LJ Idol: Week 2 - Living Rent-Free In Your Head
"Why do we call you Black-Headed Grandma? Your hair is all grey!"
Ettis May smiled down at her great granddaughter, sitting beside her on the polka dot chenille couch. The preschooler had been happily coloring beside her while her parents, Ettis' grandson and his wife, sipped sweet tea and chatted about christenings and garden cucumbers and Cousin Sarah's gout. Now the little girl was bouncing her legs impatiently and asking questions with the impertinence of a five-year-old forced to sit too long in a humid living room while wearing itchy, ruffled socks.
Her mother looked embarrassed.
"Caroline, the big people are talking," her mama intoned. "No interrupting, remember?" but honestly, Ettis was getting desperate to change the topic herself. One can only discuss swellings and water pills for so long before the conversation dies entirely.
"Oh, that's okay. I'd love to tell Little Bug about how Black-Headed Grandma got her name."
She stood slowly. Her old knees had been giving her fits on rainy days of late, but she offered her hand to Caroline. Together, they walked behind the piano and she helped the child climb up on the bench, placing a steadying arm around her waist so they could examine a photograph on the wall.
Within the gold-painted frame, a young woman with a big bouffant hairdo stood behind a microphone in a radio studio. Her eyes were sparkling and she was blowing kisses to an applauding studio audience.
"Who's that lady, Black-Headed Grandma?" Caroline asked. "She's pretty!"
"That's me, kitten!" Ettis exclaimed and laughed when the little girl looked between the picture and her wrinkled face incredulously.
"Are you sure? Her hair is so black! Ohhhh..." the child trailed off, realization dawning.
"It was SO black back then! My mama always said it was because she was a quarter Cherokee that she got a baby that looked like a blue-eyed indian! My hair stayed black like that for a long, long, time. Even when your daddy was a boy I never had to color it. Looked like Priscilla Presley until I was near 50 years old! Since I weren't like all those grey haired grannies, my grand babies called me their Black-Headed Grandma and it stuck! I dyed it for a while but once I was a great grandma, I figured it was okay to let my hair do what God intended. Now I'm just as grey as a thunderstorm sky!"
Caroline nodded. "What are you doing in this picture, grandma?"
Ettis' eyes glowed as she remembered that evening.
When she was a girl she had loved to sing. She'd been in the chorus at school and the choir at church. At the state fair one fall she had climbed the wobbly steps to the main stage and sang Amazing Grace so sweetly it brought the audience to tears. She was just 17 years old. In that crowd was a man named Merv Gillespie who "discovered" her that autumn afternoon and promised to make her famous. For a country girl from East Bumble, Georgia, this sounded peachy to her!
She finished her senior year of high school and, against her mama's wishes, because respectable girls are not stage stars, Merv started managing her career, driving her to gigs at church revivals and folk festivals. He opened her eyes to how her husky voice lent itself beautifully to blues music and country crooning. One night, on an overnight trip to Savannah, she opened her hotel room door to find Merv, slightly tipsy, confessing his love for her. They had stumbled over each other to the full-sized bed, his whiskey-spiced kisses burning her lips. With her knees clenched tight around his hips, she discovered one more thing to sing about.
The night the photo was taken, Merv had gotten her a spot on the WLAC radio show in Nashville. She had teased and sprayed her jet black hair into the best beehive she could muster and painted on cherry red lipstick, like a good rockabilly starlet - not that you could tell in the black and white image on the wall.
It was 1962 and her cover of Patsy Cline's Crazy had brought the studio audience to their feet. She'd asked one of the production crew to take her picture and he'd snapped the shot on the wall with her camera as she'd been thanking the crowd for their gracious praise. Later that night, over a diner supper of red-eye gravy and biscuits, she told Merv that she was pregnant, thinking it was the best news in the world...and everything changed.
Her grandson's bass voice brought her out of her reminiscing.
"Your great grandma was an amazing singer, Caroline! That's where you get it from - she was so talented! Singing is in your genes! In that picture, she had just performed live on the radio! In Nashville! That's a big deal. But just a few weeks later she met my Grandpa Walt and the rest is history. It was love at first sight. They got married, had my mom, and after that, Black-Headed Grandma just sang to us."
Caroline looked quizzically at Ettis.
"But Great Grandma, you didn't want to sing on a stage anymore? You were so happy!" The child touched her smiling face behind the glass of the frame.
A waterfall of memories rushed behind Ettis' blue eyes.
Merv insisting the baby wasn't his and waking to an empty bed the next morning without so much as a note to say goodbye...
Her mother's fury when she'd crawled home, alone and pregnant. "I told you only whores put themselves on display like that. If you'd just stayed here and found a nice boy to marry, you'd never be in this kind of trouble..."
Meeting the new postman, Walter May, after Sunday service and seeing the adoration in his eyes when he shyly admitted he'd heard her on the radio from Nashville and couldn't believe his ears when he heard her sing in church that morning.
Their whirlwind romance, and courthouse wedding, and his surprise and joy to learn they must have conceived "on their wedding night!" Men back then didn't know enough to wonder about a premature delivery although some of the women did the math and certainly whispered when Ettis started showing so early.
The birth of her first child when she was 19, still a child herself. The blood and pain and then the pinkest, perfect baby girl being laid in her arms. "And just look at all that black hair!" people had exclaimed...
The three babies that followed and 50 years with a devoted husband who held her close in the kitchen when he caught her singing as she stirred their dinner.
The sting in her heart to this day, to this very day, whenever she heard Patsy Cline on the radio...
Ettis May looked into her great granddaughter's blue eyes, so much like her own.
"No baby girl, that was a life that wasn't meant to be. I thought that was my dream, but your Grandma Susan, your daddy, you...you are my sunshine now."
Caroline grinned. "I know that song! You wanna sing it with me, Black-Headed Grandma?"
"Grandma's throat's a little scratchy these days. How about I play and you sing, honey bug?"
Caroline settled next to her on the piano bench.
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey..."
Her fingers on the cool keys, Ettis May smiled gratefully as Caroline began to sing.