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Capturing a Life in Black and White
My grandmother is dying, and I am making her a photo album
Alone in my parents’ house, I hunt through drawers and boxes for old photos — the older, the better. Square snapshots from the 60s, edged in white, colored as though they were drawn in soft colored pencil. Black-and-white photos from the 40s and 50s, with names written on the back in my great-grandmother’s loopy blue fountain pen. Childhood photos of my mother, out-of-focus pictures of Yorkshire terriers, and a photo of my grandmother herself — young, red-haired, gorgeous, wearing a strapless bathing suit and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses, smiling from a poolside lounge chair with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
I gather up all of the photographs in a plastic shopping bag and drive twenty minutes into town to find the nearest color Xerox machine. I focus on the mechanics — how many photos fit on a page? How many pages can the plastic presentation book hold? I know I can’t bring the originals to the nursing home — the risk of losing them is too great. But I try to make sure the copies are as crisp and clear as possible. With a fine-tipped marker, I mark up the color copies, captioning as many of the photos as I can.
A decade ago, I sat on the floor of my grandmother’s house, holding up old photographs, insisting she tell me her stories. “Who wants to hear about Mississippi? The Depression? Ugh,” she would say, waving me off.
“I do,” I protested, holding up another photograph. “Who’s this?”
I dragged those stories out of her. I was greedy for them. She eventually relented, still baffled by my interest. For so many years, she had lived as a Yankee executive’s wife, taming her accent to fit in at the country club, her Southerness reduced to a penchant for sweet tea and a jealously-guarded fried-chicken recipe. She led a life kissed by glamour, but one where the memories of her dusty, sweet childhood were often tucked away. I always got the sense she was a bit ashamed of where she came from.
Her stories were of pranks, of games, of children playing among the detritus of a crumbling society, all innocence.
