**GRIOT** Pentecostal Ghost Stories (Part 2)

(Please see the notes at the end of this post)

In the previous post, I didn't really give you ghost stories. I gave you creepy stories but the real ghost story in our family has to do with me. Of course. With my scaredy-cat self...

I was born in June of the year my Grandma Jack died. My cousin, Candy, was born that September. Grandma had gotten sick sometime in March or April. She died basically of untreated "sugar diabetes" and high blood pressure. That's so common in the black race that our people in Texas used to say that someone died of "the sugar and salt".

People in my family at that time didn't go to see doctors regularly. They would get healing teas and balms and poultices from women who were knowledgeable. Mama told me that a lot of that knowledge had been handed down from slave ancestors. The problem is, those ancestors had been dealing with a different diet and lifestyle. 

I rarely eat even a burger these days

Grandma knew that she didn't have long to live. She had gone from being able to work from dawn to dusk to being waited on by some of the many kids she had raised - hers and those of other people. Eventually, she spent most of her time sitting in a chair on the porch or in her bedroom while ladies from the church sat with her. They read the Bible to her and prayed with her. Her kids made sure she ate and drank something. She had worked so hard all her life and now she was just tired.

This is my grandmother, 
Gretchel "Aunt Jack" Pruitt

Sitting with her on the porch one day, my mother unintentionally started a tradition** that I will tell you about in a bit. Grandma was feeling really bad that day but she sat on the porch while my pregnant (with me) mother kept her company. At one point, Grandma fell into a doze and my mother was thinking the worst. She called Grandma and got no answer. Thinking that if Grandma wasn't dead, she was close, my mother quietly told her that if she needed to let go, she could. She told Grandma that she'd earned her rest and that if she was ready to go home to the Lord, everyone here would be all right.

Mother was startled when Grandma roused herself awake enough to say that she was ready to go "Home" but was waiting to see her grandbabies. She was talking about me and my cousin.  She lived to see both of us. Candy was born on the 7th of September. The family took Grandma to the hospital to see Candy and her mama. Then Grandma Jack died on the 8th. 

Every time Mama would tell that part of the story, I would feel so moved and loved and connected to my ancestry. My grandmother waited for me and my favorite cousin to be born. That is special to me.

Then Mama would get to the creepy part of the story and I would end up sleeping with the lights on for the next week.

I get it, baby boy

After Grandma died, Mama and Daddy were staying in her house to take care of things for a bit. My father was military and we were going to moving away soon to be with him at his next base. He was getting to spend a little family time with his wife and the new baby (me). At this point, I am around 3 or 4 months old.

Laying in bed one night, down the hall from my Grandma's old room, Daddy was talking to Mama about all the changes that would be happening. He was discussing the drive to the new base and getting the new place all set up for a new child in addition to my older siblings, and blah-blah-blah. Being a new mom, my mother was tired and only half-listening. She got up at one point to make sure that I was covered well and tucked in. I was sleeping soundly.

Like couples do, they would talk there in the dark and go quiet for long spells. I was in a crib against a wall across the room from the bed. These old houses had big rooms and this one had an entry door from the hallway on one side of the bed and another door that exited out on the other side of the room. 

In my crib, I had fretted a couple of times but quieted back down enough that my mother and father dozed off.  Until my father was nudging my mom awake because he'd heard something. Footsteps, he said. Out in the hall. Mama listened but didn't hear anything but me starting to fuss just a little. She was just drifting back to sleep when she did hear. Not only did she hear the steps she recognized them. They were her mother's.

The steps had come down the hall from Grandma's room. While Mama and Daddy were now laying there very alert, the steps came into the room and paused. Then they moved toward the crib. I stopped fussing.

At this point, my Mom would always have to stop to herself under control because she'd be laughing so hard from remembering my father's reaction.

She said that she was kind of sitting up and watching the crib and it was rocking very slightly. She turned to ask my father if he was seeing that, but he was holding up the sheet in front of his face so that he wouldn't see. 

