Emily Bernard is the author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. She is a contributing editor of the Scholar.
For Sandra
My name is Emily. Like every story that defines the course of a life, the story of my name began long before I was born. Emily was the name of my paternal grandmother. I never really knew her, though I can recall in precise detail the first time I met her. My father had taken my younger brother and me back to the country of his birth—the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago—so that we could be presented to his family, something many immigrants of his generation did. I was three years old. I remember my grandmother Emily as an old woman with deep-brown skin, dressed all in black, like a creature from another world, the Old World of my father’s childhood. And just like his childhood, my father’s mother was a mystery to me. Even to a three-yearold, she seemed fully contained, dense, full of secrets rich and deep, like a grave.
Taking this memory apart to examine and then describe it feels like pulling out a tattered toy from a creaky old trunk in a darkened attic, then blowing the dust off its crinkling, straw-filled body. It feels just like this when I try to remember my paternal grandmother—the sensation is so strong, so exact—even though I have never, in real life, lived in a house with the sort of attic I describe, and I have never owned a toy like the one that appears in my mind’s eye. I know that this feeling could easily have had its genesis in something I read once at an impressionable age—a scene I ask the question seemingly every day, and I almost never have a definite answer. This is how my memory works.
