daniel, Page 6 Author

Tomorrow, I will wear my “Old Black Lady” hat in honour of my beloved grandmother, Jessie Bryce. It has been an Easter tradition for a very long time. And, I will remember that she was the most influential person in my life. I will thank God for giving her to me. I will thank God for my two excellent parents … for a very blessed life with great family on both sides … for four great “kids” … 31 yrs being able to touch the lives of students … my Trinidad poets … the list is endless … and I will ask that He heal my back via the docs but if that is too much to ask after 70 yrs of so much good that He gives me strength to be grateful for a little pain in the midst of such ease. Happy Easter to all!

Apparently, I had never mentioned this in the past fourteen years as there was a bit of shock and awe at the lunch table today. Here goes … As a child, I wore an amulet (a little sack of spices & odds and ends) around my neck (under my clothes & out of sight) to school. This was to ward off both illness and any bad spirits seeking to do some harm. It would seem that my grandmother (the West Indian g’mother who used to read tea leaves for the neighbours) very much insisted that it was of utmost import to wear these. Of course, it made perfect sense to me because it always was … only as I got older and recognized the bizarre looks on the faces of the school doc and school nurse did I think it might be unique. My mother, child of the Irish g’mother, capitulated to this and a few other things to “protect” me because it terrified my g’mother to do otherwise. I say this to put a fine point on the fact that each of us is a product of our upbringing whether it is in terms of attitudes toward others’ religions, customs, clothing, appearance, race, sexuality, education, nationality, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Am I superstitious? You bet your ass, your dog, your house, your last nickel I am. I come by it quite naturally. Am I embarrassed by it? Not in the least. You might wonder if the amulet worked … Well, no great harm ever came by me but I did endure chronic bronchitus until adulthood … so, it worked for evil spirits but not for colds, measles and chicken pox. I never got the mumps, however!!!

This anniversary week, I need to reflect on my g’mother and not be so distracted. Jessie Bryce was very intelligent and worldly for one who was raised on a small island in the Caribbean. She came to the US with just $32 and ultimately owned two houses … they weren’t great houses but they were her houses. As you can see by the photo, life in the US was a challenge. She did everything she needed to do to raise her son (his father was booted early on … he said he didn’t need to work because Jess would … he was also taken with his brother’s wife …) She lost most of her eyesight in a silk mill doing fine work and survived by working in people’s houses. In fact, she had to put my dad in a boarding school in Montreal for a couple of years so she could work in a house. The school was Mt. St. Louis and run by the Christian Brothers. Virtually all the students there were foreign. He came out of there believing that he would become a priest. My mother believed that she would grow up and become a nun. Whew! Kath almost missed the ride into this world. See what you would have missed!

For whatever reason, she moved around … I imagine going where jobs were. They lived in Los Angeles and Detroit … she had a half-brother, Dr. Roderick Adolphus Bryce, who was a medical doctor there … by that time, my father was able to sell the Detroit Free Press on the street to support them … When they returned to Syracuse, she worked in the rectory at Most Holy Rosary Church. When the stove blew up in her face, they merely bandaged her and put her to bed for a couple of days. Perhaps they didn’t think a Black face would be harmed by fire. (To this day, 65 yrs. later, I cannot light a fire.) During the war, she and my mother put a roof on the garage. She taught Mom how to cook West Indian and we enjoyed that for my mother’s life as well as hers. When the 1940 Census was recently released, I was half surprised that it stated she was from Spain rather than Port of Spain, Trinidad. She knew how to survive as did my dad. She read tea leaves for the neighbours and served as their “lawyer” filling out papers and assisting with those things that plague the foreign born. The Italian and Polish people that filled the neighborhood loved Miss Jessie and relied on her judgment and skills. I have her hands. I see her every time I look at them. She was my life for eleven years. She is my foundation today.

My grandmother came from some wealth in the West Indies. Tutor-educated, she was always teaching. Because we lived first in her house, and then, she, in my parents’ house, she was a constant in my life. She taught values from two main sources … her knowledge of bible stories and Aesop’s Fables. She taught me to write and to spell from the time I could hold a pen. I had books with the margins filled with my child scribbles.
Things weren’t always accurate on my part … I remember saying, “Shadrack, Meshack and Intobedyougo” … my spelling remained a challenge until I finally gave up after retirement. I decided I would rather seem pretentious than have to go through everything I write quickly to Americanize it. I credit my first teachers with my less than stellar penmanship. I could never understand the need to print when I already could write … I still feel the sting of the teacher who humiliated me when I was at the blackboard. My script was what my g’mother taught. Teacher looked at my Kathleen with the K looking very much like an X and said, “How do you expect to be able to write if you can’t write your own name?” As noted previously, when I began to teach, I knew what not to do to students … their job was to teach me what to do. Very few hours ever pass without my thinking of Jessie Elizabeth Bryce of Trinidad … there will always be a loneliness for her within me. I cannot speak aloud of her without tears … whatever good I have done in this world is because of the good she instilled in me. She died in life 59 years ago today … when I am gone, there will be no one to remember her so I must do so every single day for as long as I can.

It really struck me today that while I do seem to be a lot more spiritual than religious, per se, that there is absolutely no doubt that I am very, very superstitious. I don’t give it much thought because it has always been intrinsic to my life. Without a doubt, it is a lasting remnant of my upbringing. My Irish grandmother was Roman Catholic and pragmatic. My Caribbean grandmother was Episcopalian, then Roman Catholic. From neither was religion forthcoming. It was from the latter that the superstitions came into play. From the poultices that I wore around my neck to ward off illness and evil spirits to the reading of tea leaves to the repetition of words or phrases to the knowledge that my father appears in found pennies and my mother is seen keeping watch as a hawk in the passing trees … all of these deep-seated beliefs walk with me every single day … from saying goodbye in gratitude to a car that kept us safe to saying “I love you, stay safe” each time a love one leaves the house to saying, “Thank You, God” upon turning into the neighborhood after a ride. I suppose, on some level, each of these is a prayer but mostly each is a superstition learned by a child at the knee of a beloved grandmother. I wouldn’t give one of them up for all the tea in Trinidad. They say home is where the heart is. If that is true, my home is filled with palm trees, beaches, and a city called Couva that was once where my great-grandfather, Robert Nesbit Bryce, owned a sugar cane plantation …