When we stayed with my grandmother in Birmingham, I had a black nanny too, Blue. She had been my Aunt Fay's nanny for many long years.
Her name was Sally, and I loved her. And why wouldn't I? She used to scold my mother (who was really a saint), for being nicer to my brothers than to me.
I once ran away from home (I was always doing that, for adventure), looking for Sally. I found her little one-room cabin, just beyond a sugar-cane field. And I was pleased to see that Sally had a little girl of her own, about my age. (I don't know who looked after her, while Sally was looking after me. And she was probably a granddaughter, not a daughter.) So we two little girls bedded down together under a blanket on the little cot. Sally must have gone to summon my father, because a short while later he burst into the cabin, looking shaken and distraught, and carried me off home...
But I do know what happened to Sally. After all those years of looking after Fay and then after me, her services were no longer needed. She had not a penny to her name, no pension, no monetary "separation package," nothing. She still lived in that one-room shack, together with her no-good wandering husband, who had returned home only after he became too sick to wander any more. Sally snapped. Here is the ending of a poem my dad wrote about her fate:
Broken by overwork and age, she cared
for Sim, her syphillitic man, who lay
speechless and blind, yet beat her when he dared.
First axing Sim, she set their shack afire
and slit her throat upon her widow's pyre. |
