Lacey and the African Grandmothers (5 page)

I remembered Kahasi telling me that I shouldn't be so shy, that sometimes women needed to speak up. That was what the grandmothers were doing. By using their sewing, the grandmothers here were speaking up to help the faraway grandmothers. I wanted to speak up, too, but I wanted to speak up quietly, so no one would notice. I kept making silly faces for Kayden, but I kept my eye on Mrs. B. When she sat down at her desk, I decided to speak up. I lifted Kayden into my arms – holding someone smaller made me feel stronger, braver. I stood beside Mrs. B.'s desk and waited until her funny halfway glasses looked up at me.

“I can sew, and I am learning how to bead. Do you think I'd be allowed to help in Africa?” I asked.

“Help? Help the grandmothers, you mean?”

I nodded my head and tried to move Kayden to my hip. She was so big now that her feet reached down to my knees. “Maybe if I could sew some purses, I could help a little.”

“Hmmm,” said Mrs. Buchanan. She rested her chin on her hand and looked up at the ceiling. Then she said, “Well, you are not a grandmother, but I expect they need all the help they can get to raise those babies. Why don't you send them a letter and ask?”

I had learned how to write a letter in grade 4, but I didn't learn how to write a letter to grandmothers in Africa. Mrs. B. said just to write what was in my heart. I thought about it for a few days, especially when I was sewing with Kahasi. I decided it would be easier to write to the grandmothers in Canada. Their headquarters were in Toronto. This is what I wrote:

Dear Grandmothers Helping Grandmothers in Africa,

My name is Lacey Little Bird. I am a grade 7 student at Central Bow Valley School in Gleichen, Alberta, Canada. My sister is a grade 11 student at Sequoia Outreach School because she has a nine-month-old daughter named Kayden.

Last fall, I helped my grandmother make a jingle dress, and I am learning to do beading. I like to sew, and my grandmother says I am good at traditional art. I'm a member of the Siksika Nation – Blackfoot tribe of Southern Alberta.

The principal at my sister's school told us about the “Grandmothers to Grandmothers” program, and I thought that we could make some purses, too. We could invite our grandmothers to help us decorate them. This way, we would form our own Grandmothers to Grandmothers group.

Would it be OK for us to do this?

On our reserve, grandmothers are so important. Lots of our young parents suffer because of the effects of poverty, drugs, and alcohol. Even though our lives are sometimes hard, I think they're not as difficult as the lives of those grandmothers in Africa.

Please tell me if it would be OK to help.

Yours truly,
Lacey Little Bird

I showed the letter to Mrs. B. She said that it was a fine letter but that I needed to include my mailing address, or an e-mail address, so they could write back to me. We don't have a car, and it's hard for my parents to get to the post office to pick up mail. We don't have a computer either, so I wrote the address for Sequoia at the top. Mrs. B. got the Toronto address from the grandmothers in Calgary, gave me an envelope and a stamp, and promised to mail the letter for me.

As I licked the gluey flap of the envelope and closed it, I thought about how far my words would travel – all the way to Ontario and that big city of Toronto. I hoped the grandmothers would like my letter, and I hoped they would let me help. I knew Kahasi would be proud of me. And she would teach me what I needed to know; she could sew anything. Maybe my mum could help, too, because she was a grandmother of Kayden. I bet she would like to help the African grandmothers – if she felt well enough – even though she liked sewing about as much as Angel did, which was not at all. If the Canadian grandmothers said yes, maybe even Angel would finally get interested in sewing.

I gave the envelope a little kiss before handing it to Mrs. B.

Every day I bugged Lila about the mail. “Is there a letter from those grandmothers yet?” I asked as soon as I got to Sequoia, and every day Lila said, “No, not today. I'll let you know as soon as it arrives. Really. I promise. You will be the first to know.”

It seemed to be taking an awfully long time. Waiting for a letter was as painful as waiting for seeds to turn into plants. I thought it would be nice if the grandmothers could give me an answer right away. If they said yes, I could get started on the sewing. The sooner I started, the more purses I could make, and the more purses I made, the more money the African grandmothers would get for food and shelter and other things for their grandchildren. What could be taking them so long? I decided I didn't like to wait for letters; an e-mail would have been better. Maybe I should have asked to use the computer at school.

I sprayed water on the dirt where the seeds were buried every day for six school days before the miracle happened. It was Tuesday afternoon, just after a holiday long weekend, and I couldn't believe my eyes when I lifted the wet lid from the seed tray. It wasn't just black dirt anymore. During the weekend, specks of green had pushed up through the dirt in some of the compartments. They looked like bright green butterflies on short stems. The soil and the baby plants smelled like springtime after it rains.

“Mrs. B.! Mrs. B., look!” I called across the noisy classroom. “The seeds are alive. The flowers are growing.”

Mrs. Buchanan smiled. “Lacey, shush,” she said, putting one finger to her lips. “Not so loud.” She hoisted Kayden onto one hip and wove her way through the tables covered with books, water bottles, and baby carriers. “I'll be there in just a minute.”

She stopped to talk to Kelvin on the way. He had a lot of papers and books spread on the table, and a pen in his hand, but his head was lying on top of the papers. It was hard to tell if he was tired or mad or needed help. Mrs. B. sat beside Kelvin and held Kayden on her lap as she pointed to things in his book and asked him questions. When she left, he was sitting up and writing again.

