The Original Feminist

My grandmother’s hands skim swiftly in midair as if she’s pulling a thread and needle through a giant quilt. She performs better than any mime, making movements as if arranging swaths of fabric on her lap. She mutters to herself. Sometimes she licks her fingers and squints at her empty hands, trying to thread an invisible needle, “Honey, could you thread this for me? I can’t quite see it.”

In yellowing black-and-white photographs she’s perched on the hood of a shiny car. She’s wearing pants and an impish look that says, You wanna race? It’s the Roaring ’20s and her brown, finger-curled hair is a little windswept. Her skin is milky, her eyes sharp, her nose strong.

Born Hattie Cornelia Causby, Mei Mei, as we called her, was a North Carolina farm girl and one of 12 children. The Mei Mei before Alzheimer’s was a five-foot whirlwind: pulling pans of rolls out of the oven with her iron fingers, sewing matching Christmas nightgowns for all 18 women in the family, reciting scary stories and then reminding us with a hug, “I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.”

She cut and sewed all of her outfits by hand. A gold lamé jumpsuit, a navy tailored bouclé shift with a matching jacket for church, pencil skirts that curved around her round hips and tiny waist. I thought she was glamorous. My mother said that though they could never afford the latest fashions, Mei Mei could always sew a copy for them. The few things she did buy were always dirt cheap. Her eye for bargains was honed by the Great Depression and, even when money was easier to come by, she would still wash sheets of aluminum foil to reuse until they disintegrated.

I would sit at her cherry dressing table draping myself in yards of her costume jewelry and squeezing my 10-year-old feet into her size five high heels. She always wore a full face of makeup, and she always wore heels even if she was just spending the day inside sewing and ironing. “You never know who you might see when you go out, and you never know who might drop by when you stay in,” she used to say. She smelled just as a grandma should, like lavender and baby powder. At 85, Mei Mei’s hair was still auburn. She claimed she never dyed it, though her boys would go digging in the trash looking for dye bottles to prove her wrong. No one ever found one.

But it was the Mei Mei before I knew her, the one daring the camera to shoot that I wondered most about. This was the Mei Mei who got my prankster granddad, Paw Paw, out of the pool hall. He loved her first because she was beautiful and second because she was good. After they got married in ’31, she put him through high school, then through college and then through seminary, working odd jobs and supporting their first two children.

Mei Mei was a feminist before feminism had a name. It wasn’t just her three boys who were going to college; no, she made sure her two daughters went as well. This was the Mei Mei who said, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” She did it all. She worked as a hairdresser, took care of the house, painted the refrigerator when it started to look shabby, killed the snakes in the yard and brought up five kids while her husband was away for weeks at a time preaching in churches all over the country.

Towering over six feet, with a bellowing voice and a fiery temper, Paw Paw was a civil rights activist before civil rights had a name. He preached equality in black and white Southern Baptist churches. He worked with Martin Luther King Sr. and so knew Martin Luther King Jr. as a little boy.

One summer day, on the way to church, Mei Mei and Paw Paw stopped to get gas. In the back of the Cadillac were pamphlets with a black hand holding a white hand. Above the hands was the phrase, “God Make Me Color Blind.” Paw Paw went to use the bathroom. The gas station attendant sauntered over to the car, and Mei Mei looked up to see a shotgun sticking through the rolled-down window. “What do those pamphlets mean?” he asked her. She looked him right in the eye and said slowly and clearly, “They mean just what they say.” The man hesitated and said, “If you wasn’t here today to witness, I woulda killed your husband.”

Before Paw Paw died, Mei Mei went to water aerobics every week. She looked 65 though she was in her 80s. But after Paw Paw died, all of those years she had cleverly evaded just glommed on. Maybe the sudden onset of Alzheimer’s helped her to forget he was gone. It was around this time, when her mind was beginning to disintegrate, that Wake Forest University gave her an honorary degree. She had always regretted not going to college, and was honored for her scholarship fund for medical students of color. She wore a cream suit, brocade and fitted, and of course, high heels. She was confused and disoriented for most of the dinner until they presented the award. She stood to their applause, and suddenly the gracious Mei Mei was back, saying, “Thank you all so much for coming. Why, this is just wonderful.”

Soon after that it became too difficult to care for her. When Aunt Ruthanne found her wandering through the house in the middle of the night crying and saying she was “looking for her mother,” they found a good nursing home and packed up the house.

I sat in her closet going through coffee cans full of jewelry. Sorting and trying on like I did when I was a little girl. The gold leaf brooch with the colored berries that I used to pretend was for time travel. The fur stole with the fox heads still on. The clip-ons that used to weigh down her long ear lobes and the long necklaces with their flat heavy stones that would rest cool on my chest. I wondered, would some of her strength and vitality, some of her humor and grace, sink in through the metal and into my skin?

It was in the Alzheimer’s ward, without anyone to do it for her, that it was finally confirmed: Mei Mei never had dyed her hair. It stayed auburn almost until the end. In the ward she always carried a purse and would ask the male nurses to dance with her.

I hold her hand, soft and small, stroking her crinkly skin. I rub her shoulders. I tell her often that I love her. She asks about people long dead and who took her purse and plays hostess in the cafeteria. I am hugging her in her chair, and in a moment that seems like lucidity, she turns her face up to me saying, “Honey, I don’t know who you are, but I want you to know that I love you.”

Katrina Grigg-Saito spent her summers in North Carolina and still wears her grandmother’s jewelry. She is a writer from Boston, living in Tokyo, where she writes for Metropolis Magazine. Katrina can be reached at katrinagriggsaito@gmail.com.

~Katrina Grigg-Saito