Nothing but the blood: Tigi
Kirby thinks I ought to pen a few character sketches for you.
He and I were talking the other day and he said it’d be nice to explain who some of these people are that I keep writing about. He said it’d increase reader-interest if I described in some detail the repeated members of my sweet, dogged family I refer to so often in my memoir-esque blog.
I think that’s a great idea.
For several reasons: first, it’ll certainly help those precious few of you who read this thing with any regularity to have some reference points, and secondly, it’ll be a good wake-up call for me to reflect on those people who have influenced me so much in my life. Those that I take after, both in blood and beatitude.
It’s a good exercise for any of us, I think. Besides, lately, I’ve been so encumbered with work and worry that I’ve been straddling that god-awful fence of Depression, again.
So, as a remedy, I’m taking Kirby’s advice, to remember those who have made me, Me, for better or for worse.
And I’m going to start with the person I most remember as the center of my thrown-together, partly-fictionalized family. (I’ll explain what I mean by “partly-fictionalized” eventually…so, don’t you worry about it).
That person would be Tigi.
Or as she was brought into this world: Tiny Gertha. She was born in August of 1898 in the Delta, and for most of her life was referred to as Miss Gertha, by the community. Or, good, old Granny. Eventually, nicknamed, Tigi, with a soft “g.”
She passed away in 1984, and never grew taller than 4’11”. I’m not sure if some Delta gypsy cursed her at birth, or if she did what any proper, Southern belle would do, and live up to (or down to, rather) her name. Either way, she was, indeed, tiny, in all things but heart and determination.
She would marry young and well…until the Depression. That didn’t stop her from giving birth to nine children, among them U.L. and Nana. Their stories come later, though.
Tigi was, despite her name, the first giant I ever knew in this world.
She was the first person to encourage my creativity, the first to cry in front of me, and the first to put a pan in my hand and point me toward the stove. She was riddled with cancer, my entire time of knowing her, but she smiled anyway. She played the “mouth organ” as good as Little Walter Jacobs, and tickled only the black keys on the piano. But, boy could she play. Mostly roots gospel, but is there anything better, really, to play on an old upright?
A few things I’ve already mentioned to you like her cooking elan and legendary temper, but those were in her worn, later years, when experience had sharpened her to the point of exhaustion and wisdom. They were also only a part of her portrait, a few deep hues caught in the glare of a waning sun. It was her determination to walk even after the cancer denied her the use of her own legs, her refusal to stop making, in the last years, even a pitiful pone of cornbread for U.L.’s supper, stubbornly overlooking the resistance her arms and fingers gave, victims to the spreading killer, rippling beneath her skin, that made me love her, that helped me understand the stock from which I came.
She’d lift that iron skillet, if it took an hour, and never once did I hear her complain of its weight. Not once did she show anything but grace. I’d try to help her, but it wasn’t until the afternoon she fell that she finally relented and let me.
Starting in kindergarten and up through second grade, it was with Tigi that I stayed in the afternoons. She lived with U.L., and as it turned out, the house was a mere four houses away from the school I attended. It was a private, small, and extremely focused school, where, ironically, despite the distance my upbringing necessarily created between me and the Jewish side of my mother’s family, I still learned Hebrew at the age of four.
Jesus’s kind of Judaism was fine. My maternal grandmother’s was not. And oh, what a delicious story hers is. But, later. Later.
Tigi was never one to spoil me.
Though she did make my favorite snack for me, each afternoon: fried dill pickles. She did this until she was no longer able to, which took me through the years of four, five, six and seven.
Up to the age of eight. That afternoon she fell.
And, for all intents and purposes, never really got back up.
She’d had to turn more and more to the walker, which she hated with a relish usually reserved for those who didn’t vote or attend church regularly. She despised having to rely on the walker, this daughter of sharecroppers who’d on more than one occasion picked cotton until her fingers cracked and bled, this woman who had gone without electricity, and sometimes, fresh water. Buried under twisted cartilage and arthritis, shrouded in folklore and faith, eaten up with cancer, she was still bound and determined not to lose the ability to take a step on her own terms.
I don’t blame her for that one bit.
But, at the age of eight, I did. At least, at first.
I came in the front door and there, somehow, in the den, she’d managed to scoot the couch up to the bar, called such because of its shape not its use, and had taken an old broomstick, missing the broom-part, and was attempting to roll it along, half of it on the back edge of the hard-ridged couch and the other half on the bar, as she guided herself along behind it.
I can’t imagine the purpose of this other than sheer rebellion. There was no definite destination in sight: your choices were either the right side of the couch or the left.
“Or,” as she said, in her typical wit and fashion (one that U.L. has inherited), “the right foot in front of the left.”
Some destinations are meant to be nothing more than the journeys in and of themselves.
I stood at the door, coming in from the carport and watched as she looked up at me; she was smiling at what she’d done, halfway down the length of the back of the couch, and then, letting go of the broomstick, took a brief, solo step and then fell forward into it, breaking the stick in half on her way down to the hard floor.
I was devastated. Terrified and frightened. It was at that moment, I believe, that the fear of Choice and Living, that fear of Striking Out On One’s Own, that is so inherent in my family’s history, took root in my own soul. (It was also then that my own fight, consequently, began).
I ran to her, crying. All eight years of my existence in each wet drop.
She was crying, too. Smiling, but crying.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I remember her saying to me. She hadn’t hurt anything but her pride and the broomstick. I think that’s what she was really crying about. With it broken, her shot at freedom, at independence, was also.
I helped her, as best as I could, to the arm of the couch. She sat there, perched, for a long, long time. When you admit defeat, I guess, it’s really a quiet thing. True loss is nothing but putting the memory of winning in its place. But, keeping your head held high, regardless.
That is, I believe, the very definition of dignity.
I called U.L. He left work and came home, stayed the rest of the day with her.
I looked toward the kitchen, but there were no fried dill pickles on the table, that afternoon.
And there never were again.
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