Etta Mae Woods was my grandmother.  A small-framed woman with purple rosebud lips.  Beautiful glazed brown skin.  I’d wipe her kisses off my cheeks because they smelled like tobacco.  She’s dead now.  I shouldn’t have wiped off so many kisses.  My grandmother was the first person to teach me about toughness.

When you walked into her house there were four small black statues, carved out of heavy wood.  One statue was a sinewy man with a spear and a shield.  The others were stone faced figures with wide noses.  I never asked her about those.  Maybe they were there to ward off any bad spirits that tried to slip into her house.  Or maybe they were just decoration.  She was a tough old woman.  I don’t think she needed any help with protection.

The old smoke alarm was always going off in her kitchen.  Not from her cigarettes, but from whatever was on the stove.  She cooked in cast iron skillets that were dangerous and baked black with flavor.  On the table there was always a homemade cake, a jug of iced tea with lemon and mint leaves on the countertop.  That was her world, that kitchen.  If you were hungry, she’d take one last puff from her cigarette, plant the butt one of the crystal ashtrays, and cook up anything you could imagine.

I remember she used to take us fishing.  She drove a smooth black Cadillac that never had a speck of dust on it.  We were rambunctious kids, but when we got in the back seat of her car, on those leather seats – we sat still and shut our mouths.  She played classic soul music from the 60s; The Temptations, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder.  Maybe it was the music that kept us in line.

Two thing stick out in my memory about fishing with my grandmother; one, she was the first woman I’d ever seen pee outdoors.  I don’t blame her.  She had to go.  So, she hid herself behind the car door, squatted, and handled business.  The second thing I remember was when she took a barbed fishing hook clean through her thumb.  There was a little bit of a yelp, then a grunt, then with the hooked hand up in the air, still attached to a pole, she was scrounging around in the toolbox for a pair of pliers to pull it out with.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been gored by a barbed fishing hook, but, you’re not pulling that thing out.  To her credit, she tried.  She took a final puff of her cigarette, squashed it dead in the sand, bit her bottom lip, got a grip on those pliers – and then maybe I started crying.  I don’t remember exactly.  I remember cringing and seeing beads of sweat gathering on her forehead. 

Maybe she tried to push it all the way through, or cut the hook off below the barb.  All I know is she didn’t cry, she didn’t complain about it, and she drove us all the way back home with that hook through her thumb.  She might have wrapped a piece of cloth around it to keep the blood from dripping onto the steering wheel, but that was about it.  To make amends for cutting the fishing trip short, she went through the McDonald's drive through on the way home and bought us all apple pies.