From Boy-Sandwich
1989; Johns Hopkins University Press; Issue: 39 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2931561
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
ResumoToday Grandma is in her chair. She is clutching her bag, which is stuffed like a pregnant capybara with her possessions. Her bag contains the things she vows no one but me would inherit after her death. It's no use saying I don't want them. They are mostly the tools of her trade-thimbles of all sizes, pinking shears, scissors, tapemeasures, boxes of pins, scraps of jewelry and her money. She talks of her doubloons, though no one has ever seen them. As far as money goes, there are small plastic bags with a few coins -some old and strange and some she says her father gave her years ago. There is also a pair of shoes she wore to a dance in 1952. The West Indian dance was held at a church hall in Brixton. De dance end at ten o'clock but everybody happy, she confided the day she showed me the shoes. De police shut down de dance. Say it noisy and workin' people want sleep. In dem days dey say black people tek social security more dan white people, same as de do today. In her Island home she had danced as well, and had kept Grandpa Simon interested in her by refusing him a waltz when she observed his antics with his cousin Julinda. She continued to ignore him until he promised to give up slaving for his father for little reward. Under her supervision he abandoned tailoring and joined his brothers who were at that time running contraband between the islands. When the adventurers returned they brought money and trinkets which made girls cluster round them. They went dancing, drank rum, made babies and played dominoes. But Simon's heart was not in it. He married Grandma and took up tailoring again, but this time in partnership with his father. His mother welcomed Clara Riley. She was known to have a good character and understood all the fine points of etiquette. She was no pick-head shrimp of a girl. Happy with her husband, she continued dressmaking until her fate brought her to London. My father was a sickly child, so fearing that the cold weather would cause his kind of blood to congeal, Grandma left him with her parents and her sister until the roots of life had grown deeply into his body. That took seventeen years. Fate never allowed her to indulge her only son, so Grandma belonged to me. I was her baby. She loved me and looked after me. When she met me after school and took me home to tea, I felt a deep pleasure. The colors of the fabrics piled up everywhere in her rooms made me pretend I was in some rainbow country that I had conquered. Grandma would let me feel the silks, the satins, the cottons and the crepes, and she would tell me their names; and when Grandpa came in from the garden we would take tea together. He always drank mate while we
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