Of course, at this point in the story, I always asked my mother if she had been scared. "Scared of what?" she'd always say. "It was my mother, checking on my baby."

Me:

Okay so. That story always made me shiver a little when I was younger. Now that my mother herself is passed, I think about that story with a whole new perspective. As a Christian who has now studied the Bible and looked into things such as "ghosts", that story gives me nightmares. 

There is no such thing as "ghosts". The dead are dead and they aren't coming back to haunt or trouble the living. So... what was rocking my crib? 

See what I mean? 

I choose to believe that maybe what was in that room that night was an angel, maybe? The only other option is... not an angel...

Well, I've told that story. Now I am going to go put on some lights, say some prayers, and douse myself in holy water. 

Peace

--Free

**When my mother was in the hospital and barely hanging on, my sister and I told her that we would be okay if she wanted to go be with the Lord. Not long after, she "let go" and died. Years later, I had to sit alone with my sister and tell her the same thing. I didn't think about this being a "tradition" until later. 

NOTE: I have to clarify that, as an adult Christian, I do not believe in ghosts, every dead person resting in peace just because they are dead, people becoming angels when they die, or any kind of communication with the dead. The dead are dead. My grandma is not coming back to watch over me or tell me where to find the old watch that was lost years ago. The only things from the dead "communicating" with those of us still alive are nothing I want to know about. As an adult, I also no longer believe "shouting" in church or other emotion-based disturbances in worship should be a thing. True faith is not based on emotion. True faith is based on the belief and hope in salvation through Jesus Christ. When music and apparel and other types of "show" become more important than worship and learning, we are making our faith more about us than about the One in whom we profess to believe. I think that churches need to be more focused on making sure that members know the Bible, know and can defend the faith, and in showing due reverence. We should not base the way we worship on pure emotion and imitation. We are to be a light to the world, not entertainment.

**GRIOT** Pentecostal Ghost Stories (Part 1)

Please see the notes at the end of this post

So, I was raised in a holy-roller-type - aka "Holiness" church. I say "raised in" because, even though I only remember going from about the age of 10 to 14, I spent more time on those pews than I did in my bed.

Even though my mother and grandmother went to C.O.G.I.G. churches, they didn't exactly share all the beliefs. The church my family went to believed in things that some people outside the culture will find strange. Now that I am an adult who studies the Bible on a regular basis, I find them more than strange...

• "Shouting" (also called "getting happy" or "getting the Holy Ghost")

So... is the service about worshipping the Lord?
Or entertaining ourselves?

• Speaking in tongues - which, even as a child, I doubted was authentic.

Who is she speaking to?
 And who is interpreting what she's saying?
I have questions...

Not listening to secular music or dancing - like a lot of black churches did. Baptist, Holiness, C.O.G.I.C, etc. This is either ironic or not since so many great singers came out of these churches.  I give you Sam Cooke (Holiness), The Staple Singers (Baptist), Aretha Franklin (Baptist), Otis Redding, Billie Holiday (Catholic), Whitney Houston (Baptist), Marvin Gaye (Pentecostal), etc. If they didn't come out of the churches, they took their sounds from the churches.

• Women not wearing pants.
• Women not wearing excessive jewelry.
• Women not wearing makeup.

And when I say that they had these beliefs, I meant they lived these beliefs. Most of them. There were always the folks who had come straight to church from the pools halls and "jick joints" (juke joints). The majority though had grown up dressing and behaving like good, rule-keeping saints.

My grandmother adhered to the dress code and she didn't care for secular music or a lot of jewelry or makeup. However, she didn't get with all the shouting and speaking in tongues. Neither did my mother. Neither did I.

Another thing that I know now as "not cool" is a belief or participation in the paranormal. My mother and grandmother, though... they had horror stories to rival those found on Reddit. Most of their stories centered in some way toward Voodoo or Hoodoo or similar practices. 

