The Tree Trunk

My Nannie sits if not all day, then most of the day, her bum resting in the cushion of her armchair, her blackberry ankles waiting-to-burst softly placed up. The sun rises and she shifts ever so slightly in her chair, and then the sun falls, and she shifts just a little bit more. She has her handy Bible sitting right next to her, ready for her third reading of the day right before noon. My Nannie prays a lot, says it’s something you gotta do before you’re gone. I think about that a lot. I think about my family, my life, and what comes next a lot.

By now, my Nannie has lived most of her life in Chicago, but she was born in the South, down in Mississippi, during the summer of 1935. She packed her bags and moved up North sometime in her early 20’s. According to one of her daughters, she moved North because her man was having an affair. But if you ask her, she moved up here for better work opportunities and to follow after her mother, Mama, who had already moved North. For whatever reason though, she marched along with the Great Migration with the herd of her children to the bustling South Side Chicago streets. An iconic replica of the historical migration hanging in her house. I wondered why she wanted the reminder, especially when she talks about how she never wants to go back to Mississippi. Hmm, maybe it was just that.

When I see my Nannie, especially around the holidays when the family busts out the oldest family photo album and go through the pictures naming all the dead people reminds me how every person, she called a friend, has died and all she has left is her children’s generations. 

A couple years ago, she told my mom on the phone she wanted to bring the family back together before she leaves this Earth.

This past Christmas, she said, “I’m ready to return to the Lord”. When I glanced around the bright Christmas-lit house, it looked emptier than ever.

A Broken Branch

My mom was the second grandchild of my Nannie and the second child of her mom, my Nana. According to my mom, my Nana was known for dumping her and her older brother off at other people’s houses and leaving them there for hours, if not the whole day. Despite this, my mama loved her. So, at a young age, my mom learned how to sneak out and roam the gritty South Side streets until she found her way back to her mother. She probably loved her mama more than her own life, but that was one of the many things she didn’t like about my Nana. She swore she wouldn’t dump her kids off with anyone, so when I was born, I was the second child to be tucked to her side.

We stood in the chaos of our living room, sometime during my late high school years, the dull warmth of the kitchen light trying to reach around the walls to our living room. So, my eyes adjusted and caught the darkness of my mother’s face. The edges of her body outlined against the backdrop in my sight. I leaned back against our L-shaped couch, my back scratching against the frame.

“I think about killing myself often,” she said softly, the sadness vibrating through my chest. I never realized how lifeless her eyes had looked and the sinking depth of them. Years later, the rest of the conversation now forgotten; her figure submerged in the darkness engraved in my memories. 

I didn’t tell her that I thought about killing myself but could never muster the courage or how I questioned the value of my life. I guess that’s something we both have in common, toeing on the edge of life’s dissatisfaction and the numbing purposeful-will of survival. Did she ever think these things? 

I suppose our Nannie’s prayers were what saved us for us to see another sun-filled morning, another family spent holiday. Those moments that she sat reflecting on the family lost in those photo albums with the family that had more life to give. I suppose it’s the way her trembling fingers glide over to the table, sliding under the Bible with an uplift to her lap, her lips silently moving over each word read, always making time to read even if it’s only for five minutes. Her silent prayers always sustaining just a little while longer.

Lately, I’ve been praying that her prayers keep lasting. This past decade of my life has been hard. I constantly feel my anger bubbling over into a mass ocean of sadness, isolation, and insecurities. It’s hard to imagine the years I have left to live; the struggle of your lonely twenties being swept under the rug by those who’ve lived longer only seems to drown me more. Yet, in this emptiness I can only imagine how my mother feels. Her entire life, a failure in her eyes. The blanket-tight disappointment of goals never achieved and constant accepted discouragement.

“You’ll never finish school,” they said, and she listened.

This is why we find ourselves in these places, in the dimness of our living room, the dimness of our lives waiting on those prayers. Those same prayers to give us direction from our own self-destruction; my own patience slipping by the weeks, soon the days.

