Grandma Dickerson’s Unintended Gift
Author’s note: since we have just passed a time of gift-giving and are entering one of new beginnings, this essay, previously published in Georgia Writers News, seems relevant.
Grandma Dickerson always seemed like the very essence of grandmotherliness to me: sweet, frail, and warm, she wore her steel-gray gathered up into the traditional elderly woman’s bun and her face was a mass of gentle wrinkles. On visits to her home, she would lead my little brother, David, and I in hymns.
“Jesus loves me this I know, because the Bible tells me so,” she would sing in a quavering voice full of the purest love. Always reading the Bible, she took a special delight when David or I would recite a verse, and would gather us up in her arms and shower us with kisses. When introducing either of us, she would say with a special emphasis, “This is my GRANDchild.”
She was the mother of Aunt Vada as well as Dad but I didn’t know that they were only half-brother and sister. I don’t know what the events were which led up to it but I was going into adolescence when Mom explained, “Aunt Vada’s illegitimate.”
“What?” I asked. I must have looked quite confused. “Illegitimate? You mean Grandma Dickerson–”
My Mom nudged me and whispered darkly, “Grandma Dickerson was a young girl and a man lied to her. She was disgraced afterward and had to leave the state she grew up in.”
I was thunderstruck, not because my pious Grandmother had sinned, but because of the sudden realization that Grandma Dickerson had been YOUNG.
In my mind’s eye I saw her as a young girl: dark-haired and fresh-faced and innocent . . . and . . . foolish . . . and foolishly in love. Then: confused and lied to and “in trouble” and ashamed and disgraced.
Often after I learned of my Grandma’s history, I would look at people and try to imagine what they could have been like far into the past or future. I would visualize a teacher as a kid and wonder if she (or he) had been a good kid or a brat or imagine a kid as a grown-up and try to see what s/he would look like and be like.
This triggering of the imagination helped make me a writer, I believe, and was Grandma Dickerson’s unintended but infinitely valuable gift to me.
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