One story was about a woman who had been "cursed" by a jealous rival who had married her lover. The jealous woman had warned the other woman that she would make sure she was never happy if she went through with the marriage. The marriage went through. Soon after, the newlywed began to get sick. Her stomach ached and she started to be really fatigued. She couldn't find a way to be comfortable and would have to be on all fours with her knees tucked under her belly. Things went downhill fast and soon she was confined to bed and started going downhill fast. As she was near death, someone attending to her saw her love rival peering into the window of the bedroom, looking grim and angry.  She focused her stare on the sick woman as she mouthed some words then left. That evening, the sick woman began to make a "lowing sound" - like that of a cow. She didn't stop making that sound until she died.

The other story I heard was probably to scare kids straight. Both my grandmothers were in awe of storms. Or rather, they were in awe of the power of God. Some people talk about Mother Nature, but holy rollers believe in "the master of the wind" (go read your Gospel accounts). When it began to thunder and lightning, everyone was made to sit down and be still. I wasn't around to know how Grandma Jack handled things but Big Mama made us unplug everything in the house. We weren't even allowed to read. If we were going to do anything but lay down and take a nap, it was going to have to do with prayer.

So of course, kids needed to be taught to respect the power or the weather. This next story is what was told to kids who came before me.

A bad storm broke out and a woman was getting her kids settled down to quietly sit things out. As in a lot of homes, the wife was devout but the husband was less so. He was actually quite the drunk and was often slightly abusive.

As the wife settled the kids and began shutting off lamps, the husband got angry about it. She had to bravely defy him to finish shutting off lights and closing shutters. She begged him to "Sit down and have some respect for the Lord." 

That really set him off.  He ran over to the front door, snatched it open, and began yelling curses at the sky. There was a loud BOOM of thunder and a flash of lightning that lit up the whole living room. The man went silent and fell against the side of the door. His wife ran over to see if he was all right.

According to my mother (and her mother), the man's face has been twisted into a stroke-like grimace that never went away.

As I have grown up, I no longer give time to a lot of the nonsense from my youth. However, I still sit my behind down when there is a storm thrashing around in the skies!

Peace

--Free

NOTE: I have to clarify that, as an adult Christian, I do not believe in ghosts, every dead person resting in peace just because they are dead, people becoming angels when they die, or any kind of communication with the dead. The dead are dead. My grandma is not coming back to watch over me or tell me where to find the old watch that was lost years ago. The only things from the dead "communicating" with those of us still alive are nothing I want to know about. As an adult, I also no longer believe "shouting" in church or other emotion-based disturbances in worship should be a thing. True faith is not based on emotion. True faith is based on the belief and hope in salvation through Jesus Christ. When music and apparel and other types of "show" become more important than worship and learning, we are making our faith more about us than about the One in whom we profess to believe. I think that churches need to be more focused on making sure that members know the Bible, know and can defend the faith, and in showing due reverence. We should not base the way we worship on pure emotion and imitation. We are to be a light to the world, not entertainment.

(Repost) **GRIOT** Devil Beating His Wife

(I'm going to be posting twice today. When I was recycling some of my old posts I realized how mundane this blog has been lately. I think I have gotten away from why I started this blog. I always wanted to share my thoughts and feelings as a way to uplift people - and myself. I used to blog about things that perhaps other people could relate to. Looking at some of the more recent posts, all I see are product reviews. How did that happen?

Anyway, I am going to still post product reviews but I really want to focus on life and living and being. For today, I am resharing a Griot post first then I will finally put up a review of that dang Ninja coffeemaker that I have been trying to finish for the longest. This Griot post is from July 11, 2019. It's one of my family's favorites.)

Being the child and grandchild of southerners, I grew up hearing a lot of odd phrases. To be honest, my relatives just talked plain funny. They had weird phrases and they painted the English language with a beautiful array of colors. My people used language in their own way, just as they put a unique spin on living life.

my mother in her late 20's-early 30's (?)

 For the longest time, I thought that only my mother said things like "You don't believe fat meat's greasy". That was for when I was being warned that my misbehaving was about to get me a whooping. Modern mothers threaten to start counting to ten, my mom had more colorful ways of warning me.

 While a lot of the phrases I heard had to do with consequences of my behavior (for instance, my butt was constantly in debt from all the checks my mouth wrote), there were some to go with everything from the weather to someone being sick.

