Storymania - A Requiem For Ruby Ellen Daniels by Brotherman

A Requiem For Ruby Ellen Daniels
Brotherman

It is understandable that people find gravesites places of sorrow and morning, but not for me. It is one of the rare places in earth where one can be surrounded with total and absolute serenity and solitude. Life immersed in the bosom of Tacoma's downtown is one of such a territorial and sonic schitzophrenia that one is constantly an instant away from a crash, scream, vroom, roar, fight or just the sound of the wind roaring through the downtown, coming over the hill like a translucent Artic Calvary. It is in contrast to that, in which I find a modicum of peace at the Lakewood acres funeral site; spending a day with my grandmother, Ruby Ellen Daniels. The site is massive in acreage, spanning the range of three hills, with enough of a width to consist of a small city. In a way it is a city, a democratic multi cultural post mortem Mecca, serving as the resting place for the towns of Tacoma, Spanaway, Lakewood and the greater northern Olympia area.

Where my grandmother resides is beautiful. A brass tombstone right next to the crest of the top of the first hill, right next to a brass tombstone of her first husband, who died fighting in the battle of the bulge. Seeing her now is so serene, dignified, almost joyful if I think about it. But mostly I come to talk and to see if I can hear a message that she has for me in the cadences of which way the wind blows, the sweet voice dialect of a blue bird, or the hypertensive fluttering of a butterflies wing. That might be sappy naturalism, almost to a fault you might say, but when one is so close to a loved one they will resort to much of anything in order to leap beyond ascribed mortal bonds of intimacy, to compound the internal bond that two souls have with each other. The bond that I had with my grandmother has been one that has sailed right in the middle of massive extremes, regality and debauchery, joy and pathos, clarity and madness, serenity and tragedy. In that median lied a life grand in scope and a personal oral inheritance, majestic not only for the richness of it's tale , but for the subtle understanding of life that came from both telling and receiving it.

The earliest discernible memories that I had of my grandmother came from the beginning of our families greatest impasse. Reeling from his own failure as a businessman and his own demons, my father had freebased himself out of house, home and family. My mother was stuck with the extravagant bills that he ran up and was tormented by his paranoiac need to inflict drama, 48-60 hour work weeks in order to keep herself, my brother and I financially afloat, and creditors threatening to send her to debtors prison. So most of my early youth, between my fathers madness and my mothers unholy workload, I would spend at my grandmothers house. At first she was kind of irritated because she didn't want to be a baby sitter in the middle of this surrealist biracial Kramer Vs Kramer that was being played out before her eyes. But after a while she saw me as the only person who wasn't going to b!tch at her about her son, or hustle, con and steal any goods that she had. Gradually our discussions turned from whatever she was b!tching about that day to a venue for her to tell her lifestory, to establish an oral tradition that would serve as a calming backbone, a reassuring template of heritage in the schitzophrenic environment that I was living in.

I remember our conversations with great detail, my grandmother sitting in her easy chair, pouring bourbon, smoking a homeade cigarette that I would roll for her, with a record playing in the background, usually Big Mama Thorton or maybelle, but sometimes she would tell me to go to her record collection and surprise her. She would disclose her story in an interwoven , stream of conscious fashion, blending moral and memory, fable and fact, harangue, and hyperbole. She could b!tch about my father one minute, remembering the blisters her hands would get from picking cotton the next, then fondly reminiscing about the touch of her first husband when he would give her a bear hug for making her breakfast the moment after that.

Slowly I would flesh out a cohesive history, of which she was a dazzling narrator. She would put her whole body in a story and immerse yours at the same time, so much so that a glance, a smirk, a shudder or a sigh would contain a hidden internal narrative of it's own. She was born on July 25th 1919 In Mobile, Alabama, in a stable of an old run down plantation, to a diminutive middle aged sharecropper and the owner of the land. Because she was three shades darker than the other children that her mother fathered with the owner, she would work in the barren fields with her mother and the other dark sharecroppers. Her face would tense and bristle as she described the vicious, fruitless cycle of trying to pick cotton that wasn't there in a barren decrepit land; and taking the brunt of beatings from a "Touched" ( Black folk speak for crazy), demented owner who somehow blamed his workers and not his inability to buy real estate for his troubles. When she told that story she would pour another bourbon, look toward the sky, put her hand over her heart and let out a half bemused, half melancholy laugh. And it was here when I first understood that the difference between a belly laugh and a burst of tears was separated by a line as razor thin as one could possibly cut.

At the age of 14, she would fall for a charismatic " hi yaller" preacher, with straight hair and green eyes, who ran a gospel troupe that went city to city pitching tents to save souls throughout the south. The preacher would lay his healing hands on the congregation in front of the tent, and his healing hands on the women behind it. Thus nine months later came the birth of bobby Daniels Sr, born in the same stable his mother was born in fifteen years before, and about eight months and twenty some odd days after the reverend Daniels Sr skipped town.

