I was born and part-raised in an insular black college community that seldom dealt with white folks and their poisons. We dealt with each other. And our own poisons kept us busy enough. As did our triumphs and daily joys. So, after my granddaddy passed in 1980 and everybody worried who would keep her company, I raised my hand high to leave Salinas and stay a year with Grandma. Something sensible had urged me this way. Messing around with hateful white folks, I had nearly lost my sense of rootedness. I had even begun to join in diminishing myself: puffing weed and sipping wine down at the park with my 300-pound homie, Lorenzo. I went home to Pine Bluff because my 12-year-old self sensed its need.
For a whole year I sat in Granddaddy's chair listening to Grandma repeat stories. She repeated them enough for me to remember. Details. Names. Kitty Ann. Robert White. Grandma could wear you out with her repetitions. But God, she could tell it righteously. The highs and lows. The in-betweens. Her insistence on the low-bottom ugliness. The comedy. The word play. The honesty. Unparalleled. And she drew crowds to her back door. They came. And Grandma held court. And we all listened growing more amazed as we aged and wondered at this gift of hers. Where had it come from? Why was it still sitting in that living room on North Spruce Street and not in the wide world? Aside from the stacks upon stacks of romance novels in Grandma's bedroom, a vagueness pervaded our understanding of Grandma's artistry. From her stories, we learned about her mother. She died in Chicago when Grandma was but 6 or 7 and her sister Mary, a year of two younger. Grandma was raised by her heavy-drinking father and Grandma Fanny and Big Ma. Grandma wrestled with this shock and abandonment and it loomed heavy for her. "I was a motherless child," she'd say. At that point conceding to her child's heart that never mended. And it was her child's heart that cast a shadow for us, in understanding this branch of our lives. A sadness and expectation of tragedy colored the most minor occasions. And not until my late twenties did I ever learn anything more about Grandma's line. Her details, shared with me and Mama, would later reveal history that may have shielded me against all the diminishment heaped upon my firm, round, deeply brown body.
Colossal history revealed in casual conversation:
My brother Toure invited Mama, my daughters and Tatum to a Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Legion of Honor, a romanesque museum set atop a green hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. It was 1997 and Toure was teaching at Mohammad's Mosque No. 26, in Oakland, and had been turned on to his African American culture after dropping his football dreams and finishing school at San Francisco State.
I had just finished undergrad and was excited to meet Mama and Tatum, who'd divorced the year before, in the City to share an afternoon with my girls. White clouds rolled Eastward after a rain over the Bay Bridge and a miracle opened a parking space at the museum. We lined up outside as Tatum played with my girls. And after the show started, we found ourselves standing before a painting of nightclub scene. The placard described the technique: noted for its ability to show an almost iridescent light alongside the movement of the black subjects. Archibald Motley was the artist, it said.
"Look at the light!" I whispered to everyone.
And Mama, her eyes someplace else in the museum said, "That's my Mama's cousin."
"Huh?" I said, my face scrunched up.
"That's Miss Ann's cousin. He was a painter. His brother wrote books. On her father's side. Clarence."
I stopped my girls from playing with Tatum. "You see these? Grandma said that's y'alls cousin."
Why did she never tell us this? I thought. Grandma never said anything about these cats either. You mean my cousin was a Harlem Renaissance painter? And his brother was a novelist? Something in me changed at that moment. I had been struck with an honorable history. The story broadened out of tragedy and I wanted to know more.
My brother would pass the following year and I would escape Oakland for grad school in Atlanta, returning to the Atlanta University Center and its richness of heritage. The World Wide Web had blown up and we couldn't get enough of all the key-stroke accessible information. I occasionally searched for this Archibald Motley, cousin of my grandma. One day, just before leaving for a study trip across the country, I searched his paintings. I found an oral history of him from his later days in Chicago and I found a series of Black Belt paintings he'd done in Pine Bluff.
He'd been commissioned by the WPA to paint black subjects in Pine Bluff. And he did. He painted church scenes, juke joint scenes and portraits. One portrait, titled, "Snuff Dipper", was rumored to be a local root worker and another, "Uncle Bob" was unclaimed by any local lore. But the painting intrigued me. I printed it out and searched for more information on the painting. Uncle Bob? It rolled around in my head and I wondered at the Anglo-cized sound. I didn't know any black Bobs. Unless it was Barb, pronounced the way we do. Then I remembered Grandma's repetition: Robert White. Grandma Fanny's husband. Grandma's Grandfather. Her father's father. Dim paw. He lived around the corner, then in Vaugine. The Pine Bluff patriarch. I held onto that name and that printout and carried it in my suitcase to Grandma when I went home to watch my sister graduate over one Mother's Day weekend in 2002. It was just me and Grandma again and I told her I wanted to show her something. We ate a chicken dinner that evening and I pulled out that printout and showed it to Grandma.
"Dim paw," she said. "That's my Grandpa, Ta-lee."
"I thought it might be, Grandma."
"Oh, Lord, ... " she said. She held the picture in front of her and told me about her Grandpa.
"His sister, Mary, was Archibald and Willard's mother. They moved up to Chicago. They had all come from down in Louisiana. Rest of the family stayed here in Arkansas. It was twenty of them." I watched Grandma study the painting as I had. His fingers. His pipe. His small stature. He had been a slave. He had survived and lived a long life where he had a chair to sit in and a table with a cloth and flowers and a book stationed upon it. A book.
That Mother's Day Grandma created for me a new story about her. One that didn't start at tragedy; but that was definitely impacted by it. A multi-pronged family history that had traveled up the Mississippi Delta and spread across the nation. She grounded me in a wider story that first revealed itself in Mama's casual disclosure.
I couldn't help but wonder who I might have been had I felt more rooted, sooner.
