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CHAPTER 1
Life with Grannie
I thought all grandmothers were white.
I had an incredibly close bond with Grannie, who was white as a marble statue. Born Greta Strasse, she was the daughter of German immigrants, yet she chose to marry a coal-black Cuban immigrant in the 1940s, a time when interracial marriage was as rare as a passing comet.
Greta and Tony Peru met while World War II was gripping the country. One time after his factory shift, Tony walked into a Woolworth's in downtown Cleveland. Known as a five-and-dime store, every Woolworth's featured a lunch counter where meals were served on the cheap. Tuna sandwiches and hot dogs were a dime; coffee and soda were a nickel.
Tony slid onto a red leatherette-covered stool at the lunch counter, where a friendly waitress took his order.
I don't know who flirted first. I don't know when their eyes locked and they made a connection. I don't know how many times Tony visited Woolworth's before he got the courage to ask Greta to meet him in a park or a restaurant in the black neighborhood of Cleveland — because he certainly couldn't meet her in her world. All I know is that sometime in 1943, she said yes to meeting him in secret.
Tony told her his story. He had traveled from Cuba to the Gulf Coast of Alabama by boat ten years earlier when he was sixteen years old. After stepping on American soil, he took any job he could get as a day laborer, working a hoe in cotton fields as far as the eye could see or picking peaches and pecans at harvesttime. He made fifty cents a day toiling from sunup to sundown and bunking in lean-to shacks, where he slept on hay and straw and wore the same clothes for weeks at a time without any washing. He was fed scraps from the farmer's table and sometimes had to eat what the goats were given — half-eaten cobs of corn. That's what he did to survive.
He had to learn English. But he also had to be a quick study and be quiet about it because if he was too bold, too mouthy, or too independent, he would be considered "uppity" and need a reminder of who was really in charge in the Deep South — the white establishment. He witnessed foremen beating farm workers for the slightest infraction, saw bound black men hanging from tree limbs following a lynching, and came upon white crosses burning brightly in the night.
The United States' entry into World War II after Pearl Harbor changed everything for Tony. As mobilization transformed an idle economy into a powerhouse economic engine, there was an unprecedented military production of arms and ammunition: hundreds of ships; tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, cannons, and jeeps; and millions of rifles and bullets. This resulted in a huge demand for labor in the nation's factories, mainly concentrated in the steel-producing cities of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Tony heard that blacks were being hired for the first time to work in those factories. He hitchhiked — and walked — over 700 miles from Birmingham to Cleveland, dreaming of a better life.
Greta, four years younger than Tony, never told her parents that she was seeing a black man. She couldn't. She knew that. Her parents were from the Old Country. In their eyes, there was just no way a black man and a white woman could be romantically involved. Yet Tony and Greta got married anyway and started a family.
Their first child, Elizabeth — my mother — was born on June 11, 1945, and was followed by six more children: Michael, Kelly, David, Carl, Antoinette, and Anita. Most of the Peru children, with their straight hair and fair skin, could pass for white even though their father was black like his African ancestors who had reached Cuba on slave ships.
In the late 1950s, my grandparents were walking arm in arm on a Cleveland sidewalk when a white man stopped my grandmother and asked her why she was with a big, ugly guy like my grandfather. Actually, the white man used the N word, which lit a fuse. My grandfather reared back, swung his clenched fist, and broke the man's neck. A jury sentenced him to ten years in state prison for socking a white man. The family lost their house in Buckeye, a Cleveland suburb, and moved to Hough, a gritty neighborhood close to downtown. My grandmother found a two-story house with two units — one up, one down — and took the second floor. She cleaned homes to keep a roof over her family's heads and food on the table.
Most of the time all my grandmother could afford was a gunnysack of russet potatoes — and that was when they were on sale. The menu was always the same: potato pancakes for breakfast, a watery potato soup for lunch, and potato slices browned in shortening for dinner.
Michael, a year younger than my mother, and his younger brothers, David and Carl, became food scavengers. They'd bring home fresh loaves of bread that "fell off" a Wonder Bread truck or fruits and vegetables they had stuffed into their pockets when the local grocer wasn't looking.
That's how they lived.
That's how they survived.
* * *
Grannie was respected in our predominantly black neighborhood. She was shown courtesy because she was a white woman who chose to live in the ghetto, raising a large family and doing the best she could with what she had. Black men tipped their hats, and black women included her in the neighborhood gossip.
