Zabe Bent

My grandmother once told me, “Mi never did wan’ live wid mi children.” She loved her family with her whole heart and plenty hugs. Once everyone was grown, while she could happily live near to us, she didn’t want to be entangled and certainly didn't want to become a burden. She said this as we stood in the house she shared with my aunt, her daughter. By then she’d already married, moved across the parish, divorced, moved across the island, worked a steady job, remarried, emigrated to the Bronx, worked several more jobs, and migrated again to South Florida. 

Grandma, Dad’s mum, was fifty years my senior and the only grandparent I knew well. She was a simple woman, buxom where I was flat, flat where I was curvy. The perfect apple to my ample pear. She was neither matriarch, spitfire, nor overachiever, just a woman, born in rural Jamaica in the 20s, nearly one hundred years after slavery was ended there, mere decades before veiled independence came to the island or feigned equality to Black people in America. 

Years after her passing, as I contemplate my own life, I wonder if any of our lives were better in foreign than they would have been at home, had we stayed in Jamaica. Did my grandmother, and my parents like her, feel that we took proper advantage of the tortuous chances to level up? Or did it gall her, emigrating to America only to end up keeping someone else’s house? Taking care of someone else’s children while my siblings and I waited alone for our parents to come home from work? Could she have been or done more without the trappings of feminism in Jamaica, without the hindrances given Blackness in America, without the ongoing, ubiquitous tethers of colonial imperialism? 

Decades have passed, and still I reflect on conversations Grandma and I had while she tailored garments or baked Christmas fruitcakes—dark, rum-soaked puddings, not the dry mess even Americans regifted. Grandma would sit at her sewing table, and fold back the tablecloth to make room for her Singer sewer. Rather than Bob Marley or Beres Hammond, it was Anne Murray who issued from the radio. Soft beige curtains swayed in the air conditioned breeze, which kept the heat and humidity of South Florida at bay. 

“How yuh really feel bout dis boy?” she asked. “Di one carryin yuh to di dance?”

Prom was weeks away but we had to start early. She was making my dress in between projects, with me acting as tailor’s assistant when I could get away from schoolwork or my receptionist job. It took me a minute to register the question though. There was once a boy, but we’d broken up. I was going to prom with friends.   

“I don’ know, Grandma. It matters right now?” I refilled her glass with iced tea. There weren’t many ice cubes in the glass. That’s how she liked it. Ice was reserved for rum drinks, and she didn’t bother with those anyway. 

“It matters if yuh mekkin decisions bout yuh life based on di boy.”

I assumed my place in front of her so we could finish our project. We often sewed in the kitchen: me facing the living room built-ins; her on a chair facing the veranda. The white tiles made it easier to see pins that fell to the floor, and prevent stepping on them. 

“I don’ really know what to say y’noh. Is not really about the boy.” 

She plucked a pin from the fake tomato in the tackle-box-sewing-kit and stuck it between her lips. My arms extended like a scarecrow while she fussed with the velvet. 

“When I must ask? Yuh gwine mek yuh decision soon, an’ after dat why must I bother?” She pulled a pin from her mouth, cinching my waistline unnecessarily close. She knew I’d never wear anything that tight. Just as I knew she’d never make anything that form-fitting for me. Mum would say how it look butu, how she didn’t raise me to walk street like a leggo beast. And Grandma would agree.

“If yuh pull it any tighter, I might have to wear a thong,” I said, a smile in my mouthcorner. “Like the dancehall queens.”

“Thong?” She kissed her teeth, short and crisp. “What is di point o dem tings? Wha dem put inna dem bottom, mek dem wan to floss it?”

I laughed. Such comments seemed to surface when only we were together. “It’s their style, Grandma. Their flair. And sometimes thongs just mek sense.”

“Look’ere,” she said, “just tell mi more bout dis boy an dis college.” 

“Let’s stick to college, because it’s not really about him. Ow!” 

She’d pricked me as she repinned the seam. She, who’d spent decades sewing. 

“I want to go back to New York, Grandma, but the school is expensive. And, before yuh even ask, he’s staying here. His whole life is here. He can't even afford to visit me there.” This was the new boy, the one I’d met while school was winding down. We weren’t anything yet, but he was kind and creative, which felt more like me. 

“Him nuh have job?” She pulled a couple more pins from the dress. 

I shook out my arms, taking a quick break from the scarecrow stance. 

