Anna Senior

Anna Senior

My grandmother was the most unique person I have ever known, but to hear her tell it, she really wasn't special. She was just Granny to me. She was old when I first met her. Anna Beulah Walker Wynn, Granny to us, was born on March 13, 1884, in Chester, South Carolina, but she came to Virginia around 1900. She was coal-black, with smooth, soft skin that never wrinkled. She had delicate facial features, not at all the wide, African features suggested by her deep hue. She was a "geechy", that is, she spoke the Gullah dialect, which I understood perfectly, but never quite learned to do justice to in speech. The smooth soft dialect of what sounded like a mixture of English, French, and some nondescript Caribbean language rolled off her tongue, and sometimes I had to listen closely to clearly understand what she said, especially if she was somewhere in the stages between waking and sleeping.
While browsing through the Welcome Center of Charleston, South Carolina a few years ago, I happened to hear that same language, which immediately flooded me with memories of my childhood. I stood, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, staring at the man who spoke that language. He watched me intently as he spoke to the white woman to whom he was selling an expensive, double woven grass basket, realizing almost instantly that I understood exactly what he was saying. He looked, then smiled, and then began to converse with me as though she wasn't listening. She looked absolutely baffled by what he was saying, and I realized then that he knew the extent to which she did not understand and that he would eventually capitalize on that fact. He began to ask me questions, starting with, "How is it you speak my language?", and I answered each question without once asking him to repeat what he had said. He explained to me about the island he came from, each day, to sell baskets and artifacts in the welcome center. He told me that his people rarely mixed with outsiders, white or black, that the only contact they had was in the markets, while they were selling the crafts of their people. In that instant, they became my people. He talked like my Granny. In a land of strangers, and with a quickly dwindling family, it was good to be home; home at last.
Granny was slightly above average height, and was what most people refer to as big-boned. This was perhaps the reason she was put to work so soon in the cotton fields of her family's sharecropped land in South Carolina, and why she left so early in her life. I guess statuesque is the word that would be used to describe her physical size. She was not a small woman, and her presence, her aura, preceded her and made her appear larger than she actually was. Her voice was powerful without being loud, and sometimes she could set the church on its emotional edge by simply beginning to moan, rather than sing. But when Granny sang, the sky opened and God said, "Sing some more, Miss Anna". My sister, whom I refer to as Anna, Jr., has that same quality to her voice, the quality that many singers only dream about. Granny was always singing and cooking, kneading dough to the beat of her song. I guess that’s why Mama never quite learned how to cook, Granny always did it for her, but she sure learned to sing. Mama could cook some of Granny's specialties, like macaroni and cheese, rice pudding, and homemade soup, but she never really learned to cook. By the time Anna, my sister, was twelve, she had learned to cook better than Mama ever did. She was Little Anna copying from Big Anna. She learned to sing, too, and so did I, but like Mama, I only learned to cook what I liked to eat, and nothing more.
I was born into a very large family, even though it doesn't seem so large now. There were only the two of us children, my sister and myself, in my immediate family, but we had so much extended family, that it was never just us. My mother was the youngest of nine, and all her brothers and sisters and their children, visited all the time. There was always a house full of people, a house full of love. My Granny was the family matriarch, and, in the eyes of her children, she was the queen. They worshipped her, and she knew it.
I lived in my Granny's house almost exclusively from birth until I was four years old. My mother went back to college, at my father's insistence. He was fifteen years older than my mother, and he expected that my mother would outlive him, so he insisted she be able to provide for herself. He knew that, with her disposition and temper, she would never survive if she had to be a domestic. Granny could be a domestic, mainly because nothing ever really disturbed her. She never raised her voice, or her hand in anger. If she did either, it was calculated, and done in order to prove a point. Mama was not like Granny. She got mad, and she believed in getting even. So Daddy insisted she get an education, and she agreed to do so. It proved to be a wise thing, since my father died fifteen years later, leaving my mother a forty-year-old widow with two teenage daughters. My father decided that while we were infants, the best place for us was with Granny. After my mother graduated from college, my parents bought a bigger house, and we all moved in together; the four of us, and Granny. So, I was never without family all around.