I remember whenever it rained while the sun was shining, my mother would say that the Devil was beating his wife. I was surprised to learn just now how commonly that saying is used - and in a lot of cultures. I'm going to have to go take a closer look at that website.

one of the aunties

When my Yankee friends were "about to" do something, I was "fixing to". When Yanks were not paying you any attention, I wasn't "studdin" (or studying) you. You might be going to Heaven, but I'm going up "yonder". We also go over yonder, back yonder, or way yonder.

I'm not sure if this one is Southern or not, but where others might say someone had you wrapped around their finger, we'd say that they had your nose wide open. Another way to put that is to say that someone has your drawers (underpants) hanging on a bedpost. That, I think, had something to do with voodoo (or "hoodoo"). Another one from the voodoo files is to say that someone must have "worked a root" on you.

an uncle with a church group

Maybe right here is where I can get into my Big Mama's fear of all things pagan. Big Mama wouldn't eat food if she didn't know who cooked it. If she didn't know you, she wouldn't eat your food unless she had watched you prepare it. Why? Cause she was scared of hoodoo. For that same reason, she never left her comb or hairbrush laying around where just anybody could get to it. As Christian as she was (which is why she didn't like voodoo/hoodoo), she wasn't ashamed of her superstitions. She was one of those people who, after accidentally spilling salt, would toss some over her shoulder. Yes, my Bible-believing grandmother could be so unconsciously paranoid that it was kind of hilarious.

 These are some random photos from an old
photo album of my mother's

I don't know most of the people except that they are aunts, uncles, extended cousins, or 
very close family friends.

 I thought it would be cool for my younger nieces & nephews to see these photos. I just now started posting links to this blog of Facebook because that's where the kids hang out!

 

 I love the hair & clothing fashion of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.










Maybe because of their cultural ancestry, or maybe just because they were very practical and thrifty people, my relatives even dealt with health issues in their own ways. I've already talked a lot about my grandmother using asafetida poultices to deal with chest colds. I suppose there's a reason 'fetid' is in the name, but I just learned another thing: that asafetida gets its name from being funky. Wow,. At any rate, my mother never tortured me or my siblings with it but our Big Mama made up for it by giving us daily tablespoons of Castor oil. You might want to throw up every morning after your dose of oil but you were never constipated around Big Mama.

On my mother's side of the family, it was less about the countrified 'slanguage' and more about the Texan lifestyle. Where back in Hope, Arkansas where our Big Mama took us fishing with worms for bait, my West Texan grandfather let us enjoy his walnut and pecan trees. My mother would make homemade, fresh-churned ice-cream right in the front yard of Grandaddy Bud's house. Back in Arkansas, we ate bacon from pigs my grandmother's husband, Mr. Brown owned. We had fresh eggs and meat from his chickens.  In Texas, we ate peaches and apples and crab apples fresh off Granddaddy Bud's trees.

My granddaddy Bud always owned a pickup truck of some kind. My cousins and I would ride in the back while he went around to different homestead's taking care of business and sharing the goods from his trees. I remember one time when he took us on a long ride out "in the country" and showed us fields of cotton ready to be harvested. He told us to ask our mothers about their time spent picking cotton as kids. My mother told me that it was one of the ways she and her cousins made money as young girls. They would spend hours in the field, filling bag after bag with the cotton. I was absolutely horrified, but my mother had good memories of the time spent with her cousins and friends out in those fields. Even though she explained to me that there was a difference between being forced to pick cotton and being given a choice to get paid for doing it... I never could handle it. Years later, when I went through my stage of being a junior revolutionary and idolizing Newton and Seale for being bravely defiant, I would just cringe when I thought of my mother picking cotton.

