I never saw Nanny cry. Not even when her humble, eat-off-the-floor-clean basement apartment flooded repeatedly. Back in those terribly inconvenient days, it was normal for all of us—especially my mom, sister, and me—to worry profusely when the weather forecast called for rain, especially heavy ones. We knew any hint of a deluge meant my poor Nanny was in for a day or two of mopping those black-and-white, faux marble, linoleum floors, along with managing garbage bag after garbage bag of trash removal, and prayers for a dry season. A seamstress by trade, my Nanny knew instinctively how to patch things back together and to keep it pushin’.
Her (most likely) illegally rented apartment house on the corner of Avenue D and Brooklyn Avenue remains etched in my memory. It’s where I learned the art of having a limitless supply of candies on hand for expected and unexpected company, like the irresistible hard butterscotch or cinnamon-red sweets that would later birth a few of my first cavities.
It’s where I ran inside for comfort after my ring finger got accidentally caught in the car door as my father dropped me off before heading to work. Thankfully, this traumatic event only lasted for a few seconds before my Dad reacted quickly to my blood-curdling screams, hit the brakes on his 1970s beige Buick, and heroically released my finger from the door while still in the driver’s seat. The good news is that my finger is totally fine today, decades later after the incident. To be real, my finger probably was fine a few days later. You’d never guess the incident caused it to be temporarily flattened like a sad inflatable stick figure, like the one you’d find in front of a car dealership flailing around. It is amazing to sit back in awe sometimes about how the body can heal itself. God has, without a doubt, thought of everything.
It’s also where, to my immense horror, the landlord entered my Nanny’s apartment—as on any typical day to drop off the mail or check on the heat or some other activity to assert his ownership of the house—and cornered me, raised his yellowish-tainted fingers under my green, red, and yellow Parochial school uniform, and rubbed my prepubescent vagina through my Care Bear panties. I don’t know or care to know where that predatory monster is today, but I trust God to deal with that loser.
Now, back to where I was: I never saw Nanny cry until she learned I was getting a divorce.
Up until that point, I was handling, the best way I knew how, my sadness, unwarranted feelings of failure, and devastation. I was a sea of tears and numbness and anger and confusion, utterly and profoundly lost. A complete basket case. I didn’t let everyone in on how I was feeling, because I really didn’t know how to. I was dumbstruck by my then husband’s infidelity and his seemingly indifference to what felt as the shattering of my heart.
Still, with all that I was feeling and trying not to feel, Nanny’s cry for me was the moment that completely broke me. It was at that pivotal point that the world as I had always known and believed it to be, mostly fair and loving and hopeful and bright, even amid a few unfortunate and evil hiccups along the way, was gone.
Nanny’s tears weren’t exactly floodgates; they were more like a slow, steady release of pain. She didn’t speak; she didn’t have to. We had a bond where verbosity wasn’t required to fill a quiet space. She got me. No facades needed. Although fifty years my senior, Nanny was, and will always be, my girl.
I never harped on how close Nanny and I were because I didn’t know any different. She was always there for me, making my hot tea with extra big lemons and lots of honey, just the way I loved it. On special occasions, I was treated to one of my favorite meals of hers: a traditional Bajan dish of flying fish and cou-cou. Nothing else seemed to matter when Nanny placed that meal before me. I was in heaven. My mouth gets watery thinking about it now.
Nanny was truly my homie and confidant before I understood the significance of these nouns. She got me in ways that no one else ever could or did. I knew that she knew when I wasn’t telling the whole truth just by the way she would look at me. Like the time I was dating this guy. He was good-looking enough. Smart enough. Kind enough. But not enough for me to want to marry. I didn’t have to tell Nanny anything; she said it before I could: “You don’t love him.” In the many years I was blessed to have with Nanny, I learned to keep it 100 with her. There was no fooling that woman, so I didn’t try. She was as sharp as she was smooth.
Nanny, who others called by her name, Evelyn or nickname, Ev, intrinsically seemed to know how to pick up the pieces of a broken life and move forward. It was a gift no one wanted to have to use, but more often than not, it was one she came to rely upon time and time again.
I can’t imagine what it was like for Nanny, as a young woman in her late twenties/early thirties, to have to leave her children behind in the small island of Barbados to travel to the United States in search of something more.
Those children she left for a few years with my great grandmother, Rheta, were my Aunt Sonja (aka Antz) and my mom, who were about six and three years old respectively, at the time. They would be reunited again with my Nanny when they were nine and six. This may seem unusual for some now, leaving your children in their formative years, but it was and is a major occurrence for families seeking a better life for their children in another country that feels like a promised land.
While I’m sure it was an almost unbearable reality Nanny faced, having to leave her babies while she pursued the so-called American dream, she also relied heavily on the motto, “You gotta do what you gotta do.” Nanny dealt with the cards she had been given:
Her ex-husband had failed her.
She didn’t have a lot of money.
Her education had only advanced to the sixth grade.
But what she did have was the willpower to do her best with what she had.
My Nanny traveled to the United States, ready for better days.
Up until this moment, the story I told myself was always the one where Nanny saw and lived in a sea of hope. She always expressed pride in her relationship with her long-time boyfriend, Lloyd. She and my Uncle Lloyd, as many in my family called him, were partners for thirty-nine years before he passed. He was the father figure my mom and Aunt Sonja didn’t have with their father, Owen.
She also saw both her children graduate college and even go on to earn master’s degrees; feats that made her beam with immense pride and gratitude.
Nanny never became a fancy homeowner or earned her driver’s license, but the stable life she afforded her children was her lasting legacy.
But I wonder about the pain she left behind. Was it really left behind?
I grew up in a family where you didn’t talk much. Things were the way they were and you just didn’t question it. So I never asked my Nanny what it was like to go through a divorce. I didn’t know what young love looked like between her and Owen, before my Uncle Lloyd came into her life. Did she ever deal with infidelity with Owen? I had heard a rumor that the woman he ended up marrying after my Nanny left had somehow always lurked around.
As a woman with a divorce and second marriage under my belt, I understand pain and even a little drama. It’s none of my business but there must’ve been something so messy, so hurtful, and so traumatic, that the only thing my Nanny knew to do was to keep it movin’. That’s the Nanny I knew: strong, resolute, and determined.
But the Nanny who cried for me, as she saw the pain I was facing in my own disintegrating marriage, finally broke free.
My guess is that those cries for me had hit from someplace deep within her. While she had found a love of her own in Uncle Lloyd, the past had somehow traveled with her too. It was in the form of a history that repeated itself, in an ugly cycle of men who behaved badly and forced women with no optimal choice: either deal with it or leave and start anew.
Life can be tough. But if you’re brave enough to believe that you deserve more, you will eventually find more.
My dear Nanny, who lived to be ninety-one years young, found more. She was blessed to have two children, four grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
Life wasn’t easy for her. The floods often came, literally and figuratively.
But Nanny mastered the art of facing life’s torrents, picking up the pieces, stitching them back together as best as she could, and facing forward. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel pain; she just knew she had to keep going. She had people counting on her. She knew she had children, and grandchildren, and great grandchildren who were looking up to her for guidance and love and protection. And she never failed in giving us all those things and more. I learned how to be strong from my Nanny, how to love fiercely with what little or much I had.
That day when Nanny cried for me revealed a powerful lesson: the dam may break at times but the sun will come out again. You just have to hold on in the storm, find your way no matter what, and press onward.
*Edited by Non-Fiction Editor, Jina DuVernay
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