“There was nothing my grandmother wanted . . . she had everything she needed—a beautiful home, a loving and devoted family, a new grandchild.”
THIS IS WHAT MY MOTHER has told me: on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 16, 1973, my grandmother, Thelma Vivian Gordon, died of a massive coronary episode while tending to the garden in her front yard. I was eight months old. Earlier that morning, my mother had dropped me off at my grandparents’ home, a few seconds’ drive from where we resided, before beginning her daily thirty-minute commute to work. During my afternoon nap, my grandmother went to care for her plants in her front yard. While watering and pruning, and periodically checking in on me to see if I had awakened, she suddenly collapsed. Mrs. Emerald Lattimore, who lived across the street from my grandparents, saw my grandmother in distress, called for help, and retrieved me. My mother says that I did not wake up throughout the entire ordeal—when my grandmother lost consciousness, when the ambulance came to take her to the hospital, or when my family finally reached her as she breathed her last, labored breaths.
That my mother periodically voiced the details of my grandmother’s passing has always made the story even more remarkable to me. My parents and extended family rarely spoke the names of those who had passed on or expressed how we continued to feel their presence in our lives. It stood out to me how different my experience was from my wife’s, as she witnessed rich modalities of “talking to the dead” in the southern community of her birth. In the small Florida towns in which I was reared, the names of deceased men occasionally came up, often with a hint of derision, because their faces stunningly and unexpectedly appeared in those of men and women who publicly claimed other paternal ties. Otherwise, there was a silent veneration of the dead.
Eulogies commanded that we theologically weigh the deeds of the deceased: whether their behaviors and choices admitted them into the Heaven we all aspired to go. But after their lives were funeralized, we only felt their presence as unspoken moral lessons of our community’s Black Christian ethical code for how to spend our remaining days on Earth. The revered departed remained beacons of light, examples of how the living should serve the Creator, while those who had not abided by our Protestantism’s standards were cautionary tales of how the secular world might lure us from our divine paths.1
In telling me the story of her mother’s unexpected passing, my mother broke from our family’s usual way of talking about our ancestors. She did not speak about her mother as an exemplar of moral goodness, although I am sure my mother would not have argued otherwise. The story instead invited me to join my mother in grieving the woman who gave her life, the rupture of an extended family that we no longer had, and the eventual erosion of a commune that connected our house to my grandparents’ home, where my grandmother’s garden lay prominently in front. My mother planted a story of our Thelma in an emptiness that has become one of my beginnings, my home.
My mother’s narrative about October 16, 1973, was one of many about her Thelma—how my grandmother would spoil me—and would have spoiled me more had she lived longer than her forty-nine years; how she would call me “Papa”; how she loved to laugh. I know my mother told me these stories about my grandmother to create memories of a woman that I would not otherwise have, to extend to me a love I would never feel from my grandmother in the physical world. I think my mother knew I would need this to survive, but I also believe she needed to imagine my grandmother’s presence with us, watching over our relationship as we blossomed into mother and son. But my grandmother’s abrupt death when I was a baby prevented me from seeing, or at least remembering seeing, my mother mothered: I do not recall watching them in the kitchen talking about recipes, or television shows, or other people; I do not remember them exchanging gifts on birthdays or holidays, having a conversation about their days at work, or embracing each other. I did not knowingly witness how they, together, joked and laughed with my grandfather, or my uncle, who is nine years younger than my mother.
It had been years since my mother last told me the story of my grandmother’s passing when I came across Lucille Clifton’s “Spring Thought for Thelma,” one of her early uncollected poems, written in the late 1960s. The poem, which I happened on while reading Aracelis Girmay’s edited collection of Clifton’s work, How to Carry Water, drew me in because “Thelma” appears in the title, but as I read it, repeatedly, I began to remember the story my mother had told me:
Someone who had her fingers
set for growing,
settles into garden.
If old desires linger
she will be going
flower soon. Pardon
her little blooms
whose blossoming was stunted
by rooms.2
Composed of three sentences across nine lines, “Spring Thought” tells of Thelma’s anticipation to cultivate new life in her garden, but her intentions are suspended by “lingering desires” that threaten to intercept her from her planting. The interruption may be a literal deterrence or an internal restraint that stunts the fullness of growth, but regardless, Thelma is between flourishing and fleeing.
