Memories of a Cape Verdean Grandmother (in a child's voice)

# 1 -----Grandma has a nice house with nice furniture.  My favorite piece of furniture is in her extra bed room.  It is in an armoire that she just bought.  It's pine and it has a key in it.  There is nothing inside.  Sometimes I just stand in front of it and lock it and unlock it with the key.  I stick my head inside and smell the wood.  We don't have armoires at our house in Connecticut.  We have closets.  Every week Grandma and I walk eight blocks to Union Street downtown to pay her bills.  She is paying for the armoire at the furniture store.  

# 2 -----   You would have thought that I had done something really bad the way my grandmother chased me around the table.  She was trying to beat me with a strap.  The strap always hung behind the stove on a nail and it was called a cat of nine tails.  I would run one way about two or three times but as soon as I gained speed she would switch up on me and I would have to change directions. 

The running around the table thing was an old routine.  When we were both younger she would be able to catch me but she couldn't catch me now.  I don't think she really wanted to.  I had been bad and beating me was something that she thought she had to do. 

When she was almost out of breath she sat down and cursed me in criulo.  I stood at the other end of the table panting furiously.  For an old woman she was pretty fast.  She laid the cat of nine tails on the table and lifted her checkered apron to wipe her sweating face.

"Ba abra la janella" she ordered and I did what she said.  I raised the window just enough to put a small sliding screen between the bottom of the window and the top of the ledge.  I kept one eye on her the whole time.  She could be sneaky.

She was staring into space but looking in the direction of the wringer washer on the other side of the room.  I walked to the kitchen stool near the stove and sat down.  I could hear the cat moving around in the paper bags in the drawer under the fridge.  "Bu kre komer?"  Grandma asked.  I knew that her mood had changed since she had asked me if I wanted something to eat.  Offering food was her way of making up. 

"Not that fishy stuff" I protested and then right away gulped when I realized that I had said something that could make her mad again. 

She didn't reach for the strap this time but rather said "Madera" under her breath.

As I went to sit at a chair by the table I realized that I had never heard anyone else's grandmother say the word "shit" as much as my grandmother did.  In fact, I'd never heard anyone else's grandmother say it at all.  Madera was one of my grandmother's favorite words. 

Grandma got up from her seat to prepare my snack.  I was relieved when she went toward the cupboard instead of the stove.  The pot on the stove was filled with cald'pesce.  I don't know how she expected me to eat fish heads when they still had their eyeballs in them.  My mother told me that in the old country this meal was a "delicacy".  At home it was what we fed to the cat.

Grandma pulled out a box of milk crackers and crumbled them into a bowl.  She started toward the fridge.  "Grandma, you forgot the sugar!!!!" I whined.  "Madera" she said again as she turned around and walked back toward the cupboard. 

Grandma told everyone that I was a "fustant".  That meant that I was picky.  It wasn't so much that I was picky as that I wanted things done my way. 

After Grandma put the sugar on the crackers she went to the fridge to get some milk.  She poured the milk close to the side of the bowl.  That really let me know that she wasn't still mad.  At first she didn't know that you just couldn't pour milk into the middle of a bowl.  I had to teach her how to do it.  You had to pour it close to the side so that I could watch it slowly creep toward the middle.  If the milk wasn't poured into my cereal that way I wouldn't eat it.

The cat must have smelled the milk because he came out from under the fridge.  He ran around the table to the place where I was sitting.  He paced in circles beneath me, his one tail beating softly against my leg.

#3 ----- A lot of furniture in Grandma's house is being saved for special occasions.  No one, except guests, for instance, ever goes into the parlor.  The dining room is never used even though it has a huge table, a side bar, and a hutch.  Grandma has a set of pretty China in the hutch which we never use.

Grandma keeps all of the Christmas and birthday gifts which anyone gives to her in the tall chest.  She has brand new pots which she is saving in case she has special company.  She has nightgowns, robes, and underwear in case she has to go to the hospital.  She has new drinking glasses that she only uses when the insurance man comes by to pick up the fifty cents on her policy. 