Back when I was young, church and religion was a different experience depending on which grandparent I was visiting. My dad's mom (Big Mama) was deeply religious but didn't attend church on a regular basis. Nevertheless, if there was a heavy storm, she made everyone (kids and adults) get still and quiet. If there was any lightning or thunder involved, well, forget doing anything but taking a nap. You weren't going to disrespect the Lord in Big Mama's house by doing much of anything until the storm passed. To this day, during a heavy storm, I will sit my tail down and try to be still until the weather calms down. Unlike Big Mama, I don't go around unplugging everything, but I'm not trying to party down.

I didn't realize it until I was writing this post, but apparently, I carry a lot of my recent ancestors around in my behavior. Yesterday, I was cooking some sausage in my new cast iron and I flashed back on my mother standing in front of the stove, cooking something in her cast iron. I understand that people we love don't go ever completely away. They are in our memories of them. They are in the lingering memory of their touch or the sound of their laughter. They are here with us in the ways they affected us, changed us, or made us love them.

Peace
--Free

For the video pick, I think this one is just about perfect.

(Repost) **GRIOT** Named and Loved

 (Okay, this one from 7/13/19 is the last of the repostings. The sarc fog is easing up. I've been drinking a lot of coffee and am working on the review of the new coffeemaker. For this last recycling of posts, I wanted to share one that always makes me smile. My family is my whole heart and just thinking of them makes me feel better and blessed and able to keep going. If you don't have blood relatives, your friends can be your family. Your neighbors can be your family. Whoever your "family" is, always think of them with love.)

Okay, so I was chatting online with some of the nieces and nephews about these Griot posts. They love hearing about their 'grandpeople' and I love sharing what I can remember. Since the cousins are all about the genealogy these days, I thought that I could talk about some of the names that run in our line.

A name is a special thing. Your surname can be a kind of placeholder in history. Your first names sometimes are meant to reflect the hopes pinned on you. In the Bible, names are very important. God would change people's names or bless their names. Today, we honor our Adamic past by giving children Bible names. I watched a documentary the other day where the presenter noted that you won't find a lot of children named after Judas Iscariot. I had never thought of that before. Personally, I have always believed that the name a child grows up with can have a serious impact on their personality and attitude, not to mention in how the rest of the world might see them. That's why we make cruel fun of people by calling them a "Becky" or "Shanequa" - and I have been cruel in that way...

In my family, nicknames were kind of a big deal. My mother had an older brother named Eber but everyone called him "Mutt". Uh, yeah. Don't ask because I don't know. There were other male relatives or close friends known as Sonny, Sonny Boy, Snookie Boy, and Bugs.

One of my mother's sisters - the one who passed before I was old enough to know her - had a beautiful name: French L. The "L" didn't stand for anything, it was just part of her birth name. I do remember that some of my folks would pronounce her name as "Frānch L.", going long on the 'a'. Apparently, she was as beautiful as her name. She must have been a riot though. I heard one story about her once being a little tipsy and admonishing a child for having their shoes on the wrong feet. The child knew better than to mention it, but the adults who were there cracked up laughing because Aunt French L's shoes were also on the wrong feet. Aunt French L's granddaughter was named after her but we mostly called her just "French" or "Frenchie".

Some of the adults I knew as a child were always referred to by their initials. To this day, I can't tell you what Aunt French L's husband's real name was. We just called him Mr. J.B.

My father always called my mother Hon but most of her other family and friends called her "Tootsie" (or, as they pronounced it, "Too-see"). This is because she was very dark-complected but, as a child and teenager, had fire-red hair. Being so black-skinned with that red hair, she looked to them like a Tootsie Pop. She dyed her hair a deep brown for years until it started to grow in a darker auburn. Here's something crazy: I'm very dark-skinned like my mother and my hair also tends towards auburn if I don't keep it dyed. In addition to that, I inherited from my father blue encircled irises. It's a harmless condition and not a totally uncommon thing although it can freak people out when the sun hits my eyes the right way. Without the sun shining into them, most people don't notice anything different about my dark brown eyes.

Back to the wonderful nicknames, one of my favorite uncles - formally named a Jr after his father, Oscar Sr - was always called Hot Shot (or 'Hah-sha'). My grandfather was known to his friends as "Bud". Oscar Sr's wife (my step-grandmother) was "Miss Ollie" to everyone, including me and the other grandchildren. By the way, young Rudy Cosby sounded just like Miss Ollie did when saying "Bud".

