At the Table

It’s night outside, and I’m sitting at the table in the same place that I always have. I’m with my grandmother, my father’s mother, Edna Etah Thompson Kirkpatrick. I called her Gammy, then, when I was ten. I still do, especially when I recall such nights in her living room-turned-dining room with the whole family gathered around her immaculate, fourteen-foot table. The white tablecloth has been laid, and the red linen napkins are in their rings. It’s Christmas night. Most everyone is here—my parents and brothers, my aunt, uncle, and cousins from Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Gammy and Granddaddy. We’re all dressed up nicely, as if we hadn’t just been playing with our new family video game in our pajamas all day. From my seat at Gammy’s right, I can see out of the big, triple window that faces the street. I can see the twinkle of the candles in the light posts that flank either side of the driveway and the beautiful red ribbons spiraling down from the hurricane globes. It’s elegant. It’s peaceful. It’s Christmas. It’s home.

As I sit at the table, my mouth waters at the prospect of all my favorites: brown rice, macaroni and cheese, green beans, butterbeans (made especially for me), honey ham, deviled eggs, fruit salad (made especially for my brother, Walker, with an orange sauce good enough—or almost good enough—to drink straight out of the bowl), and biscuits. My grandmother made all of it—for every single family holiday. She has two ovens—one upstairs in the kitchen, and one downstairs in the kitchenette. She switches out honey ham for turkey, and dressing and giblet gravy on Thanksgiving Day. This is a food economy, and Gammy is in charge.  

As a child, I don’t know how Gammy knows all she knows, how to cook all these foods, but she makes it look easy to an unknowing but aspiring child. Every eye of the stove is red-hot with a different pot preparing some part of the meal for the entire day. There are never fewer than two things in the oven, and the best is when the biscuits are baking because you can smell them all around the house. I am never around to see her make biscuit dough and cut it into small circles, but I’m always there when they’re ready to be taken out. Gammy has one way of presenting biscuits and one way only. She’s taught this to me and I know it by heart. First, you put the warming stone in the oven at the same time you put the biscuits in. The warming stone is a flat, clay disk that I’ve never seen in any household but the Thompsons’ or the Kirkpatricks’, but it gets removed from the hot oven with a careful, pot-holdered hand and a “Now, you watch out now. I’m about to open this oven,” as if the oven were threatening to leap out and smother me with its heat if I stood too close. The warming stone goes in the bottom of the breadbasket, underneath two tea towels. Gammy always uses two tea towels to wrap up the buttery biscuits. Otherwise, they’ll get cold, and you just can’t have cold biscuits.  

At our table, at Gammy’s table, everyone eats biscuits last as, my dad says, our “pre-dessert.” Kirkpatricks love dessert and all the steps leading to it, but I’ll take biscuits any day, and Gammy knows it. She puts both the grape jelly and breadbasket in front of my place at the dinner table. We pass everything around the table, family-style, counterclockwise. It’s orderly and right, as though there are no other ways to distribute food because this is how Kirkpatricks eat dinner together. At ten, I can handle serving my own food, but somehow Gammy, or my oldest cousin, Vivienne, to my right, seems to always help me so I don’t get burned. I don’t mind, though, because the casserole dish for the macaroni and cheese—arguably one of the most exciting things on the table—is hot, heavy, and bigger than me, and I want a lot of macaroni and cheese. But, when everything has finally made the rounds, the biscuits end up back right in front of me, and I know I’m set. As soon as I finish my food and the stories really get going, I can sit and quietly serve myself biscuit after biscuit, slicing them in half and smearing jelly on each of the warm, buttery, soft sides.  

