Janvier Chouteu-Chando
TISI BOOKS
NEW YORK, RALEIGH, LONDON, AMSTERDAM
PUBLISHED BY TISI BOOKS
This story is dedicated to the grandmothers who raised their children’s offspring.
My deepest, warmest, and everlasting thanks to my entire family: Special attributes to my mother Theresia Njomo, and her mother Susan Njiki for being exemplary grandmothers.
"A grandmother’s love is selfless all the way to the bones.”
―THERESIA N. TCHOUTEU-CHANDO
It was a warm day in December, too warm for a North Carolinian winter, I would say, with the midday temperature already hitting sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit. It excited so much enthusiasm in my bosom that I thought it would be a good idea to share it with someone.
I concluded in an instant that my father’s older brother was the soul most likely to relate to my feelings and share my exaltation. So, I set out looking for him like someone with a secret she could no longer keep to herself. I found him on the balcony, sipping whisky from a crystal glass and basking in the sunshine with a satisfied expression on his face. My very educative uncle had talked to me about life the evening before, but declined answering my question about his love life, promising instead to tell me something about it another day. Something told me this was the right moment to have a discussion with him at a deeper level. So, I greeted him in a joyful manner, and then leaned on the balcony rail.
However, when I brought up the topic of his love life, I was actually looking forward to seeing Uncle Paul go beyond letting me know that he was still unmarried because of ill luck. In fact, I expected him to engage me in a sort of sincere and revealing conversation centered on the secrets of his love life.
That was why I was taken aback for a moment when he said suddenly, “I came across three cases involving grandparents and their grandkids. You won’t believe it, but those three experiences influenced my outlook on certain aspects of life in a profound manner,” he paused, and then smiled like a happy soul reminiscing about something or someone that just illuminated a secret portion of his soul.
“Grandparents you said,” my Aunt Auntie Vera interjected at the door with dimmed eyes fixed on Uncle Paul. I had almost forgotten she existed.
“Hey, Aunty Vera! Uncle Paul was about to tell me a home truth?”
“He wants to tell a home truth! Wow! Is it okay if I join you?” Auntie Vera intoned.
“Suit yourself! By the way, why don’t you take a seat?” Uncle Paul modulated, indicating the chair next to his.
Auntie Vera sat down with a smile, crossed her legs, and then raised her eyebrows. “Your story,” she said and nudged him.
“What story?”
“The exploits of the grandparents!” I reminded him with a note of exasperation in my voice.
“Oh, the grandparents!” he said and sniffed, “They were grandmothers actually. All the grandmothers had big hearts, you know! If they did not, then they wouldn’t have been so great in the supportive roles they played in the lives of their grandchildren. There is, however, one thing about those grannies that truly amazes me. Hmm! They are fantastic souls. And they were ingenious too in the ways they dealt with their children who should be held accountable for the malaises in their families. Please bear with me on this one.”
“Which one?” I asked, suspecting that the alcohol was beginning to influence his narrative.
My uncle regarded me for a moment, shook his head, and then took a sip of his drink. “I will go ahead and start with the first grandmother,” he said, and then began his story:
* * *
Now, the first grandmother Ilona Harrell had an only son called Lawrence Harrell, a son she loved dearly and was willing to sacrifice her life for him if given any reason to believe that her act of immolation would make him a distinguished person in life. Ilona gave this beloved son everything she could afford in a bid to make him a worthy person in society, but she could not give him the figure of a father at that stage in the kid’s life when he was badly in need of a male role model to emulate. This smart and well-balanced kid scored A-s when he had his father around to put some seriousness into his head on how to go about acquiring knowledge and navigating the challenges in life that mature us into responsible adults. Unfortunately, the boy’s father died in a car accident when he was only eleven years old, a tragedy that turned the kid’s life upside down.
Lawrence Harrell exploited his mother’s vulnerability thereafter, stretched his quest for freedom to incredulous levels and even blackmailed her emotionally. About four years after the death of his father, this once bright-eyed boy dedicated himself to a gang that messed around with drugs. He met a crackhead seventeen-year-old blonde with a special knack for freedom and fathered two children with her shortly afterwards―twins they chose to call Geraldine and Gavin. The pair soon found themselves in prison for drug dealing. Now, this blonde girl got a light sentence of two and a half years and could not wait for her boyfriend who still had three years to serve in jail. She stepped out of the confinement after serving her term with a smile of relief on her face, made up her mind not to see her children and their grandmother, and accompanied a truck driver to the east instead. She has been living a wasted life over there ever since, three thousand miles away from her children who still wish to know her one day. I am yet to find another grandmother who has been so dedicated to her grandchildren.