“Thelma” is an often-visited figure in Clifton’s poetry. There is “the message of thelma sayles,” in which the speaker instructs her daughter to “turn the blood that clots your tongue/ into poems. poems,” or “to thelma who worried because i couldn’t cook,” spoken in the voice of a woman admonishing her mother for projecting onto her fears of being unable to care for a man—”madam, i’m not your gifted girl,” she snaps, “i am a woman and/i know what to do.” There is also the “the death of thelma sayles,” an elegiac homage to Clifton’s mother, who died suddenly in 1959 at age forty-four, one month before the birth of Clifton’s first child. The poem’s speaker lovingly watches her “little girl” from an indeterminate, but insurmountable, distance before lobbing her heart to her child, who catches it and heads home to care for her own children. Both Clifton and her mother shared the name Thelma, so in all the poems featuring their namesake, voices move in syncopated rhythm between mother and daughter, spirit and nature, the living and the dead.
My mother planted a story of our Thelma in an emptiness that has become one of my beginnings, my home.
As I recited “Spring Thought” to myself, I began to wonder if Clifton, in following Thelma’s movements across time and space, had also cosmically foretold my grandmother’s death. It was not just that my grandmother shared the same name as Clifton and Clifton’s mother; it was also that her gardening was interrupted, although not by “lingering desires,” but by life suddenly fleeing her body. The words, rhythmically placed across the stanza, also brought to mind questions that I had not thought to ask my mother, like “What nurturing spirit summoned our Thelma to her front yard in October?” and “What kinds of flowers did she grow?” and “What did she know about them?” The image of the garden is so familiar to me from my readings of Black writers, but I had never thought about its presence in the story my mother had told me of my grandmother’s passing. Now I wondered, what was that “unknown thing” that lay deep within my grandmother that she wanted to make known through her garden? And how did her flowering feed her “creative spirit”?3
I had never shared written poetry with my mother before, but “Spring Thought” spoke to me so vividly that I texted it to her last November, about a week before her birthday, to see if she would have a similar feeling about Clifton’s words. Within a few moments, she responded with a message thanking me for sending it. “This is beautiful,” she wrote, “and so much like my mom who was gardening when she died.” The poem had returned us, after many years, to the story of our Thelma.
When I was finally able to muster the will a few months later, I asked my mother what she heard in the poem. “Well, it is about a woman named Thelma who is gardening,” she said. “It reminds me of my mother. You know she was gardening when she died.”
I probed a bit further. “What do you remember about the flowers in your mother’s garden?” “Well, she loved roses,” my mother reflected. “I didn’t like them because of the thorns, but she loved them. And she had different kinds and knew each of their names. And, oh,” she continued, “my mother loved zinnias, which she would plant in the spring.”
A memory of the zinnias opened my mother to sharing details I had not remembered, or had not heard, in the story. My mother told me that our Thelma could keep an eye on me while she was gardening because she could see me through a bay window that separated her garden from the room where I napped. This new detail summoned in my mind an image of myself in the garden, our Thelma tending to me like one of her flowers.
My mother and I did not consider together what ultimately became of Thelma in “Spring Thought,” but she told me, for the first time that I can recall, about my grandmother’s funeral. Her voice was steady as she painted a picture of the small sanctuary of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church crowded with family, friends, coworkers, and beautiful flower arrangements. The minister was a bishop in the Baptist Church from out of town who traveled to our small community to preach my grandmother’s soul Home. His prestige reflected both our family’s social status in our community and how special my grandmother was. “When God looks out at his garden,” my mother remembered the preacher avowing near the end of his eulogy, “he chooses and picks his favorite flower.”