My father adopted Mama's whole family as his own, even though he had lots of family himself. He loved Granny most and she loved him. Theirs was a “mutual admiration society”. My mother used to tell the story about the one time she left my daddy, before Anna or I was born. They had only been married for a short while, and she was extremely spoiled, so she believed that things should always go the way she wanted them to. They argued and she packed her things and went home to her mother. When she entered the house, and Granny found out why she was home, she said, "You married him… Go home to your husband", and set my mother's suitcase back out on the porch. She allowed her to visit for an hour or so, without moving her suitcase back into the house, and then she had to go home. Granny insisted upon it. Mama never left again.
Granny never interfered in arguments that were not her own, and she never took sides. First and foremost, Granny believed in fair play. Even a fight had to be fair. If it wasn’t, she made sure she evened things up. When we were in elementary school, and were engaged in schoolyard fights, Granny would monitor the fights with a broom. If anyone other than the two people who had the original argument tried to interfere, she and her broomstick kept the fight fair. All the kids in the neighborhood respected her for this. Ours weren’t the only fights she monitored. If there were fights between any of the kids, she would do the same. She had done this for, and between her own children, my mama's siblings, and she didn't stop when we were kids.
Granny had a potion or an herbal cure for every ailment any of us had. She never practiced voodoo, but I am certain that she would have been very good at it if she had. She seemed to be good at everything she did. Root teas and smelly ointments were the first remedies she tried, and only when she knew there was no chance of a cure from these, did she resort to calling the doctor. Consequently, we only went to the doctor for an annual check-up, and when we were struck with childhood diseases, so the doctor could record the fact that we had measles, or mumps or whatever. Granny had the cure, and we relied on her expertise. After all, she was the smartest woman in the world.
As I said before, Granny was old when I first met her. She was forty-six years old when my mother was born, and seventy-two by the time I was born. Her steps were slow sometimes, but her mind was always sharp. She loved to take trips, and I wondered why she loved to travel until I was old enough to realize that she had lived from the days of horses and buggies, having been born in 1884, right up to man's first landing on the moon. She was fascinated with transportation. I often wonder what she would do if she ever had access to a computer, but I know that she would use one. She was just that adventurous. I inherited her enthusiasm for adventurous endeavors.
One of the many things that fascinated me about Granny was her philosophy of religion. She was a very spiritual woman, but I don't think I would ever refer to her as being religious. She only had a second-grade education, but she learned to read by letting her children teach her everything they had learned in school daily. I don't know if they realized that they were teaching her, but they learned well because they knew she would require them to repeat what they knew to her when they got home from school. She loved learning, a quality that she passed on to all of her children. She read the Bible because she had very definite ideas about not taking anything a preacher told her at face value. She wanted to read it for herself and make her own judgment about it. She believed that a preacher was only a man, not to be worshipped. She had some favorite preachers, and she loved to hear good preaching, but their interpretation of the Bible was only their interpretation. Her connection with the spirit was evident in the way she sang and in the way she lived. She believed in helping people, without ever asking for anything in return. If she had something a neighbor needed, she gave it freely and never mentioned it again.
Granny was resourceful. When her children were growing up, she supplemented the family income by taking in white people's washing. She had a two-fold purpose for that. First, she believed that a woman had to have "a piece of a job" to have the money for the things she needed. She didn't believe in asking her husband, my grandfather, for more than he could afford to give her. He paid the family bills, while she paid for anything extra that their children had to have. She bought chickens and used the eggs to feed her family, and she killed chickens for Sunday dinner meat. She could make family dinner stretch by making a pot of soup with just a few vegetables, especially potatoes, and homemade biscuits. When her children got older, and needed clothes for special school performances, she supplemented their wardrobe by allowing them to wear the clothes that she was given to wash. They wore those clothes carefully, and returned them, unharmed, to Granny so that she could wash them again to prepare them to be returned. They never realized that they were poor because they were always warm, full, and had decent clothes to wear.
Granny was the queen of grits and rice. At every meal you had to have one or the other. Rice pudding became my favorite dessert, and I expected to have a fresh one, in my own special pan, every day when I got home from school. Granny provided this, my comfort food, until she was no longer able to cook. I guess she was about eighty then, and I was about eight. Some days, when she felt good, I still received my treat. Only Granny could take the staple that stretched the slave meal to feed many and make a delicacy out of it. That was her way. She could make the ordinary extraordinary, because she carried "spirit" within her, and that spirit is still very present in the family. We fondly think of it as "the God factor".