I wasn't smiling what Mrs. B. calls my “shy smile” when she came over. I had the big smile that lets my crooked teeth show. She bent her head to smell the dirt, too. “Excellent. Excellent!” she said. “That's the soil giving birth to new life. Amazing, isn't it?”

I nodded. “Will they really grow into flowers?”

“You just wait and see.”

“How long will it take?“

“It will take as long as it needs to take. You just keep watering them every day, and let them surprise you. Oh, this baby smells bad,” she added, wrinkling her nose. “Kelvin, your daughter needs a new diaper.” She handed Kayden to Kelvin and went back to her desk.

Every time I went to Sequoia to help look after the babies, I looked after the little plants, too. They are called nasturtiums. Mrs. B. told me that they would have flowers the colors of the sun – red, yellow, and orange. She also said that we could eat the plants – the flowers and leaves would taste good in a salad – but if we left the flowers, they would make more seeds for next year. She said some people even ate the seeds, and they tasted spicy.

When the plants got bigger and stronger, we would move them into bigger containers, and after Easter, when it was warm outside, we would put them on the street so everyone could see them. I just hoped people wouldn't realize that my flowers were good to eat.

Chapter 5
“I Was Going to Need a Lot of Help”

L
et me see what you have there. Your beading is looking good, very neat,” Kahasi said when I went to her house after supper one night. She pulled at the beads I had sewn in the diamond “ pattern, trying to pry them loose with her fingernails. None of the beads came loose.

“Do you think it's time to start working on the hide?” she asked.

I couldn't believe what my ears were hearing. It was time to do some real beading.

“First we need to make a paste. Some people draw the design on the hide with a pen, but I like to do things the old way. Sometimes, the old ways are better,” she said. “We must remember the old ways.”

Kahasi lifted a little bowl from the shelf and scooped a spoonful of flour from the bag. Then she poured in a small stream of water. “Now, you stir it until it is smooth,” she said.

She dipped a toothpick into the paste, then moved her glasses up and down so she could look through the bottom part and see better. She used the toothpick to draw a flower on the upper piece that she had cut from the hide. She kept dipping the toothpick into the white paste to make a smooth line. She drew each petal slowly and carefully, and then she added leaves. “There,” she said, “now we have your design ready to bead.”

I picked up the piece of deer hide. The flower was perfectly shaped, each petal looked exactly the same shape and size. “You can get started beading if you want. I'll get the other one ready.”

“Can I use the glass beads now?” I asked.

“Go ahead, my girl.” She nodded as she drew the other flower. “But be careful doing the curved edge. Go slowly. Even though you know what you are doing now, you will find it harder.”

It was tougher to push the needle through hide than through fabric. I started with the outline of the flower, using three beads at a time. I tried to sew exactly on the curved line that Kahasi had made, but it was harder to make a curved line than the straight lines of the diamond pattern. I could tell it was going to take me a long time to bead just one moccasin.

“Ouch,” I said as the needle stuck my finger. A tiny drop of blood formed on the tip of my finger, like a small red bead. I wiped the blood on my jeans. “I think I should have asked you to do the beading. By the time I finish just one petal, the moccasins may be too small.”

Kahasi laughed softly. “Beading will teach you about patience, Lacey. There will be many times when you have to take off some of the beads you have sewn because they aren't right. Making something sometimes means going backwards, starting over.”

Any pattern can be beaded, but First Nations
people most often use designs from nature.

“Not me. I like to go forward. I like to make new things without wasting any time.”

She didn't say anything. She just smiled and looked down at her sewing.

“Kahasi, do you think you could teach me how to make purses?”

“Making purses from hide would be a waste of valuable material. People need moccasins and other clothing, not purses. Where did you get such an idea, ah?”

“I don't mean hide purses. I mean cloth purses, something that would be fast,” I explained.

She smiled again. “To be fast, you need a machine. A sewing machine. The only sewing machine I have is my hands, and they are not fast anymore.” She made some more stitches on the tiny quilt she was making for my cousin's new baby. “Why do you want to make fast purses, anyway?”

I told her about grandmothers helping grandmothers and about the letter I had sent. “That sounds like a good idea,” she said. “We all have to help each other. You know how to embroider and now how to bead. I could help you, too. But the fast sewing you will have to learn from someone else.”

There were small pieces of fabric on the table where she had been cutting different shapes, and I knew she had more scraps of heavy cotton like the one she had given me to learn beading.

“Kahasi
,
are you going to use those old pieces for anything?” I asked.

“Yes, some day. I save everything in my basket, and some day it gets used.”

I was hoping she would say she was going to throw the bits away. I was going to ask her if I could have them. Instead I asked, “Would you mind…would it be okay if I looked at the things in your basket?”

“Yes, yes, go ahead. There are pieces there of just about everything I have made going back a long time. Each of those pieces has a little story.”

I pulled out scraps of hide, ends of cotton printed with designs, and heavy canvas-type material. I played with the pieces on the table, making patterns with them. They looked a bit like an old-time quilt. They also made me think of a colorful cloth bag one of my teachers used to carry papers and things.