Even though my mother and I did not talk about the poem’s second sentence—”If old desires linger/she will be going/flower soon”—my grandmother’s “desires” have always been a part of the story my mother has told me. While the poem suggests that Thelma’s lingering yearnings for freedom might lead her to flee her garden, my grandmother was comfortably settled in her life. On that October morning, before my mother departed for work, she asked, “Mom, do you need anything?” to which my grandmother replied, “No, I don’t need anything. Everything I need is right here.” The words ease my mother’s grief, knowing that, a few hours after she left her mother for the final time, her Thelma quietly slipped away into another world. In those final hours, there was nothing my grandmother wanted—nothing she hoped for, nothing that pulled her full attention from us, her blossoms; she had everything she needed—a beautiful home, a loving and devoted family, a new grandchild. My grandmother’s final declaration of satisfaction relieves, at least slightly, a sense that her young life was unfinished. And there were, of course, the flowers she left behind, blooms that budded once more following my grandmother’s death before they, too, passed into my mother’s memory.
I cannot say with any certainty whether my Thelma ever encountered Clifton, who was known to communicate with ancestors and whose Baltimore home was thought to be a “way station” through which spirits would pass. But what I do know is that Clifton’s “Spring Thought”—with its lyrical query about the intentions and possibilities of Thelma’s gardening—delineated a new shape of the narrative my mother and I share about her mother. As we have invited Clifton’s verses into the home of our story, I find myself returning again and again to the third sentence, “Pardon/her little blooms/whose blossoming was stunted/by rooms,” which does not easily echo the story my mother has told me. Was I one of the “little blooms” in Thelma’s garden, and if so, how had I been stunted by her departure? And if not me, who, or what, are her flowers, or the “rooms” hindering our flourishing? What might Clifton be urging me and my mother to know with this concluding line of the poem about Thelma’s flowering?4
My grandmother was born in Rubonia, Florida, to Harrington and Delceta Douglas on February 9, 1924. A small Black town that sits just off of US 41, near Terra Ceia Bay, Rubonia was where our Thelma lived her entire life. It was where she went to school, where she met and married my grandfather, James Gordon Sr., and where she raised her two children: my mother, Beverly, and my uncle, James Jr. And it was where she cultivated her garden at 1203 Seventy-First Street East. But even before my grandmother could no longer settle into the garden, government planners jeopardized the stability of the infrastructure managing the flow of water throughout Rubonia. The community’s poorly designed water system has been incapable of sufficiently draining the soil to flourish the zinnias our Thelma loved to grow during the spring season.
On the day that my grandmother passed, my mother took me to my grandparents’ home before heading to Robert H. Prine Elementary School, where she taught second grade. The school had been desegregated only a few years before, nearly twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education declared the racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Prine Elementary was named after an agriculturalist and former president of the Manatee County Growers Association, a collective of local white farmers. Until his death eight months before my grandmother’s, Prine lived on the predominantly white island of Terra Ceia, a few minutes’ drive from Rubonia. Along with other agriculturalists, Prine established a packinghouse in Rubonia during the 1940s, where Black residents found menial work bundling crops of gladiolus bulbs, tomatoes, and strawberries. Terra Ceia was a destination island where more affluent white families had waterfront views from their homes and luxury recreation vehicles; Rubonia was where less affluent Black folk lived when they were not picking crops in nearby fields.
At its commercial height, Rubonia had two general stores, two gas stations (one of which was owned and operated by my grandfather, James), and two bars that supported local residents and tourists en route to Florida’s more popular destinations. By the time God called our Thelma from Earth’s garden, government land developers had already begun to stunt Rubonia’s growth. In 1965, Manatee County planners rerouted US 41 east of Rubonia to expand the highway from two to four lanes. Drivers on the north–south thoroughfare between Tampa and Miami no longer needed to pass through Rubonia for gas or food, relegating the community into the opacity of lush Florida trees.
The community is pulled from obscurity once a year when Rubonia and Terra Ceia residents hold a Mardi Gras, a raucous celebration with colorful floats, bead throwing, wild costumes, and food vendors. Legend has it that the event began in the winter of 1980 when Luane Topp, a white Terra Ceia resident, could not raise enough money to travel to the New Orleans Mardi Gras, so a group of her friends pulled together a local parade celebration that has grown for over forty years. Now financed by a nonprofit foundation, the Mardi Gras has become a fundraiser for the Rubonia Community Center’s scholarship fund. The celebration, held the Sunday before Fat Tuesday, is taken out of the religious context of Black diasporic carnivals rehearsed throughout the Global South.
