M Is for the Many Meals She Made
By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
To read the original post, go here.
First note the title. It's a well-chosen title, punning on the famous acrostic about "Mother" ("M" is for the many things she did for me, etc.). She doesn't just title her essay, "My Grandmother," but finds a title that captures the imagination.Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
To read the original post, go here.
My grandmother's hands are wrinkled and buttered and floury.
Her swollen knuckles knead the flour into crusts for the pies.
The writer doesn't "tell" about her grandmother; she "shows" us. One of the best ways is by showing the person "doing" something (another way is by showing them talking). Note the strong verb ("knead") and adjectives ("buttered" and "floury"; "wrinkled" is fairly common but sturdy). Note how specific she is (lower level of generality; not "baking" but "kneading . . . crusts"). Below the writer begins with another action ("hopping"): showing, not telling. Note the many vivid (specific) images (underlined):
Now she is hopping on her good leg to get to the sink, where she will drain the boiling sweet potatoes, the steam rolling off the water, melting her curls. Her red lipstick is glistening in the kitchen heat.
Note in the following paragraphs the repetitions of the conjunction, "and," which can be quite effective to build a rhythm (Hemingway was a master of the use of ands). This style reaches its climax in the third paragraph below. Note there are no general rules (some students may accuse a teacher of "contradicting" himself by saying one thing but also the opposite on occasion. It's obvious that too much use of "ands" is bad writing (if you don't now what you're doing). If you know what you're doing and do it deliberately, it's good. Clearly the writer here wishes to stress t he tedium of her grandmother's life, but also the ritual dedication, which she admires and which (as we learn below) is a lifestyle that is now lost to the granddaughter. Don't ignore the specific details below either:
She will mash the potatoes with sugar and butter and add some cinnamon and nutmeg. And she will beat the eggs and squeeze in a little fresh lemon to keep the pies from turning brown.
She will wash the roast and season it and put it in the oven. She will wash the collard greens and boil them until they are tender. She will scrape the corn off the cob and mix it with a little flour and salt and pepper and fry it in some butter.
Her aching hands scrape and mix and season and dust and wash and stir as she hops around that little kitchen in Kansas on her one good leg.
Note that the writer had delayed revealing her grandmother's name (Christine Taylor) until now. This is a device called "cataphora," which adds interest (curiosity). Note how the writer contrasts Grandmother and "the rest of the family" (sleeping). Note the strong final sentence of the next paragraph: "But they know Sundy dinner will be ready after church," which further defines Grandmother as a dedicated matriarch (female head of the household):
The sun hasn't even come up yet, and Christine Taylor has been up an hour making Sunday dinner, banging pots and pans, running water. The rest of her family, now spread over town in their own little houses, is sleeping. Nobody really knows when she cooks. But they know Sunday dinner will be ready after church.
Below is where I would differ with the writer, who seems to lose focus, from Grandmother to herself. That does not mean a double focus is impossible; because the essay is obviously not about Grandmother, but about Grandmother seen from the point of view of the writer's past and current life; in this sense, the essay has unity and the writer is in control of her double focus (in a sense, a double subject with a single focus). The real subject of the essay is the melting pot, and how an Afro-American woman (as we soon discover) has lost her basic ("soul") values. And that's another strength of the essay; the way the writer withholds important details until later, allowing the reader to "discover" her real subject: living as an Afro-American person. Still, we will jump to the next point in the essay where the focus shifts back to Grandmother. Besides, I believe the writing is not up to the rest of the essay in the strike-through text below; the details are less vivid, etc.
I remember sitting on those hard church benches, my mind trying to listen to the sermon, but wrestling with worldly concerns:
Fried corn, greens, turkey, peach cobbler -- and sweet potato pie--waiting on Grandmother's table.
The preacher would huff and the church organ would jump on his words, emphasizing each syllable.
And I would wait, sitting in my Sunday dress, hair pressed and tied, tight, in ribbons, sitting with my knees lotioned, socks turned down and patent leather shoes polished.
Praying little prayers, like: "God, please let the service end so I can go eat. Amen."
Sometimes, He would answer those prayers sooner than later.
Church would end at 1:58 p.m. rather than the regular 2:30.
We would shake the pastors' hand. Wait for my mother to finish talking. Wait for the cars to file out of the gravel parking lot. Wait, in the back seat of the white Ford Granada, windows rolled down, hand stuck out the window, beating the waves of the wind, traveling all the way down to where Grandmother lived in a little white house up a broken driveway. There, the food sat, like a glorified offering.
