While the World Watched by Carolyn McKinstry Read Free Book Online Page A

work. My grandfather’s confidence in my abilities made me hold my head a little higher. Whenever my grandfather came to Birmingham, my bedroom became the guest room, and I gladly gave it up for him. He loved the lunches I prepared for him—usually tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. He would compliment me as though I had prepared a gourmet meal.
    My grandfather was an amazing man. He believed in giving his children and grandchildren names that meant something, like parents did in biblical times.
    “Names have a purpose,” he explained. He told me that every time a person says my name, he or she is recalling the attributes of my name into my very lifeblood.
    I later found out that Carolyn also means “little champion.” My schoolteachers and some family members referred to me as “stubborn.” But I like “little champion” (or perhaps “determined”) much better.
    I didn’t understand the full meaning of my grandfather’s statement about the power of names until I grew up. And in remembering his words, I saw another aspect of who my grandfather was—a person who used every means possible to bring something positive and admirable into the life of a little girl of color who lived in the heart of racially segregated Birmingham. True to his occupation, he created teaching moments in everything he did.
    * * *
    Several years earlier, my “strong one” name had been severely challenged. It was August 1957, and I was nine years old. For the first time in my young life, I didn’t feel very strong. My grandfather pulled his car into our family’s front yard and honked the horn. Mama and I and the rest of the children ran outside. I peeked in the car’s backseat and saw my grandmother, Mama Lessie. Grandfather had placed her head on a bed pillow and wrapped her frail body in blankets. In the August heat, she lay very still, and I saw pain written across her face.
    “I think it’s time we took Lessie to the hospital,” Grandfather whispered to my mother. “She’s been hurting and bleeding for a while now. I fear something bad is wrong with her.”
    Grandfather and Daddy lifted Mama Lessie in their muscular arms, took her inside the house, and laid her on Mama’s bed. Not long after, Mama told them she felt we needed to call an ambulance. The ambulance took my grandmother to nearby Princeton Hospital, and we followed by car. I expected the nurses to put her in a clean room in the main hospital ward, where doctors could treat her and make her well.
    They didn’t. They took Mama Lessie down the back stairs into the bowels of Princeton Hospital and placed her on a small bed. Other people of color lay down there, too, moaning and groaning in unrelieved pain.
    “Why are they putting Mama Lessie in the basement?” I asked Mama.
    “Never mind, Carolyn,” she said. “Just help us get her settled.”
    I looked around the basement where my beloved grandmother lay on her back, still and quiet. It was a small, closed-in space, with sweating water pipes climbing across the walls and ceiling. Big drops of water fell onto the cold, brick-and-cobblestone floor.
    “Carolyn, you’ll be staying here with Mama Lessie and taking care of her while I’m at work. After I get off, I’ll bring her supper, and you can go home and rest. But she needs someone to stay with her all the time down here, and since you are the girl-child . . . well, it’ll be your job.”
    “Will we have to stay down here in the basement?” I asked.
    “Yes, Carolyn, and I’ll depend on you to take care of her while she’s here in the hospital.”
    It was a tremendous responsibility for a nine-year-old. I felt like a big girl, and I was proud I’d been asked to help. But I also felt afraid. I loved my grandmother. I wondered what the future held for her. And for me.
    My hope for my grandmother’s recovery faded day by day as I sat in the basement of Princeton Hospital and watched her suffer. I sang the song I had heard so many times before