My Beautiful Aunty Greta

the mothers of memory by brown 2010

My Beautiful Aunt Greta

My mother is a bastion of secrets. Her fortitude in the face of my questioning is magnificent. She will not tell that my brother has a father other than mine. She will not tell about her pre-marital pregnancies. And if it were not for pictures, she would not have even told the true color of her hair. But she will, and enjoys, telling of other’s trespasses. One such trespass she particularly relishes, one she constantly refers to behind her mother’s back is that of my great grandmother Frances Lopez. “Shhh.” She would say, alive with a glee that should only be reserved for the adolescent, “Don’t let Mommy Clarisse (her mother) hear us. She does get vex when she feel we bad talking Ma.”
It is February and I have traveled to Trinidad. It is the first time I am here with my husband and child—in other words it is the first time I have traveled to Trinidad as a woman. The trip is a lesson in how difficult it is to sleep in the home of my youth. Every wall and every crevice reflect a magnified dream inebriated by youth.
One day, in an attempt to reconcile the past with my present, in a gesture borne out of the homage I yearn to pay to my youth, I walk out to the backyard of my grandparent’s house to smoke a cigarette behind my son’s back. It is a typical blistering hot Caribbean day, where the sun nails everything down with its steely glare and my eyes rest on the same hut-spotted hills my eyes had rested on as a child when my mother, her own keeper of secrets with newly dyed red hair and freshly painted orange toenails shuffles up to me and says, “Ask Greta, she will tell you everything.” For one brief moment it seems as though my usually erratic mother has calmed down. I even detect a bit of sanity in her eyes.
When I look into my mother’s eyes, I see a thwarted woman who is guarded by the careless, ragamuffin soldier of her youth.
I know what my mother wants me to ask Aunty Greta.
It has to do with my Great Grandmother, Frances Lopez and her children. It has something to do with a man named Pa, her husband, and later, I will find out, a man named Mr. Louie, his cousin. It might even have something to do with the liver spots on my Grandmother’s hands and why another, someone other than her mother, raised her.
It is a story I have always wanted to know. That my great grandmother may have committed indiscretions finally gives me a woman in my family that I could perhaps identify with. I had always felt I was without authentic female role models. My mother and her tendencies to attract and stay with abusive men was not an option for me. I found her insistence on being lady-like boring and crippling. And although my grandmother, a Renaissance woman of sorts, had many qualities that I hoped to aspire to, her Catholicism was not one of them. My Aunty Bernice, the second in a line of daughters was rude to me as a child—that is something I could never respect. And my other Aunt, well, unlike me she had big breasts…Need I say more?
But Frances Lopez. Perhaps there was something in her story that I could perhaps learn from. That she may have committed indiscretions gives me a blueprint that I could perhaps related to. That she may have committed indiscretions took her down from this pedestal my grandmother has put her on, similar in the way she has placed Mary, the Virgin. In this way I could neither empathize nor learn anything from any of these women. But perhaps I could learn something from Frances.
I have tried to ask my grandmother about her mother but she remains tight-lipped and tells me nothing. She does not understand the unwavering allegiance I have pledged to my Great-grandmother, Frances Lopez. It is not the same allegiance that my Grandmother claims—a silence that strangles her story, preventing the truth from pumping through the veins of our lineage, to oxygenate the stalemate of my own life, my own failing marriage, my own fumbling motherhood and by extension, humanity. As my Uncle John once lamented, “Nobody want to tell the truth. Nobody knows and when they die the story dies. You see they always have secrets. Who born out of wedlock nobody want to say but everybody? They in the same bacchanal.”
So my mother organizes the visit from Diego Martin to Santa Cruz to visit Aunty Greta. Without a car, we rely on my 80 year-old Uncle John and the same powder blue car used to drive my cousins and me to the beach in our youth. The gentle breeze prods memories of brown limbs atop other brown limbs and red nail-polished chipped nails holding onto plastic door-knobs and the smell of sweat and salt mixed with the excitement of getting closer and closer to the sea, as we panted and our hearts beat wildly, like a lover finally allowed to enter a beloved.
My mother, her own keeper of secrets and perhaps relieved to redirect my prodding into her past and unto someone else, comes as well, along with my Danish husband, (disoriented by the general disorder of my family and by extension Trinidadian culture) and my son, whose hearing impairment serves him well amidst the squawking of my family. The road to Santa Cruz winds through the lush and wet grasshopper green hills. Despite his 79 years coupled with his 3rd pre-noon beer, my Uncle John handles the road expertly. I watch my son as his little eyes fall on the same wild, lush green hills that we must drive through—and I feel as though I am experiencing a miracle: to bear witness to his sapping up the very same land my ancestors had once tread (how blessed am I?)
I know the route well, and I hope that one day my son can say the same.
We pull up to the house where my Great-Grandmother, Frances Lopez died. “Crazy” Aunty Greta lives there now. This house holds many secrets that I had not known at that time. Like the love that was not allowed, the pregnancy that was ended and the baby that was buried under the mango tree in the backyard. No wonder Aunty Greta tends her land with such care.
Today, according to my mother, Aunty Greta will tell me all that I’ve ever wanted to know about my Great Grandmother Frances Lopez.

