Hands
Of all the memories that I have of my great great grandmother from the first thirteen years of my life, the one that I remember most of all occurred in the tiny kitchen of her small home, tucked away in the orchards of Live Oak. I was in sixth grade, and she was teaching me how to sweep the right way, a skillset that my mother had still yet to properly impart upon me; she was too busy smoking weed and sleeping with her latest boyfriend.
My grandmother had lived through the Great Depression. She traveled from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl and birthed her first child at fifteen somewhere along the way. She picked cotton and lived in a tent with two children and an alcoholic husband for many years. She’d raised four generations of children. But teaching me how to sweep was her magnum opus.
I looked down at her and up to her simultaneously. She was hardly five feet tall, but she could wrangle with the best of them, and her temper was infamous. She was a great person to have in your corner when she was on your side, but she could be a fierce adversary. As she taught me how to sweep, my grandmother’s face grew redder with annoyance. She began to berate me. I wasn’t doing it right. There was a faster way. I was being slow, and the angle of the broom was all wrong.
My grandmother pretty much raised me for the first six years of my life, and we always had an unshakable bond. But she had made me like her. My temper is something that I have had to learn to control. To this day, I’m still terrible at hiding my emotions or holding my tongue at even the most minor of injustices. We were the best of friends due to our similarities, but they also drove us apart sometimes. There were never two people who were more stubborn or less likely to concede an argument.
I turned to her and snapped, “I know what I’m doing!” Although, clearly, by her, and basically any normal functioning adult's standards, I had no clue what I was doing.
My Grandma’s lip curled in annoyance, the way that it always did when she was questioned. Her rose-colored lipstick left a stain on her pearly white dentures. The Monroe-Esque “mole” she had tattooed on her upper lip wrinkled. However, instead of arguing with me the way that she may have someone else, or cursing me out every which way until Sunday, she just stuck her hands out to me. They were wrinkle-worn, red and rubbed raw from picking cotton across the United States, the veins bulging against the pale white skin in mountainous valleys of green and blue. “Put your hands out, honey child,” she said in her Southern accent, her voice surprisingly gentle.
Shocked into silence at the lack of a blowup, I did as I was told, sticking my own smaller, darker, more dainty hands face up next to her well-worn knuckles. I looked at the two sets of hands contrasted against one another, proof of how much can change in three generations. Here was an Okie woman standing in her kitchen in Northern California with her mixed-race great, great granddaughter. Here were the hands that had held so many generations of children, the hands that had bestowed spankings and wiped away tears alike, the hands that gripped my own mother’s hand in solidarity when she gave birth to me at age fifteen, the hands that read me stories from well-worn children’s books before bed and rubbed my back when I couldn’t sleep, no matter how late it was or how fast asleep she’d been when I asked. Hands that could simultaneously give and take, sometimes at the same time. Hands that could be as gentle as butterfly wings or as rough as aged wood.
My grandmother looked at our hands contrasted against one another, and she said, “Now, whose hands do you think have done more work? Whose hands do you think know more?”
I was quiet for a moment, my stubborn, pre-teen mind unable to concede. Finally, I gave in and said, “Yours.”
“That’s right,” Grandma agreed, and her rose-pink lips curled again, this time into a smile.
She grasped the broom in my hands, her wrinkled fingers curling over my smooth ones, and that day she taught me how to sweep.
*
A long, hard year passed in a blur, and with it my grandmother’s mind. A year where she stopped cooking me pancakes, and I began making her dinner and reminding her to take her meds. A year when she stopped reading me bedtime stories, and I began reading her Harlequin romances. Anything to keep her mind active, the doctors said. Anything, I prayed at night. I’ll do anything to keep her here a little longer. Please.
The last time I saw her, in a poorly lit nursing home that smelled of shit and death, I held her thin, shaking body in my frail hands. I kept telling her that I loved her. I’ve never had an easy time telling people that I love them. Maybe it’s because I’ve been taught that love is shown in bruised skin and dark circles from staying up late fighting. My grandmother is one of the only people that ever taught me true love. That day, I was making up for years of not telling her those words enough. Whether there was a hereafter or not, that was all that mattered. She had to know that I loved her. Maybe that’s all that there is: this stupid, frail, uniquely human gift of love. Maybe everything else is just a stop on the way to oblivion. When I was done whispering those three words over and over, I pulled away and looked into her glassy blue eyes. I wasn’t sure if she even knew what I was saying, but something passed between us. Some kind of acceptance.
