My Grandmother's Hair

Underpinnings

Underpinnings

 Underpinnings: ballast, footing, bedrock, gist, ground, roots (Roget’s Thesaurus)

Mounting fears and unrelenting questions break apart on the memory of my Grandmother’s story. I remember, again, how her story has permeated my life – always – is such a prominent thread in the weaving of my story, and of my family’s story.

My grandfather made my grandmother cut off her long chestnut hair

and throw it in the garbage. Because it was unseemly in a married woman.

My mother heard her cry through the closed door.

It was the only time she ever heard her cry.

No one was ever the same.

 REMEMBERING

I don’t know

how old my mother was

or how she happened to be near

when she heard her Mother cry.

I don’t know how she knew

what her Father had done

to her Mother

for her to cry so loud that

she was heard that one time.

Or how she knew – there was

no speaking –

that it wasn’t the only time,

just the heard time.

(The length of her hair?)

But she heard and she knew.

That much is certain.

I don’t remember when

my mother told me her mother’s story,

except that I was a woman then,

with her own first daughter,

my grandmother long dead. Was she

the first to speak?

                    Already I knew

that part of my grandmother’s “never the same”

was not answering the call her husband heard

to minister in Cleveland.

She didn’t follow him. Against the grain, she

left him, came

To live with one of her unmarried daughters.

Opened a space for speaking.

Did my mother tell me

because I was the oldest daughter?

Or because I now had children and should hear it?