Beulah, full of grace.

My aunt is light on her feet, more of a floating spirit than human. The single thing anchoring her is a dark stone medallion with the Virgin Mary, the one where she is all Chicana in a star studded robe, hands at chest-center looking like she just finished the sun salutation yoga pose. She was in the side room and appeared to me while scanning the last version of the New York times. We end up talking about working, and not working, and employment and what the procedure was like when she first left Trinidad to come here. One had to call in, and apply over the phone. "Now they want to see everything on paper" she says.

She is a number of shades lighter than I am with naturally straight hair, but has a story about 'us black people' having to find work here in the 1970s. She explains in her simple linen white shirt and loose mint green pants that on the trains, white people would not ever sit next to blacks, and she muses on how much she has seen the world change in front of her. By now her eyes are more alive than I have ever seen, but her mouth moves with a certain composure, she is fully engaged in the memory of the thing and tells me that God is leveling the world.

She says that people are intermarrying, living in the same communities together, certain animals are becoming extinct, certain animals are coming into existence, some plants are growing smaller while smaller plants are growing larger. She is explaining that an equilibrium is being established in the world. Not that I had expected  any marxist theology from the meagre bodied woman in a chemotherapy suite, but she says all these things with a collection and wisdom in her voice that I cannot doubt.

She mentions that the name 'Beddoe' that we came from was a well-known family name in Trinidad, that we were all related. She says that now it's like the name has been married out of us. We have enough girl children to show for it all. She used to paint things, beautiful things. She also wants to teach me graphology because she thinks the art is about to die. She says that God is coming soon, and floats back into the file room.