“Madea! You can’t go to the store like that!”
Our small mouths hung open, aghast. Our grandmother’s smile was pure amusement, toothsomely sweet as the Louisiana cane that papa brought us from the neighbor’s field.
“No?” she asked in her slow drawl, willing to be led by our whimsies. “Well, if y’all take ’em out, y’all gonna put ’em back up again, y’hear?” We promised faithfully that we would take care of everything, and spent some part of each day on every vacations, whether visiting her home in one-stoplight-Patterson, or she visiting our more metropolitan corner of West Coast suburbia, carefully taking out our mother’s mother’s curlers, brushing her black-brown hair into soft curls, and carefully rerolling it on our return from wherever the day had taken us. No one in our experience went out in public wearing rollers, and we didn’t know what to think of her, the sheer scarf she wore no cover to the shame. What was Madea saving up her “good hair” for, if not to be seen in public? We weren’t old enough to understand her timeline, and the years where women took out their rollers and put on a pleated dress at 5pm – when the patriarch’s work day was done, and theirs was merely continuing. We just thought she had a lot of outfits, so she liked to change in the afternoon. If we’d had as many nice shoes and dresses – and those hats she wore to church, and those gloves – we would have changed clothes, too. Wouldn’t you?
Madea – [ˈmədēˈä] – ma’deah, my dear. You smiled so often at your guileless granddaughters. I wonder what else of your many faces we failed to see.
a woman’s glory
that is what this is
she, the angel of the house
curls up in limbo
rolling out the shopping cart
stalks through earthbound paradise
(The B&W curlers photograph is from the book “Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal”, published in 1974 by American photographer Abigail Heyman. Click to embiggen.)
