When You Get Down to the River

It's not how you start, it's how you end.

"When she gets down to the river, that's our sign to get up," eight-year-old Zelda whispered to her sister Annie who was visiting Georgia from Michigan.

The two had not spent much time together since their mother died three months after Zelda Lucile Colbert was born. George and Norma Colbert had brewed a good-looking clan, all with silky black curly hair, big dark-brown eyes, and bronzy skin that shimmered in the sunlight. Zelda came in the same.

The doctor had told the fragile Norma not to get pregnant again after having already given birth to six children. Her kidneys were too weak to carry another child and doctor visits were too infrequent. Upon the news of Norma's death, Annie, then two years old, went to live with their dad's sister and her husband. Their four brothers and one other sister either were old enough to be on their own or stayed with their dad in their rickety wooden house where you could sometimes feel wind blowing through holes in wall boards. Norma's mother, Mary, affectionally called Big Mah, took Zelda to live with her in the Big House. Grandpa Ben had died by then, but Big Mah's other daughter, Lovie, and her husband and son lived there, too.

Big Mah was a tall, slim, vibrantly strong woman in her late sixties. She had high cheek bones, stringy hair, and long golden-brown arms, reflecting her African, European, and Native American ancestry. Community folk called on Big Mah when someone was sick because her herbal concoctions and strict orders usually got the sick person well. She could walk from her house to the Chestnut Grove Baptist Church where she attended once-a-month services every third Sunday. She had Zelda singing solos there, standing on a stool, by the time she turned five. Big Mah also prayed at home. A lot. She prayed the same prayer long and out loud every morning from her bedroom in the two-story, antebellum house with the wide wooden staircase, spacious hallways, and squeaky hardwood floors. Zelda could recite the prayer word for word and used it to time her rising and chore schedule.

The river line came. Zelda and Annie hopped out of bed, said their own quick prayers, put on clothes, tidied up their pigtails, and hurried downstairs to the ample kitchen that featured a floor-to-ceiling, white brick hearth big enough to hold a small writing table. There, Zelda made a fire in the fireplace to warm the room. Then she went about, moving around like the head chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant and showing Annie what to do. She pulled out the cast iron skillets and steel pots and orchestrated the making of a big southern breakfast: fluffy buttermilk biscuits, fatty pork belly side bacon, creamy cheese grits and soft scrambled eggs. After everyone had eaten and were full, Zelda got busy again, showing Annie how to clean the kitchen to Big Mah's satisfaction.

Over the next decade, and despite suffering from what Big Mah referred to as might-die-at-any-moment asthma, Zelda learned to sew and make top-quality clothes and home goods. She would at times take in mending and repairs for neighbors and make robes for the children's choir. At Big Mah's behest, she walked through the woods pass Mr. Thompson's mean dog to Great Aunt Emma's house to deliver or pick up stuff. On top of trekking the seven or so miles to school and back, she would ring the neck of and pick feathers off a chicken for dinner, whitewash the fireplace bricks, polish the silverware, plus a myriad of other tasks. Zelda was so helpful, industrious, and talented that Aunt Lovie turned her into her very own handmaiden—almost, her slave. Almost.

With Big Mah entering her old age, the one who should have been like a second mother to Zelda became a controlling task master. Lovie would buy home items and give Zelda a bill to pay for them. Lovie demanded dinner at a certain time which meant Zelda had to prep and cook before going to work her little job. Lovie inspected the fireplace bricks with much care, though it was her husband's chewing tobacco spit that dirtied them when it missed the spittoon, which was often. Lovie would commit Zelda to sing at a church event without telling her until the last minute. And she would tout the feeble efforts of her son, who in her eyes could do no wrong, above whatever Zelda accomplished. All the while, her son cried the poor mouth to Zelda to convince her to loan him money after he'd make one dumb decision after another, including getting his already-with-a-toddler girlfriend pregnant and moving them into the Big House.

Ignoring the fact that Zelda was entertaining a pleasant, ambitious, down-the-road neighborhood boy, Burnett, who rode his motor bike to visit with Zelda on Sunday evenings, Lovie picked out a nice, young, puny church boy for Zelda to marry. He was the kind of under-mama's-apron boy whom Lovie knew she could boss which is why she became aloof when Zelda refused. None of them were there with cookies or punch or flowers or well wishes when Zelda wed Burnett at Rev. P. E. Dorsey's house in the spring of 1952. She was 19.

Even amongst some sweet spots (the occasional visit from her oldest brother who would come from Detroit decked out in the latest double-breasted suit and bearing gifts for Zelda which made her feel special; or when her dad came to get her back when she was nine, but Big Mah wouldn't hear of it and even threatened to take him to court; or a sixteenth birthday party with cake and ice cream), years of oppression in her youth cloaked as daughterly love, made the acid in the lemons that life had given her dry out and form a strong, tough, standalone crystalline solid. That was Zelda, and those were the traits she used to return to the Big House and nurse Big Mah and Aunt Lovie when they were close to their deaths. It's how she became a primary school librarian, the first lady of a baptist church for nearly fifty years, and a present help for other people who were in need.

"When you get down to the river," Zelda would start when passing wisdom on to her three children. "...be it a decision stream of flowing family, career, money, or belief water, you're gonna hafta cross on your own. You and the Lord within you. That's all there is, and that is enough."