What Rubonia’s festival shares with the one in New Orleans, however, is that they both provide a gloss over poor infrastructure. Just as Hurricane Katrina exposed how New Orleans’s defective levee system left Black people more vulnerable to the effects of storm surges, Rubonia, which is just two feet above sea level, is annually confronted by the threat of severe flooding. Some residents claim that extreme water events did not begin until planners redesigned US 41 by damming the river and cutting off canals, which caused water to back up into the community during hurricane season, a duration that continues to lengthen.
The Manatee County Board of Commissioners, the governing body that apportions funding for infrastructural improvements, has long neglected Rubonia, consistently refusing to include line items in its annual budget to improve the community’s poor drainage system. Rubonia has historically had no retention ponds or storm drain piping, and its elevated inlets are blocked by roots that hold water unnecessarily. A new multimillion dollar project to update Rubonia’s drainage system began in 2021, but rising sea levels in this era of climate change continue to make Rubonia vulnerable to flooding. After Hurricane Idalia in August 2023, and again after Hurricanes Debby and Helene in fall 2024, flood waters overfilled ditches, filling sidewalks, yards, and homes. When Debby brought historic rainfall to Manatee and Sarasota counties, local news captured a photograph of my grandparents’ former home at 1203 Seventy-First Street East. Elevated water engulfed the yard where my Thelma grew her flowers.5
Rubonia’s community organizers continue to develop action plans to assess the community’s changing demographic makeup, environmental and structural conditions, and land use, but their efforts are undermined by the neglectful decisions of local government bodies. For instance, the Rubonia Community Center was forced to close briefly in 2013, needing more than $100,000 in repairs. After a three-year administrative drama involving a private educational firm; the Manatee County school board, which once owned the center; and the county board of commissioners, the commissioners finally devoted $75,000 toward the repairs, allowing the center to reopen in 2016. The move suggested the county’s concern for Rubonia’s children, while veiling the failing infrastructure that erodes the homes in which those children live. As the state of Florida renders Rubonia a “blighted” area, the community carries racial stigmas that obscure the realities of decades of abandonment. With rising crime, a discourse of “law and order” resonates more than one that acknowledges historical environmental neglect. An increased police presence is justified by the imperative of protecting property and moral life.
Now a right-wing political movement that privileges real estate development envelops Rubonia. A park for luxury recreational vehicles sits on lands above the flood plain created by the irrigation system that exposes Rubonia residents to an annual deluge. Even the Rubonia Cemetery, where Thelma and James Gordon Sr. are buried, is now flanked by a housing development on its eastern border, and Interstate 75 on its western border, two encroachments that threaten to pave over the once-untouched clearing where Rubonia’s ancestors eternally rest.6
Over the holidays, my father asked me if I had any memories of our first house, a small ranch that sat a few streets from where Thelma cultivated her garden. I flatly told Dad no, but that was not completely true. I could not remember the exterior or interior of the home, or even where it was located. Tucked away from any of the main streets, next to a small rivulet that intersects with McMullen Creek, the house is to be found only by those who are looking for the family that now resides there. A few months before, I wanted to show my oldest son the house, and despite my enduring familiarity with Rubonia, I could not find the residence where I spent my first three years of life. But my not remembering the actual residence did not mean that I had no memory of it. What I can recall, even now, are the hermit crabs that would scurry along the bank of the rivulet next to our house. I did not want them near me, and they served as a natural deterrent from my going near the water.
I did not remember the playful haunting of the hermit crabs at my first house until my wife, first-born son, and I, shaken by all that COVID claimed from us, fled to Anguilla in November 2020. I felt Rubonia everywhere we went on the Caribbean island: the architecture of the stuccoed and wooden homes situated between palm trees on narrow shell-graveled roads, the sense of togetherness that emboldens local residents to hold strangers in prolonged gazes until they prove themselves relatively trustworthy, the imprint of the plantation on the structural order of things, the afternoon rain showers that cool air heated by an unforgiving sun.