Granddaddy Bud's first wife, my grandmother, was named Gretchel but, for some reason, everyone called her "Aunt Jack".For the longest time, I thought her first name must have been Jacqueline or Jackie.

I had a cousin we always called "Yogi". Whenever a teacher in school used her birth name of Saundra, everyone - including Yogi - would look around to see who she was referring to. Other cousins and peers of mine had names that had to do with sweetness: Peaches, Cookie, Sugar, and Candy. I use those names for characters in my stories because I loved the real people.

Now that  I think of it, my Texas family were the ones with nicknames. Not so much with my Arkansas relatives. I'm going to have to think about that a little bit. Actually, my dad's father was never called George; everyone called him Mr.Tampa and I don't know why that is since "Tampa" was no part of his actual name... Now I'm going to have to get in touch with one of the aunties! I need to know what was going on with my grandpa's name!

Remember now that my paternal grandfather - Mr. Tampa - was a Louisiana man. His relatives did have nicknames. I remember a distant female cousin (?) that was called "Big'un". I really am going to have to talk to my paternal aunties because I cannot remember some of the other nicknames for the Lousiana family...

My oldest brother was called "Chubby". When he was younger, he was, in fact, kind of chubby. My sister who I've talked so much about over the years was nicknamed "Mike" and there's a story behind that. I was Penny to my parents and siblings up until I became a teenager. One of my older brothers still calls me by that nickname on occasion and I had one uncle who called me that until he died a couple of years ago. Apparently, as an infant, I was copper-colored like a new penny. As I got older and my skin darkened, one of my older brothers started calling me "Black Knight". Yeah. Cute... In high school, I went through a phase where I used only my middle name: Michele. Some of my closest friends back then called me Bones because I was so rail-thin. Oh, the good old days of carbs without consequences!

Names are not just an identity. Your name belongs to you in a way that can help shape your identity. When you love someone - through kinship, friendship, or romance - their name on your tongue has the taste of your relationship with them. You might remember that favorite quote of mine is by a child who defined love as keeping someone's name safe in your mouth. That's so real.

Thinking back to some of the first people, Adam's and Eve's names had meaning. Even God has several names and they each have a special meaning. I personally like to think of Him as El Shaddai and Elohim. To go further, even love has different names. In reference to my faith, Agape (or Agapao) love is the one that most comforts me.

So, when you think of your loved ones and speak their names, remember what the Bible teaches about the power of the tongue. Keep those names safe in your mouth. Speak their names with love and peace and hope for their well-being. Even when speaking of your enemies, be careful not to use their names in ways you wouldn't want anyone to use yours.

Peace
--Free

And since I am in a praising the Lord mood right now, here's some Third Day with beautiful lyrics

(Repost) Back to Church

(I'm recycling some old posts while my brain is on a sarc-induced hiatus. This one is from 5/14/19. I've been listening to music that uplifts my heart while I rest my body. One of my favorites is "Redeemed" and my mother and I both loved "In the Upper Room" and, another of my faves & and because Buckley does such an amazing tribute to Mahalia with his version"Satisfied Mind".)

I can't remember (and don't have the patience to check) whether or not I have ever posted here about why I left the Pentecostal church. Basically, it was all about that church being a legalistic man-based religion instead of being Bible-based and God-led. The church I grew up in worried more about a person's outer appearance than they did the inner heart. And they really loved to pick and choose which parts of Jesus' teachings to follow.

Anyway.

One thing I did always love about the church services of my youth was the music. There is no Broadway production that can beat a Sunday service at the right church. When the preacher finishes performing, then comes the choir with its musicians.

I have always had a hard time explaining to people what the music was like in the church I grew up in. Then I found this video. It took me back 45 years and sat me down in a pew in Big Spring, Texas just like I never left.