It was here, she told me, was where she realized that in order to survive she had to drastically change her circumstances. The birth of her son was met by scorn by her father, who kept a tight inventory over the food he gave his employees and dreaded that he had another " nigrah baby mouth to feed"

" So what did you do then?" I asked.
" Work, baby work. Claw. Fight. Pray. Believe. I got a job workin at this nice white lady's house as a maid and scrapped to save some money to feed my son. But when my daddy found out that I was making money on the side when I was supposed to be only working for him, he kicked me out and told me he'd shoot me if I came back. So I got all my money, responded an to ad for ship work for minorities in Washington and took a train here. I promised I would send for my son as soon as I had the money but the ship work didn't pay that much better than picking cotton or being a maid. So I didn't see my son for eight years."

" he's always held that against me" she said sighing wistfully.

So she would work harder. She got a second job tending bar at night, and a third running numbers in between time. It was here when she met Willie Davis, numbers runner, pool hall owner, and a son of a b!tch so mean that looking at 60 year old pictures of him could scare the hell out of you. Like the one she had on top of his dresser drawer. It was at a club on Jackson street in Seattle with both of them sitting at a table. What always struck me about that picture was that although he had a "I don't give a f*ck if I live or die and PS I can kill your a$$ without blinking" snarl, he held my grandmothers hand with the gentlest of care. She would become his main woman, his wife and then when he was sent to the eastern theater and didn't come back, his widow.

Here is where the story got interesting. Instead of " being a shrinking violet" she took over Willie's pool hall, used the money she got from the government for his passing to by another pool hall , hired big hulking body guards to help her run both places and establish a numbers racket, brought her son home in style, (first class airplane seat), and reigned as African American royalty in the city of Tacoma. And she was, whenever she would take me downtown to visit her old cronies, they would treat her like a queen, almost to the point of falling at her feet. The need for tenement housing as ascribed from President Johnson's great society caused the government to buy her pool halls for a steep price in 1966, but only after she made them squirm for over a year. The local government of Washington paid her off to close her numbers racket in 1970 , giving her enough bread to buy her own property and built her own dream house on the outskirts of Tacoma's exclusively all white north end. The house was majestic, five bedrooms, a bar in the basement, and two garages, and spacious kitchen and dining room, the place where we had most of our conversations.

Listening to her tell her story was to be in the presence of a giant, a fighter, a person of a godly aura of which I was in awe. She would tell me " boy yo daddy might not be sh!t, and you might be poor right now , but you are royalty, and don't let nobody tell different or otherwise" Her story was her gift to me and listening to her give it , I saw someone who was invincible, impenetrable. I though that nothing could touch her.

But I would find other wise, for I quickly saw that the only man she couldn't take was her son. There had always been an antipathy between the two, as he held the years of abandonment over her head( Now one wonders why he didn't have an resentment against his father who he never knew, instead of the mother who took care of her for the bulk of his life, but such is the unexplainable mystery of the male psyche) They had a calming period in the 70's when he got a affirmative action contracting job, but when he proved ineffective , he drowned himself in pity and the pipe. Thus their relationship dynamic changed to where she gave and he took and took and took and took. At first he would beg for some jewelry to pawn and promise to pay her back, then he would declare that he was taking some jewelry and goods, then he would just outright steal sh!t and take offense if either of us protested his actions. Naturally one would be offended by his actions of thievery, but alas, one of the prerequisites of dealing with a junkie of my fathers magnitude was to endure a world of illogic of a grand scale, a frightful underbelly of a personal culture of " me". And you know it just might be the disease that people who never had their sons rob them to death or have their fathers burn them with butane lighters say it is. But my grandmother and I had too many scars, shed too much blood, and endured too much trauma, to extract any pity for his affliction.

And because of his actions , a brand new vicious cycle took flight. Everytime he would come, I'd see her gasp for a breath she'd used to have, to cough one more time that she usually did, to age just a little bit more. You could see it in the brown skin of her face which had for so many years been impenetrable marble, but now had started to erode. Her beautiful big mama figure began to shrink from her not eating. It got to the point where I couldn't stand it and begged deacon Alton Parrish of Bethlehem Pentecostal church to take care of her.

