My grandmother looked good in blue. She would wrap her gray hair around the torn strips of a brown paper grocery sack at night, and in the morning her hair bounced with curls. Her high cheekbones were smoothed over with caramel skin, and her eyes seemed to sparkle when she looked my way. “Keep looking up,” she’d say to me.

She’d lived enough life for any four women her age.

Her first husband – my paternal grandfather – died at the age of thirty, leaving my grandmother to raise two young boys on her own. I wonder what I would have done. I wonder how a single black woman raised two little boys in a rural Virginia community back in 1941. In my mind I see her straight-backed with her head held high and I wonder how she defied the odds to grow straight and lifted instead of bowed and bent.

“Keep looking up,” she’d say to me.

My dad says they might not have made it if it hadn’t been for the family. Countless aunts and uncles and cousins who scratched together enough to help my grandmother stand on her own two feet and raise those two boys on her own.

She took what her family gave her and she turned it into a general store and that’s how my grandmother fed two little boys whose daddy had gone on to heaven too soon.

When my own daddy was grown with two daughters of his own, we’d ride over the hills and into the country as the asphalt shimmered in the heat. On those summer Sundays when I was little, I’d sit in the hard wooden pews in my grandmother’s country church. Women would fan themselves with images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., printed on cardboard and stapled to thin wooden handles. Men would wipe the backs of their necks with crisp white handkerchiefs. Folks would keep the beat with leather soles on the wooden floor beneath us. I’d suck hard peppermint candy until it turned to lace inside my mouth and wonder why my grandmother sang the hymns so loudly.

“Keep looking up,” she’d say to me.

When I grew up and had children of my own, we rode over the hills and into the country and sat in the wooden pews of that same country church to say good-bye to my grandmother. My dad stood watch by her side through the day and I cried when I saw her in blue.
Blue like the sky up over my head.

My grandmother looked good in blue.

by Deidra, Jumping Tandem

church photo by Melissa Stone Photos

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