My grandmother and I sit together at the foot of the table and listen. Granddaddy, the natural storyteller, usually heads up the conversation. He tells about his various hunting trips or fishing trips or goodness knows what. I remember one in particular, from when he was in the army. Granddaddy was always a heavy sleeper, and everyone knew that. I was always sent into the den to wake him from his afternoon nap when dinner was ready; I’d kiss him on the forehead and say his name and he’d wake up, but not unless I gave him that kiss on the forehead. Anything could be happening around him or any noise could clatter in the kitchen, but he would only wake up to a kiss. It was my special gift, he said. So, to hear him tell about how he was sleeping so soundly on the hard ground in Korea was not at all difficult to believe. His stories were mostly funny, ending in a punchline of sorts, followed by his heavy, breathy, chuckled laughter. Apparently, he had been sleeping so soundly and so loudly that the sound of his snoring had alerted a wild boar to his camp whereabouts. The other men with him heard the boar and got up immediately and fled for the trees, knowing that such a strong animal could tear a man to pieces. Granddaddy, apparently, slept through the entire ordeal and the boar simply walked in circles around him as he slept, and the other men did nothing. In the morning, Granddaddy woke up to find footprints all around him, and just shrugged it off.  

We had heard this story many, many times before. And many others like it. Granddaddy told stories, my Aunt Amber told stories, my dad told stories, and my Gammy and I listened. At some point, I learned that if I sat there quietly, the grown-ups would forget that I was there. They would just talk and talk and laugh and I would get to be a part of the group that could hear, too. If I laughed too much or tried to give any story of my own, it would never measure up. They would look at me with those unmistakable grown-up eyes that said, “You’re a child. You’re speaking. It’s kind of adorable, but we really don’t want to listen,” and eventually ask if I wanted to go play with the blocks on the floor with my brother—or worse, if I would mind grabbing the dishes to begin taking them into the kitchen. Ugh. There was nothing worse than doing the dishes. It took twenty minutes but in child time, like dog years, that’s an eternity.  

Gammy never had to do the dishes. She always did the cooking.  

I open the tea towel, grab a biscuit, place it on my plate, replace the towel, and grab the jelly and the jelly spoon. Gammy always said that I had to use the jelly spoon to serve jelly onto my plate and then use my knife to spread it. I thought it was a waste of time, but Gammy said it, so I did it. Besides, I never liked jelly stains on white Christmas china, one of the best parts about Christmas, a part that makes you realize Christmas is actually coming. The plates are a beautiful white with a green Christmas tree in the center. The tree looks old—it has candles on it for lights—but bright and fun: there’s a little toy train underneath the tree. I now have that Christmas china as my own, and I know that Christmas at my house will be beautiful, just as it always was, and it will be right, as Gammy’s always was. It is my avenue through which I can tell my children or grandchildren, one day, “You are welcome here. Come, sit at the table with me.”

For Christmas dinner at Gammy’s, I get to set the table, and that usually gets me out of doing the dishes afterwards. She taught me how to do it the right way. She trusts me to be careful, exacting, and I am. I first make sure that there are exactly enough chairs for everyone who is supposed to be coming. I space the chairs out evenly so that the table looks neat and orderly, and I always make sure that I get to sit in one of the big, white dining chairs. Then, I put a Christmas plate at each place, Christmas tree facing the correct way so we don’t have any upside down candles. The bottom edge of the plate is three or four finger-widths away from the edge of the table. We don’t have placemats for this meal because Gammy has already laid the tablecloth. For nice meals, we never use placemats. Then comes the fun part. I get to hold a giant handful of silverware and walk around the table, around and around, placing each utensil ever so carefully and uniformly. First, the forks. The forks go on the left side of the plate, with one finger between the salad fork and the dinner fork, and two fingers between the dinner fork and the plate. The bottom of the dinner fork is lined up with the plate, and the salad fork is centered vertically beside the dinner fork. I place the knife, then the spoon, in the same way on the right side of the plate. This always takes a long time, but I don’t mind; it suits me. My favorite princess as a child was Cinderella—not the glass slipper and the happily-ever-after part, but the beginning—when she does all of her chores so dutifully and gracefully. Each time I got to set the table, knowing I was doing it the right way and that I was doing it for the family, I felt like that dignified scullery maid, and I loved it.

