CARL BOON
BATON ROUGE
We lost Grandmother in the middle of October. Her face turned black to tan to the color of a peach, and then she died. I thought the episode rather artistic, like one of those great works of literature that transform and transform beautifully, then suddenly stop. You want to read on; you want to find out what happens next, but there is no more. Death is like that. A lot happens, and then nothing does. We fear it unreasonably.
Grandmother never feared death. She had the Gospel according to St. Luke writ large for her failing eyes on a posterboard by the Pastor and raisin bread and a hardboiled egg, her usual breakfast. Jesus and food to her were one, like Christmas and her birthday, the same day. She prayed and ate, and right down to the end kept her hair in curlers in the morning to greet the postman in the afternoon and had Binh from Vietnam next door buy her groceries. He was a refugee. I think she would’ve been happy being a refugee, too, which was almost like her being Black in Baton Rouge. Binh’s brothers owned a shrimp boat on the Gulf, and always made she sure she had enough for gumbo on New Year’s Eve. The woman loved her gumbo. I could’ve lived without the okra, but she insisted on making it the old way. Too much Old Bay seasoning, too much damn okra. But I suppose we Black folks have to stick together in the old ways. Okra’s the old way, like the Gospels and looking right for the postman. To deviate makes Louisiana nervous. Ask Binh. The rednecks almost burned him out in 1977.
Some of the folks called her death a blessing, but that word strikes me wrong. She was old, she got older, and then she died. No one could’ve prevented it. Nothing could’ve saved her. When the cancer gets inside there’s not much anyone can do but pray and wait. The fancy doctor from New Orleans came up once, just before her 83rd birthday, but he shrugged his shoulders, left some free med samples on the kitchen counter, then went away. He seemed more concerned about the LSU-Alabama game on TV than about Grandmother, but he didn’t charge us anything for the visit, which was good. I figure anyone who drives a new Cadillac can learn to leave a few pennies behind. It wasn’t his fault, and I won’t blame him for being white. He was born that way and I was born Black, Grandmother and me, and we never complained, at least out loud. You can’t fight the old genes. You turn the other way when a fancy doctor says, “There’s nothing to be done. Keep her comfortable.” You turn the other way and say, At least the rednecks haven’t burned us out. Yet.
I did my best. I scrubbed the blankets in winter and made soup, but she never got better. She rallied at times, but her rallies abruptly turned down and then she’d wail from the ache in her bones. I smoked cigarettes on the front stoop and prayed. I drove down to McKay’s for a shot and a beer, but when I returned she was always the same—a fraud of the mother I’d known, one who’d rather have burned forever than neglect the dust on the dining room table. I wiped it myself while she chuckled to The Cosby Show and asked why the apple juice tasted sour. It was the medicine, I told her, but she didn’t believe me. “White folks medicine,” she called it—not with anger but with resignation. It was the cost of being old and Black—things lose their sweetness and other things simply have to be forgotten. I’d curse her quietly then go upstairs to bed. I had my own dreams and fears to face—my girlfriend Charlene in Caddo Parish, my grad school research on Paul Laurence Dunbar and the commerce of faith. I didn’t want her to die, but she did. I didn’t want to bury her, but I did.
On the 20th of October the Baptist preacher said his thing and off we went to brunch at Harold’s on the Square. I ate a hardboiled egg, thinking it would soothe her in death. I had toast with blackberry jam and black coffee and didn’t cry. She was dead, my grandmother, and I had done my best. I’d given her a bit of life at the end. She’d given it to me when I needed it more.
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CARL BOON IS THE AUTHOR OF THE FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION PLACES & NAMES: POEMS (THE NASIONA PRESS, 2019). HIS WRITING HAS APPEARED IN MANY JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES, INCLUDING PRAIRIE SCHOONER, POSIT, AND THE MAINE REVIEW. HE RECEIVED HIS PH.D. IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM OHIO UNIVERSITY IN 2007, AND CURRENTLY LIVES IN IZMIR, TURKEY, WHERE HE TEACHES COURSES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AT DOKUZ EYLÜL UNIVERSITY.