My maternal grandmother died just after I turned 18 and had gone off to college.  I still miss her.

Mammy was the greatest grandmother a kid could have.   It didn’t matter which one of her fifteen grandchildren you were or when she saw her, ‘cause when you were with her, you were the most important person in the world, and the only grandchild that ever existed.

Mammy was rich.  She had a change purse that she always kept in her apron pocket and it was always full of money.  It may not have been more than five dollars, including coins and bills, but to a kid she was loaded. 

Mammy was child-full and fat.  Not just pleasantly plump, but fat.  She was about 5'5" but weighed about 260 pounds.  At least she was smaller than two of her three younger sisters.  Aunt Gladys dressed out at 410, but Aunt Nell only weighed 300.  So my Mammy was the lightweight.  Mammy had these titties that hung down to her waist.  Each of her nine children must have been well fed.  I guess after nine kids, any woman has a right to weigh 260 pounds.  Aunts Gladys and Nell didn’t have that excuse.  They were childless and fat.  Mammy was child-full.

 Mammy made the best quilts I’ve ever seen.  They weren’t these fancy-schmancy things that you find for $200-$400 at bazaars and craft shows.  They were made with love, not design, in mind.  My favorite has the little strips of cloth from every dress she made for my mother or me during one three-month visit with us.  The one with baby blue stripes was the dress Mama was wearing when she told me she was pregnant with Brother #3.  I kept looking at the front of that skinny sheath and wondering where the baby was gonna go.  Then there was the burnished gold strip from the dress Mama made for me before I spilled a whole bowl of cereal on the skirt.  The cereal didn’t matter, but the milk did.  It stained.  Mama had to sew a whole new skirt on that sucker. 

Mammy’s teeth were cool.  Most of the time, they lived in a glass beside the bed.  One day, Brothers # 1 & 2 flipped to see who would try them on.  An hour after breakfast, No. 2 brother was found crying, under Mama’s bed with Mammy’s bottom falsies wedged into his five-year-old mouth.

Mammy would give one of us a hand full of change, a six-pack carton of empty soft-drink bottles and the order to “go to the store and get me a six-pack of Pepsis.  They’ll help settle my stomach.  Oh, and get yourself a drink, too.”  Mine was always NEHI Grape.   Brother #1’s was always NEHI Orange.  Brother #2 was too little to go to the store by himself, so his was always a begged swallow at the bottom of a grape or orange. 

We thought Mammy was nuts to want to “settle her stomach” with one of those awful black drinks.  But all of our assurances of imbibing one of the syrupy “fruit” flavored ones never conned her.  I was twenty-five before I recalled Mammy’s prediction that only Pepsi would help settle her stomach.  After one too many slices of left-over parlor pizza, I suggested that we get us a Pepsi to “settle our stomachs.”  It only took twenty minutes to realize that the Pepsi did the job quite well.  Since “pep” is a Latin derivative dealing with one of our internal organs, is that the reason the stuff was named “Pepsi” to begin with?  Mammy was smarter than her elementary education ever gave her credit for.

I wounded Mammy unintentionally when I went to Tennessee to live with my aunt.  It was near Mammy’s house, but I would never spend the night at Mammy’s house.  I’d stay all day and play with the pigs, the chickens, jumping out of the hayloft, slipping through the chicken yard to the “outhouse,” running all over the farm and in general, having a blast, but when it got dark, I insisted on going “home” to Aunt Betty’s house.  I loved my Mammy deeply, and I would sleep with her any time, anywhere else, but not at her house.

It wasn’t until I was about eight that I admitted that the only reason that I wouldn’t spend the night at Mammy’s because there was no bathroom inside the house.  I probably hadn’t had to use the bathroom in the middle of the night since diaper days, but I was deathly afraid that I would have to potty in the middle of the night.  Which meant a trip through the chicken yard to the outhouse.  Having to do that during the day was enough of a stretch for a little kid, but that out-house was at the edge of my nightmares during the night.  I think I would have tinkled in my pants rather than go to the outhouse at night.  Even with the flashlight Mammy gave me.  Even with offers of more NEHI Grapes.  Even for a whole one of Aunt Mat’s egg custard pies lusciously cooked in her  wood-burning stove.  To go to the outhouse during the night would have meant going through Jericho’s domain. 

Jericho was Mammy’s rooster.  Although I could run past him quickly enough during the day, to try and miss the little piles of chicken poop on the wooden planks that led to the outhouse in the dark would have been little kid suicide.  I could vividly imagine slipping on the poop, plopping on the planks and passing out as Jericho did a tap dance on my pate.  Never occurred to me that chickens always went to roost at night and Jericho would be unavailable to join in my nightmare.  Didn’t matter, it was vivid enough without him.

When I admitted my fears to Mammy, she chuckled from the bottom of her fat apron and confided, “I’ve got a chamber pot that can solve that problem.”  A chamber pot, for those uninitiated to the finer points of camping out in the house, is a large pot, usually ceramic or porcelainized metal, with a lid and handles, in which one deposits bodily excretions and excrements when one is indisposed to travel great distances to a facility designed for such ablutions.  In other words, a potty away from the potty.

If you would eat real food, not this pretend crap that comes in cans or boxes or out of the freezer these days, you never went hungry at Mammy’s house.  She started lunch before breakfast, when she put on a huge pot of navy beans each morning.  Didn’t matter what else there was for dinner, navy beans were on the menu.  That was a holdover from when Granddaddy was alive and wanted, neh, required navy beans on the table three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  Anyway, pick the meat and she usually had it and a dozen or so bowls full of stuff on the table.  If it wasn’t eaten for lunch, she spread a tablecloth over it, (I thought to keep the food warm, but really to keep the flies out), and you had it for supper.

The only unkind word I ever heard pass from Mammy’s lips had something to do with Tennessee Ernie Ford.  Don’t know ‘til now what that word was, but one day when his show was on, she came in and turned the channel, because she didn’t want to hear him.  Said something about his character and more than one wife.  Since divorce was not in my realm of experience at that time, I never quite caught on to what she was talking about.  I just knew that his voice ranked up there even with Jesus’ and just behind Perry Como’s.

That’s not to say Mammy never said an unkind word.  Mammy had her prejudices as we all do, but they were not against people of color or a different nationality than her. Mammy’s were against her friends and relatives that lived differently than her and (she felt) looked down their noses at her.  But Mammy was smart enough to never let her grandchildren hear the comments that her children had heard numerous times.  We all thought Mammy was God’s gift to kid-dom. 

My favorite memories of Mammy include...  Well, let’s leave that for another time. She was too much woman, literally, to confine to limited space.

Maybe that’s why I still miss her.

Maybe that's why I assumed the name "Mammy" for my grandson to call me.  Hope I can live up to the title.