My grandmother on my mother’s side, Miz Lena, was a force to be reckoned with. The childhood years that I spent, off and on, under her roof and consequently under her eagle-eyes-never-missed-a-thing supervision, I never got away with anything.
It was her interrogation techniques. She had more than one. Sometimes, I really hadn’t done a thing wrong that day, and before she was through with me, I’d confessed to something I’d done a few weeks back. Perry Mason had nothing on her. If Miz Lena had put her mind to it, she could have found Jimmy Hoffa.
When we lived out on the farm, before we moved into town, before I turned 5, she’d call me into the kitchen and start off with, “A little bird told me.” I knew it wasn’t gonna be good for me.
When Grand Mom moved us into town, she stopped telling me that a bird had told her something. She took it to a new level. From the time that I was 6, it was God who let her in on everything that I did wrong. The Almighty, according to Miz Lena, updated her on my goings-on in her dreams.
I bought it hook, line and sinker. Frankly, I believed everything my grandmother told me. Even the time that she decided that she needed to go on a diet. To her, a diet meant laying off sweets, cutting down on bread and eating smaller portions. A commonsensical diet. She kept it up for a good while.