“like only a Black (grand)mother can…” by veronica bohanan
We sat. her in her chair and me on the blue and white flowered sofa. we watched our favorite channel, wttw, while waiting for my most beloved childhood food to finish its rise to a fluffy, yellow, buttery, delicacy. we bobbed our heads and smiled as we watched wynton marsalis and a young man tapping on, live at the lincoln center.
nonney kept the time of each ‘toe-toe heel-heel’ and ‘shuffle ball change,’ and in a daddy’s girl voice she said, “when i was a little, i took tap classes.” i imagine my grandmother sunday evenings, in the late-40’s, returning home from the chicago metropolitan or regal theatre putting on a tap show for my great grandfather and her brothers. i see her as a pint size girly-girl with bouncing pigtails, a prancing dress, and flapping feet inside of black patent leather tap shoes, adorned with pink bows.
i grew up tap dancing, its my first artistic love, but i never knew nonney also had the tapping-jones.
we both knew we should check on the cornbread, it was probably brown and splitting in the middle. nonney stood to make her sojourn to the kitchen, but she stopped. with her eyes glued to the screen, and hand on hip, i was reminded of her
and my grandfather bopping a two-step on 89th street.
when i was a child, my grandparents, nonney and daddyman, owned a lounge on 89th street. i can still hear diana ross’s, ‘the boss’ gyrating from the speakers, and dr. reid in the dj booth nodding his thick 70’s natural. after school i’d sit in the corner booth, in front of the cigarette machine, sipping on a shirley temple with an extra cherry made by eleanor, which i pronounced ill-a- noise. with blushed cheeks, my gap-toothed smile would watch nonney and daddyman.
it always started with her standing at the bar, hand on hip, and fussin’ bout something. daddyman would mosey over to her, give her a smooch on the lips, and pull her onto the dance floor. they were black love and black business amongst the 89th street strip. the strip was saturated with rhythm and the communal interweaving of black life—campbell’s bakery, charlie’s blade and spade, little town nursery, trey’s resale, and epps printing. (mr. epps took my uncle under his wing and taught him the trade, alongside his sons.)
years passed and daddyman laid down to rest in his best suit. at his casket, nonney stood in her familiar stance—hand on hip. she smiled and touched daddyman’s hand for their last dance.
her voice jarred me from this memory. “your daddyman would have liked this show,” she said with a reminiscent smile from over thirty years ago. tale is, daddyman looked like my grandmother’s father—the person that paid for her tap lessons.
nonney made her way to the kitchen and opened the oven door. the moist smell of cornbread created a harmonious sound for ancestors and living legends
to tap dance a timeless duet.
© Fa’11