“Put back your arms,” she said, leaning sideways to appraise the fit again. 

“Of course he has a job,” I said. “Is just his motha alone with his brotha and sista. Then he still has to buy art supplies. You know how expensive they are.” 

Her second husband, a draftsman, built their house back home. He wasn’t technically my granddad, though that house was our base in summer. During the school year, he’d bring us treats like hardo bread and tamarind balls. Watching him at his plank desk deepened my desire to study architecture at college. When he passed, I received that desk and all of his tools: a t-square; slide ruler; pens and pencils; scales and tablets; rolls of vellum. 

“Mm,” Grandma said, adjusting a next pin. “Sounds like dis boy is responsible.” 

“Grand-maaa,” I said and couldn’t help my eyeroll. She was focused on leveling the hem. If caught, she’d tell me, “young people have no broughtupsy these days.”

“Stan’ up straight. Di hem won’ sit proper if yuh scrunch up yuhself like dat. Mi teach yuh dat already,” she said. “Let mi just pull dung di zip.” 

I felt the zipper slide down my back, and she gave me another pat on the hip. I started for the back room of the condo, where my street clothes lay folded in identical squares on her chaise lounger. I paused at the bedroom door. “Grandma? What would you do if you were me? Would you draw down big loans for college?”

She took the needle from her mouth and pushed it into the little tomato. She continued stalling, wrapping the green thread loosely around poplin leaves. Finally she said, “When mi did likkle olda dan you, mi get a chance fi visit Tuskegee University.”

She'd told me some of this before, about being a young, foreign Black woman in the American South in the 1950s.

“I couldn stay, but mi get fi see plenty different part of America. Mi go New York, mi go Washington, DC. Mi even go South Dakota fi look pon Mount Rushmore.” 

Her body jiggled and her eyes seemed to travel to the mountains in memory. I'd lived most of my life in the US and hadn't seen what she saw in those months. Her experiences, particularly the fact that she’d had such opportunities long ago,  drove me to work hard at school and work, so that I could see the US and the world too. 

For my family, especially my aunts, my sister and I, my cousins, talking about Grandma’s time at Tuskegee is important. The trip was a government exchange, a high honor at a critical time for a nascent country. She could have been and intellectual, we note, so her story must not focus on either of Grandma’s husbands. She was more than that. All women should be allowed to be more than who they marry, who they leave, who they make themselves for or remake themselves against. Occasionally I asked how Grandma felt about her choices. Whether she preferred the entrepreneurial life she carved out after decades in the States or simply grateful to leave behind a life of abuse and underappreciation. She was an excellent teacher and patient leader, traveling the country teaching trades of managing a home and farm. Did she miss the job that would lead to social service posts?

“Some a di people tink me was a Indian like di one dem have up dere. But dem never wear dem hair short like me. And dem never talk like me.” 

Grandma looked mostly Black, but the blood of English colonizers, Portuguese Jewish settlers and indigenous Caribbeans warred with that of enslaved Africans. Her skin was paler than many Black people, her jet black hair wavy more than kinky. 

“Why yuh didn stay, Grandma?” I asked her. “And finish at Tuskegee?”

“Me? In Alabama? In dose days?” This kiss-teeth was long, wet, ducklipped. “All now mi wouldn live over deh.”

“So… what would you do if you were me?”

“Cho!” She’d never answer the question. She would only point out the little facts that I needed to settle into the decision I’d already made up my mind. Mid-nineties Florida wasn’t for me. It didn’t seem a place with opportunities for anything besides senior medical care and cul-de-sac proliferation. Southern conservatives and backwoods preppers met New York and Montreal snowbirds met Caribbean, South American, and South Asian immigrants, even in transplant-rich South Florida. It didn’t feel like the place for an aspiring architect who hated sitting in traffic. It didn’t present as a place to fulfill my dreams or my family’s aspirations.

“Yuh gwine stay fi dinna?” Grandma asked.

“I could miss your oxtail wid rice and peas? It have butter beans and carrots?”

“Butter beans, yes,” she said without looking up. “But carrot? Carrot?? You can have the shredded cabbage and carrot like always. Or yuh can tek yuhself to one o di restaurant fi di tourist dem.” 

“So mi turn tourist now?” I joked. She waved me off, a crinkle in her eyecorner. 

