Sundays At Age Nine

When I was nine, I spent Sundays with my great-grandmother. Saturday night, my mother would drop me off at her house. My great-grandmother and I would eat dinner, and then I would bathe and go to sleep.

Sunday morning, I would take much pride in wearing my only pretty dress, yellow, with frilly white socks and white patent leather shoes that she bought me. My favorite accessories were a small white purse and white lace gloves. I must have resembled a canary.

After Sunday school and church, her son, my great uncle, would take us to the Piccadilly. My great-grandmother taught me manners. She still remembered when the family was one of the wealthy southern aristocratic families in the area. I paid close attention to how she behaved, and I modeled her manners even at the Baskin Robbins where we always bought a quart of mint chocolate chip ice cream to take home. There, we would eat a reasonable portion in a fancy china bowl using a fancy silver spoon. A game of Pollyanna was always expected after ice cream.

I remember well those weekends that lasted until one night I was scared. In the hall, a money tree sat upon a tall shelf. A money tree is a metal figure with a trunk-like base with branches from which hang flattened oval pearly disks roughly the size of half dollars, maybe slightly smaller. The tree had stood in the same spot since long before I had ever begun staying with my great-grandmother. But I had never noticed it. The thing appeared to have the shape of a face. It had eyes. Frightened, I began to cry. This upset my sensible maternal figure very much, and she promised never to let me stay with her again. She kept her promise.

Though I missed my great-grandmother after that, I never harbored ill feelings toward her. But I chose to use the positive lessons that I learned from her. The lessons about good manners and appearances. I chose to ignore the lessons about people that she tried to teach me. The lessons that black people were "moving in" too quickly on television, in the neighborhood, out in public, in schools. They should learn to keep their place. Even at nine, I knew what it meant to be a hypocrite.