This is why some church services lasted well into the night. Just when you thought you were going to be dismissed and get to go home, someone on the keyboard or drums would get inspired to hit one more note and then someone else would start to get "happy" and we'd be back into another round of singing and shouting. I got used to being in church and banging a tambourine until as late as ten o'clock on a school night.

Say what you want about all the stuff that's just wrong about the "Holiness" church, you can't badmouth the musical talent.

My ex and his cousins were the musicians in our church and their talent was just astounding. My ex is the best musician I know. He grew up in church and around all that great music. Too bad that growing up around all the preaching didn't rub off on his behavior as a human being.

I want to mention that not all people associated with the church were bad. There were a lot of good, well-meaning and true-hearted Christians who attended. Just like in the rest of the world though, it's easier to focus on and criticize the worst of the bunch.

Peace
--Free

Memory Storm (4th time)

 UPDATE - I added some graphics for those who asked.

(8/17/21) I'm going to be recycling some posts while I deal with a little health interlude. This is the fourth time with this one. I heard such a beautiful song the other day that it made me feel both happy and sad. It is a song about missing someone who is no longer here in this life. After I listened to it 3 or 4 times in a row, I thought about my mother, my brother, my sister, my husband - all the people who I never dreamed I would have to live without. Even now that I am a Christian, I grieve for them still. I wonder if their essence is still here. I read somewhere about the possibility that the air still holds the breath of people who are long gone. And isn't that something to ponder? Sometimes, I just sit and think about things like that. So, once again, here's this post.

(1/20/10) This is the third time I am re-posting this one. This time is for my girl Miss Carrie :-) 
Seems like a lot of us over on Facebook had our Mamas on our minds. So...


(2/19/09) I posted this the first time almost 3 years ago. At that time, my life was in a cycle of changes, but they were all good changes: moving to start somewhere fresh, new job, new relationships... This time the changes are more painful and harder to bear, but I realize that, God willing, I will live long enough for these hard times to be just a memory. Hopefully, this is just a valley I'm going through on my way to some peaks.) Anyway, like always, good times or bad, when things are at an extreme for me, I think of my mother. So this is, again, for Mama.



(3/14/06)
A Memory Storm
Hey y'all. Your girl here is having what I like to call a memory storm. You know, when you have so much going on in your head that things collide & your brain rescues itself from possible system failure by taking a walk in the rain of pleasant memories. Only the memories aren't nice & organized - they just bounce all over the place, like hail or those hard little raindrops that hurt when they hit you.

Memory storm.

Memories about my mama.

Asafetida - I don't know if that's how it's spelled, but I remember Mama saying it's what her mother used to put on her (Mama's) chest when she had a cold or something. Said it stunk to high heaven & probably only worked because the odor scared the germs away.

Urine Shampoo - Mama told me once how, when they were young, her cousin "Bunky" was the only one in the family with short hair (do y'all remember "In Living Color" where one of the characters talked about folk & one of her lines was about a woman with short hair: "hair so shawt you can read her thoughts!"?) and someone told her that it would grow if she washed it in her urine. This fool saved her pee in a big old jar & once a week, she'd pour the urine on it. I don't know what that old pee must've smelled like, but Mama says Bunky grew enough hair in a few weeks to snatch up into a rubber band. She might've grown more hair if "Aunt Jack" hadn't made her stop with the pee shampoos.

Bacon Grease Lotion - Mama says that if they ran out of Jergens or Vaseline, she and her cousins would use bacon grease (and you know she meant that big jar of "drippings" that sat on the stove in an old Folgers can) instead. One time, one of her cousins oiled up and headed off to work. She was running late, so she short-cut it through someone's backyard. "Someone" had some dogs. Dogs smelled the bacon grease. Cousin had to pull the Wilma Rudolph out of her soul and book like the wind. I guess she was leaping fences like somebody had bet money on her. (I suppose she made it away from the dogs. Mama never said. We were both laughing too hard for her to finish that story.)

