Chasing Ghosts and Family History
My paternal grandfather Murphy was a ghost. A man I and my father was never meant to know. He died tragically at the young age of 22 from a short illness long ago. The little I know about my grandfather comes to me through disjointed fragments of memories told to me by older relatives. Because of my grandfather’s early death, I didn’t know many people on his side of the family. Much of my early childhood was spent being around my grandmother’s kin. I saw the face of my late grandfather for the first time a few years ago.
For the first time, a shadowy ghost became flesh and blood and I no longer had to rely on my imagination.
I must have stared at my grandfather’s photo dozens of time before I could accept the reality what I longed to see my entire life was finally here. There he was. Captured in time like a butterfly trapped in amber. In his face, I saw faint traces of my own, my father and my brothers. The ghost was alive and staring back at me across the vast chasm of time.
According to Swahili spirituality, there are two concepts of time. Sasa and Zamani. The Sasa are the living dead. They are the spirits kept alive by the memories of the living. My grandfather is still in the realm of the Sasa because many of the people who remembered my grandfather are still on his Earth. When all the people who remembered him die, his spirit will enter the realm of the Zamani- the truly dead. This is the place where myth and all the ancestors dwell. The forgotten. We honor them through the stories we tell and in the books we write across the generations. But, my grandfather didn’t leave behind any stories or books. He couldn’t read nor write.
He was a sharecropper and farmer who spent his short life tilling the soil and sweating in the hot Louisiana sun to take care of his family in a world where men of his color were treated like second-class citizens in the land of his birth.
Sometimes, I ask myself what if questions. What if my grandfather lived to be a ripe, old man my father would have known and loved for years? I would like to imagine that somewhere in an alternative reality, there is a me who got to know my paternal grandfather in the flesh who spent a thousand moments talking to and embracing him. Then again, if my grandfather never died so tragically, the chain of events that eventually lead to my birth wouldn’t have happened and I wouldn’t be here writing this essay to you at this very moment and keeping my grandfather’s spirit alive by telling his story.