Ilona Harrell did a fantastic job of raising her son’s daughter and son, doing her utmost not to make the mistakes she made while raising Lawrence. Those grandchildren were doing pretty well in school until their father returned to their grandma’s home after serving his term in the penitentiary. Geraldine and Gavin demonstrated the affection of kids deprived of the love and attention of their parents, made their father promise never to leave them again, and talked loving about him to their friends and classmates. Their father was like any other human being who got derailed in life as a teenager, and for that reason, he needed another chance in life; the brother and sister reasoned. Lawrence Harrell could be warm-hearted too, you know. However, his failings returned and he was back in jail.
He went back and forth between life in prison and life in his mother’s home, breaking the hearts of his children in the process and leaving his mother brooding all the time. Now, how did the children of this jailbird react to his flaws? The son came to terms with the fact that his father was unreliable, wiped away any illusions he had about him and fully embraced his grandmother’s view of life. However, his twin sister could not adjust to the fact that her father was a degenerate. Instead, she reacted in a way that psychologists can do a better job of explaining. She transferred her disappointment with the male figure she had looked up to as a kid by rebelling instead, as if her subconscious way of hitting back at her father or of coming to terms with his jaded lifestyle had to be by following in his footsteps.
Geraldine chided her grandmother for being too lenient with her father, spoke disrespectfully to him, and went a step further in her teenage rebellion by getting herself a new boyfriend who was in every way imaginable like her father when he was in his early twenties. Now, this lovely girl got herself pregnant without meaning to or so she claimed later. Her pregnancy must have unsettled her even further because she ran away from home and joined her boyfriend in the dingy apartment he had been calling home for close to five years. She told her grandmother later that she left the warmth of the home she had known all her life because she wanted to prove that she was now a woman who could start a life of her own and be responsible for the welfare of someone else. By someone else, she meant the baby she was determined never to let down in life.
* * *
“Now, what do you think happened to Geraldine after she left home, the only refuge she had known all her life?” Uncle Paul asked, fixing his eyes on me.
“I don’t know. You are the one telling the story,” I replied and heaved my shoulders.
Uncle Paul regarded me for a moment, smiled, and then continued:
* * *
As the story goes, this searching soul’s boyfriend deserted her not long after she moved in. Now, who was there to bring her back home? Her grandmother, of course, was the one who provided her with the shoulders to sob on. She had her grandmother to fall back to. I mean the very grandmother who was always around in her life was there to rescue her again. There was, however, a marked change in that household following the welcoming of the new baby. Ilona finally came to terms with her incorrigible son and prayed for his arrest. Her unsettling prayers received an answer a couple of months after the return of her granddaughter, when the police arrested the unreliable and degenerate Lawrence, put him on trial, and then sentenced him to jail again for the umpteenth time. Now, when it came to pass that Lawrence finally got behind bars as she had wished, this remarkable grandmother vowed never to repeat the mistake of allowing her only son to become a part of her household again as she did before, each time he came out of prison after serving his terms. Not allowing her son back into her home did not mean that she intended to cut off all ties with him. No, that was not the case. This remarkable grandmother would always be there to help her son if the need arises. In fact, she actually helped him get a place of his own after he got out of jail. He couldn’t believe it at first, but he lived there, away from the rest of his family for the first time in his life as a free man. Ilona Harrell’s first remarkable action to prevent her son from unsettling her grandchildren’s emotions again and driving them into delinquency, drugs, crime, and promiscuity made a big difference because Geraldine and Gavin are forging ahead in life with a sense of direction and purpose that I find remarkable. In fact, Lawrence is back in jail. The story of how he got back there is a footnote and not the main content in the current chapter of the narrative of the Harrell home.
* * *
“Is that all?” aunty Auntie Vera asked.
“Yes, that’s all about Grandmother Ilona,” Uncle Paul bellowed.
“Hmm! Interesting name Ilona! I wonder about its origin.”
Uncle Paul nodded, but did not offer a response. His mind must have been on his story because he continued his narration as if he did not hear my aunt’s last words:
* * *
Now, here is another story, my second about grandmothers and their grandkids. I came across this stoic of a grandmother by accident, but I don’t regret the trust and respect we have developed for one another over the years. She is a lady in his sixties with memories of more haunting tragedies in life than most people can even imagine. Her name is Iris Hogers.
