I'm not sure what you call this, but I needed to get it out despite being incomplete. It's about my grandmother and America.
Lengua
When she was dying, I visited my grandmother in the nursing home. I brought my infant son, Luke, for her to meet. It would be the first and last time she met him. At the time my grandmother suffered from the end stages of peripheral artery disease. In addition to being physically infirm, her mental status had declined precipitously since I had last seen her. She recognized me, but she existed in a kind of twilight zone between past and present, fluidly slipping between here and there.
We wheeled my grandmother to a common room and she held her grandson on her lap for a little while. She smiled broadly. I remember my mother telling me that she loved working the maternity ward when she was a nurse in the hospital. She had a thing for babies and it showed even as she was slipping from the world.
When Luke was in her lap, she sang him lullabies. She sang in Spanish because she couldn’t remember the English lullabies she learned later, when she was an adult and had her own children. My grandmother was born in San Antonio to a Mexican immigrant mother and a German-American father, who, by dint of happenstance, was orphaned and raised by a Mexican-American family. She learned to speak Spanish first and English second. And while her English remained slightly accented until her death, it was the drawl she had picked up from her thirty plus years in Texas that was recalcitrant.
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). A Nebraska law forbad teaching foreign languages (except Greek, Latin, and Hebrew) to public and private school students who had not successfully completed the eighth grade. Meyer taught reading in German at the Zion Parochial School (a Lutheran school, and we know from experience that Lutherans are radical usurpers of law and order in the U.S.) to, among others, a ten-year-old boy named Raymond Parpart. Nebraska charged Meyer with and convicted him of violating the statute, a criminal offense. Meyer appealed the conviction; however, the Nebraska Supreme Court affirmed it.
Meyer sought relief with the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. The Court noted, tongue-in-cheek, “the salutory purpose of the statute” due to “the baneful effects of permitting foreigners … to rear and educate their children in the language of their native land,” before concluding that the Nebraska statute was unconstitutional. As Justice McReynolds wrote:
[t]he American people have always regarded education and acquisition of knowledge as matters of supreme importance which ought to be diligently promoted...
and:
[t]hat the State may do much, go very far, indeed, in order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally, and morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected.
The Court held the Nebraska statute was unconstitutional because, among other things,
[i]t is well known that proficiency in a foreign language seldom comes to one not instructed at an early age, and experience shows that this is not injurious to the health, morals, or understanding of the ordinary child.
Justice McReynolds put the matter succinctly:
The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.
Tender and fierce, my grandmother smiled when we arrived for visits. She never wanted us to leave.
I didn't know her when she was young, obviously, but I know she was young like I know I was young and you were young too. What I know of her youth I learned from photos and stories, mostly stories. Her stories. My mother’s stories. Things heard while the adults talked around the dining room table. I pieced these things together to imagine who she was.
And she was the sun around which her family orbited for many years. Until her sons and daughters became suns in their own right, establishing new orbits, spinning out of the old. I think she knew and understood what was happening and why. I don’t think it broke her heart so much as it caused her, especially in the last few years, to atrophy in loneliness.
It broke my heart when we left on Sunday after Mass and after breakfast and I could tell that she didn’t want us to go, her small and bent 90-year-old frame waving good-bye at the back door of the Pine Meadows senior apartments, eyes rheumy or lachrymose or both. Mi abuelita.
We experienced the vestiges of her Spanish when I was a child. My grandmother used two Spanish expressions unceasingly: ‘pobrecito’ and ‘¡Cállate!’ For her there were no English equivalents. So when we were sad or sick or hurt we heard, ‘pobrecito.’ And when we were too loud or rambunctious, we heard ‘¡Cállate!’ My mother said ‘pobrecito’ all the time but abandoned ‘¡Cállate!’ in favor of its English equivalents. I occasionally hear ‘pobrecito’ escape from my lips, but only infrequently.
My grandmother lived an interesting life. She experienced the Jim Crow south in a peculiar way: she passed for ‘white’ while her mother was clearly of Mexican origin and so my grandmother witnessed segregation from a privileged but psychologically devastating perspective.
Chris Mapp, GOP Senate Candidate, Texas, speaking to the Dallas Morning News. In response to the story, Mapp replied that using the slur was as “normal as breathing air in South Texas.”
My grandmother chose a path most women of her era would not have followed. She received a BSN and worked in public health in San Antonio. She obtained a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University. She lived in Quito, Ecuador for a time as part of a medical exchange program. She did not marry until her mid-thirties. She continued working after she married my grandfather and moved from San Antonio to Antigo, Wisconsin. She met my grandfather when he returned from WWII and was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Eventually she became a public health nurse for Langlade County, Wisconsin.
My grandmother was tough and had an independent streak that was indelibly Texan (because, as she was wont to remind us, Texas was its own country once and didn’t really need the rest of the United States). She did not suffer fools. When she wanted to do something, she simply did it. And she was fiercely protective of her family. And she believed ardently in the obligation we have to help our fellows. When she retired, she ran a blood pressure clinic for senior citizens. She made her grandchildren quilts. She painted ceramic figures and donated them to church fundraisers or gave them as gifts. She was in the Rosary Society and rarely missed Mass.
I eulogized my grandmother poorly, which torments me. Too few people sat in the pews, which happens when you live to 95. The empty spaces distracted me. Everything I said reverberated, hopelessly inadequate to the task, incapable of lifting the audience up, of bringing her alive in our minds and memories. I suppose this is my attempt to repair that failed peroration.
She remains with me, occupying a prominent place in the conversation that takes place often in my mind between those who have come and gone and me. I know her smile still, unfaded and just a bit mischievous, and I can taste her mincemeat cookies, and I can hear her say my name, an inimitable utterance, like no one else. An immigrant's child. Abuela. Grandma. Bertha.
Cousins come
Aunts and uncles come in from the cold
And in the air is … is
I do not know but it is delicious.
The ruddy faces, handshakes and hugs
And my grandmother smiling:
We are hers and she knows it.
And knowing she knows is delicious
