Guest AuthorThe phone call I dreaded for 30 years finally came. My grandmother, who raised me as her own son, died in her sleep a few days ago. She was 92.
The news was not unexpected. Over the last year, my grandmother, Peggy Skerritt, had become increasingly frail – repeated emergency trips to the hospital foretold the approaching end. Her departure is worth noting because her life is testimony that poverty isn’t permanent, that one person, especially a woman with determination, can alter the course of future generations.
She lived long enough to hold her great-great-grandchildren. My grandmother only reached third grade before she left school to help support her mother and four younger siblings. Still she inspired her grandchildren to become university grads. Five of her six great grandchildren have attended college.
I was among the generation of Caribbean children raised by grandparents in the wake of the great migration to Great Britain in the years after World War II. That was the pattern for her life. She raised her siblings, her daughter, grandchildren, cousins, nephews, and even chipped in to raise her great-grandchildren. She planted cotton and tomatoes on land she leased but made enough money to pay the passage of friends and relatives who wanted to emigrate to England.
Through sheer force of will she transformed delinquent, feckless boys and girls into educated adolescents and successful adults. Her lessons about the value of education were as much a kitchen staple as white rice and stewed beef. She sacrificed to pay for extra math and grammar lessons after school. While my friends played cricket or rode pushcarts on the streets outside, she forced me to sit at the dining room table figuring out arithmetic problems. When my sister failed common entrance exams three times while lesser students passed, my grandmother was convinced that the hand of nepotism had intervened. When I repeated a class and was in danger of being expelled from school, she didn’t harangue me.
“I have a hoe and an acre of land waiting for you” was all she said.
When her husband died, she returned to work. She mopped floors and cleaned bathrooms to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Over the Christmas holidays, she sold homemade ice cream, roasted peanuts and American apples at festival events to ensure that in January she could pay the property taxes and other new year’s expenses.
And there were her lessons of faith. She believed God would always provide. She lived it every day. On days when her purse was empty, she had confidence that money would come, in the mail, from some unexpected source. It usually did.
Peggy Skerritt was far from perfect. She was a lefty with a temper. Her aim wasn’t always true. She hated ingratitude and loathed sloth with a passion. I’m grateful she did.
