A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [4]
We didn’t know to complain. It was home. The notion of having more than one bathroom or multiple sockets in the kitchen or a window with a view was not something I thought much about. We were better off than many. What we had was always orderly, even if our lives were not, as if making hospital corners on the beds each morning would keep the economic chaos at bay.
If we had been tempted by pity, my grandparents would not have allowed it. They came to Chicago from Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s, driven by ordinary middle-class aspirations for themselves and the family they hoped for. Their vision was simple and clear, and it helped shape my own. But, though they shared a vision for their lives, God could not have matched two more different personalities.
Sally Embers Wintersmith both embodied and defied the stereotypical grandmother. Grandma—or “Gram,” as we called her—baked cakes every Saturday morning, saving the beaters and bowls to be licked by the grandkids, and made every holiday and birthday an occasion. She could jump rope with Rhonda and her friends and read to me in ways that would make stories come to life. She also cursed so stridently and with such creativity that she would have felt at home in any barracks or locker room. The daughter of an Irish landowner and his black “charwoman,” she had bright red hair and hazel eyes and was light-skinned enough to “pass,” as the old folks used to say. When she and my grandfather would drive through the Jim Crow South, she would go into the diner first, get a table, order for herself and the family, and then call everyone in once the food was served. The proprietor was less likely to refuse them at that point, but the ploy didn’t always work. One time, a waitress said she would have to serve my grandmother and her family in the kitchen. Gram drew herself up, looked her square in the eye, and said, “We don’t eat in the kitchen in our own home.” She walked out with her family in tow, leaving the food untouched on the table.
Grandma helped manage our tenement for the nonresident owner, which defrayed the cost of the apartment. She would, among other things, collect the rent, arrange for repairs, and keep track of coal deliveries for the basement furnace. She collected the gossip as well, a job that occupied a good deal of her time.
As talkative as Grandma was, my grandfather was nearly as taciturn. Reynolds Brown Wintersmith, whom we called “Poppy,” was strong, slightly bent, and balding, not quite six feet tall. My grandmother adoringly said that in his youth, he was “built like a Roman soldier.” He wore a faint perpetual smile and had a twinkle in his warm brown eyes, but he rarely spoke directly to me or other family members beyond simple pleasantries. He had a delightful way of humming, though—indistinct tunes of his own composition, which seemed to keep trouble at bay.
Poppy’s work ethic kept us more stable than most. He was a janitor at the South Shore Bank at 71st and Jeffrey for more than fifty years. When he wasn’t sweeping the floors, he drove the executives. When he wasn’t driving the executives, he did odd jobs for their families or cleaned the nearby Laundromat. He was always pleasant, respectful, and dignified. At the bank, he was beloved by everyone from the tellers to the chief executive. At his memorial service, the bank president said that had my grandfather lived in a different time, he would have retired as the bank’s CEO.
Poppy put others at ease and was a good example of how to get along in the world. But in my youth, he remained somewhat impenetrable. When I helped him shovel coal and scrape out the clinkers from the coal furnace at home, he would say nothing save the barest instructions. I helped mop the floors of the Laundromats, but all he told me was what to do and what not to do. On the drives to and from those jobs, only his humming