THE PROGRESSIVES

Still, I don’t understand why my mother gets shamefaced when my grandparents’ education comes up.

No one ever directly asks us, but if their background is ever mentioned, her eyes, for a fleeting moment, converge towards the floor, and her chocolate skin flushes into deep burgundy. Perhaps her shame is rooted in them having been directly descended from slaves; indeed, their Anglo-Saxon names and contrasting dark skin failed to hide their ignominious heritage, her heritage. Or, perhaps her embarrassment was rooted in the tendency to associate illiteracy with ignorance, a common but severely ignorant notion in and of itself.

My grandparents were ignorant of few things. Andrew, my grandfather, died not knowing his age for his mother never registered his birth. She might have had too many children, too little money, or too little time to get to the city. Andrew knew of, but did not know his actual father, a tall, dashing, traveling newsman. Outside of these two things there is little else that he did not know.

Andrew had early childhood memories of World War One planes dispersing havoc across Europe. He also had memories of historic arrivals on the island such as the first radio, first television, and first car. He was in his nineties, when dial-up modems sputtered with internet energy across the country, and he yelled into cellphones, based on the proximity of calling relatives.

“HELLLLLOOOOOO!”

“Shhhhh, Más’ Andrew, you don’t have to shout …,” the grandchildren would lovingly chide him.

But she in America, no? How she gwine hear mi if I don’ talk loud?”

When glaucoma set in during Andrew’s latter years, he could not have been more content. He chuckled, “Di docta seh is see I see too much!”

He, like Margaret, my grandmother, had been the child of slave-farmers and had been taught to till the soil. They were alchemists and agricultural scientists; neither of them could read the McDonald’s Almanac, but they could have authored it. They knew all types of witchcraft such as when to plant, when to reap, when to milk and when to kill.

Where Andrew was tall and steely, Margaret was a dimunitive woman, but with matching strength; she would participate in the kills, as well as hauling cows, hoeing in the wrathful sun, and designing geometric crop arrangements worthy of their own Pythagorean formulas. She would sell the fruits of their labor in local markets for far less money than deserved.

She also pushed out children.

Only some of them, though, survived long enough to be raised by her. Some arrived still, too still to cry, and others seemingly evaporated right after conception. I never knew this as a child, of course, or my curious, unfiltered mouth would have launched The Inquisition.

“Where did you bury the bodies?” Maybe the bodies had disintegrated into the inexhaustibly fertile soil that we walked on.

“Where is your pain?”

But women of that generation didn’t know pain. I am not sure they had pain receptors, even. Or maybe their uteruses doubled as vast, sponge-like organs that mopped up tears of intangible loss.

It’s not that my grandfather didn’t care about education, but he was a man, a practical man. His own mother had taught him how to turn magic from the island’s loamy soil; so early on, he had decided that that was the way. The first of his seven children had been all boys, who he had begat with one woman. And Andrew came home every night, unlike his father, the educated, but wandering newsman. Andrew was a man, a progressive man.

The couple were to have their own historic first, a baby girl who came bursting out with zest and vigor. And Margaret blossomed with mitochondrial ferocity. She became determined that her first daughter would defy preconceptions. She would telepathically communicate her ambitions as she breastfed the baby girl. Her first daughter would learn how to read, and write, not just how to grow things.

Margaret wasn’t one for clothes and jewelry and all that damn foolinish. She had one yard-dress and one church-frock. All other clothing would have rendered the cost of my mother’s schooling prohibitive. While Margaret toiled and sold fruits, she ignored Andrew’s objections to education. And the first girl gleefully skipped nine miles to school each day.

By the time my mother went to finishing school and learned about aristocratic things such as salad forks, and ‘fingering chicken bones’, Margaret was down to just one frock. My mother eventually became a teacher, the zenith of literacy, and the antithesis of my grandparents’ upbringing.

My earliest memories of Andrew and Margaret were formed when they were old, but jubilant people. They would skip gleefully when their grandchildren arrived, and had discovered the delights of electricity, which dangled from exposed wires. Margaret had hats now and probably four dresses, and she used too much salt, which she neutralized with blood pressure pills. She proudly cooked in a kitchen adorned with permanent Christmas lights and a kersene stove; personally, I preferred the smoky aroma of her woodfiyah food. Her enamel pots, now artifacts, had been replaced with glistening chawkplate.

Grandchildren were forbidden from using the pit latrine – Andrew would haughtily walk up to his tank, a Rube Goldberg-engineered reservoir, to fetch the water used to flush our excrement down the luxurious new toilet.

The house was now cozier and larger than my mother’s childhood memories described it. Cement tiles had replaced the earthen floors and the new zinc roof prevented the pitter-patter of raindrops from soaking through. Maskita destroya, an air freshener of sorts, infused the laid-back decor.

The Brown Household was also the cultural mecca of the village of Prickley Pole. They had teevee an’ fridge. There was laughter and music, real music from the Prickley Pole Orchestra, a hodgepodge of handmade banjos and violins; Andrew would sometimes join in on guitar, if only to seduce the men to an afterparty where he would stealthily obliterate them on the game, Drawf.

Prickley Puddlians weren’t a people of excess, though; they drank just enough, ate just enough organic food, and they knew just when to leave. As their footsteps faded away, the mosquitoes would set in and Andrew would build a fire to fend them off. It was also the light he would use to try, futilely, to teach me how to play Drawf.

“Yuh is a gyal, but yuh muss learn”, said the Progressive. He still couldn’t read but his granddaughter was a Spelling Bee Champion.

He would yap on and on, as I gazed at the peeniewallies that would frolick around our conversations.

“Yuh gwine change dis family one day,” he would say, “Juss like yuh madda …”

But he would always get interrupted by the footsteps of a neighbor hurrying back.

“Lawd Gad, why yuh tek mi so hapazat, man?!” Andrew would exclaim.

“Sorry Mas’ Andrew, mi a beg yuh fi some ice.”