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Going Home Copyright © 2005, W. David Tarver I have a photograph in my house. It’s a picture of three African women holding their babies. The women and the babies are naked, and they are sitting in a hut. The hut is made of straw, and it has a dirt floor. There are crude bowls with food sitting on the floor. The women are smiling broadly and they seem to be enjoying each other’s company. They are quite literally dirt poor, yet they and their babies seem happy. I think about that picture a lot. Last year was a tough one for the Tarver family. First, my mother’s sister died, then last May her brother followed. Last August, my father’s mother died. Her name was Ida, but I knew her as Grandmother Tarver. My father died way back in 1973. He left the South after World War II and migrated to Michigan. He never went back. Because of this, I never got to know my father’s side of the family very well, although I did visit with them from time to time. I last saw Grandmother Tarver about three years ago during a trip to Atlanta, and we had a nice time together. At the time, she was 105 years old. She had tended the garden outside her home until she was 100. Before that, she had done domestic work for a family in Atlanta until she was in her 90s. One night last summer, she was talking and laughing with her daughters. Then she went to bed. She didn’t wake up. My grandmother was 108 years old when she died. She lived in three different centuries. Grandmother Tarver was born in 1895 on a plantation outside of Albany, Georgia. She was raised in a tin-roof shack in the red clay of southern Georgia. As an adult, she worked in other people’s homes, cleaning their houses, raising their children. Last August, our family gathered in Atlanta for my grandmother’s funeral. Near the end of the proceedings, my uncle, William David Bell, got up to make some remarks. He recalled how my grandmother in recent years talked wistfully about going back home. My Uncle Willie would tell her, "Mother, you ARE home." But he knew that his mother wasn’t referring to her house in Atlanta. He knew that, for her, home was that tin shack in the muddy red clay of southern Georgia. At that moment, I thought again about the picture hanging on the wall of my home in Red Bank -- the picture of the three African women sitting on the dirt floor of that straw hut. In that moment, I understood exactly what my grandmother meant, and I understood why those three women were smiling. The hut was family. The hut was security. The hut was a simple, uncomplicated life. I think that’s what my grandmother was yearning for when she talked about going home. Flint, Michigan May 11, 2005
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