GRANDMA....!?

Grandma, Grandma, Grandma…. I have heard my grandson call me "grandma" so many times that I can tell by the inflection of his voice whether he truly wants to speak with me, or if his mother or father has put him on the phone to say hello to his grandmother. However, on a Tuesday (a few weeks ago), my grandson was lying in the emergency room bed when I heard his voice over the phone say, “Grandma….”

There was an unspoken fear that reverberated through the phone seventy-plus miles away to me. Grandma was usually uttered without a thought; the only cause for concern was his own making when he knew he had gotten caught doing something he had no business doing. But this time he was saying my name and asking me, without asking, if I could make everything alright, as I (in his eyes) had always done. His words were laced with anxiety, just steps away from panic. His appendix was inflamed and would need to be removed. The week prior, he had fallen at school playing basketball and received a concussion, and now he needed surgery!

I told him he would be fine, hoping he couldn't hear the concern in my voice. Prayers were immediately sent up on his behalf, and in that moment, the knowledge that we are not in control threatened to overwhelm me. Before I was mature in Christ, I would have bargained with God in a situation like this, but instead, I made my request known and hoped that it and God’s plan were the same.

My Grandson's surgery went well, and his recovery is complete. The sound of his voice when he said, “Grandma…!?” still echoes in my mind, landing on a memory hundreds of years old. I’m on a plantation in Louisiana in Red River Parish, where my people were enslaved. An old woman in her late sixties stood with the rest of the field hands a few feet from the front veranda of the Big House. Miss Abigail was there with her two sons, her daughter, and two other white men. The overseer was by the steps, chewing tobacco, spitting, and pacing restlessly. The group clustered in the yard knew what was about to happen; they just didn’t know who it would happen to. Parents tightened their grip on their children and held their breath, while Mother Nature seemed to do the same. Birds stopped chirping, and even the pesty flies stopped buzzing for a few brief moments. The air was still, and the world had gone silent until the stranger on the porch began to descend the steps, and McDougal, the overseer, jotted up to a young woman clutching a boy around seven years old. The ear-slitting screams of the young mother brought Mother Nature out of her stupor, and the earth became alive again. A flock of birds flew out of the nearby tree, and the wind blew a mighty gust, causing a small cloud of dust to dance in the air. The Spanish moss curtains were drawn back as the mighty oaks witnessed yet another atrocity of this peculiar institution.

Sally, the young woman’s mother and the boy’s grandmother, joined in on the wailing. She begged the stranger to buy her and her grandson. After they had tied her daughter, along with the two other unfortunate souls, to the wagon, Sally pulled her grandson from his mother, tucking him under her arm. As they watched the wagon and the people bound to it disappear, Sally heard her grandson say, “Grandma…!?” She heard him asking, just as I heard my grandson asking, without asking if everything would be okay.

Being a parent or parenting a child, we know that we are not in control. However, we strive to control what we can. We try to protect them for as long as we can from all manner of harm. This world is wicked and dangerous, but it is also beautiful. There will come a time when our children learn that we are not the superheroes that they thought we were. They will know that we can’t make everything alright, but when you’re confronted with that moment, that sound, that knowledge is imprinted on your soul. My helplessness in the moment when my grandson called out to me made me think of how my ancestors must have felt, knowing that every day of their lives they were subjected to the capricious whims of others. I do believe their trauma has been imprinted on their descendants’ DNA because I think of them often. I marvel at their resilience and the fact that I’m here, still standing after everything that this country has done to make existing here in this land harder.

To all the grandmothers in my lineage, I want to say “Grandma…!? Thank you for making everything alright.