WHY I LOVE AMERICAN INDIANS
First Story -- Grandma
Grandma’s name was Ona Raney. She was born in Aransas after the turn of the last century, child of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and a white father. As an adult, on a tiny farm in Oklahoma
Against the dark, joyless backdrop of my childhood her memory stands forth in a gentle wash of pastel colors. Her essence is warm, round and soft amid the jagged fragments of bitter reminiscence.
“Grandma, why do you always do things so fast?”
She looked up, surprise in her blue eyes, not knowing I had been watching her.
“Well, Hon, I guess I just got used to moving quick-like. I always had so much to do, seems like doing it on the run was the only way it got done.”
Grandma bent her silvered head over the dough board. It was five-thirty a.m.; the roosters hadn’t yet begun to crow but the usual morning fare of fresh biscuits and gravy would soon be on the table.
With seven children to raise, Grandma still had to help Grandpa in the fields as well as tend her flower and vegetable gardens. That seventh and last child had arrived when Grandma was well into middle age, and Grandpa approached seventy.
Grandma’s house. The smell of those biscuits, fried chicken and apples -- that’s what I remember. I picture her in the doorway, plump in her flower-sprigged cotton dress, wiping her hands on her apron, pausing to smooth her pinned-up hair. In greeting she would smile broadly and enfold us all, in turn, in a cheerful, enormous hug. In parting she would wipe away her tears with an embroidered handkerchief. “Ya’ll come,” she’d say, as we trooped onto the porch, and then she’d wave us out of sight down the dusty track.
She didn’t know that even then she and her way of life were anachronisms, that her way of speaking was quaint -- tomorrow’s caricature, and that she was creating for me treasured antiques for the mind.
We spent the summer I was eight there on the farm. It comes back in vivid remnants mostly -- the shocking pink, orange and scarlet of tiny moss rose flowers lying lank upon hot, sandy earth. Tomatoes and corn fresh from the garden. Chickens scrambling for the parched, cracked corn I tossed. Eggs discovered one by one in hidden nests.
One day I got very sick. Grandma said it was dysentery. They didn’t seem very surprised: the outhouse, no running water, the shared dipper for drinking from the bucket that stood by the well. Perhaps it was understandable. The illness flashed through me so violently that within twenty-four hours I was a fevered, empty shell lying weakly in bed. I was scarcely able to sip water and eating was something I neither desired nor was able to do. Over the next days, I felt my already scrawny frame shrivel, grow weightless against the rough muslin sheets.
Grandma sat by me. She brewed hot tea for me from the bark of one of her peach trees. Peach tree tea was only one of many remedies passé down to her by her Cherokee mother. The medicine was bitter, but the expression of concern and tenderness on her face helped it go down easier. She cared deeply but she didn’t cluck and coo -- she was not a demonstrative woman. For her generation, stoicism was not a repressive aberration; it was the requirement of a demanding lifestyle. I was happy to heal for her.