In grad school, about ten years later, my father called with news that broke my world. I thought it a common call for chatting, discussing plans for the holidays, or confirming I’d called Grandma for her birthday, etc. Instead, proving why his Cornwall schoolmates called him Lurch, Dad’s deep voice croaked out, “Yuh grandmother. She have breast cancer.” The hesitation and worry that rippled beneath Dad’s tone reached me through the phone line, seemed to burrow into my belly and settle into my big toe. 

“Come soon,” he said. “She waited long to tell us.”

Through tears and frustration and worry of my own, I rescheduled whatever final exams I could, took the ones I couldn’t, and arranged to turn in final problem sets or papers during winter break. On the flight from Cambridge to Plantation, I hoped my meager efforts were enough to keep my scholarships and stipends. By the time I landed, fear consumed me til I didn’t give one damn if they weren't. 

Fresh off the plane, I stood by Grandma’s bedside as my mother finished the daily spongebath. Mum had been an ICU nurse for twenty years by then, but that didn’t lessen Grandma's discomfort with her daughter-in-law helping her bathe or go toilet. Mum held the damp clothes an armslength from me, ever concerned about transferring hospital germs from person to person. 

I nudged her shoulder, kissed her cheek. “Need anything from me?”

“Relax yuhself,” Mum said, “I’ll come for my hug when the ackee ready.”

“You already put dinner on? Or yuh want help wid it later?”

“Don’t worry yuhself. Pigstail was soaking from last night.” 

That meant stew peas tonight: red kidney beans, pigstail, salt beef, and coconut milk served over rice. Mum was pulling out all my favorites. All Grandma’s favorites. 

“Don’t tek sick,” Grandma said. “Too much people haffi tek care a yuh.”

I kotched on the bed-edge as Mum left. “What? Yuh thought yuh could just slip out without attention? You took care of us all this while, is our turn to tek care of you.” 

“Better off dan di rest ah yuh. At least is me get to decide wha fi do wid mi tings.”

It was so like her to direct her gifts in life, to reduce infighting after she’d left. I smoothed her hair as she lay in the bed, and she raised her left hand to meet mine. It trembled, and wondered if it was simple hesitation or exhaustion from the sponge bath.

“It used to feel so soft an’ curly,” she said. 

“You remember that time the hairdresser thought it was a wig?” I asked.

She giggled. “Fool woman asked me to tek it off so she could cut my real hair.”

I laughed too. “She’d never seen a Black woman with hair like yours, don't it?”

Her smile faded. “Now it come in like coyah.” 

Though used to the negative associations we inherited from colonialism, it pained me to hear Grandma compare any part of herself to thrash used for rope and doormats.

I hadn’t experienced Grandma’s particular kind of strife. With the virtual civil war brewing, my parents bought into the promise of America, brought my brother and me here in 1979. They didn’t understand then, that even as youth, we would work doublehard and still wouldn’t fit. We struggled to accept callous standards of a system that didn’t consider us whole or home. Even with the ability to speak without accent anytime I please, ostensibly to exist as a palatable Black woman, I still felt (and feel) apart from this place and often from myself. I saw a kind of sadness in Grandma even then, but I aligned it with the cancer. I thought her resigned but resilient. While I wished she didn’t have to be, I hadn’t yet moved away from pride in forced strength or endemic resilience. 

Looking back on those moments I see the impacts of what we call sufferation, turned “simple” depression for some of us, anxiety for others, both and more, which the family is only now coming to understand and accept. Some call it island culture, some say colonial chains. Perhaps it is both. The result: we were not free to experience or embody such things, much less to wallow, process, or heal. We kept going, rising again and again, just to survive. The hope is that one day by God, maybe we thrive. Or maybe our children do. Or children’s children do. I knew myself to be that hope, and still I hated that any one of us should have to wait. She deserved her own vibrant life, not just an end to sufferation.

“You gave yourself away, y’know. When you gave me the Singer.” I wrapped a thick curl around my finger, smoothed another back into place. Eyewater burned me.

“Come now. Don’ fuss.” She reached for my hand and squeezed. 

Maybe I should have seen it when she started giving away her jewelry too. “You mus think you’re so sneaky,” I said.