And then I came along on June 15, 1963. If you do the math, Mom had just turned eighteen years old four days earlier. I was born four weeks premature and weighed four pounds, two ounces. My lungs were underdeveloped, which impacted my breathing. I battled pneumonia right off the bat. I was a sickly child, always struggling with pneumonia and earaches.
A couple of months after my arrival, my unmarried mother moved to New York City to make money, leaving me in Grannie's care. I wouldn't see Mom for nearly two years. During that time, my grandmother was an incredible nurturing presence — feeding me, changing me, bathing me, and rocking me in her fleshy arms when I cried out to be comforted. She cheered my first steps and helped me form my first words.
She had plenty of Old World experience to draw upon. Once I was crying uncontrollably when it was time to change my diaper, but Grannie had a solution. She put a towel down on the dining room table and then laid me on top. Before she started changing me, she reached up and gave the chandelier a gentle push. The rocking motion of the chandelier silenced me. I was mesmerized by the dazzling swaying of the shimmering glass beads above me.
Grannie's upstairs unit had a rat problem. These Norway rats would come crawling out of the toilet in the middle of the night, sniffing for food. If they caught the scent of milk on your breath, the rats would chew off your lips or part of your nose. At least that's what Grannie had read in the newspaper, so she was on high alert and wasn't going to take any chances, especially with a baby in the house. She and my aunts took steak knives with them every time they went into the bathroom. It was my uncles, though, who eventually "solved" the rats issue. They put a cinder block on top of the toilet seat cover after it got dark so the rats couldn't get out.
Life with Grannie wasn't always so eventful. She loved me and found a way to take care of me, day in and day out, even though she was on her own and raising my aunts and uncles, too. I was too young at the time to know or care why Grannie bore so many burdens by herself. But years after I had lived with her, Grannie told me why we never saw her parents, the Strasses. Talking about them was enough to get the tears flowing.
"Oh, Skeezix," she moaned, using the nickname she gave me. "They didn't want to see me after I got married. They even had a funeral for me and filled a small casket with my clothes, scrapbooks, pictures, and high school diploma. They said I was dead to them."
As a result, Grannie felt isolated and alone. She was abandoned by the Strasses for marrying my grandfather, but it was worse than that. With her husband in prison, their marriage was practically over. Even after my grandfather was released, he and Grannie did not reunite as husband and wife. I never learned the details of what happened — it just wasn't talked about. All I knew was that he and Grannie would live separately for the rest of their lives, showing up together only at large family gatherings held on the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. In fact, those were some of the only times I saw Big Daddy — as I called my grandfather — when I was growing up.
Despite the care Grannie showed her family, she was a sorrowful, despondent woman. She had lost her husband, her house, and her good job. She had ridden a chute from the middle class to poverty. When you consider that her family disowned her because she married a black man, it was no great surprise that Grannie was depressed much of the time. Most days it seemed like only I could put a smile on her face.
Her disfigured face.
A year or two before I was born, Grannie experienced fainting spells. She was cleaning homes to feed seven hungry kids and put a roof over their heads, so she was under enormous pressure. Grannie was cleaning a bathroom one day when she suddenly felt lightheaded and had to sit down for a minute. On another occasion, she told me that her world turned black when she was behind the wheel. Grannie averted an accident, but that incident told her that something was seriously wrong.
She made an appointment with her family physician, who referred her to a specialist. The specialist ran several tests, and a few weeks later, Grannie learned some very bad news: she had a cancerous tumor in her brain just behind the left eye.
Back then, cancer treatment was fairly crude compared to today: a neurosurgeon would do his best to cut the malignant mass out of the body while the family hoped he got it all. For my grandmother, the news got worse: during the procedure, her surgeon had to remove her left eye as well as parts of her skull and a small fragment of the frontal lobe of the brain to save her life.
She survived the operation, but my mother, aunts, and uncles claimed she was never the same. They said the gruesome procedure changed her personality drastically. She was no longer outgoing, no longer adventurous, and no longer active. Bedeviled by depression, mood swings, and headaches, she became quiet and shy. She felt deformed and ashamed. Grannie believed that people thought she was ugly.
Her glass eye never looked right to me, but it was hidden behind humongous tinted glasses she wore every waking minute, day or night, indoors or outdoors, sun or no sun. It was the only thing she could do to hide the glass eye and the botched job the surgeon did while sewing her up.
I didn't know Grannie before the operation, so I never saw her outgoing, adventurous side. But I loved her all the same, and she clearly loved me.
Despite all that she had endured, Grannie took care of her family the best she could. Grannie was a survivor. And in many ways, I would become one as well.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What Belief Can Do"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ronaldo Isaac Archer.
Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.
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