*
I pulled away to leave, but one of her skeletal hands reached out for me. I sat down on the chair beside her bed for an extra moment, wrapping my tanned hand in her pale one. I looked at our joined hands, and I memorized the hills and valleys of her veins and wrinkles. My grandmother was never an overly affectionate woman. Compliments were a luxury that she did not have time to give. But she always used to tell me, You have such pretty hands, Mieka. So dainty and ladylike. I never believed her. But it's funny the way things can change. At that moment, for all their wrinkles and sunspots, I thought that her hands were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
The next day, she finally drew her last breath, and there was no more kitchen to sweep. No more late-night back rubs or reading Zane Grey novels on the couch. No more laughing at reruns of Golden Girls in the living room or listening to Dolly Parton records as she cleaned the house. No more long conversations over cups of instant coffee with canned milk in the cramped kitchen. Everything sucked away in a whisper in the night.
*
The day after she died, I dreamt of her. In it, she was waiting on an Oklahoma porch, the brown flatland spreading before her in all of its endless flat brown beauty. I cried, and she brushed my hair from my face the way she used to when I scraped my knees as a child. She kissed my forehead, something that she rarely did in life. “It’s okay,” she said. The words echoed in my half-conscious mind as I awoke in a cold sweat. It’s okay.
It wasn’t. Nothing was okay. She took everything with her when she left. She broke us. I was irrationally angry at this phantom of my grandmother, though I knew it was just my mind processing her death. I wanted to go back.
I looked at my hands, bunched in the sheets before me, and I thought of her hands gripping mine as she taught me to sweep. I thought of them wrapping around my fingers, gentle despite our earlier argument, and her encouragement when I got it right. I thought of them wrapped around my small fingertips in that hospital room, soft and mushy, their grip loose and fading. The goodbye in her blue eyes. I had the hands of a thirteen-year-old. The hands of someone who had done everything and nothing all at once. These hands had never worked. Never driven. Never touched a boy. Never done an application for university. They had barely lived. At that time, I thought I would never recover from the loss, the crippling aches in my young body. She was the only functional parent that I’d ever had. I wanted to lie down and die with her.
It took almost two years to move on from my grandma’s death, whatever that means. Two years to learn to live without her. My grandmother is long gone now. To that front porch in another realm, to another life, to somewhere else in the galaxy, to nowhere or to everywhere.
But wherever she is, she lives in my hands. My small, brown, chipped-nail-polish hands are also her white, clean, wrinkled ones. Every person I touch, every story or poem that I type, everything I make or break. She is in it. Her atoms are my atoms.
Someday, we will make our way back to one another
*
My hands have changed over the years. They’re not so delicate anymore, though they have remained the same tiny, frail-looking things. My hands have never stayed still for long. Not like my grandmother, who relished the ability to finally be languid after years of back-breaking work. They have an unfortunate tendency to flit from one part of my body to another like an anxious fly. Tucking my hair behind my ears, pressing against my cheek, tapping against my leg, chewing on my cuticles. Ladies don’t bite their nails, Grandma used to say. I don’t think she’d approve of a lot of things that I’ve done.
My hands no longer have the privilege of a lack of use. I notice new lines on them every day, and I know that before long they will look like hers, wrinkled and over-used. Soft but rough all at once. My hands have been used to make pizzas and sandwiches for minimum wage, fold clothes for a department store, shelve books at the library, file paperwork, edit others' work, drive cars, read tarot for my friends, pass joints, hold bottles of beer and glasses of wine, lock doors of hotels in cities that my grandmother never got to see, touch lovers with gentle fingertips, and so much more. So much that my grandmother missed.
I can only hope that one day I will get to share all of the things my hands have done with my grandmother. I have a hard time believing the way that her Southern upbringing mandated that she did with unrelinquishing fervor. But maybe she was right. Maybe someday we will sit on that porch in the sky, back on the farm in Oklahoma that I know would be her personal heaven. We will look out at the cotton that picks itself, the crops that never shrivel up and die, the perpetual sunset gazing back at us, and I will tell her everything, good and bad. She will laugh the way that she used to, unabashed and loud, almost embarrassingly so. After I finish, I will lean my head on her shoulder, and she will stroke my hair.
-Damieka Thomas
Damieka Thomas is an emerging mixed-race writer and poet. She is a current MFA student at the University of California, Davis, working in multiple genres. Her work has been published in The Noyo Review, Glassworks Magazine, Third Iris Zine, Poetry.org, Rejected Lit Magazine, and Open Ceilings, with forthcoming publications in Boulevard Magazine, the New Limestone Review, and the Mendocino Women's Poetry Anthology: Spirit of Place. In 2024, she was given an honorable mention in Boulevard Magazine’s Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers for her essay “Fort Bragg: A Love Letter and an Elegy.” In 2021, She was the recipient of both the Diana Lynn Bogart Prize in Fiction from the UC Davis English Department and the Celeste Turner Wright Prize in Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. In her spare time, Damieka enjoys reading, writing, hiking, yoga, traveling, and indulging in the frequent Netflix binge with her cat by her side.