Nana

Nana and Pa... my maternal grands. From my earliest recollection. We lived up-stairs in that big square house on Georgia Avenue, next to Boo and Uncle Maury... Nana was slim and nervous... always in motion.... losing her grasp on reality. She was born Janie Elizabeth Richmond in 1876, 60 years before me. She ate like a bird, sometimes taking a spoonful of suger raw... Married Pa in 1902.... good looking pair in the rather art nouveau oval portraits. She was the youngest of the Richmond girls, and had suffered from malaria as a child. She told of her doctor giving the bitter awful tasting quinine, the only thing they had then.... and later, after marriage, had a bout with typhoid fever, loosing all her hair from the high temperature. Mama was a teenager when it happened, and they used to quarantine the homes of people with dangerous contagious illnesses. Her hair grew back in beautiful curls, Mom said. And Ibel, her youngest sister was afraid of her new looks!

Nana was extremely nervous during the summer thunder storms. Mama said her fear of electricity was so bad, that on stormy nights she would not even let them play the piano! Convinced it would draw the lightening inside! A couple of summers when I was 5 and 6, I slept in the hall beside the stairs, because it was cooler there, and Nana would come sit on my cot and tell me about her life growing up during Reconstruction in Concord... already another lost world and way of life by 1936, when I was born. She taught me ten commandments. We went to church all the time... I still remember many passages from the Bible I was encouraged to learn. Much reading went on in those days. Radio was still a novelty and TV had not descended into our lives. The depression was raging, and times were lean. I learned the 23rd Psalm of David by heart... and they asked me what I wanted as a prize. I asked for a water sprinkler for the lawn. Fascinated with lawn hydraulics... love to watch the big oscillating sprinklers on the neighbors' lawns. So I got a brass ring shaped thing that did the trick, and my cousins and I would run through the waters on hot afternoons. Days of no air conditions, the front porch and shady lawn, the big windows always open, was what we had. The ceilings were higher, 9 feet at least...

Those stormy nights, she told me about her job at the Post Office, how she would walk to work so fast that Old Will Gibson would call from his shop, saying "Where is the fire, Janie??? Slow down!". She rode a her bicycle, too! And hated bananas! One time, a shipment of bananas arrived at the post office, and some were left there for the workers... she ate so many it made her very sick. And since that time she never ate another! And passed her banana phobia on to Mama. The only people I have ever known not to love that fruit.

There was a servant Nonne, big, black and authoritarian, an all knowing big mamma, in for no non-sense... She came 6 days early, cleaned, cooked breakfast and lunch, called dinner, the big meal of the day, and took home enough for her family. Her husband, James Parks, had the enviable job of being janitor for the prestigious First National Bank. Together they made enough to send their daughter to college!!! The black Normal Teachers College then in Greensboro. They lived in the "black part of town" Logan School, for the segregated folk.... Separate but unequal, really...