I wash dishes with a shredded rag even though there are brand new wash rags in the chest.  I drink out of jelly glasses instead of the new glasses which she is saving. 

Sometimes I open up the chest and take things out one by one and look at them.  It is almost like going shopping.  

# 4 - ----  New Bedford is not like New Haven.  In New Haven everyone lives together.  In New Bedford people live in different parts.  My grandmother lives in the South End with the other Cape Verdeans.  The white Portuguese from the Azores live further south.  The colored people live in the West End and the whites live in the North End.  My grandmother calls the white Portuguese "jambobs" which means "yam eaters".  This isn't a nice thing to say but she says it anyway.  My grandmother doesn't like anyone unless they are Cape Verdean.  She doesn't even like some Cape Verdeans.  She doesn't like people from Brava because they think they are better than people from Sao Nicolau.  They think this because they have lighter skin. 

My grandmother is tan, my grandfather is dark brown, and my mother is the color of clay.  But they are all Cape Verdeans.  My father is colored but he is white.  My grandmother was very angry when my mother said that she wanted to marry someone who was not Cape Verdean.  My grandmother told my mother that she couldn't bring him to the house.  My mother told my grandmother that she was going to marry my father and that she was going to bring him to the house anyway.  My father came to my grandmother's house and before the meeting was over he was flirting with Grandma and sitting on her lap.  Since then he has been one of her favorites.

I like everybody.  My grandmother's way of thinking is confusing.  On fight nights my Grandma and her friend Antone watch the boxing matches on t.v.  My Grandma cheers and laughs and claps every time the colored men knock the white guys out.  Even though they are not Cape Verdean she always takes the colored man's side.  

#5 -  When my aunt was little she would wake up at night and see a witch sitting on one of the stoves.  The witch would laugh at her.  Whenever this happened my aunt couldn't go back to sleep.  Spanking her with a belt didn't help so my Grandmother called the priest.  The priest came over and sprinkled some holy water and said a few prayers.  My grandmother felt that when these kinds of things happened a priest was not enough so she called the healer.  The healer was an old man from her island who is like a doctor.  To get rid of the witch he put a string of garlic at the head of all of the beds.  After that, the witch didn't come to visit my aunt anymore. 

My Grandmother uses the old man a lot.  My parents won't let him work on me though.  My mother says that when she was little and she broke her arm my Grandmother called the old man.  My mother says that he rubbed chicken fat on her arm "and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed" and then when she least expected it he snapped the bones back into place.  My father broke his leg once after he came to New Bedford and met my mother.  He had been showing off for her by running on the rocks at the beach.  My father wanted to go to the hospital to get his leg fixed but my Grandmother thought that the healer would be better.  The old man came over and set my father's leg.  My father always  seemed surprised about that experience.  

# 6 - Grandma's house has a huge basement with a coal furnace.  The basement is the coolest place to stay in the summer.  It is dark and musty smelling.  It smells like it has secrets.  In the beginning of the summer we take two of the old Adirondack chairs out of the cellar and we put them in the yard under a tree.  We go back and forth on the days when we are gardening to get the gardening tools.  Grandma has two gardens.  One is in the back yard and it is where she grows corn and squash.  We call the squash "bobra".  The other garden is about five blocks away.  The city lent the community a whole city block.  A lot of people have plots over there.  Grandma grows more corn on her part.

Grandma's bedroom is grand.  It is almost as long as the kitchen.  At home I only have one mattress on my bed but Grandma's bed has two.  When I was little I could hardly climb up on it but it is easy now.  When I sit on Grandma's bed I feel like I am sitting up on a throne.  All of us children like sleeping on her bed. 

