As a child, I did not think it out of the ordinary that our family had a slave chair in the living room. It seemed every house in Georgia had some sort of antique or what-have-you from before the Civil War. Sagging cane seat, pine wood, ladder back, broomstick arms — the chair was a relic from the slave quarters of a bygone plantation. I never asked how it had come to be in my grandmother’s living room. I was, I think, afraid to hear the answer.

You could not have wished for a more terrible chair to sit in. At family gatherings, we fought to avoid its miserable contours. We said it was because the chair lacked cushions, that it was a simple matter of comfort, and that was the truth, but not entirely.

Several years ago, I came upon a photograph of the slave chair in an attic box. I hadn’t seen the chair in more than a dozen years, and despite the fact that I regarded it with the kind of disdain I reserve for very evil people, its image stuck with me. It began to turn up repeatedly in my dreams, during the dog hours of the night, and to break into my thoughts like an odious song.

I knew the slave chair had come back to me because of Grovinia. She was my mother’s and my grandmother’s maid. She was the black nanny, the one who left her own children to come and take care of my brothers and me, the one we called “part of the family,” yet who took her meals in the kitchen after we were served. I’d always looked back on her presence in my life with embarrassment, thinking I’d closed the book on the subject.

For twenty-five years, I’d done everything in my power not to write about Grovinia. Once, when the urge nearly overtook me, I called a writer friend in Atlanta, the way that members of Alcoholics Anonymous call their sponsors when the desire for drink becomes overwhelming. “Listen to me carefully,” my friend said. “Bury all thought of writing about this; then bury the shovel.”

Yes, of course. What had I been thinking?

Then came the recurring dreams, the old orbit of memories surrounding the chair, and I knew the not-writing was like deceit, like sanitizing the story, cleaning up my personal history the way Grovinia had scoured my father’s boot marks off the kitchen tiles. I called my friend back and tried to be persuasive. “We’re composed of story more than blood and bone, you know. Not writing about Grovinia is like an amputation.” I quoted Eudora Welty: “ ‘The challenge to any writer . . . is not to disown any part of our heritage.’ ”

My friend said, “I repeat, bury the shovel.”

To hell with her, I thought.

I cannot express the puniness I feel, though, as I take up my cause, as if I know anything about Grovinia. I cannot speak for her, but she inhabited the exiled places I can no longer afford to ignore. Home places.

Once, visiting an art exhibit of Nancy Spero’s work, I came upon her depiction of Nut, the Egyptian mother goddess. Nut’s feet and hands touched the ground, while her backbone formed a soaring St. Louis Arch over the earth. Ancient Egyptians said every woman was a nutrit, a little goddess, a person who became a place by bending her life over the terrain of others. I know it isn’t fashionable now to twist, bend, and contort one’s life into fantastic shapes for others’ sake, that women are more than umbrellas opened over the lives of their children — and, frankly, I’ve spent a goodly amount of time and money finding a posture of my own — but I will tell you this: I was glad Grovinia spread herself over my childhood. I grew up to feel conflicted about it, mind you, but I was glad for it at the time. Grovinia was my nutrit; she was a significant portion of the space where my life existed. I thought I loved her, and that she loved me. I believed this utterly until I was ten.

 

On a spring day in 1958, I circled the table in my grandmother’s dining room, trying to figure out one of her “test tables.” The test-table challenge worked like this: My grandmother set a formal table, purposely committing an array of errors so subtle even Emily Post couldn’t spot them — turning a knife blade in the wrong direction, placing an iced-tea spoon where a soup spoon should be. My job was to do what Emily Post could not.

Engrossed in this game, which was not really a game but an indoctrination into the secret ways of the South, I didn’t notice that Grovinia had ceased dusting and left the dining room. I often used her to cheat when stumped, as she knew the esoteric rules of table-setting from having spent so many years around my grandmother.

Do salt bowls go to the left or the right of the water goblets? I wondered. I went in search of Grovinia.

I found her in the living room, sitting in the slave chair. She wore my mother’s hand-me-down dress. It was too tight on her, I remember, and her whole body was covered with broken light from the Venetian blinds. Her eyes were closed, as if her mind had wandered off in search of something and, finding it, discovered it to be a huge disappointment.

She appeared so sad I could have broken down and cried right there, but then an amazing thing happened. I suddenly felt shot through with adrenaline, all sweaty and tossed about, and at the same time outraged, as if she had offended me. What are you doing there? I thought. Get up, get up, get up!

After that, I thought of Grovinia in the slave chair so many times and with such a mix of guilt and misery that I began to worry about myself. I made up ever changing stories about what had been going through her heart as she sat in the lap of her history, surrounded by the stories that lived inside the chair. Did she muse over the slaves who’d sat in it? Did she wonder why she had to sit in the back seat of our Ford when my mother drove her home? Did she hate us in secret?

Seeing Grovinia in the slave chair ruined me. Now I was aware of things. I couldn’t go back to the place where the worst thing in life was a misplaced salt bowl. At night in my bed, I wondered if we were any different from the family that had first owned the chair. Did we deserve Grovinia’s hate?

