A Matter of Grace and Our Father

“Grace,” said mom. 

She sounded very distant, even though she was six feet across the table from me. Behind her wooden dining chair, an eight-foot artificial Christmas tree titled in the opposite direction, almost touching the plain white wall. The tree had fewer than usual ornaments, a red ribbon that stopped halfway down the middle, and not a single light bulb attached. She exhaled deeply, her head resting against the back of the chair, her eyes closed. She wore a somber expression, typical of when she had a severe headache. 

I closed my eyes and proceeded to say what I had always recited, ever since I could speak.  “We thank you for this–”

“No,” interrupted mom.

I looked up. My brother, who was sitting next to me, opened his eyes. 

“Mom?” 

“Our Father,” she replied.

My brother and I exchanged glances. 

“But we’ve never said that for–”  

“Are you going to keep talking, or are you going to pray?” she interrupted again.

My brother shifted in his seat.

“Do you need me to repeat that?” Her voice was almost too calm.

“No, it’s ah…” My eyes searched for my sibling, but he was busy repositioning his fork on the gold tablecloth. 

For as long as I could remember, I was never exempt from saying “grace” in our house. It was my father’s idea to name me after my paternal grandmother, whose name was also Grace. Mom agreed to that because she got to name my brother Davian, a few years earlier.  She graciously included my father’s name first, Howard, as Davian’s middle name; but for some reason, they could not settle on a second name for me. My mother wanted to give me her name, Esther, but my father thought that both names combined sounded ridiculous. As a result, I ended up with no middle names. Instead, they made sure that I got the most use out of my first name, especially at mealtimes.

“Grace...” my mother echoed.

“Yes?”

I finally made eye contact with my brother, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Just get on with it.” If only that was easy.

 “Why do we need to say that?” I replied. “I mean we’ve always just said grace.”

My mother leaned forward in less than the second it took for her to open her eyes. “Because that’s what I asked for.”

Davian turned his head aside and wiped his brow. That meant I was completely on my own.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

My mother reclined in her chair and folded her arms. “Well then, go say your own grace and go eat your own damn dinner by yourselves.”

Davian was the first to pull his plate from the table. He headed towards the basement. At six feet four inches, he had to bend before stepping onto the narrow staircase. Our eyes locked before he descended. “What?” I mouthed. He shook his head and disappeared below.

An hour later, I was upstairs, in my room. My plate sat next to me on the bed, my food untouched. I had only been gone for one semester and yet everything in my world had been rearranged. The posters, T-shirts and other merchandise that lived on the walls of my room for years were now reduced to a pile on the floor. Images of reggae icons like Koffee, Shaggy, and Sean Paul peeked out from the stack, as well as the faces of Adele, Brandy, Bruno Mars, and many more renowned artists. Next to that pile, was a box of photos (chronicling my high school days), two very small flags (one American, one Jamaican), and a small suitcase. Just about all the other furniture I had was sold because, according to my mother, I was now a visitor. That was her rule: once you move out, you don’t move back. What she actually meant was once I moved out, because I didn’t see my brother leaving out any time soon—not with him taking over the basement, and not even after his next two years at the local university. 

While lying under the glow of stringed lights fastened to the ceiling, I reflected on the earlier conversation. In all the years I had been saying grace, it was pretty much the same: “We thank you for this food. Amen.” Not much to it. Dad always said that the only thing we should pray for, when praying for, food was the food—not for whole neighborhood, not to get our favorite toy or a new car, nothing else. “Get to the point,” was his philosophy, and now she wanted a whole prayer. 

A few hours after agonizing with my thoughts, I retreated to the kitchen. I ended up refrigerating the rest of the meal. After putting away my plate, I noticed that right above the kitchen sink and the window above that was a cross. Actually, there was not a single room in the house without a cross. Some even had two or three, but none was ever in the kitchen before. I wasn’t sure what my mother intended by having all those crosses in the house. Did she think we would forget what they looked like from one room to other? 

It’s not like that was part of her upbringing either. She had grown up Baptist and my dad Anglican, but they both couldn’t agree on a church for us all to attend together. As kids, my brother and I would alternate going to services with each parent. The problem, however, came at holidays (Christmas and Easter), when both of their churches had events. They would argue over where “the kids” should go, and we’d end up at attending multiple services. Sometimes we even had to rehearse for different performances on the same day. By our early teens, my brother and I decided that we’d had enough. We teamed up one Sunday—probably the only time we ever really joined forces—and announced that we would stop going all together until they came up with a solution that didn’t require all this back and forth business. 

They finally asked us what we wanted to do. Without a second thought, I said I’d keep going with dad. That meant my brother was to straggle along with my mom. We would continue to say grace whenever we all had dinner together, but that became less frequent as the years went on. 