And we would dig in.
"Mother, this is so good," my mother would say. "You really put your foot in it today."
(Putting your foot in it means "This is an excellent meal! You seasoned it perfectly." But at these Sunday dinners, nobody but the proper cousins talked like that.)
A carefully chosen analogy (comparing two things of different kinds) adds to one's style:
We would dip into the sweet, red Kool-Aid punch with its ring of ice floating like an iceberg. We would eat until we were bursting. No pretense was needed. No need to make small, polite conversation. No need to talk at all. You could just sit on a sofa and eat, and nobody would think you were rude. And when you became a teenager, you could eat, put your plate in the sink and leave without helping to clean up, and nobody would say you were wrong.
At Grandmother's house, it was always about the Food.
Note how the writer plays on two different meanings of "Soul Food": Afro-American food, but also spiritual food, tying a family together, as shown in the ritual acceptance of the newcomer in the family (below):
This was Soul Food, food for the soul. Sunday dinner was the glue in the family, like flour and water--always spiced with drama.
I remember when the uncle brought home the new wife who was from "another culture, " and everybody stopped eating when the uncle put some chitlins on her plate. We waited for her to actually eat these meticulously cleaned, incredibly rich pig intestines. And when she did, we knew she would fit in.
As I grew and went off into the world, I would encounter other people's cooking at holidays and always leave slightly disappointed by the blandness, the lack of salt, the lack of
seasoning--the lack of drama.
Grandmother grew up in Mississippi, a pretty little thing who got married at 17 to get out of the house. Took the train north to Chicago. She doesn't talk about that part of her life much. Only bits and pieces slip out every now and again. Like the time I was helping her get dressed and I asked her about the scars on her back, three slashes on each side of her pretty back. The kind that you see in photos at the Smithsonian.
She doesn't talk much about that or having to move aside on the sidewalk in a segregated town.
Note how the writer reveals grim details bit by bit, to aid in the reader's process of discovery of what it meant to be a black person in her grandmother's time; so the essay "accrues" (builds) meaning, from being a mere picture of a person's grandmother to a picture of an entire ethnic (Afro-American) group. A minor point: although numbers up to a hundred should be spelled out, she writes "seventeen" as "17." Like I repeat in class, style has become less standardized than in the past; or the Washington Post editors simply overlooked it. Note, below, how omitting the subject ("She") adds to the style ("Doesn't" instead of "She doesn't"). If it's done on purpose, it's right; if it's done unknowingly and without a sense of pattern, it's wrong. Also "doesn't" has a purpose greater than style; it expresses or dramatizes the grandmother's refusal to speak about memories she's troubled by:
Doesn't talk much about the first husband, whom she left because he was mean. Doesn't talk much about the second husband, who was good to her but was in the service and her kids didn't want to travel the world with him, so she stayed home. She doesn't talk much about the move from Chicago to Oklahoma to Kansas, where she worked in a hospital for 25 years, cooking for more than 300 people each day, getting up at 4 every morning for the day shift. Twenty-five years--until one day she asked for a vacation and they didn't give her the days she wanted, so she retired early. She's been retired 13 years. She is 79.
Now she hops around in her own kitchen, hopping to keep the family together.
Now we can see that the subject if not only Grandmother, but the writer herself, who sees herself in comparison to her grandmother. Now note how the writer makes a simple and mundane action (eating) into a symbol or metaphor of a way of life:
Sometimes, I wonder how far I have gone from Grandmother's house.
It has come to this. I rarely eat greens. Who has time to wash each leaf, checking it for ladybugs? . . . I rarely eat homemade macaroni and cheese anymore. Who has time to make the roux and dice the onion finely? In fact, I don't have big Sunday dinners anymore because everything has changed and I have moved so far away from family.
I like this dialogue; it has a special ring to it:
On Sundays, I call Grandmother's house and she says, "Hey, baby. How you doin'? I'm so proud of you."
The final paragraph seems like a weak way to end the essay, but not if one realizes that food is really a symbol of the "soul" and of a way of life, which has forever changed:
I hang up and turn to my own Sunday dinner, something quick: grilled salmon and brown rice, a sliced organic tomato with extra-virgin olive oil. Grandmother would have never had this on her Sunday dinner menu. My dinner is not soul food.
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