At the age of 14, I moved with my mother to a nice new home in the suburbs that grandmother helped my mother pay the down payment for. It was a 2.3 acre home, right in the middle of a cauldesac in the chambers creek area of University Place, 15 miles away from where my grandmother lived at the time. Every two weeks she would get deacon Parrish to drive her to visit me, to continue on our conversations. She always came on late Saturday afternoons, riding in her big beautiful brown 1987 Oldsmobile. And everytime she came, she would always look in awe at the trees, the nice houses and the peace and quiet surrounding the cauldesac that we lived in. She didn't talk as much as listen to whatever I was doing in school, what I was doing playing baseball, who I had a crush on and so forth. She didn't have to talk, she already told me her story. All she did now as just sit in her big chair and drink strawberry lemonade and enjoy the peace and quiet.

Yet I couldn't help but notice how the spiral continued. And as I got older, she would wither and fade more and more, until there wasn't that much left. Then came a hot July day, four days before my sixteenth birthday. I visited and slept in the basement the night before, because I knew that time was closing in on her. But on that Sunday morning she was feeling pretty good and decided she'd like to go to church. So deacon Parrish and I got on our Sunday best, helped her get into her favorite black dress, picked out her favorite pheasant hat to wear and planned to go to the 11:30 service at Bethlehem Pentecostal church. Deacon Parrish cooked a nice bacon and eggs breakfast and we were all eating together quietly. As we were about to finish, along comes my father wearing a raiders shirt, with slobber, vomit, and other food particles on it, smelling of the same incendiary metallic odor that showed that he had been hitting the pipe for two days straight. A smell that always gave me crippling headaches.

" what the f*ck ya'll doing " he said"
" Boy is that anyway to talk to your mother" replied Parrish.
" what the f*ck you gonna do old man"
" were going to church" I chirped In order to diffuse the situation.
" I'm gonna go too, give me a suit"
" go to hell, you punk" deacon Parrish mumbled
" WHAT DID YOU SAY!" my dad said grabbing a lighter and holding it to his face.

Just as he did that, my grandmother threw her eggs up on the table, drenched with blood and gastrointestinal fluid. As he got on his suit we cleaned up after her; I wiped the blood off her dress, while the deacon cleaned up the table. He came back with the same Raiders shirt and a suit two sizes too small. " it's time to go" he bellowed, like a lazy disanthropic king, the demented ruler of the household that he had always been.

We got to the church late and sat on the wooden pews in the back row. The church was a triumph of eccleastical decadence. A gold plated cross hung in the air, the baptismal area was a luzury pool, a garden of plants led to the preacher's chair but the congregation sat in crappy old oak wooden pews that had splinters on them because the church was too cheap to by seat comforters. My grandmother sat on deacon parrish's jacket right next to me, while my dad decided to stay five feet away in the end of the row because he was tweaking. On the left side of her was a mother with three children, grimacing from a tortourous spinal condition. As the reverend whipped himself and the crowd in an evangelical frenzy, he called on people that he could touch with " Gaawds healin powahs!"

" listen , Chillun, my flock , my congregation, do ya neeed to be healled this mornin!" he said " let me give you the powah that god has given in my hands"

The mother stood up, grimacing in pain. With her oldest son helping her down the aisle.
" sista what is your affliction this morning "
" I have scoloiosis" , she said " I can barely walk , I have to work two jobs to feed by babies, I need Jesus to heal me"
" Be BLESSED!" he said pushing her forehead with his palm as she fell to the floor " Jesus has healed you"

She laid on the floor with her whole body shaking, then proceeded to get up and walk a few steps pain free.
" Don't yah see the miracle of Jesus" the reverend said as he waved his hand in the air, and did a dance with his feet similar to the camel walk " Dont yah see what he can do, he can make the crippled walk, praise the lord, "

Just then my grandmother whispered in my ear." Boy I want you to look at this woman, I want you to see her right now, she wants to believe with every bone in her body, she wants to believe him more than she wants to breathe. And for a glimpse she's got that old time religion in her, and it's powerful".

" For that moment belief made her walk those steps." she said while I looked at her " for a moment that belief freed her from her illness"
" Isn't that supposed to be beautiful , grandma"
" nope, look at her now" I turned and saw her grimace in pain as her son helped her to her chair.

" Do you understand now boy? do you see it now? Do you see how fake that belief it. She thinks that she is hurting again because she didn't believe enough. And she's gonna punish herself over and over again for not " believing" enough. But it's a lie, boy, a damm lie. I thought I could endure all my troubles through the same belief that she is craving right now, but I can't believe no more. I got too many bumps, too many bruises, too many scars. I cant believe no more." she said " I just cant believe no more."

As the service ended we went to the lobby and my father bumped her to ask if he could borrow some money
" I ain't got no more" she said
" you're lying, b!tch"

And right as the last syllable of the word b!tch left his mouth, she stopped cold as stone, grabbed her cane so hard you could see the sweat of her hand start to crawl down it, pointed the cane at his forehead and let out a roar that came from the bottom of her stomach.