One evening in the spring after our arrival, I stopped to observe a hermit crab scurrying in front of me while I walked the grounds of our island residence. The crab was bare, and once it saw me, it hurriedly hobbled on its pinchers into a shell. The crab’s freedom from, and then security in, its transportable home returns to my mind the third sentence of Clifton’s “Spring Thought.” “Pardon” sits by itself at the end of the sixth line, calling for grace for the stunted blooms, an exoneration that invites seeing their restriction as part of an unceasing rhythm of withdrawal and springing towards unfixed horizons.
I do not know how my Thelma would now feel about the stunted development of the community she called home, nor what her desires might have been around the environmental vulnerabilities of the yard in which her garden blossomed. But Clifton’s closing lines of “Spring Thought” are sutured by the moans of vowels; the long oof growing and going sounds movement, a springing toward flourishing; the long u of blooms reverberates with rooms, opening a hopeful space to envelop me and my mother, once again, in our Thelma’s love. It makes me feel that our Thelma is close by, always, despite the persistent feeling of loss—of the rhythm and tone of her speech, of her smell, of her voice in song, of her physical presence, of how she felt as I nestled against her. In this way, “Spring Thought” carries for me and my mother what Clifton assures in her memoir, Generations: “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.”7
Clifton’s poem has gifted me and my mother a new room where I can sit more assuredly with the gnawing sense that things would have been different had our Thelma been with us longer in the physical world. I can settle there with the lingering worry that intensifies each year that I live beyond the age she was when she left us without warning. It is not as much an anxiety about my demise, of how I genetically carry the propensity for a similar cardiac episode. It is, rather, a persistent uncertainty of whether I am aligned with the spirit of her growing, of where she might have been leading me, and the community of her birth, had she not taken her final breaths so soon, there among her flowers.
James Manigault-Bryant is a professor of Africana studies at Williams College. A native of Bradenton, Florida, he has published essays in the CLR James Journal, Critical Sociology, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Journal of Africana Religions.
Border illustration: Close-up of flower, by Argha Saha, Agartala, Tripura, India, unsplash.com; flowers field, by Avery Thomas, unsplash.com; red roses, by Artem Saranin, pexels.com; colorful flowers in the garden, by Jeffry Surianto, pexels.com; red rose, canva.com.
NOTES
- LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
- Lucille Clifton, “Spring Thought for Thelma,” in How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, ed. Aracelis Girmay (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2020).
- Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983; repr. Boston: Mariner Books, 2003).
- Marina Magloire, “The Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton,” Paris Review, October 19, 2020, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/19/the-spirit-writing-of-lucille-clifton/; Rachel Elizabeth Harding, “Authority, History, and Everyday Mysticism in the Poetry of Lucille Clifton: A Womanist View,” Meridians 12, no. 1 (2014): 36–57.
- Cathy Carter, “‘This Was One Flood Too Many.’ Rubonia Residents Still Recovering Eight Weeks after Hurricane Idalia,” WUSF, National Public Radio, October 20, 2023, www.wusf.org/environment/2023-10-20/rubonia-residents-still-recovering-idalia; Alexa Herrera, “Manatee County Officials, Sen. Scott Give Update on Storm Recovery Efforts,” WTSP, 10 Tampa Bay, August 6, 2024, www.wtsp.com/article/weather/hurricane/hurricane-debby-manatee-county-recovery-road-closures/67-43f90155-46e9-48c3-ab17-0afc620d5d2c.
- Founded and directed by Antoinette Jackson, the Black Cemetery Network (https://blackcemeterynetwork.org) has recorded the systematic erasures of Black cemeteries throughout the South, and particularly in the Tampa Bay area. See also Paul Guzzo and Brandon Meyer, “In Search of Lost Cemeteries,” Tampa Bay Times, December 30, 2019, https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2019/special-reports/missing-tampa-cemeteries-map/, and Scott Pelley, “‘This Is Not an Isolated Story’: Forgotten Black Cemeteries Uncovered in Florida,” 60 Minutes, July 30, 2023, www.cbsnews.com/news/black-cemeteries-florida-60-minutes-transcript-2023-07-30/.
- Lucille Clifton, Generations: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1976), 78.