The Brittle Bark

My Nana was Nannie’s third child, and she had smoked on and off through most of my childhood. When I got in her car for a destination that holds no recollection to me anymore, the smell of bittersweet, congested smoke still burns slowly in my memory clouding my brain like how her recent burned-out cigarette had added to the layered smell that was soaked into the seats and the ceiling of her car. 

She was driving me around somewhere on the South Side for some reason I can’t remember. She was rambling, not sticking on one topic for long, asking rhetorical questions that I wouldn’t have had the answer to even if it wasn’t rhetorical. I nodded along anyway, easier to agree, and much preferred compared to if the conversation shifted to my personal life. She cursed, using every swear-word that the Lord forbids, and ranted about my alcoholic uncle and his “messy” life tendencies. I nodded and shrugged, not having much to say about addictions that seemed to carry themselves generation after generation. I knew she cared in her own way; I wouldn’t say it was the best of ways. However, I hummed in agreement either way. The car slowed to a stop at a red light. A high fenced-off cemetery resting outside the driver’s side window.

“You know this is where Mama is buried,” she said, pointing out at all the plots of tombstones beyond the fence. She turned and looked at me. “And where my brother, Anthony, is buried too.”

She looked at the guarded tombstones, the grass where they lay still fresh and alive, and the sun still shining. Then the light turned green, and her foot hit the gas. We were off and gone, just like the bodies that were returned to God’s earth.

“Sometimes I visit and put flowers on their graves,” she said. The conversation didn’t last much longer after that. The distance between us and the cemetery growing, and the one-sided chatter quieting.  

My family talked about Nannie’s mom, Mama, often. And they talked about Anthony just as much if not more. I couldn’t imagine no longer having my brother around. I wondered did it hurt any less to say his name almost 30 years after he passed or was the wound just as fresh. Would she ever bring me to give them flowers? 

I thought about all the stories my family ever told me about them as we continued to drive down the road. 

How Mama was a mean old lady that didn’t like dark-skinned Black people despite our own Blackness being no different to anyone else’s eyes, to how I took my first steps in the nursing home visiting Mama just days before she peacefully passed. How Anthony would steal the quarters from the coin laundry in their neighborhood, to how he would paint so effortlessly and refused the art institute when they offered him a scholarship to study, and to his final moments when he fell and cracked his skull open on that wooden deck. 

I thought, “Who would be the final person to tell their stories before they just became pictures of past family members?”

The Aging Tree

When would I become just a story? Another legacy of poverty or unfilled aspirations. I feel I have nothing to show for my 21 years on this Earth. My family numbers and family functions are dwindling. Even childhood friends and peers starting to find their return to God before we could get an email for a high school reunion. These are the pills that the poor must swallow, and I feel the lump in my throat that water can’t even push down. What happens when we’re dead and we just reside in someone’s memories? Is that truly good enough?

Take my Nannie for example, her memory is starting to fade. The names of her relatives are slowly becoming a puzzle. Which makes me wonder, what’ll happen to the stories only she knows? Are we satisfied with being forgotten? The meaning of life has been playing on repeat in my mind along with a crossroad coming up in my life. One that with a simple wrong turn could be hard to overcome with the constant physical and mental poverty that riddles my family. So lately, I lay quietly in dissatisfaction contemplating on what constitutes a happy life worth living. Were my family members satisfied with the love of their friends and family at the end of their lives, or did they ever wish for more? 

Do I wish for more?

I’ve been thinking how I don’t like college because I think it’s a greedy, hungry machine. A scam. But as I wrap up my junior year and head into my final academic year, I find myself not wanting to leave. The only thing seeming to keep me running towards the graduation stage is the outrageous monthly payments. But what comes after college? A JOB? Some whack 9-to-5 desk, pushing papers kinda job. I’ll pass. Either way, I’m not really sure what I want to do with my life after college. I keep spitting out careers, yet I’ve never known. When I was younger every month, I would jump from one career to another: a FBI agent, a doctor, writer, actress, engineer, architect. I wanted to be them all until I couldn’t. My mother was struggling to raise me and my siblings in a single parent-household, just as her mother had, and just as her mother’s mother had. When would it ever stop?