Sooty Beauty - Back in the day (Mama's day), there weren't a lot of readily available cosmetics for "women of color." Most of my mother's family has LOTS of color & they go from black as midnight (some of them with grey eyes that gave me serious nightmares & this is before colored contacts!) to Light as Vanessa Williams. Most fall in the middlin' to dark category. The lighter-complexioned folk could get away with over-the-counter lipsticks & blushes and all that. My mother and the rest had to work something else out. So what did they do? Mama says that they'd find the darkest lipstick (usually some kind of slut-red shade) and they could find, then mix in some soot. Yep. Soot from the bottom of pots or burnt wood... The soot would darken up the lipstick enough to compliment a sister with deep roots. (Another time, Mama told me that there were some cosmetics for black women. These were sold door-to-door or could be ordered from ads in the back of romance magazines. A long time ago, someone sent me an old copy of a black romance mag & I saw an ad for "Lucky Heart Cosmetics." Somehow, I picture this as one of the places Mama would have found her makeup when she was young.)

"Busting" a part - My mother was extremely honest. If she didn't know you well but didn't like something about you, she'd be polite about telling you. If she knew you well - or "owned" you as she did her children - she'd skip politeness & just get to the damn point. (Mama's bossiness with a person went up with her level of approval of them. I could always tell a friend of mine was "in" with my mama the minute she went from inviting them to "come on in and have a seat" to telling them "bring your ass on in here and sit down, boy. That couch ain't gone bite your ass." Most guys who made it past being like by Mama were keepers as far as I was concerned.) One time, I thought it would be cute to wear my hair with a part down the very center. Mama didn't think it was cute. When I came out to rescue a date from being scared into incontinency by Mama, she took one look at my head and asked, "Why you got your hair busted down the middle with that part, looking like Sista Tutta?" (I have no idea who "Sista Tutta" is & I didn't ask. I was too busy sliding back into the bathroom to get that part out of my hair. And, no, I didn't "keep" the guy I had the date with. He laughed a little too damned hard at Mama's comments.)

TPV Perfume - (This crossed my mind when I did my "favorite perfume" on the ABCs yesterday.) When I was younger, I wasn't allowed to wear make-up (don't forget my Pentecostal "holiness" background), and perfume was too extravagant. BUT - I knew I had hit a milestone of "getting grown" when Mama let me wear TPV to a school "dance" (aka a bunch of kids standing against the wall in the gym and pretending not to notice each other while music played). Talcum powder and vanilla extract. Yep. I didn't get to buy "Heaven Sent" (or whatever it was called), but I sure thought I was some hot stuff when I wiped that cotton ball of vanilla across my shoulders and then puffed on some powder. Shoot. Too bad the only boy who got close enough to smell it was the boy handing out the plastic cups at the punchbowl.

Chewing tar - This falls into that category of "country health" stuff. I can't even lay this on my mama's generation & end it there because she passed it down to us. Until I was about fourteen (right around the time I was leaving my small-town life), I - and all my cousins, play & real - chewed tar. I don't remember where it came from. My mama and aunt would have it to hand out to us. It was clean little pieces & shiny where it had been broken or cut into bite sizes. We'd gnaw on that tar like dogs on rawhide. Mama always said it was good for the teeth. And I have to say, I always had great teeth - until the Air Force let their dentists practice on all of us.

Wow. Memory storm. Mama on the mind.

Believe it or not, I owe almost all of my current manuscripts (the ideas, the characters, the settings - everything) to these memories. Of course, I guess most writers will say the same thing.

Speaking of writers - be sure to check out the new link on the left. John Baker, out of the UK, writes mysteries & we've exchanged links. (John - I'm SO coveting the cover design on your books - just beautiful! - & I can't wait to read these.)

(1/20/10) Can't believe I forgot this one in previous posts... 
Hot Toddy (?) Remedy - This was a concoction of really hot, really black tea with some liquor tossed in. Mama would give it to me for my, ahem, cramps. I joke with my friends now that I don't know if the cramps went away or if I was just too drunk to notice. (And, BTW, I never did become much of a drinker. Just ask any of the ladies who were with me on a particularly hot Mother's Day outing when I experienced something called "Saki Bombers" for the first time. I definitely got bombed...)

Peace
--Free