My grandfather came to Detroit from Tuscaloosa, Alabama with only a rifle and a duffel bag. He married my grandmother, a widow with a small boy, in 1935. He fathered two boys, a girl, and one more boy. The girl was born in 1940; she was my mother. I don't know when my uncles were born.

My grandfather loved my mother especially. My mother recalled that when she was little, she used to have one of the prettiest heads of hair at her school. For black girls back then, and probably even today, it was a stroke of luck not to be sneered at. Her hair could swing in wavy, long braids. When unbraided, her hair was thick and luxurious and with a few strokes of a brush emanated a fragrant, soft sheen.

In the fall of 1947, my mother and her brothers caught ringworm. My mother's hair fell out, leaving rough dry patches of wool growing futilely on a scaly, barren scalp. My grandfather was heartbroken, to see her come home from school in a clumsy bandana and a tear streaked face. For six months, every day after school, he bought her a bag of lemon drops, her favorite.

My grandfather taught all the boys how to shoot the rifle. As they started their teens, they, including my mother, would stand around him in the backyard of their tiny urban house, and watch as he shot a pigeon from the rooftop. They studied the pigeon lay dead on the ground. It was almost as if my grandfather had brought Death for visit, "Children, I want you to meet death, take a good look at him. Say goodbye now."

My grandmother started taking trips around the country, as my mother and her brothers graduated high school in the fifties. My grandfather never went with her. She went with members of the deaconess boards or fellow nurses from the hospital were she worked. The photos I have depict my grandmother at Niagara Falls, Seattle, New York, Memphis, Knotsberry Farm, Yellowstone Park and many other places that were nice tourist attractions.

I wondered if my grandfather was ever lonely while she was away on those trips. I cannot remember him, in fact, in any of the pictures with the family, not even at a picnic. I think that my grandmother and grandfather simply parted ways.

My mother married a very handsome man in 1967. He was born in Georgia in 1937 and came to Detroit in the late fifties. My father sang in the choir at my mother's church and that's how they met. Soon after they married, he was unfaithful to her.

My mother found out where his mistress lived and went to the apartment one night. After the woman opened the door, my mother proceeded to beat the living daylights out her. My father stopped the fight; the mistress called the police; My mother went to jail.

My mother called my grandfather from the police station, who, upon hearing his daughter’s plight, got his rifle and went looking for my father. My grandmother then summoned her sons to stop my grandfather. It came to a head with my grandfather standing on the lawn of my parent’s house in the early morning, calling out for my father. My mother stood pleading before him, telling him it was alright. My uncles managed to take the rifle from my grandfather and take him home. My grandfather never intervened again.

I do have pictures of my grandfather holding me at age one. He is holding me in his lap and I am laughing. According to my mother, I ate paint off a windowsill when I was two years old. This had been going on for some days, and my mother could not figure out what was wrong when I started pulling out my hair and eating it.

My mother and grandfather took me to the doctor who diagnosed me with lead poisoning. This required that I have a series of painful injections. I screamed, kicked, and cried as if I was going to die. My mother recalls my grandfather telling them to stop, and holding me in an effort to soothe me.

When I was sick with cold, my mother asked my grandfather to watch me while she worked during the day. My grandfather would come in the morning with ginger ale and cherry flavored cough drops. I would fall asleep with a tall glass of Vernors on my bedstand and the sound of an afternoon baseball game droning softly on the radio downstairs. When I woke up, my grandfather would be gone and my mother would be at my bedside serving open faced cheese sandwiches with tomato soup.

In 1976, my grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes. She was sixty-eight years old and not strong enough to have a kidney transplant. She was taken to the hospital three times a week to have dialysis. My mother and grandfather took turns taking her to the hospital but as the disease took its toll, my grandmother insisted that my mother take her. My mother was a nurse, like my grandmother.

Sometimes, my grandmother would spend the night at our house the day before her hospital visits to save our mother a trip. I would wake up in the morning to see my mother cooking grits, eggs, and bacon at the stove. My grandmother would be sipping Pepsi. The doctor told my grandmother that Pepsi was bad for her but she drank it anyway. To this day, waking up to smell bacon frying reminds me of my grandmother.

During this time, my grandfather drank. The smell of whiskey on his breath was not unusual to me. I cannot remember otherwise. Looking back now, it amazes me that I never saw him drunk. My grandmother was a fearful woman and stated throughout the marriage that she would not tolerate any alcohol in the house, but my grandfather always kept a bottle of whiskey under the couch. Whenever visiting my grandparents, I could see the pink seal of the whiskey bottle under the couch.

There were no surprises when my grandmother died. Her dying was laborous, unapologetic, and cynical. In spite of thrice weekly encounters with the dialysis machine, she continued to drink bottle after bottle of Pepsi against doctor’s orders. At one point, she lifted her dress in the company of her children and grandchildren to reveal an ugly, withered pudendum, the underwear hanging in lank folds. She exclaimed how sexy she looked now.

After she died, our lives were neatly divided as "before" and "after". The after part was a quiet sorrowful time, and it seemed everyone retreated into themselves. My mother quit going to church and resigned herself to having a bad marriage with my father. My father continued being unfaithful and was rarely home. My siblings and I got used to fixing our own breakfast and eating whatever dinner we felt like.

My grandfather made ghostly visits in the late afternoon, handing out the ritual Wrigley's gum then sitting for a while with my mother as the sun set. Against my mother's wishes, he would go home. With whiskey kisses for us, his grandchildren, he would drive off in his Ford into the twilight.

Two years after my grandmother died in 1980, my grandfather suffered a heart attack, then, was diagnosed with diabetes. Once again, my mother was making weekly hospital visits. My mother related to us some years later that my grandfather felt guilt: guilt at being a burden, guilt from grandmother's death.

This is the only explanation I have for his death. My grandfather was found in his bedroom, dead from a gunshot would to the heart, with his rifle beside him. My mother called her brothers, made the funeral arrangements then picked up her worn telephone book to call his sister, his only living relative. I didn't go to the funeral, but I do remember my mother telling everyone he died of a heart attack and my father standing over his coffin on a chair taking pictures.

My grandparents are buried in an unmarked plot of land in a cemetery. My mother did not buy tombstones because no in our family goes to cemeteries. Some years later, I pulled out the fire resistant metal box my mother keeps important documents.In the box, she keeps birth, death, and marriage certificates, the mortgages and deeds to her house and my grandparents house, pictures of her children, funeral programs and my grandmother's and grandfather's wallet.

Looking through my grandfather's wallet I see his drivers license, his United Auto Workers membership card (Walter P. Reuther, president), his health insurance card, and his pension card from Ford Motor Co. I also found the deed to my grandparents burial ground. My grandfather is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery.