My maternal grandmother's last words to my momma and uncle, her two youngest, were, "I'm getting out of this hospital tomorrow and I'm gone take y'all down to the fair grounds." My momma was 13. My uncle was 11. And my grandma wouldn't live to fulfill those wishes. At the age of 47, on a gloomy October day in Americus, Georgia, she made her transition lying in a hospital bed. My folks say she died due to medical negligence after receiving treatment for intestinal issues; them white folks sewed her body back up with a dirty gauze still inside. To this very day, October is still hard on Momma.
Born with the name Clotelle, meaning lady warrior, grandma's obituary reads, "Mothers never really die, they just keep house up in the sky. Death beckoned her with outstretched hands and whispered softly of an unknown land. She took death's hand without fear and journeyed to the promised land." Last on the obituary's order of service, right before the recessional, was listed: Viewing of Remains. This last offering to connect with what was left of her was a part of a long-standing tradition of grief rituals within our bloodline. See, grandma's remains, like those that came before her, would be brought back to the home of the family, where momma, her ten siblings, grandpa, and the rest of our family would be able to have a sacred mass with her—afterwards to be laid to rest in the red clay fields of Eastview Cemetery, where the rest of the Tysons were buried. I wonder what her last thoughts were. Did she dream of who would survive her? Did she have time to conjure up any last wishes? Before making that promise to momma, did she have a premonition that her time was coming? I'm not sure if I'll ever know—it'd take the dead to see those answers through.
My great auntie, a funeral practitioner and mortician, would tell me, "the body has a way of slowing down when it's time to go. The skin runs cold and the tears run slower." See, Auntie G, from my daddy's side, had been dealing with the dead since well before I was even thought of. She knew death intimately—and because of that, she possessed a certain comfort in the role of death doula. Her work perambulated below the Kalunga-line. She was quiet—ain't say much, ever, unless it was about tending to her work. Growing up on our family farm in Ellaville, Georgia, I witnessed just how vital death was to her work; and the urgency it carried. Folks would call her, usually short calls—with moments of silence; she'd take down their address, house color, and end the call with, "I'm so sorry—we will be on the way." There was no need to write down their names—round here, everyone knew everybody. I didn't understand at the time, but by, on the way, she meant that she would be coming to get the body.
During the summers, my dad would drop me off at the family farm, and my uncle would task me and my cousin with running the roadside farm stand after an early morning of harvesting whatever was in season. Hot, skin sweaty, riddled with dead gnats, and bored with country time, my cousin turns to me while spitting out muscadine seeds, "I bet you won't go with auntie to see them dead folks." He looked at me with the heaviest eye of persuasion. I knew if I didn't, I'd have to spend the rest of the summer with him calling me "Scary Perry" or "Coward Howard," which were the last names associated with the bloodlines we share. So, as auntie drove towards the edge of the property, down that red clay avenue of pecan trees, I hopped out from behind the produce stand, and I asked the unthinkable, hoping she'd decline. Instead, like Mozelle Batiste Delacroix said to her niece Eve in Eve's Bayou, auntie answered—"Sure, as long as you're quiet and ain't scared of the dead. Get in." Up until that point, I don't think I really understood how much it took to see a body through to ceremony. As the baby that was passed over the caskets of my ancestors, I had a certain familiarity with death, funerals, teary-eyed folks and such—but no—never did I truly grasp how the dead got so damn pretty sitting up in those wooden boxes. Or how they "kept" their composure until their bodies were laid down six feet under. See, death somehow enters forcefully; it requires you to look beyond rational explanation and call forth new memory—memory that my adolescent mind had not quite yet reached.
The first time I saw a dead body move was in the cold halls of auntie's funeral chapel. The old folks used to call it The Lazarus—the experience of residual reflexes leaving the body. "It ain't the dead folk you got to worry about; it's the ones that's living," Auntie would remind me many times over. Auntie inherited this work from her parents, who first opened the funeral chapel in the 1950's along the Flint River, in a little town named after the founder of the state of Georgia. Before funeral chapels were a common practice in death rituals or even accessible to most people, Black folk, including my family, brought their deceased home for wakes to be had. Auntie's family helped to usher in this new way of seeing and being with the dead. In her youth, she and her siblings began learning how to embalm the bodies of the deceased, style their hair, make their faces, and dress their bodies—eventually leading entire funeral services without the supervision of their parents. I learned from auntie what she learned from her momma and daddy—"Our job ain't just to bring the family comfort in these times. We got to comfort the dead as well. Ain't they at least deserving of that, Quincy?"
"Our job ain't just to bring the family comfort in these times. We got to comfort the dead as well. Ain't they at least deserving of that, Quincy?"
After the mirrors of the dead were covered, the clocks stopped, and their bodies were pumped with their final cocktail, you couldn't just begin working on 'em. You had to sit with their vessel, and consult them on how they would like you to move forward with preparation—entering a space of ritual. Bounded by prayer, with a Bible, and her tools and such, auntie would say to me, "Now gone on outside and play, I gots work to do." Then quietly closed the door behind me. I'd later see that person's body; it would be sitting up at the front of the funeral chapel, in a shiny wooden box, with an arrangement of flowers. I used to ask auntie how she got them to smile like that – she'd say to me, "I guess the Dead got jokes that we can't hear."
Soon after, the family of the deceased would begin showing up—sometimes in groups, other times, alone. Watching from afar, I'd see those same expressions of grief that I witnessed from my family being played out by the families of these strangers; tears, weeping, and sometimes even falling out right in front of the dead. How strange and confusing it was to a 10-year-old me trying to make sense of it all—death, and the antiquity of its pedagogy. Eventually, after a handful of visits to the funeral chapel with auntie, I came to the understanding that the time that we have here with each other is surely not guaranteed. In the film Idlewild (2006), Percival Jenkins, played by Andre Benjamin, who also plays the role of a mortician, reminds us, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, all with a specific role to play. Even at a funeral."
Twenty years would go by before I entered the walls of that funeral chapel again. It would be Mother's Day, I would be 30 years old, and my paternal grandmother would have just transitioned, lying right next to me—less than 10 hours prior. It was 3 am when I heard that awful gurgle and gasp for air. Eventually, working up the courage to look at Grandma, who lay to the left of me, I passed my hands over her eyes to close the veil. Stepping outside, I made a call to my dad and the rest of his siblings to inform them. My dad says to me, "Call your great auntie". As if she could read my mind, Auntie, now also 20 years older but with the same vigor in her voice, says that familiar phrase to me,
" I'm so sorry, Quincy. I'll be on the way". Her words echoed as I shuffled back inside the house. Within the next 24 hours, the same baby that was passed over many caskets would assist auntie in carrying out grandma's obsequies. She consulted with me on hair, make-up, jewelry, dress, flower wreath arrangements, and obituary language. And even that deeply involved in the process, I would be the last person to view grandma's finished body. It lay up at the front of the funeral chapel—surrounded by flowers, candles, photos of ancestors that passed before her—an altar that assisted in the process of receiving her to the other side—a ritual of border crossing, of seeing below the Kalunga-Line. There is more to a living thing than its external appearance, but damn, grandma looked good. She wore her favorite Sunday dress, pearls, and white gloves that appeared as if they had been washed with hyssop. I held those hands, in those white gloves, and cried. I could feel her bones, and the generations of memory that she held within them. Sitting there with her body, her flesh, I recall a conversation that I had with my Dad years prior. He spoke of the memories that he carried from the night of Martin Luther King's assassination; how the Klan rode through his hometown on horses, how they had to barricade themselves in their home, and what it took for Grandma, a newly widowed Black Woman, to see their bodies to safety well into the morning. "Quincy, God don't make no mistakes, but sometimes I wonder if the safest place for our Black bodies is in that pretty wooden box?"
I carry my father's words with me as I continue throughout life and work to build new ways to understand his original sentiment. In conversation with Alison Saar, bell hooks calls us to deal with death radically. "You're up against death, then you make death this buffoon, this trickster, and that's how you deal with what you face, and that's how you survive it, because otherwise you'd just lay down and die. All our diverse losses, unnamed sorrows, undocumented deaths can find expression as we gaze upon this bed where living bodies might lie together, leave their mark. We confront an absence that is also a trace leading back so that we can bear witness to the intimacy that was present. Although the bodies are gone, memories sustain the experience, allowing the feelings these bodies generated—the warmth and passion—to be revealed, recalled, recorded."
I now walk this realm with all of my grandparents' remains lying six feet under this thick Georgia red clay, as they have now gone forth with the Lord. Both grief and sorrow visit me often. I yearn to hug and hold their warm vessels—to feel the vibration in the drawls of their southern patois—to cross borders through their eyes—to feel the healing of their workings over my wounds. What's clear to me is that this beautiful, yet mysterious experience of death ain't stopping no time soon. So long as folks continue to divorce their spirits from their bodies, I'll continue to imagine new frontiers where Black flesh is not always falling from our bones but one in which we are able to bond closer to them—as a place of memory. A world where Black life and mortality meet as a thread, weaving together the wholeness of our creation in our darkest hours. A world where our remembered grief and sacred expressions work in tandem, like auntie, to make both our bodies and spirit, anew.
