WHEN I WAS seven years old, my maternal grandmother, Ruth Stanley Ross, came to live with my family, the Coles, in Baltimore, Maryland. She joined my parents, my five siblings: Valerie, Karen, Kelvin, Ernestine, Linda and me plus our dog Rover in our two story row house.

I can still see Granny Ruth, a caramel-colored black lady in her fifties who stood five feet, three inches tall. She always wore a housecoat, socks and slides or slippers in the house. When going out, she wore stockings tied just above the knee with matronly slip-on shoes. She never wore makeup. Her eyes sparkled. She had a ready smile and an irreverent sense of humor, speaking things in my hearing that my devout, sober-minded Catholic mother would have prohibited, deeming such utterances inappropriate for young ears. My favorite was, “If you’re sad, stick two fingers up your tail and get glad.” Of course I didn’t know the connotation of this phrase. The idea of anyone doing that seemed outlandishly funny to me. I welcomed the occasional bawdiness. Granny’s zest for life amused and delighted me.

Granny quickly became a welcomed member of our working class Baltimore neighborhood. It was the late 1960s, a time when people were neighborly, sharing flour, sugar, eggs and ketchup. My mom shared these things and loaned encyclopedias as well. As the neighborhood’s elementary school teacher in residence, she promoted education and willingly lent from her stockpile of books which included the Harvard Classics.

Our corner house had one of the largest yards—plus, a non-working barbecue pit in its corner—plenty of space to play and make mud pies. Since my outgoing grandmother spent much of her time at home with our family, she quickly became a part of the neighborhood. The children in the neighborhood grew to know and love her. Many of them called her Granny right along with “the Cole clan,” as Mama referred to us.

Granny’s residency at our house on Finney Avenue ended abruptly on a spring day in 1969. After I arrived home from school, before I could change out of my school uniform, I noticed my grandmother had propped our front door open with a porch chair. This was unusual. Granny always lectured, “Keep that door closed so bugs won’t fly in this house,” What happened next was even stranger.

Wild eyed, my grandmother began hefting our living room furniture onto the porch. Out went a lamp. Out went an end table. Out went a chair . . . She performed her task frantically, with unusual strength, like an erratic Hercules.

My three-year-old sister, Linda, who was usually right up under my grandmother, was staring at Granny from the couch that remained in the living room, tears forming in her eyes.

Though she spoke to herself under her breath, I think I heard my mother say, “I have to do this.” Trembling a little, she picked up the phone’s receiver and dialed. I scrambled over to the sofa to grab my baby sister. She was crying, silently.

Mama pleaded into the phone for help before placing it back on the hook. Standing transfixed on the far side of the living room, she could see the street outside our front window, while keeping an eye on my sister and me. She avoided Granny until the police arrived, in what seemed like less than a minute.

My mother walked out to the porch and stood behind Granny as two officers walked up our front steps. They spoke calmly to my grandmother. “Ma’am, exactly what’s happening here? What’s going on?”

From inside the house, I heard Granny scream, “Go away and leave me alone.”

I ran to the window and saw one of the officers take my grandmother by the arm. She yelled, “Get away from me,” then turned and punched him in the chest.

In response to this unexpected resistance, the policemen handcuffed my usually docile grandmother, cited her with disturbing the peace and placed her in the police car. Not long after they arrived, they drove away. By this time, my older sisters were standing inside the front door with our mother. She was shaken, not tearful.

Grabbing my little sister by the hand, we walked upstairs to my parents’ room. She began to cry audibly. I sat on the bed and held her on my lap. Five-year-old, Teenie, lay next to us in wide-eyed silence.

At the time, I couldn’t understand why Mama didn’t ask the officers to calm Granny down without taking her away.

Years later, Mama explained that she had been forced to call for police assistance on an earlier occasion, when we lived in an apartment on Lakewood Avenue in 1961. Having grown up with an actively bipolar mother, she was acutely aware of the times when her mother’s behavior escalated beyond her control.

