Inauguration Day   

By Jane Gill

I take the string of antique glass beads from my jewelry box. The multi-faceted beads have no color of their own, but they sparkle like icy diamonds reflecting the colors around them. Gently, I hold them in my palm and they warm the memories of my heart.

These were Gramma Stovall’s beads. Now they are mine. Aside from a few photographs and wine glasses that once belonged to her and Jim, her husband, the beads are the only tangible gifts I have from her. I clutch them to my heart and smile as visions of our days together spring forth.

Gramma and Jim weren’t related to us; they were friends of my parents who had retired to my hometown in upstate New York from Queens. Jim had been an interior designer and Gramma a corset maker. She had learned to make corsets in the convent orphanage in Hell’s Kitchen, where she had spent part of her childhood, having been placed there by her parents for a time when they could not provide for her.

Gramma was warm, round, soft of body, and had an easy smile. She wore black lace-up practical shoes, but she owned a Persian lamb coat. Sometimes she painted her nails bright red. When Jim’s family was up from the city, or it was New Year’s Eve, she wore her glass beads. Our family would be there, the dining room table covered in cut glass dishes overflowing with tempting food. On those occasions, laughter rang out in the house and I was hugged—a lot. Gramma looked beautiful in the beads, her long dark hair, which she braided nightly, caught up in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, framed by tiny pearl earrings that dangled from her pierced ears. Jim was somewhat stoic, bald, slept in a nightshirt and cap, and was embarrassed once when I came into the kitchen in the early morning and saw him in his sleepwear. But, as long as his dinner was ready on time and Gramma and I didn’t burn the cookies or make too much noise playing hide and seek, he was content.

Gramma and Jim did not have children, but they readily “adopted” me as a kind of grandchild. Gramma said I looked like Shirley Temple, without the curls. Jim said I looked like the little girl on the Blue Bonnet margarine box—again, without the curls. They loved me openly, and I loved them back.

Gramma’s house was large, her furniture dark and heavy. There were carpets on the floors, large paintings of flowers on the walls, and even a massive tapestry hanging in the living room. Also hanging in the living room was a print of an elegant lady, opera glasses in hand and a tiny white dog on her lap. I adored that lady. I used to tell Gramma that when I grew up I was going to look just like her. She would laugh and say no, I was never going to look like that lady.

The ceilings in Gramma’s house were huge, as were the windows, hung with heavy draperies from cornices of matching fabric over wooden Venetian blinds. At home we had linoleum, and plastic curtains, and my two older sisters and I shared a bedroom upstairs, where I slept on a rollaway bed under a heavy blanket. The upstairs of our house was heated by whatever warmth the kerosene space heater sent up the stairwell. Gramma’s house had radiators.

It was grand to know my way around Gramma’s house, where I had my own room with a huge bed. I slept over many a night on crisp white sheets that had been ironed on a mangle and tucked tight with hospital corners around a horse hair mattress. Often Gramma baked chocolate and vanilla pinwheel cookies that she served me warm from the oven with a glass of cold milk.

She taught me to sew neat stitches in a straight line and we fashioned a heart-shaped pin cushion of dark red velvet—a gift for my mother. Because she kept shelves full of fabric scraps, ribbons, and lace in her sewing room, we spent hours together looking for just the right piece for a project. She helped me make my own apron too, for when we baked cookies.

Jim and Gramma had a big blue car, which Jim took a great deal of pride in and sometimes we went for a ride. They had a television before we did. I don’t remember what year that was but, of course, many of my memories of TV are in black and white. It’s ironic that in the 1950s and 1960s, there were no color televisions. Our world then was always in black and white. Today, we have color TVs and see clearly that the world is not so easily defined, but a mosaic of many colors.

One memory stands out vividly. I was in Gramma’s dining room, where we were working a puzzle on the glass-topped table, when the news came on. Suddenly, on the screen in the living room, were some colored kids, teenagers I guessed, and it appeared they were in trouble. There were policemen all around them and a lot of yelling was going on. I’d never seen anything like that before so I questioned it. Gramma told Jim to turn the television off. She said the kids weren’t in trouble, they were trying to go to school and some people didn’t want them to because they were colored. I was upset because it didn’t make any sense to me. There were two colored kids in my class at school. Why wouldn’t people let those kids go to school? Gramma explained that this was way down south where colored kids weren’t allowed to go to regular schools; they had to go to their own school. I remember wondering why those kids on TV couldn’t just come to my school. But Gramma pretty much wanted to change the subject, so we didn’t talk about it anymore.

That was 1955. I was 10 years old, and that news program was my first exposure to America as a country wracked by racial strife. I would grow more aware of my world during the next five years as I saw and heard the mounting tension in our country. I remember seeing film of crowds of people running away from policemen with dogs and fire hoses that they turned loose on groups of coloreds. Some, they even clubbed to the ground.

I remember 1960, watching Ruby Bridges, tiny and demure in her white dress, again just trying to go to school. By then, I was 15 and I had gained awareness of the social differences dividing America. I also figured out that Jim, Gramma, and I, were not the same. Gramma was right; I would never look like that lady in the picture in her living room. They were colored and I was white. 

In 1963, when Martin Luther King made the March on Washington, I wanted to go, to join the marchers as they cried out for racial equality. But my parents wouldn’t hear of it. “Are you crazy, drive all the way down there? With all those people? Absolutely not.” End of discussion.

When President Kennedy was assassinated, again I begged to go and grieve with my fellow Americans. Again, my pleas were denied. Two world-altering events had lain just out of reach. My heart was broken. I couldn’t make my voice heard.

Gramma and Jim never got to know my children, although Gramma did meet my eldest, her namesake, when she was a year old. Gramma’s maiden name had been Eleanor Powell, a movie star name. So I gave my first daughter a middle name to be proud of: Eleanor. It was my way of honoring a woman of quiet grace, who wore pearl earrings, glass beads, and bright red fingernail polish. A woman who surrounded herself with tapestries, beautiful pictures, and warm cookies in the oven. A woman who loved me unconditionally, and who treated me with gentleness, patience, and respect, even though I was a child. Who never told me that the world was black and white.

So, accompanied by my daughter, whose middle name honors Gramma, I will wear these beads to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I will stand on the Mall and smile, and hope that somewhere up in Heaven Gramma will smile, too. I will join my voice with a million others to honor the Little Rock Nine, Ruby Bridges, Martin Luther King, and Jack Kennedy, on a day and in a place where every voice counts—where, together, we sparkle like diamonds reflecting the colors of America. 

[Jane Gill is a paralegal with a Sarasota/Venice law firm. Although she grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York, she has lived in
Florida for nearly 30 years.  When her children were small, she made up stories to tell them, but her serious writing efforts began only a few years ago. As time moved along, her daughters encouraged her to write family history and memories for her granddaughter. In 2006, she won First Prize in the Dan Howe Life History writing contest, and was encouraged to write more and more. Last year, The Bridge magazine in Venice published a couple of her poems. Jane is a member of Sarasota Fiction Writers and the Suncoast Writers Guild of Englewood, Florida.]