The sickness of poverty spreading through my blood could be the cause of it all. For one, I felt it sooner than wanted. The way it steals all your aspirations and forces them down your throat until you can’t breathe, choking until the contents of your stomach rises up instead. My mom made it a point to tell me I could be anything I wanted, but when I looked around it was clear I couldn’t or at the very least it would be harder. When I got older my mom told me, “At least we’re poor in a good community”. It didn’t make me feel any better, the way I watched my peers eat their homemade packed lunches, and how I waited to ask for their leftovers. I’m sure it didn’t make her feel any better either, the way her bills ate up her paycheck before noon on payday just to be in a good community. Instead, it made me think about my family, my life, and what comes after. 

My Nannie worked until she couldn’t anymore, and it looks like my Nana and her daughter will be doing the same. Could it be so bad to not want that for myself?

Is there anything that could save me from the premeditated fate set out for me? I often feel like the path I’m walking is already in stone. Nowadays, a college degree can’t save you despite what my family says about knowledge is power, but, in the end, we all know that money is powerful and last I checked I didn’t have a money tree in my backyard. I’ve never even had a backyard. Yet, according to my mother, I am the child that is supposed to change our narrative. All her failed aspirations shoved into my back pocket supposedly pushing me forward. However, I feel my time is only fading. My anger and sadness devouring my life’s energy. I figure there has to be something more than this life—something better. You work hard your whole life scrummaging for some change, and the odds are you watch your kids do the same. I can’t imagine dying in a life like this and ain’t shit on the “other side”. Is this part of the reason my Nannie prays so hard? I’ve been thinking even harder. When will the Lord’s hands touch me? The weight of a crowned savior compressing my survival. How am I supposed to save a family when I can barely save myself? I don’t think my Nannie’s prayers can deliver us from this chaos of a world we live in, and I, a mere human, can’t carry the aspirations of a household. 

I’ve been thinking hard about my life and what will come next.

I often find myself yelling into uninhabited spaces, screaming meaningless things with meaningful intent. Often to heal anger that buries the hurt, but anger has a way of continuously climbing up your veins. I found that a lot of things beg to stick around, almost like emotional cancers. They eat away at you too, leaving you to rot and scar like how the whispers of others continue to eat away at my mother. 

My college experience and growth into adulthood has been disastrous just as much as fulfilling. Maybe it is true—broken people find broken people, and not in the cute indie film way. People that are broken into small indistinguishable shards of glass. I never realized how broken people can break people even more. Maybe, it’s just as much my fault as theirs.

I spent most of my freshman year intoxicated and practically all my second year depressed. I thought they said college was going to be eye-opening and amazing. It was so amazing that to escape my depression I got drunk and popped ecstasy only to crash from the mind-numbing high of euphoria to talk of self-misery and potential suicide. A teammate of mine had to sit with me outside in the early morning crisp fall breeze on the concrete steps of my dorm building. I don’t think college is amazing for the poor. No one prepares you for the imposter syndrome, family alienation, and the actual pressure of success and college workload. In my entire time of college, I don’t remember a single form of a “good job”, since I got accepted into college and the next one will probably be when I walk across the stage—just a bunch of self-destruction and self-determinacy in between.

At the end of college, I didn’t expect to feel like a failure more than a successful graduate. This could just be my depression talking but just listen to my logic that I’ve presented in this essay. I did all this high school good grades and college bullshit to lift my family from poverty even if it is just a jump to a working-class family. I endured generations of broken homes and bedtimes with empty stomachs just for this success to be a real success, when I do leave college with no job security. I’ve been reflecting. I’ve settled to journey and to carve a path down this road because my family believes in me.

My family has always believed in me since the day I was conceived.    

 So, I’ve settled to write this ode to my family, my personal essay, that I am merely a human in a society that was designed for our failure before I even entered the womb. I decided to write this love letter to my family for surviving long before me and surely after me. I may never lift us from the shackles of poverty, but I will deliver us from suffering. So, I write my so-far life story for the one who carries us all—my Nannie’s prayers.