 

Grovinia came to work for my family in 1950, when she was in her twenties. She had caramel skin and wore bright scarves coiled around her head. She gave us the best years of her life for a dollar an hour. I remember the ironing that went on and on, how she sang mournful songs I’d never heard, dipping her fingers in a bowl of water and flinging the moisture across my father’s shirts as if she were conducting a gospel choir. I would position myself in such a way that the drops grazed my face. Knowing this, she took care to rain on me generously.

I made her my playmate, setting a place for her at my doll’s tea table under the mimosa tree. When the tree dropped its parachute blossoms, I gathered them while she tagged along behind me holding those I’d collected in the basket of her skirt. She decorated my hair with them, and when a gust of wind caught the blossoms and took them like kites, she grabbed my hand and we chased them across the neighbors’ yard.

Those were the times when believing in pure love was effortless.

One Saturday, after I had witnessed Grovinia sitting in the slave chair and thereby been initiated into the uncertainties of love, the Ku Klux Klan marched through downtown. They wore hoods and sheets, flaunting their hatred along Front Street. I was in the shoe store with my friend Connie, looking at back-to-school oxfords, when they poured into the store aisles, waving flags and shouting things I could not understand.

Most people in the store broke for the door, and I would gladly have followed them, but Connie held my hand and pulled me behind the sale table. We stood with an elderly, black-skinned woman who fanned herself with her hat, pushing her lip out so far in a gesture of perfect stubbornness that I could see the little crescent of pink inside it. I cannot, to this day, hear the word Klan without the memory of her rolled-out lip, how strong it was.

When I described the Klan march on Front Street to my mother, Grovinia, standing beside her, uttered the only expletive I ever heard from her. “Damn idiots,” she said.

I wanted Mother to say, “Damn idiots,” too. I wanted the three of us to march around the oval rug chanting, “Damn idiots,” throughout the afternoon.

But Mother said, “Why, Grovinia!” As if damn were something to be offended by, given the circumstances.

I turned to Grovinia to catch what surfaced in her face, believing the deeper truth would finally slip through, but she had looked away.

One Sunday afternoon in June, the family gathered at my grandmother’s house for hand-churned peach ice cream. Our out-of-town cousins were coming to visit. Grovinia was present to serve and clean up, and to keep a watchful eye on my two rascal brothers and me.

Tired of waiting for the cousins to arrive, my brothers and I found a rain-filled wheelbarrow swimming with tadpoles, and we raced inside to ask Grovinia for three Mason jars so we could catch our fill. She hammered nail holes in the tin lids so we wouldn’t suffocate any of God’s creatures.

We were nearly out the door — so close to freedom — when my grandmother of the table-setting fame, my grandmother who venerated decorum and gentility in girls above all, appeared in the doorway.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked me.

“They’re wanting to catch tadpoles out back,” Grovinia told her. “Ain’t gonna hurt them to catch tadpoles.”

Good old Grovinia, my hero.

“Girls don’t catch tadpoles,” Grandmother said, and she whisked the jar from my hand. “Come on. I’ll teach you a new song on the piano.” I followed her, dragging like a puppy pulled toward the yellow puddle and the rolled-up newspaper, while my brothers raced out the door to tadpole heaven.

The next day, Grovinia told me the two of us were taking a walk. I said no thank you. She said we were taking a walk, and that’s all there was to it. We trudged several blocks in the heat. I complained bitterly.

Eventually, we came to a ditch distended with rainwater and alive with tadpoles, at which point she produced a canning jar from her bag, little nail holes hammered in the lid.

“Go on, catch your tadpoles,” she said, handing it to me.

Out of nowhere, my grandmother’s voice rose up in a great symphony of sound, like a whole field of cicadas: Only boys, only boys, only boys. I froze at the edge of the ditch.

Emily Post or Huck Finn — which would it be?

“You gonna catch ’em, or you gonna stand there?” Grovinia said.

I slogged in till I was elbow-deep in brown water, pursuing the darting life beneath the surface, feeling defiant and blissful. I was the Wonderland Alice who drank the potion and grew so big her head poked through the roof and her arms and legs protruded through the doors and windows. My grandmother’s house could never hold me again.

I grew up to love the writings of Toni Morrison. At one point in The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s words cracked my heart:

Edging into life from the back door. Becoming. Everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders. White women said, “Do this.” White children said, “Give me that.” White men said, “Come here.” Black men said, “Lay down.” The only people they need not take orders from were black children and each other. But they took all of that and recreated it in their own image. They ran the houses of white people and they knew it.

Grovinia did run the house, a fact acknowledged by no one.

During the turbulent sixties, when I was in college, I told my mother the story of the tadpoles and speculated that women like Grovinia had been the source of values within many white families, functioning as a hidden voice of dissidence that vibrated in the white children they reared. I said, “Grovinia taught me subversion.”

My mother, wiser, ready now to chant, “Damn idiots,” throughout the house, said, “I’m so glad, because I wasn’t able.”

