I was in New York City. It was April 22nd, a few days before my 30th birthday. Some work shit had happened and I was thinking about how to address it, vigorously typing out an email in my hotel bed. Even so, I was looking forward to the weekend in Brooklyn I’d promised myself.
I had missed a call from my mother (typical) when my dad rang and told me my grandfather, the venerable Leonard Eady, had passed.
I hadn’t expected it— or, perhaps, wasn’t thinking about it. My grandfather was a large man, in stature and in his world, but not a large presence in my life. In fact, I had been expecting my grandmother to go first. They had long been divorced, but ironically suffered from the same malady— congestive heart failure. The strange thing about congestive heart failure is that your heart hasn’t yet failed, it is failing. It’s a disease that deteriorates the body as one’s heart functions at a percentage less than 100 and eventually less than 50.
I found that death is as jarring and strange as the poets say. I forced myself to leave the hotel room. I took a walk around the MoMA in a daze and with a heaviness.
In a few days, I returned home to Georgia for the funeral. At the wake, I saw my grandfather in person for the first time in I don’t know how long…over a decade? I wept for him, I wept for my mother. I wept for the fascinating and fearless individual he was.
Farmer, business man, community member, convicted vote buyer.
He and my mom would talk a lot about God after they reconnected later in life. Perhaps it helped them avoid other topics.
At the funeral, my grandfather had requested that “A Charge to Keep I Have” be sung. The original song was written in 1762 by Charles Wesley for the Methodist Church. The song is derived from a Bible verse in Leviticus: “Keep the charge of the Lord, that ye die not” (KJV).
But the way my grandfather knew the song is deeply evocative of a negro spiritual. It’s sung by drawing out every consonant and vowel possible. It’s reminiscent of another time, of our Black elders growing up with a different religiosity and experience of God that happens in tiny alabaster churches in the grassy crevices of rural Georgia.
After the funeral, I went to see my grandmother for what would turn out to be the last time. Leonard was her first husband, though he passed second. Lloyd, her second husband, passed first, a year or two ago in Florida.
Lloyd, with anger and resentment in his heart, left my grandmother some money. Before he passed, he reminded her that while she would get his money, she wouldn’t get to enjoy it.
He was right.
betty
My grandmother separated from Lloyd about 15 years ago. At some point, she had discovered another partner and a child— a boy. With that and Lloyd’s steady cruelty, she had had enough. She left their sleek Florida home, all white carpet and glass, and moved back to Georgia. She got her own place in Eastman, a few minutes from me, my parents, and my brother. It was a joy to have her around for my last few years of high school.
Betty Joel Davis grew up in Rhine, Georgia. Her father, David Davis, a farmer, and alleged moonshiner, died when she was young. My understanding is that he crossed the wrong person— slapped an ice cream cone out of someone’s hands and died of a resultant stab wound. Maybe it’s just family lore, but it tracks with an old saying about Rhine: All the good people of Rhine have killed off all the bad people.
My Ma Bette recounted to me once that as a (too) young mother, her husband, Leonard, would leave on Saturday nights and come back in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Handsome as he was (according to her), she couldn’t take it. They separated and she, her mother Willie Mae, and her grand mother, Minnie, would raise my mom and my Aunt Tine on the other side of Rhine.
Betty eventually left Rhine and went to Florida to get work. My mom was about eight. Ma Bette would visit her girls, but she never did return permanently.
My mom lost the people who raised her truly— Willie Mae and her Uncle Willie, Ma Bette’s brother— when I was in middle and high school. My Great Granny was “Mama” to her and Uncle Willie was her most protective and caring father figure.
Though Betty wasn’t a present mother, she was a wonderful grandmother. Ma Bette was funny, charming, and stylish. She was a Pisces, like my mom. Both are deeply spiritual and empathetic women, drawn to the fantastic. My mother, though, has grounded herself with earthy Tauruses (me, my Dad, and my brother Josh) and a level-headed Leo (my brother Derek).
Ma Bette, though, preferred to focus on the fun of life. She loved basketball games and a little moscato. She drank martinis and ate fried oysters. She liked to shop with her friends and gossip. She used to text in all caps and was surprisingly good with gifs. Every year on our birthdays, Ma Bette would call and sing Happy Birthday to us— the Stevie Wonder version, of course. She and I used to talk about politics and celebrities, laughing at the ridiculousness of the Republican Party and at the Chris Rock/ Will Smith slap fiasco.
She was my friend.
She passed away last Thursday, just about 5 months after my grandfather. I feel like I began losing her in truth when COVID struck. It took away her social outlet—church—and isolated her. Her illness began and sped up during this time and we watched her deteriorate since. She was a fighter, though, and held on as long as she could through hospital visits and the various indignities of old age.
My mom stepped in as caretaker for Ma Bette and stayed in regular touch with her father in recent years. She responded to their absences in her childhood not with anger or a grudge, but with forgiveness and grace. I admire her for that.
Those who know me well know that I am a not-so-secret Taylor Swift fan. When folklore came out during the pandemic, I really loved the song “betty.” I think it’s because have blind spots about my grandmother as a young girl. What was she like? How did she live? I can’t imagine many options for a young Black girl in rural Georgia, growing up in the 1930s and 40s. She created a life for herself though—for better or for worse.
We loved her. We’ll miss her.
I write this brief essay despite a bit of umbrage from my mother. She, my Aunt Tine, and Ma Bette teased me that I liked the family gossip. But I write this to embrace the flawed and beautiful humanity of Black people who eventually made vibrant a life out of nothing much in rural Georgia. We now all exist in an extended web of family and memory. I write this for the same reasons that most people write— to process, to grieve. But most of all, I want to bear witness to the lives of my grandparents.
As with my grandfather, we buried Ma Bette in Rhine, in a grassy cemetery—a Clearing like the one in Beloved where Baby Suggs communed with the ancestral, the divine, with her people. Loss, I find, recreates the emotional space of the Clearing, where memory and collectivity forges strength in spite of pain.
We press on.