Grammie and Me

By Chris Lloyd

Ethel Calpurnia O’Neill Smith was a woman of shadow and light, a harsh judge of character and unforgiving of those who wronged her, yet a gentle touch to those young enough to have never disappointed her. She was a mountain woman of West Virginia who viewed her narrow life anchored stubbornly to her front porch swing. Her friends called her Callie, but I just called her my grammie. 

At 80 years of age, Grammie’s face was pulled downward by lines as deep as the mountain holler in which she lived. Her chin had taken on the appearance of a marionette puppet, and her terse lips had all but disappeared. A beakish nose, casting a long shadow, carried a pair of thick black cat-eyed glasses which hid watery brown eyes. Her once rich black hair was now sparse and jetted with white, always pulled sternly back from her face into a bun no bigger than a baby doll’s hair-do. 

Grammie always wore loose housedresses, and her slender frame was punctuated only by a distended belly, perhaps from eating too many sweets. A barefooted woman by summer, a slippered woman by winter, I never saw my grammie wear shoes, and I never saw her venture beyond the front porch of that Appalachian home where she loved to hold court on her swing. Grammie handed down both judgment and mercy from that porch swing.

“You whoop your kids hard, don’t you, Joy?” she asked my mother one afternoon as I sat on the porch steps eavesdropping. When my mother answered primly that she did indeed spank her children when necessary, my grammie said, “I saw a woman down Marmet way whoop her kids so hard they bled. Lawdy, those kids cried. That woman won’t be fergiven on judgment day.” After a pregnant pause, total silence from the other relatives on the porch, and no response from my mother, grammie, brittle-faced, finished her off with a deep sigh, “No, a woman who whoops her three kids hard is just headed fer the judgment chair. No bettern’ a yard dog.” 

Oh, but my grammie loved her grandbabies. “Hey ladybug,” she’d call out to me, hugging me with arms that felt like dry onion skin, or “Hey pussycat, let’s have us a piece of pie and watch Jimmy Swaggart preach on the TV screen.” Sometimes we’d eat our pie with our fingers, and she’d sip her coffee from a chipped tea saucer. She’d dip her hankie deep into her jar of Vaseline and slather up her cracked lips, and we’d swing.

We’d swing on that porch swing, listening to the chains above us squeak, and we’d watch the sun sink behind the hill, piling on quilts against the evening chill. She’d tell me stories of ghosts in the mountains and coalmine disasters. She asked me questions. And she listened and doled out mercy after mercy; no judgment on the innocent.

When the sky turned from red to india ink, she’d say, “Hey, ladybug, lets git us a coconut ho-ho. They may even be a couple of moon pies left!” And then she’d laugh into the still mountain night and shuffle towards the light of the house. Shadow and light. Harshness and gentleness. Judgment for some; mercy for others. A champion for a cause. That was Grammie Smith. A proud mountain woman from West Virginia.