Grandma's bedroom has a large bureau with a mirror.  She has a picture of Jesus on the bureau along with a statue of the Virgin, some candles, a rosary, a jar with her gall stones, and a Bible.  She has a Bible even though she can't read.  Her vanity is where she keeps her powders and her lipsticks and where she puts her teeth at night. 

My house in New Haven is modern.  Everything is new.  Grandma's furniture is old and dark and wood but it looks brand new. 

#7 -  On my grandmother's bureau my little aunt would have seen a rosary, a picture of Jesus, and a statue of the Virgin Mary.  Twenty years later she would have also seen her mother's "dent" and a jar containing her gall stones.  Bureaus were covered with crocheted lace and armoires were filled with gifts collected - but not used - over the years. Because you never EVER used the new stuff.

# 8 - Funerals are so different nowadays.  I am getting ready to go to New Bedford for the funeral of a close CV relative, my mother's sister, but it will be held many many days (almost a month) after the date of her actual death.  The body will have been cremated, there will be no wake/no viewing of the body, people won't go back to the family home after the internment, the long lines of cars won't creep by the home before going to the cemetery, and no one may even wear black  (I will).  People now come to these going away events in leather jackets and boots or pretty spring dresses in bold colors.  Funerals in these current times are a celebration, or sometimes merely a dreaded obligation. 

One of my grandmother's greatest and life long fears was that when she was "waked" no one would CRY for her.  She talked about it all of the time.  By "crying" she meant that she feared that her modern children would not greet each person coming into her wake with a sing song-y account of the relationship between the person entering and their dead "mae".  And how the death of "ma mae" was the most horrible thing one could imagine and the how the singer did not  know how life could possibly go on.  Because that was how you showed you cared.  By showing your immense grief via song. 

My grandmother took death very seriously.   She fervently mourned the death of FDR.  She wore Black for a year. 

If I remember correctly the CRY would go something like this (my grandmother was the singer on this occasion).  "Aye Joao Joao -- you and he used to love to play cards and sniff snuff - but now he is gone - but he will be waiting for you in heaven - you will play cards and sniff snuff there -- I am so sad ..."  or something like that.  I don't speak criulo but I understand it when spoken by my grandmother and I think it went something like that.  The CRY was a gut wrenching, heart aching, beating of the chest kind of lamentation.  It was the kind of song you would sing if, despite your imposed colonizing faith, you didn't know what was coming next.  

(and many many years later I wrote this which I called Aye ma mae)

My mom and my aunt would tell my gram, categorically and emphatically, that they would not CRY.  They assured her, again and again, that it would not happen.  Under any circumstances.  Gram was so upset that I feared that she would not die - actually was happy that she would not die - until she found someone to CRY for her.

When someone died in the 1960's in New Bedford you would go to Colonial or Burgo to a wake for two nights.  The body was at the front.  The family was in a line of chairs facing the entry door.  The guests were in lines of chairs facing the coffin.  Each person would come in, view the body, perhaps kneel and say a prayer and then make their way to the family members to shake their hands. 

Then, on the third day, (in the morning) you would, again, go to the funeral home.  Then everyone would go over to OLOA for the church service.  Then there would be the obligatory drive-by the house with a momentary stop and a look up to the windows.  Then to St. John's Cemetery.  And then back to the place where the person lived. Much food would be served at this point, especially canja.  The exact age of the decedent would be discussed and disputed. 

Grandma finally did die without any reliable assurances that she would be cried for.  I think the first night of her wake was on a Thursday.   Nothing.  The daughters sat in their chairs polished and stately and the glamour girls that they were known to be.  The second night was on a Friday and about an hour in a CRY started.  It was not heart wrenching, it was not nativistic, it was a tad modern, but, my cousin, my aunt's daughter, started to CRY.  In the same beautiful voice that she had often sung the Ave Maria at OLOA church she started to CRY.  And she cried to each person who walked in.  She told the story of how the person walking in related to my grandmother and how they would someday meet again. And we were all astounded.  But relieved and proud. And glad it hadn't been us who CRYed.