So, I position each drinking glass directly above the point of the knife, the holly leaf design always facing forward, so you know it’s Christmas. Then, Gammy comes in to help me get the linen napkins from wherever she keeps them all neatly pressed and folded, while I go back to the corner cabinet in the kitchen and count out the correct number of wooden, Christmas napkin rings that match the holly leaf design on the rim of the glasses and on the edge of the plates. Gammy and I pinch the napkins in their middle and slide the napkin rings down over them so there’s a point at the top and a flare at the bottom. Then, I go back around the table to place these beside the salad forks. When that is done, I go to the bottom drawer of the chest in the den where there are markers and crayons and stickers and paper and scissors, and I sit at the kitchen table as Gammy cooks, asking her how to spell everyone’s name. I love making place cards, but I always feel weird about writing “Joe” for my dad and “Angela” for my mom, so I just write “Daddy” and “Mommy” and hope that they can figure it out. Then, I stand back and look at the beautiful dining room. It is orderly and proper and right, and I always feel proud that I got to help make it that way.  

Before I got there to set the table, Gammy had already decorated it. The white tablecloth with the beautiful scroll pattern is spread evenly around the table, and there is not one wrinkle in it. You can’t even see the creases where it had been folded after Thanksgiving because she took the time to iron it. On top of the table, running almost the whole length of the table, is an arrangement of magnolia leaves from the tree outside, holly berries from the bushes by the west wall of the house, gold-colored beads, crystal candlesticks, and red candles. Hanging from the chandelier by red ribbons are red and white blown glass ornaments. On the buffet, there’s a chocolate cake with a wreath of holly around it that just sits there for the whole month as a decoration, and I never know why because it seems like a waste of a good cake to me. But it’s there, because it’s supposed to be there, according to Gammy.

Best of all, in the corner close to the entrance to the parlor, stands the Christmas tree. Gammy has an artificial Christmas tree in this room because of the big windows that face the street. At night, when it’s dark, you can see the perfectly shaped tree with its perfectly placed lights and ornaments, and the big red bow at the top of it, sending spiraling ribbon curls down the sides of the tree from outside on the street, mimicking the light posts at the end of the driveway. Gammy has a wooden train underneath her tree just like the one on the Christmas china, and my brother loves to play with it. It always gets buried, though, once all of the family members arrive with all of their presents.

I didn’t know it then, but Christmas, my grandmother’s Christmas, is what makes us feel like a family. We come from all over, and we all gather together to hear the same stories around the same table that has a seat for everyone. There are presents for everyone, and something special on the table for everyone. And all is right. The details of Christmas are Gammy’s, and so the family is Gammy’s. The table is Gammy’s, and so the family is Gammy’s. And that family is where I find my name and my stories and my storytelling. That family is where I find belonging and purpose and training. I know I am a Kirkpatrick because Gammy made me into one, which is funny, since she, being the matriarch, married into the family. She married into it and made it her own and passed it down to her own so that her own might keep it and know that they belong. We haven’t had a family meal since she died, and I miss those and her. We don’t really belong to one another anymore and Christmas hasn’t been right.  

But, she gave me her Christmas china so that, one day, when I am a matriarch, I can let my family belong at the table. And I hope I do it right. The careful alignment of the utensils and the orientation of the holly leaves on the glasses all bespeak a quiet love that sits at the foot of the table while the head of the table keeps the stories going. Edna Etah Thompson Kirkpatrick is quiet at the table, watching me eat biscuit after biscuit, listening to stories that I know she must’ve heard a bunch more than I have. She and I sit there together, and if I don’t have to go do the dishes later, we sit there until we’re the last ones at the table. Then, she looks at me and says something like, “Well, Lucy girl, looks like they’ve all gone and left us.” But I don’t care. I don’t want to go play with my cousins. I want to sit and eat my Gammy’s biscuits and hear my Granddaddy’s stories and watch the candlelight flicker in the hurricane globes by the sides of the driveway outside the triple window.