This remarkable woman lost her husband and their two sons in a car accident when she was at the prime of her life. I mean at that age when a woman has the most need for a husband or man by her side to make her feel complete in life, at that age when mothers tend to cherish sons with the ability to play the role of upholders of the fortress in the absence of the real man of the house. You see, this lady grew up as the only girl in a family of five and was a sort of a tomboy. So, you can understand why she bonded so naturally with her two sons and didn’t mind the fact that her two girls spent more time with their father.
Even though this lady missed her husband, she mourned her sons a lot for the most obvious reasons. She was particularly close to her boys and related to them even more than to her girls. In fact, she had even plotted a future where she would be an adorable mother-in-law to their wives and sweet grandmother to their kids. Now, her husband’s death left her with their two daughters, vivacious girls who were already teenagers.
The sisters were the type of developing personalities you sometimes find clinging to the hands and arms of their fathers, hanging on their backs or keeping pace with them even at that age when most teenage girls show some degree of timidity when perceived by their peers as daddy’s girl. In short, the two girls were too fond of their father whom they looked up to as the male idol in their lives. One did not need to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist to see that their father’s death affected them enormously. All the same, it is the nature of their approach to life after the death of the first man in their lives that interested me the most.
When the first daughter called Barbara met a man who mirrored her late father in so many ways, she decided to burrow herself into his heart and would not let go or come out of it after she found out that he too cared but that he was scared of taking the next step to holy matrimony. She became his wife a year after they met and eventually moved with him to his native Western Australia where they are living and raising six children on a ranch less than a hundred miles south of Perth right up to this day.
Martha, as the other sister is called, abused her mother’s emotions and exploited her other vulnerabilities. She even took to drugs and slept around. When she became pregnant at the age of eighteen, she expressed no remorse, and instead pressured her mother into giving her control of one of her late father’s rental properties. Her mother finally caved in to her incessant demands, which allowed her to move in with the man she let everyone know was the father of her baby. This loafer of a quasi-husband was also an addict, but he was an unusual addict in the sense that he went about life with this strange idea in his head that a man’s feet should be given the total and complete freedom to move around. It is an idea that contrasts sharply with the life of a settled junkie. I am using the word junkie because the young woman’s use of drugs reached alarming proportions to the point where they had to save her from a drug-induced coma. So, how could anyone be surprised at all when such an unreliable man moved out of this young woman’s life a couple of months after he moved in? Martha wept a lot for a day or two after he absconded, but I don’t think she missed him thereafter because hardly a week after he left, she started allowing other men into her life to warm her bed, thereby bringing more instability into her already shaky life and that of her child.
Whether this young woman realized she could not handle the instability in her life or whether she became fed-up with her lifestyle, I don’t know. Martha abandoned her home and child one evening and made herself very scarce. Had her mother not overcome her self-restraint and barged in unexpectedly, the poor thirteen-month-old baby would have spent a third night alone at home without food and water. There are several accounts of how this concerned grandmother wept as she grabbed whatever she could find in the drab apartment that could be of use to the baby, and how she tearfully left the place with her grandson in her arms as if she were being chased by the devil. It was in that state of distress that she took the child to her home, and thereafter, cherished him like he was the greatest treasure she ever found in life.
* * *
“That’s horrible! How could she abandon her own child like that?” I quivered.
“I don’t know how. I guess by walking away and behaving as if the little boy never existed. Hmm! My dear Tania, try not to look at me like that. Hmm! Yes, she did something as despicable as that. Now, would you for one second believe that this wonderful grandmother brought his grandson back to health, but decided not to report her daughter to the authorities?” Uncle Paul said.
“Wow!” Auntie Vera muttered.
“That is exactly how the story unfolded,” Uncle Paul intoned, and then continued:
* * *
Little was heard of Martha after she abandoned her home and her son until she showed up again the morning of her twenty-first birthday to claim her inheritance. Now, you would expect this grandmother to do everything possible to stop her irresponsible daughter from getting her hands on the money she inherited from her late father...
I enjoyed this read and as a grandmother I understand the depths of emotion and commitment we feel towards our little ones, no matter how big they get Keep up the good work now if all mothers and grandmothers went on strike maybe we;d get some actoin
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