She was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1905, emigrated to America in the 1920s and settled in New York. She was no great literary figure, but she was my maternal grandmother, the woman who taught me to love to read.
Don’t tell my mother I said that, because she thinks it’s her. But like most mothers she was always trying to get me to read things in which I had no interest. My mother read novels from the New York Times new and notables list; grandma read books. Most of them were sweeping sagas set in exotic places where exciting things happened. I know because I used to sneak and read them.
Every Sunday grandma did the Times crossword puzzle–in ink. She would fill it in like the answers were a quiz for a subject she’d already studied.
My grandmother was a gentle woman of quiet lessons. I remember telling her once that I hated reading. My fourth grade teacher was a horror and I decided to hate anything connected to her including reading. When I told my grandmother the reason for my sudden dislike she said to me, “Butch, you can’t let anyone else take from you who and what you are. Your education is the most important thing.”
“Butch,” that was her pet name for her grandchildren. Even when we were old enough to know what the word connoted, none of us had the heart to tell her that calling her granddaughters butch, especially in public, was probably not a good idea.
“Butch,” she would say to us, “always remember that you can be anything you want to be. All you have to do is believe in yourself and you can do it.”
She was the first to see the first short story I’d written when I was eleven. It was a disaster, but grandma never told me that. She told me that if I wanted to be a writer, I had to learn how to be one. The next thing I knew, I had my first subscription to Writer’s Digest.
This is not to say that my grandmother was a pushover. Far from it. We knew when we got on her bad side, and that was one place you didn’t want to be. Grandma didn’t curse. She said things like “dadaratit and “dogbiteit” but you knew what she meant. But grandma wasn’t one to stay angry for long.
She also had a wicked sense of humor and didn’t suffer fools gladly or otherwise. One of my fondest memories of her is a trip we took down to NYU. As we got on the elevator to leave, we noticed a white woman who looked at us with visible terror. Considering we were a little old lady and a short kid that didn’t weigh one hundred pounds, we figured we knew the source of this woman’s discomfort.
My grandmother huffed and said in a stage whisper, “We don’t bite, you know.” Having a bit of a wicked sense of humor myself, I whispered back, “Not unless you ask us first.”
The next time the elevator stopped, not the ground floor, the woman pushed past us and got out. My grandmother’s shoulders shook with mischief and mirth. “Oh, well,” she said. All I could do was laugh. You see, grandma always told us that what color a person is doesn’t matter, it’s how they treat you. The unspoken corollary was, if they don’t treat you right, they take what they get.
Although my grandmother didn’t live to see my first book published in 1999, she helped scultp the writer I was to become. So here’s to the ancestors, those recently dead and those long gone, whose voices are now silenced except for our memories of them. Here’s to the writers whose words we’ve read and loved and those men and women who fought and died for our right in America to read them–and in our turn to write the way in which our hearts move us.
Please leave a comment for Grandma. She has no blog, she has no website. But she’s still reading.
Tomorrow: Author Roslyn Hardy Holcomb
