FEATURE: The Blue Sewing Bag
A small hole in the knee of my jeans was nothing my grandmother could not fix.
Using her trustee sewing tools, which lived in a small light blue pouch, tucked away in the corner of her bedroom closet she was unstoppable. Also residing in the tiny tote was a host of miscellaneous items, each with a vivid story attached.
A key to a Chevrolet. These were the keys to the car my Grandmother owned when she lived in Cameroon. She never did drive the car herself, but her friends and family would act as her personal chauffeurs, taking her on adventures around the city of Yauounde. She told stories of long nights spent out with her friends, speeding down the dirt roads, hopping from club, to bar, to club and eventually home when the sun was already on its way up. Her passenger side POV was so glowing you would have thought she was the one driving.
The hospital wristbands my mother wore for each of my siblings’ births. She’d tell my older sister and I the story of my birth first, per my persistent request. It was Easter Sunday, April 15th 2001, the first Easter Sunday she would spend away from her home church in Cameroon. Grandma went to Easter Mass with my father and very pregnant mother, it was her due date. As the Father broke the bread, her water followed suit. They took communion, sans wine of course and went straight to the hospital. My grandmother said she was the first to greet me. As she told this story she would mimic my newborn screams she heard in the delivery room and laugh while recalling my mother squeezing her hand in the church pews.
Old shoelaces, buttons from coats, earrings missing their match, beads from necklaces detached from their strings–every item had a story. Whether or not they were completely true or embellished retellings, I never knew, but I curiously listened in awe while I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s bed.
Bernadette Tsogo Mebara was her name, but most everyone just called her Grandma–regardless of their connection to her. Grandma was a lady of small stature;by middle school I was looking down to speak to her. Her plump face was golden and hardly wrinkled at 70, but the gray coils peeking out from underneath her head tie gave away her age.
Grandma carried a certain joyfulness with her. Just like in the stories she told, she was nearly always enjoying herself. The buttons in her sewing bag told the story of her favorite jacket which she wore on many nights out with friends. The earrings with a missing pair were a gift from her late husband, and the beads from the broken necklace were from a weekend trip Douala, a Cameroonian city, it was a small memento of her time there.
Her big, white, crowded smile was her most signature look. Her laugh filled our home and every space she entered. She greeted everyone with her bright smile and was swift to introduce herself as “Bernadette from Africa”. She often forgot the names of the friends she made, but they could never forget Bernadette, from Africa, the one with the smile plastered on her face.
She came from Cameroon, a country on the Western coast, the armpit of Africa. She was born in Yaounde, the Francophone capital of the country, the youngest child to her elder sister Anastasia Ateba Ongene–who was fiercely protective over her sister. Bernadette was the wayward wild child–she was more focused on having fun than anything else. She was dainty, playful and carefree. She married, but was never able to have children of her own.
Anastasia was trustworthy, the family depended on her to take over their land and to manage the household. She stood tall, and acted sternly, her presence demanded recognition. Anastasia single handedly raised up her 7 children, no husband at her side.
When Anastasia passed away suddenly at age 45, she left behind all her children and grandchildren, the eldest daughters were left to step up and serve as primary caretakers for their younger siblings. Bernadette was now put in a position to take the lead. She took the children under her care, supporting them and their children however she could. Bernadette maintained her playful nature but was more focused, maternal.
My mother sent Grandma a visitor’s Visa to come to the US from Cameroon in 2000. This visit turned into a 15 year long stay, which she spent raising my sister and I. When I tore holes in my socks and jeans I would run to Grandma’s closet and scavenge for the blue bag. Shoveling past the long dresses which hung and the shoes which covered the closet floor, I retrieved the bag. As her eyesight grew poor, I took on the job of using my small hands to carefully feed the black thread through the narrow opening of the needle. My eyes concentrated on the slim gap and my hands steadily inserted the thread. From there she would mend. I sat and watched as she carefully stitched.
We only had one children’s book in the house, a beat up copy of Mother Goose Tales. Grandma would make me read it every night, starting at age 3. We would work our way through the book, letter by letter, syllable by syllable until every word was etched into my brain.
When I got a hold of the kitchen scissors and ever so gracefully chopped off several inches of my shoulder length hair at age 5, Grandma reached for her sewing bag and grabbed the thick black thread we would often used to sew. With tears streaming down my face, I sat in between her legs as she plaited my uneven locs with the thread. This is a common West African protective style which involves wrapping the hair in a corkscrew fashion with thread.
Grandma taught me how to sew and thread hair when I was 9. Her worsening arthritis made it difficult to grasp the thin needle and tightly hold and wrap the black thread around our hair. We sat on the king-sized bed we all shared and she demonstrated on an old sock how to weave the needle in and out of the material to patch a small hole.
Similarly, she sectioned off her short gray hair into small parts. She placed the knotted end of the thread into my hands and showed me how to wind it around the small piece of hair. From that point on, I would thread her hair every few weeks. When the last set started to loosen, I would unravel each section and do it all over. Whenever her garments would develop small tears, she would hand them to me, and I would dig in the closet for the small blue bag where all the sewing tools lived.
Grandma went back to live in Cameroon in 2015. For years at that point, my sister and I were independent enough to watch ourselves and take on household duties. Grandma was wheelchair-bound, and needed help getting in and out of bed, showering, preparing meals, and just about everything else. We took care of her the same way she took care of us our entire lives. She had not been home for over a decade. She often spoke of how she longed to once again feel the heat of Cameroon’s tropical climate and sit peacefully in the backyard of the family home, surrounded by the tall palm trees and red soil.
In December of 2019, we got the call that Grandma had passed away. I didn’t know how to feel. It was a storm of emotions: sadness, gratitude, love, fear. My mother, sister, and I cried, hugged, and shared stories of memories we had with Grandma.
My mother recalled Grandma’s first few months in the U.S., and how she would sleep under a pile of heavy blankets to keep warm in lol ko the brisk Maryland fall. My father remembered hearing Grandma’s laugh echo in the house early in the morning as he got ready for work as she watched daytime TV shows. My sister reminded us how Grandma used to wake up early every morning at 5 AM to quietly whisper the Rosary, leaving us tossing and turning in bed as kids.
I went upstairs to her room and dug through the closet to find her blue sewing bag sitting in its normal spot, stowed away in the corner. I scavenged through its contents and was comforted by the array of items which took refuge in its walls and the stories, now slipping from my memory, which Grandma painted .