After this incident, I did not trust police officers, despite Officer Friendly’s yearly visits to my elementary school classrooms.

That night, after the pieces of furniture had been returned to their respective places and every child had been sent to bed, I listened through my parents’ closed bedroom door as my father comforted my mother in hushed tones. No one attempted to quell the fear I felt in response to Granny being forcibly removed from our home. For me, it seemed like “out of sight, out of mind.” Worse yet . . . I had no idea where the police had taken her. About two weeks later, I got my answer.

It was a lovely Sunday afternoon. My father announced that our family would be visiting our grandmother. We drove for about an hour. When we got to the grounds there was a sign that read, “Springfield State Hospital.” When had Granny gotten sick? I wondered. I looked around at the grounds. At least she’s in a beautiful place, I thought. After entering the building, I was jarred by the buzzer that sounded as we entered the door of the locked ward. We were entering a Maryland state psychiatric hospital, a holding center for the mentally insane. Looking back, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I do not remember whether or not my four younger siblings, including my new baby brother were with us. I do remember my parents and my two older sisters being there. My parents acted like this was an ordinary Sunday visit.

Because this was an asylum for blacks without financial means, the walls were cheerless and the room had a slight pungency—not clean, like I expected a hospital to be. Some of the patients moved stiffly, like zombies, while others moved erratically, like wind-up toys at the end of a rotation. I didn’t know I was witnessing the effects of heavy sedation, medication or even electroshock therapy in the zombies—these were the primary psychiatric remedies of that time. I guess the wind-up group needed their medication adjusted.

As the attendant led an older female zombie to the area where my family was seated, I asked myself, Who is this lifeless old lady? And why are they bringing her over to join my family? Then I realized: This was my beloved Granny. Where was the sparkle in her eyes?

My parents talked. My sisters smiled and sat nicely. Normally the most loquacious of the Cole sisters, I had nothing to say. After hugging Granny, I sat silently, longing to go home. The hour-long visit seemed unending. We left the ward accompanied by the sound of that buzzer and the clanging of the door closing behind us. We had to leave my grandmother at Springfield. We got back in the car and my father drove home. Though my mother had been pretty quiet on our way to the hospital, she conversed with my sisters a little on the way home. As for me, I sat silently between my sisters, my thoughts in overdrive. My nine-year-old mind began to process my Springfield visit. I concluded that people who walked around like zombies or behaved erratically were definitely crazy. This conclusion unnerved me even more than Granny’s departure in handcuffs had.

The Springfield visit spawned a taproot of fear within me. The roots spread as time passed. As an adult, I still wish my parents had spared me that seemingly benign visit to the psychiatric facility. But how could they have known they should have left me at home? In their minds we had simply visited a hospital. In mine, overly sensitive Charita Cole had just stared at her worst fear.

This was the last time I would see my grandmother.

After her release from Springfield, Granny chose to live in Baltimore city with a woman who had been her caregiver, rather than return to Finney Avenue. One afternoon, while at home alone, she attempted to light the gas oven with a match. Apparently, after turning the gas on, she waited too long to touch the match to the stove. Fire exploded from the oven, igniting her housecoat. In shock, she ran from the kitchen, through the living room and outside onto the sidewalk. A passing driver saw her. He pulled his car over quickly and smothered the flames with a blanket he had in his car. My grandmother was hospitalized with second and third degree burns over at least seventy-five percent of her body. She passed away the following day. Because her face wasn’t burned, her body rested in a half opened blue casket. She wore a flowy blue shroud and held rosary beads between her gloved fingers. Our family and many of our neighbors profoundly mourned the death of Ruth Hester Stanley Ross. She was sixty years old.

AS I GREW older, I sometimes experienced disturbing and disjointed thoughts that increased in frequency with the passage of time. In eighth grade, fearing the worst, I decided to share my suspicion about myself with my oldest sister. Though she was only four years older, I trusted her wisdom. “Val,” I whispered, “I think I might be crazy.” She answered, matter-of-factly, “Charita, everybody’s crazy.”