora offered to take her to the farmers market. After my grandmother’s brother called her to say hello to his little sister, she traveled to his house to meet the Garrisons and she was overwhelmed by their love and gregariousness. So that’s where it came from, she thought. The little girl’s penchant to talk your ear off. A few years ago, I contacted a boy my age named Will Woods on Instagram to say that I was his sister. I’ve always wanted a little sister, he wrote. We texted for a while. He said his— our— younger brother was a lot like me. I imagined that scene from the show Switched at Birth where one of the kids played basketball with his biological dad and brother for the first time. The scene is blurry in my mind, but it left an imprint. Then I asked if he’d ever want to talk on the phone, and I texted and texted, but the answer was always, I’m too busy this week. I got the message. The next year, I reminded him to vote in the 2018 election and he said lol I will, and that was that. If I asked my grandmother if you can miss someone that you’ve never met, would she answer the question with a question? Would she, too, be too afraid to ask?
I don’t ask about my grandfather. I don’t ask, what do I need to know about him? What should I have asked him before he died? She would say he loved me. Even if I do not voice the question, he turns up at the edges of her every story, giving me the opportunity to ask for more. When he taught you how to drive, was he easily frustrated or was he patient? I can see them now in that blue stick-shift Pinto that she thought was the ugliest car she’d ever seen, him gently guiding her through the gears, her jerking the car to a screeching halt or a mad dash. They’re just kids. Of course he was patient, she says. I was the girlfriend. I held all the cards. Will you write about him? I do not ask. Do you miss him? What are those memories that only the two of you could share through the glint of an eye from across the room? Can I have them? Can I sit in the back of that Pinto furiously taking notes? What kind of a character is he? What kind of a character are you? What are your flaws? What is the moral of your story? Can I write you into mine?
But then even without my prodding she gives me everything. She talks about how embarrassed she’s been about marrying a second husband so quickly, how he appeared sweet until the contract was sealed, and she should have known. She should have known he would be one of those guys who leaves a pencil on the floor and glares at it for days as a cruel test to see if anyone will pick it up so that he can yell at them when they don’t. When I ask her about my mother always stubbing her poor toe as a little kid, it inspires an onslaught of tears. “I should have known Laura needed glasses,” she says. “With twins, you never get to hold either one for long before the other one comes calling mommy. But you have to go back and nurture that 30-year-old self who did not know what she was doing.” She tells me so much more of the truth than I expect she will. When I interview my mother’s current stepdad, Poppa Wayne, in the evening, him on the couch, me in a chair holding a notebook, I ask him what his grandparents told him about their childhoods. “Nothing!” he almost shouts with that familiar glee. In the beginning of the interview, I’m having trouble getting him to answer the questions seriously. “They told me sit down and shut up!” He says, “my grandparents didn’t sit down and talk to you like that.” Then he points to Grammy and whispers loud enough for her to hear: “she’s special.”
So I ask about the daffodils. It’s the only question I’ve asked that has made her cry. I was also puzzled a year ago when I gave her a silver daffodil necklace for a birthday gift I had forgotten to give her for six months after my birthday, and she burst into tears. When she was 8 years old, her preacher called on anyone in the congregation who wanted to step forward and accept Christ, and something moved her limbs forward to him, to Him. Church women asked her mother, does she know what she’s doing? Her mother said, “she knows what she’s doing.” In that creek behind the Baptist church at the intersection of two dirt roads in the mountains of Oneonta, Alabama, a preacher held her hand and waded her into the water to dunk her head and proclaim her saved. She stood on her porch in Oneonta, Alabama with her broken broomstick microphone, making up songs and preaching to the air. So, the daffodil story. It was January or February. She was holding one of her sick, crying babies— my mother, probably, and looking out the window at a dreary day. My grandfather had just lost his job. My grandmother did not have a college degree yet. She looked out that window, feeling so depressed, she says. Christmas had come and gone and there was no money for toys or anything like that and we had gotten a young pine tree to use as a Christmas tree and it was gangly and there were no lights. But it wasn’t just Christmas. It was everything. She looked out the window at the storms outside, praying silently, and saw that those “limber little shoots were just swaying first one way and then the other way, almost touching the ground, but their little yellow heads were still facing up, through the storm, through the rain, through the wind.” She heard a voice in her heart, a fatherly-sounding voice that said, “you’re gonna be okay.”
Daffodils began to crop up everywhere. She enlisted a photographer friend to capture a photo of daffodils holding their heads up to a clear blue sky for the cover of Earth Calling Heaven. On dreary days, she would open up a magazine and see daffodils. She would go to speak at Christian retreats and there would be a giant poster of daffodils hanging on the walls of the vestibule. Countless times, people who had never read her book or heard the daffodil story would come up to her bearing bouquets of daffodils. She would walk into her hotel room and see dozens of the flowers. She calls them the secret kiss of God. She tells me about a time she traveled to speak in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She got on her knees in the hotel room the night before she was scheduled to speak and said her regular prayers— lord guide me, yada yada yada. Then she chuckled and said, “you know, lord, I haven’t seen a daffodil anywhere here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”
She went down to breakfast to spend some time to be quiet with herself before going to speak. She found herself humming along in her head to a song that had started to play quietly in the background of the restaurant, “once I had a secret love, that lived within the heart of me.” The words began to come back to her. Doris Day. She began to sing along, “now I shall live from the highest hill. I even told the golden daffodils.” I find it difficult to watch her cry. When she cries, she really cries. She has let her hair turn white and yellowish and thin after years and years of dyeing it brown. The sight is rather shocking to me, after knowing her for so long as the youngest grandmother I’d ever seen. She’ll look at a selfie she’s taken of herself with me and sigh and puff up her hair before we try again. But there is a comfort to her, too, in knowing that she looks more and more like her mother every day.
“Maya,” she says, gasping for air, “I can’t tell you the love of God that flowed over me. This fatherless child has always reveled in the idea that I am cherished, I am loved, I am fathered.” When I gave her a silver necklace with a daffodil etched into the circular pendant for a birthday-turned-mothers-day present, she began to cry. She had spent so many months that year sitting inside recovering from a major surgery, missing the crows and the garden and the sun and the oak trees just beyond her window. She held the pendant to her chest like it was its own source of heat.
I don’t ask where her ashes will go. She has told me before, in jokes, in conversations on her deck under the stars waiting for the new year with my mother and I. They won’t go to sea, or up on a mantle, or onto the grounds of DisneyWorld (my mother showed me an article that reported on the hundreds of people who do this every year). They’ll go on the flowers. Preferably daffodils. When they moved into their current home, she wanted to call it Daffodil Hill. Over the years, Poppa Wayne has brought home tubs full of daffodils from an old broken-down home out in the woods of his hunting camp that’s all broken down, where the daffodils planted a hundred years ago still shoot up every spring. One year, my cousin Traistan and I were employed to help. There are hundreds of daffodil bulbs buried in their little red-shuttered house on the top of the hill, amid the oak trees and the squirrels and the salamanders. Only a few come up in those small spots of sun that are allowed between all the trees. She says to Poppa Wayne, “daffodils take a while sometimes.” In a hundred years, when they are both gone, the ground of the little house at the top of a hill in Bremen, Georgia will erupt with yellow gold. Maybe there will be a family there. Maybe that family will have twins. A mother working on a degree, a father skilled at fixing white picket fences. When they are both gone, and I am gone, and perhaps you, too, reader, the daffodils will emerge. A child will pluck a bunch off the stem and present the offering to his mother. She will place them in a vase in the kitchen window.
That is the daffodil story.
