1999. I sat like a blob on the couch in my living room. I didn’t know how long I had been there in that position. A day? A week? It was all a haze. I wanted to go outside and play Twister with my kids. I wanted to laugh and contort my body from left foot red to right hand blue, but I just didn’t have it in me. It was like gravity was holding me down. I was a damaged mind trapped inside a useless, nonfunctioning body. The familiar stasis of my childhood molasses held me firmly in its grip.
The tears came. I wanted to go outside, but I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t get up, dammit. I couldn’t get up.
The phone next to me rang. I ignored it. It rang for a while longer and then stopped. I buried my wet face in my hands as the ringing began anew. Again, I let it go unanswered until it stopped. A few more moments passed, the only noise in the room my ever-increasing wail. It rang again. This time I picked it up.
“Hello,” I managed to get out.
“Brian,” the familiar voice said. “It’s Grandma.”
I didn’t say anything as I sniffled into the receiver. Why the hell had I answered the phone?
“Boy,” she finally asked, “what’s wrong with you?”
All pretense of composure vanished with that question.
“Grandma,” I sobbed. “They finally got me. I lost control and they won.”
A beat. Was she still there?
“Grandma,” I said, crying so hard that my voice took on a husky hoarseness, “Grandma, I can’t get up.”
More silence.
“You can’t get up?” she finally said in that incredulous way of speaking that Grandma has. That tone that seems to say, “Quit playing and do what I told your ass to do.” “What you mean you can’t get up?” she said.
Suddenly, her voice changed. It was firmer, harsher. Enraged. “Boy, you better not never say you can’t get up! Never, do you hear me? Don’t you think there was times I didn’t want to get up? When your mother passed and left me alone with all of y’all all by myself, what if I would have said that? Or when your grandfather left me alone with a newborn while he was off running in the street somewhere? What if I would’ve said that? I been hungry, I been broke, I been cold, and I been alone, but I still did what I had to do when I had to do it.”
I was sniffling harder now. I didn’t need this. Then again, maybe I did.
“You can’t get up,” she said, mocking me. “Boy, you ought to be shamed. I’m shamed of you. GET YOUR ASS UP! GET YOU BLACK ASS UP NOW!!”
I was stunned; shocked by her words. Where the hell was the sympathy? Where was the empathy? Where was the compassion? I was in pain. I was in horrible, terrible, unbearable, and excruciating pain. Where was the maternal comfort, love, and support I needed from the woman who had raised me? Where? Where was it?
Then it hit me in the face like a cold blast of winter wind. Grandma, the child of Jim Crow, the granddaughter of slaves. Grandma, who always played whatever hand she was dealt no matter what. Grandma, who always stood her ground no matter how hard people tried to knock her off of it. Grandma.
There was something about the sound of her voice that could cut through drama and self-importance like a hot knife through a cold stick of butter. She was the voice of reason, the voice of my past, my present, and, I realized for the first time, my future. She was the reason that I got here in the first place and the reason I’d made it on this earth as long as I had.
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to. I hung up the phone, I put my feet on the floor, and I got up. Then I went outside and I played Twister with my kids. And I laughed. For the first time in memory, I laughed a deep, hearty, infectious, and healing laugh. At that moment I was overcome with an incredible sense of identity. I felt . . . black.