As I enter the leaning, wooden house, I cannot help but notice that she has used James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist to prop an uneven bookcase. The house is wooden and leans. It stands on stilts and the beaded curtain between the living room and kitchen is made of bright, yellow plastic.

We sit in the kitchen where Aunty Greta serves us sorrel from old soda drink bottles and complains, “The fridge not working, and I have no money to buy ice.” In the Caribbean, ice is a luxury among the poor.
One of her eyes is cataract coated. I love her for her lack of vanity and her courage to be herself. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. ‘You can’t start up a story like that.”
“But tell me…” I urge.
“I don’t know where to start myself.” She insists. Uncle John offers help, “Start with where Balbirsingh (my grandmother’s husband) used to challenge Mommy Clarisse on being the white man child.”
“You the white man’s daughter!” My grandfather would accuse in his drunkenness while my Grandmother would sing about the sufferings of Jesus (My grandfather was her cross to bear). We laugh at the memory of my now-dead grandfather and his insistent prodding at my Grandmother’s parentage. But Aunty Greta catches herself.
“I’m not going to sit here and laugh at my mother, you hear?” We assure her that is not our intention. I am afraid we have insulted her and her face, was once open and willing, shuts down. I panic, has she changed her mind? But she adds, “Oh wait, let me show all of you this.” She gets up and walks to the other room and begins to rummage through an old photo album. Her hair is cut short, her face broad and she has an angular jaw. She is a sun-roasted brown and wears a flower-splashed housedress.
“You see sometimes I does see things but I don’t remember where I see them, but I have a few pictures I want all you to see.” She hands us a picture, “You know anybody that look like that?” And as a matter of fact, we do.
He is the spitting image of my Grandmother’s youngest son, Vincent. My Uncle John, the self-appointed racial expert exclaims, “He have white in him, you see how light he is? See the structure of the nose and thing? That is French. Don’t mind he head curly.” I give him an exhausted look.
“But who is that man?” I ask. I have seen this picture before. I found it once, in one of my childish archaeological digs throughout my grandmother’s things. Every one in my family knows that I like to dig and every grown woman in my family knows better than to leave an unattended bag in my midst. As a child I would dig into the brown or black leather purses of my mother, aunt or Grandmother. Zipping or unclasping the purse open, I would dip my slim brown hand into the velvety softness of each woman’s secret. Out would come compact powders as brown as roasted peanuts, lipsticks the color of dew-kissed roses and sometimes, much to their embarrassment, birth control devices. If I were lucky, dinner mints and pens would be transferred from their possession into mine.
One day I chose under my grandmother’s bed as my Treasure Island. I dug into roach-infested suitcases and among a wooden crucifix of the eternally suffering Jesus, old bottles of half-used bottles of Limecol and Ditto, I found a picture of this man my Aunty Greta is now showing us. “Who is this man, Mummy Clarisse?” I had asked. “Is this Pa?” Thinking it was my Great-Grandmother’s husband. My grandmother sucked her teeth, unwilling to part with anything she might have known, “You like to dig, eh?” And she dismissed me with a sly look in her eyes.

“Who is this man? I ask Aunty Greta, and I continue, “Because Mummy Clarisse has a picture of him.”
“He must be your great-grandfather.” Uncle John suggests. “See, hear the romance here,” And Uncle John begins to read the message on the back of the picture. “1924. Let Happy memories spring to life again and may its something something thoughts surround us all.”
Aunty Greta assures us, “I don’t have no whole story, just pieces.” But it is the pieces I need. I want to tell Aunty Greta that all of us who are borne of my great grandmother hold a piece of her story, and together, we can make her dreams whole again.
But instead, like my grandmother and mother, I remain silent.