Too loud. | Family | c. Unknown
A poem about a laugh my grandma didn't like.
Broken like a clock Out of sync, Covered in dust and my gears shift. The brown of my skin, The curve of my hips, The rhythm of my voice, Came together to form a laugh Like a lioness.
A K-Mart portrait of my cousin (Precious Marie, in pink) and I (in green). We’re about four years old. Not seen, my Lion King T-shirt.
Thoughts on “Too Loud”.
My maternal grandma, Yolanda B. Benjamin (nee Garfield), was a blunt woman. People called her “Red”, which is a colorist Caribbean term for a “red-skinned” woman, but Grandma didn’t care. She wore red clothes, sewed herself red dresses, and drove a small red sedan that she’d pack my plethora of cousins and me into. I spent holidays and summers with her in Estate Hope, St. Thomas. She gave her grandchildren a sanctuary away from the noisiness of our parents’ homes. For me, it felt a million miles from St. Croix.
Still, I realized I was different pretty quickly. My cousins giggled when I pronounced the word “horse” (in Cruzan English Creole, the word sounds like “hass” versus St. Thomian’s soft h and r). When we’d go into bustling Charlotte Amalie, my cousins seemed to swim through the crowd like well-trained nurse sharks while I stumbled and scraped my knees on the Dutch cobblestone. But, above all that, it was my laugh that set me apart.
One day, Grandma asked me why I laughed so. “Just like your blasted Grandfather,” she’d said, nose wrinkled as she turned the pot of crab and rice. “Big, loud, standing there with his broad hat, like a lion.” I don’t remember what I’d said, but it must’ve been smart because she pinched me. “And your mouth, too; bad enough you look like he. Go, outside. Now.”
In truth, what she said doesn’t bother me. I never met Grandaddy. I couldn’t say whether what she said was true or not. When this poem came to me, I thought about her comparing me to a lion and it made me smile. She meant to say I was wild, ungovernable, uncouth, but I don’t really care about any of that. It’s just the way I was built. So, now, I laugh, and I laugh loudly.
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