From the basement door nearby, I could hear the sound of sneakers screeching on a court, somewhere, and a buzzer going off. My brother was in his zone and I wasn’t interested in watching any basketball games anyway. I debated working on the sad Christmas tree, but lost interest in that quickly. I also didn’t think it was a good time to bother my mother about decorations.

I returned to the second floor. On one end of the hallway was my room and at the opposite end was my mother’s room (she had the door closed). Davian’s old room was in the middle. I was curious to see what had become of it, so I stepped inside. Against the far corner was my old bookshelf (the one thing, apart from the bed, that she didn’t sell) and a five-foot artificial bamboo tree. A solid oak table stood right in front of the bookshelf, taking up almost half of the room. My eyes rested on a soft brown leather covering, protruding from the edge of the desk. I picked up the book and ran my fingers along the binding. As I pulled out the plush executive chair, I heard a voice in the doorway.

“You need something in here?” Mom’s voice was still edgy, but not combative. 

I held the book to my chest. “No. I was just…” 

“That belonged to his sister,” she said.

 “I thought we cleared out everything?” 

“Not that.” 

“Can I?” 

She shrugged her shoulders. Her face seemed weary. 

I opened the brown covering and found several journal entries, dating as far back as sixteen years earlier.

 “What are you planning to do with this?”

“Not sure,” she said. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Well I’ll tell you what you could be curious about—that stuff in your room. Better do something about that soon.”

She walked away as I rolled my eyes. Once I sat down, another figure appeared in the doorway—my brother. 

“So you two have made up?” he said. 

“Not exactly,” I replied.

He entered the small room and positioned himself on the edge of the desk, moving a few papers inward. 

“What’s that?” he asked. 

 “Some journal Aunt Roberta had. You know she was not much older than us before…?”

“Didn’t know she was an author.”

“I don’t think she ever published.”

“What did she write?”

“I don’t know. Want to hear?”

Davian nodded.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Can’t be any worse than listening to you two fight all the time.”

“We do not.”

“Yeah, but y’all get it into it. Over stupid stuff too.”

“I was not being stupid.”

“Yeah, you were. You could have just said it.”

“Oh, like you would’ve done, right?”

My brother shook his head and smirked. 

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just you and your ideas.”

“Okay, so you don’t always do what she wants? You’re not her fa-vo-rite?”

“No. You’re the one who keeps bringing up that stuff.”

“So, you don’t always get what you want?”

My brother sighs. “What are you, the victim now? Daddy’s girl?”

“Don’t start on that.”

“Oh, so you can’t take what you dish?”

“Don’t you have some game to go watch?’

“Game’s over. Got nothing else to do right now.”

“Well, I’d like to finish reading this journal that my father left for me, so...”

“Your father left you that journal?”

“Yes. Why’s that a surprise?”

Davian moved away from the desk and headed towards the door. Before he exited, he turned around. “You always think you know everything, don’t you? And yet, you couldn’t even say the prayer.” 

I sat for a while in the office, unsure if I should say anything further to my brother, or even my mom. We seemed to have “bonded” enough one night. My hand brushed against the journal and I opened it again. It took a while to settle on any of the entries. The first I read one was dated January 28, 2005:

We’ve been told not to compare ourselves to others, but I find that to be impossible, especially when people are always talking about themselves, what they possess and what they have achieved. How can we not, when some are blessed with great health and others are not?  Yet, looking at my life in comparison to others can be like hoisting a line full of clothes, all with holes in them. I suppose it’s okay, though, to examine these holes, because in essence they are truths of what actually is. You may have something that I don’t have and vice versa, but that doesn’t make either one of us worse or better than the other.  The challenge, I find, is remembering to focus on the areas that are intact—the places on the garments of my life that are without holes—because those are also facts. 

I definitely felt like I had some holes after reading that. While flipping through the remaining pages, I discovered that the writings had stopped in the middle of the journal. June 15, 2005 was the last entry. That was days before my aunt had passed away. She was pregnant with her only child, Eden, when they both died from complications. How devastating that must have been for my dad, who had relocated us to Chicago, where she lived, only a few years earlier. I think that changed something in him—in what he believed about the world, about God.

I read some more of my Aunt’s writings, but my mind drifted back to the issues at hand. Why did I make such a big deal out of my mother’s request? I know we hadn’t said grace together in over a year, but it was a simple request—something I could recite in my sleep. And it wouldn’t be the first time I had deviated from the one-sentence routine. 

Then it became clear. I could not get past the first few words, Our Father. The concept of calling someone father, without mine present, suddenly seemed foreign to me. What reference could I make to a father, when the only one I had known was gone like a puff of smoke, cut down by the sickle of a virus that had left an aching hole. 

And my brother? To accuse me? The nerve! I can’t remember ever hearing him say the “Our Father” prayer. I mean I struggled for one year, but when did he ever say it? Certainly not at home. And his statement, “You always think you know everything?” What did he really mean by that? What did I not know about our father?