“Which kinda sneaky? Seem like cancer come foh all o’ we. Is only Viv and Glo left after me.” Just two of her four siblings. It seemed a consequence of St. Elizabeth life. Plantation slavery had been less prevalent there due to rocky, hilly terrain, but Crown governance ensured that either sickness or hard work would take us same way. GranGran, her mum, lasted three years after her diagnosis. Just a few months in, Grandma’s girth had shrunk till her skin looked like linen draped over bone. 

“They were ninety plenty when they passed,”  I said. “Yuh have time can give me. I not even askin for the fifteen or twenty years. I could tek five or ten. Or is so yuh stingy?” 

“Hush, is ahright.” She pushed the heel of her hand into my handmiddle, squeezed and released, then pushed herself to sit up in the bed. “Look pon di table fi some fabric. Mi nuh know when yuh gwine use it, but nuh mek nobody else tek it.” I didn’t bother to imagine what anyone else got. It would be just as specific to them as this was to me, whatever Grandma thought they wanted or needed most. She sensed my hesitation though, patted my hand again.

Several yards of raw, white silk sat alone in the table's center. The neat folds of fabric looked thick enough for a long, simple gown. I’d seen it in her closet on many a visit, part of her someday pile, for special occasions. Somehow I managed to eke out a “thank you.” I'd always felt lucky to one day make my wedding dress with her. Regret crept into me for not making the effort to marry. I’d passed on dates and shirked gatherings in order to focus on my dreams, as directed. Strive, they’d said. Succeed. And I did. 

That’s what I told myself. I was poised to complete the secondary degree no one in our tight family had yet achieved. I was meant to feel accomplished, to reap the reward of a charmed or at least comfortable life. That promise was slipping through my fingers like raw sugar. Because the reward wasn’t the degree or even the life my family wanted for me. It was living it with them, with her. And she was leaving us, before we could explore it together, before we could thrive. 

Still I kissed her forehead and rose to claim her gift. The fabric was soft against my fingertips, warm as I pulled it against my heart, fragrant as I breathed into my lungs Imperial Leather, cake batter, and inexplicably, the open sea she hadn’t seen in ages.

“Tomorrow when yuh come back wi can talk bout pattern to suit di draping.”

“Okay, Grandma,” I said, patting her hand. 

We never discussed the draping. When the phone rang, I knocked it off the cradle as it pulled me from sleep. “Go to Florida Memorial,” Mum said. “Hurry.” I did not shower. I did not eat. I did not change. I pulled jeans and slippers on my legs and feet. I reached Emergency just in time for the notification. The doctor had some long-winded explanation about chemo and the strain on her heart, but the details are lost to the fog of grief. Only the typical platitude remains: “We did everything we could.”

On television, emergency room visits seem like a chaotic symphony. People moving around someone’s love, working together to revive a family member in the crescendo of some great aria. That day, in that room, there was no evidence of chaos, no remains of struggle, no hint of resuscitation. In reality, revival rarely succeeds. In reality, they clear away the tubes and pads and leads. In reality, they usher the family into a room to keen and wail, to bend and fawn over the body, to embrace their love a final time. In reality, they crammed us behind the curtain of a cold trauma bay, encircling the gurney where Grandma lay. 

I broke away from the group, inched away from my father’s hands trembling next to his mother’s, creeped away from my aunt clumsily moving her fingers along lifeless arms. Eyewater flowed freely, coated Auntie’s face as she leaned close and clutched Grandma’s body. Her chill, grey body. I backed away farther, until I turned wallflower. Grandma was not in there anymore, not inside that vessel anymore, not with us anymore, not at all.  

Days later, I sat in the alcove of her bedroom with my toes tucked into her beige chaise lounge. My father came in, staring at the empty bed. He turned to me, eyes glassy and red, maybe moreso than mine, for the first time I could remember.

I’d like to say that I thought about the arc of her life then. I sometimes feel that I should have considered whether she’d found happiness. I should have asked whether he thought she came to truly feel at home in South Florida, so close and yet so far from Jamaica. I should have wondered what she thought as her heart failed to beat, as she simply stood to face another day. Was she feeling fear, peace, anxiety, acceptance? I'd like to say that I hoped it happened so fast that she felt nothing at all. That my aunt, at her bedside, felt neither panic nor worry as she hurried for help to save her mother from death or discomfort. But no such thoughts entered my mind. No, more than a decade passed before I could set aside my deep, dank grief, to process the layers of ism and schism that led to her life, to her end.  

“Yuh ahright?” Dad asked.

I shook my head. “I wasn’t done talking to her.”