“Do you think she loved me?” I asked, knowing what Mother would say, but needing to hear it anyway, because I couldn’t bear the thought that Grovinia’s caring for me was strictly duty.

 

On a sweltering day in July, the family was driving to Fernandina Beach, taking back roads through Georgia pines, peanut farms, and small towns that all looked the same. Grovinia sat beside me in the back seat, where the wind blew clouds of heat through the window. She had come along to cook, chase children, and sleep on a fanless porch.

“Bring back some toilet paper,” she said to me when we made our first bathroom stop.

Walking to the whites-only restroom, I was aware of leaving her behind in the car, of the station attendant eyeing her from the stool behind the cash register. I stepped into the dim bathroom with its dank smell and rusty sink, pulled two feet of toilet paper off the roll, and left.

“I don’t have to go,” I told my mother, though my bladder was aching.

My father studied the passing landscapes, pulling over on a lonely stretch. Grovinia took the toilet paper and climbed from the car.

“I have to go, too,” I announced, and I followed her.

We picked our way up a hill to a privy of trees. She tore the tissue and gave me half. Squatting side by side near blackberry bushes, we watched our urine cut two golden paths through the dirt.

“Can’t see as my pee is any different from yours,” she said.

There was nothing I could say in reply. On the hillside, our two streams flowed closer, converging like tributaries coming together to form a tiny river. I wanted it to be a parable of our lives, but even in my well-meaning act of solidarity, I was aware of the great distance between us, between her world and mine.

 

Grovinia left when I was a teenager, moving to a neighboring town, dropping from my life and gusting away like so many mimosa blossoms. As the years passed and I began to wish for a more correct family history, Grovinia became the lost country. She might have remained such, if not for the photo of the slave chair I dug up in the attic box. “That which we resist becomes fate,” said Carl Jung. He was right where I was concerned. I promised myself I would find her.

She was living in a small house in south Georgia surrounded by her children and grandchildren. She’d sounded welcoming when I’d called, but walking to her front door, I felt self-conscious and doubtful. What was I doing here? What did I want? To find “the lost country”? Was it absolution I was after, or did I just want the truth?

She sat in the center of a brocade sofa, a woman I hardly recognized. I remembered her thinness, but now she spilled over the cushion, large and grand. I loved her authority as she sat there, waiting for my shaky legs to cross the room, waiting like a smiling Hottentot queen. I swear she almost laughed at my nervousness.

Look who’s here, her deep-set eyes said. Who could have thought it? She patted the cushion next to her. “Come on. Sit down.”

We talked, picking our way through the awkward moments until we made it back finally to our old rhythm of togetherness. We began telling stories. “Remember when . . . ?”

She couldn’t recall the time we’d peed together on the hill, couldn’t place the mimosa blossoms. But she did remember the tadpoles and, yes, the time she’d said, “Damn idiots,” in front of my mother. The latter made her laugh and slap her thigh.

“What about the slave chair?” I asked. “Do you remember sitting in it?”

She paused. I could see it coming, but I couldn’t believe it. She was struggling to remember not the occasion, but the chair itself.

“Slave chair? Which one was that?” she said.

This revelation fairly tilted my world. I described exactly where it had sat in my grandmother’s living room, near the front window, beside the piano: ladder back, shabby cane seat, pine wood — a terrible chair.

Her eyes caught a certain light. “Oh, that chair,” she said. “If I sat in it, I don’t remember.”

I had come with my formative moment in hand, bearing it to her like a koan or some great dharma riddle, and she could not remember the event’s ever happening.

When I fell silent, Grovinia said, “All I know is, we had us some good times and some bad ones.”

Looking back, I imagine her words were meant to fill an awkward space, but that is not how they seemed at the time. They seemed perfectly timed and almost incandescent with meaning. They remind me now of Zen stories in which the monk goes to his teacher asking the way to enlightenment, and the teacher tells him something like “Go wash your dish,” and instantly the monk wakes up. The power of Grovinia’s words lay in their unexpected simplicity. They showed me in one fell swoop how high and impossible my expectations of love had been.

I had spent years imagining the feelings Grovinia had been forced to hide from us in order to survive, and berating our feelings for her, coming as they did from privileged, patronizing places. In his Symposium, Plato refers to love as the child of fullness and emptiness, and though I had read this numerous times, I’d never much understood it until then. I’d favored love as the child of fullness — the pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated love that would satisfy my hungers and make life safe and luminous.

But how could such love have existed between Grovinia and me, given the circumstances? How could it exist anywhere? Love was also the child of emptiness — the imperfect love that seared and drained and left you wanting. It was limited by the failings inside the one who loves, not to mention the failings in the world around her.

Our love, Grovinia’s and mine both, was tainted, of course. It was full and it was empty, but it was still love, and it was saving.

I took in the sight of Grovinia on the sofa, knowing I would remember her exactly like this: not in the slave chair — I was through with that — but here on the brocade cushion, no longer the goddess of my childhood, but a woman like myself, who’d been caught in the idiocy of a hateful time and done her best to love me anyway.

This essay originally appeared in Literal Latte.