"BOY AS GOD AS MY WITNESS , I HAVE BIRTHED YOU!!!! I HAVE FED YOU!!!I HAVE GIVEN YOU THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A BETTER LIFE!!!!I HAVE GIVEN YOU MONEY!! AND TIME AND TIME AGAIN, ALL YOU HAVE DONE IS ROB ME, CUSS ME, THREATEN ME, AND HURT ME. WELL AS LONG AS I HAVE BREATH IN MY BODY, I WILL DO NO MORE ARE DEAD TO ME!!!!! YOU ARE NO LONGER MY SON. AND IF I SEE YOUR FACE FROM THIS DAY FORWARD I WILL CALL THE COPS ON YOU QUICKER THAN A B!TCH! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Just then the lobby turned deathly quiet. The deaconess Vanessa, a barmaid in one of my grandmothers pool halls, started to clap. Then deacon Ellison and deacon Forrest, The lead tenors of the senior choir, and two of her former numbers runners, started clapping and stood right next to her. Then deacon Frazier, a carpenter who helped build her house, turned to put his hand over her shoulder. Pretty soon everybody in the lobby came to either pat her on the back or stand right next her, so much so that the lobby came to look like the whole church backing up my grandmother on one side and my father standing with his mouth wide open in shock the next.

Deacon Parrish helped her get into the car, and as we drove past my father walking down the street heading to the main road leading to her house, I noticed that my grandmother started to shake. As if something had been expunged from her and the moment of cartharsis was too great to bear. But when I asked if she was OK, she told me " I'm fine, baby, i'm fine now"

We got to the house and put her into bed and had a nice afternoon. Deacon Parrish sat in the rocking chair to her left and I sat on a beanbag chair to her right as she watched the Mariners game. The windows were open because it was so sweltering and deacon Parrish cracked open the front door just to get some air into the house. My grandmother even felt good enough to promise me that she would do something nice for my birthday, perhaps get deacon Parrish to take us out to dinner, if time and god allowed her.

At about 3:45, I hear a vicious slamming of the door followed by a frenzy of footsteps, then my father coming across the hall in full speed. In a frenzy, he knocks her lamp over, pushes deacon Parrish over his chair, grabs my grandmother slaps her three times and violently drags her out of her bed and through the hall way. I run and try and jump at him in protest but he hits me with a right hook that knocks me into the bathroom, drawing blood in my mouth. Dazed, I get up to hear my grandmother screaming, begging for help, begging him to stop. I look outside and see my grandmother lying on the floor with blood coming from her mouth and body, and my father standing over her screaming obscenities. He hit her three times with a closed fist , before I tried to tackle him. He responded by elbowing me in the mouth, knocking me into the front lawn.

As I started to get up again, I turn to see a gun stick out of the front door with a fist holding it, shaking profusely.

" iff... You dont..... get off your grandmother, im'a...im'a......shoot your a$$" deacon Parrish said

My father remained unbowed. " Whatcha gonna do n!gga!" he said shaking in mock fear " im soooo scarred, you aint gonna pull that trigga, n!gga. Don't you know Im god!!! I used to own this town, don't you I made this b!tch!!! You cant stop me n!gga!! im god!!!!!!'"

" just stop.....jus....jus...just stop... just stop .. hurtin yo mama"

" You aint gonna pull that trigger!!! nooo you want to go to heaven you dont want to go to hell with me! now pull that gun down before I make you eat it."

Just then an idea flashed through my head. Remembering an old trick a crip once taught me when I was eleven, I grabbed the deacon's gun, pointed three feet away from his left leg, and fired. Would I have shot him? No. But what I knew about the situation wasn't that but the perception that my father had, that he knew I had it in me to do so. As he ran away my grandmother was left on the pavement, right cheek and jaw swollen, right rib broken, bleeding profusely from most of her extremities with her right eye gazing toward the heavens in pained astonishment. As I put a pillow over her head, she looked at the sky with her mouth open as if to say, " Are you real? Is this your vision? Is all of this your plan?" The look never left her face as the ambulance came and picked her up to go to the hospital. She died In an Er three hours later.

10 days later and four after what should have been her 75th birthday, she had her funeral at Bethlehem Pentacostal church. Deacon Parrish and my mother split the cost of it, and because she was a deaconess in the church for 50 years, her passing was a matter of high ceremony. There was an extensive service where her casket was placed in the same spot where she lies today. Calm, snug in the democracy of souls, where black, white , brown , beige , red and yellow, rich and poor, sane and insane, good and evil all come together to create a divine symphony of silence where the rests speak more than the notes themselves. And it is here where she lies, free from the rigors of her heroic battle with life, circumstance and with her own son. I say again, I understand why grave sites are places of sorrow, but to me nothing could be further from the truth.