The Sweet & Sour Taste of Forgiveness

Anytime October rolls around, I think about pomegranates.  

When I was a girl in the 60’s in NW Louisiana, we didn’t eat a lot of candy or Little Debbie cakes, so when those sweet and sour pomegranates got ready, we were excited.

My Mamaw McCann had a large, beautiful pomegranate tree in her back yard.  Once a year, we made the 12 mile drive up to her house to get our ONE pomegranate of the season.  

One.  Only one.  One pomegranate each…

Mamaw was a little mean like that.

She would let those ripe, luscious fruits fall to the ground and rot before she’d let us have more than one.

I remember as a little girl thinking how bewildering that was…seeing so many fruits available but only being allowed one…but I did what good little chubby, freckled-face girls did, and I picked out the biggest, reddest one I could find, and gave Mamaw one of the few hugs she got from me each year, and said shyly, “Thank you, Mamaw.”

I remember seeing the pomegranates show up in the Piggly Wiggly in Springhill sometimes, but we never bought those.  They were expensive, and as much as I would have liked to have more than one a year, I did feel some sense of pride that we had a family member—all be it a mean one—who grew these in her back yard.

Each year, up to Sarepta we would go…to get our one pomegranate…

I’m not sure how my mother knew it was time to go get that October treat each year.  Did Mamaw call?  If she had a phone, I don’t remember it.  Did she send word through the Webster Parish grapevine?  Was there some sort of sign that appeared to those Pentecostal family members that Mamaw’s pomegranates were ready?  A sign in the heavens?  

I have no idea.  I was a child and didn’t need to know the logistics of such things.  It was my job to make that pilgrimage past the little white house, around the impressive snowball bush and four o’clocks, steering clear of the smoke house, over to that tree by the pasture fence…and make the once-a-year choice of which pomegranate would go home with me, to be eaten at a decided-upon time, outside, where I could drip all I wanted to, and savor each sour, seed-heavy bite…and experience a taste so unique, I can eat one now and be right back there on a chilly, Louisiana afternoon eating one of Mamaw’s fruits.   

But only one…

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when the elders in the family began to be willing to start telling some stories about my ancestors.  I was always eager to know the truth about the old people in those weird, kind of-creepy pictures, but I found that my mama and her people seemed hesitant to tell us any of the “bad stuff.”  We young’uns could always sense when we had stumbled upon a taboo subject.  Glances would be made from eyes that tried to hide sorrow and sometimes shame…and in their fierce love and loyalty to family…good AND bad…the subject would be swiftly changed.  I respectfully think that was a mistake on their part.  Eventually understanding where I came from helped me on my journey…understanding the WHY of some things made forgiveness easier, somehow.

When I finally began to hear the stories about my father’s mother, her selfishness and unkind attitude toward others began to make a bit more sense.  When I became a mother myself, and then later a grandmother, my heart began to soften towards the one I called Mamaw.  When I heard the stories of the death of her mother when she and her twin sister were only four…how their daddy just couldn’t take care of them, so he dropped them at an orphanage in Baton Rouge where she lived for several years…how she was adopted by a family, not for love, but basically as an indentured servant…how she married my Papaw when she was 13, in hopes of escaping some of the pain – pain some of which I’m sure no one knows fully the extent.  But when she became Ethel McCann, it didn’t take long for her to realize she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire…

Ethel McCann

She lived with poverty and pain her whole life.  She learned to farm and to raise a garden, to butcher a pig and to cook the best buttermilk cornbread in NW Louisiana.  She learned to survive.

She bore six children, sent two sons to war, had a mentally handicapped son at a time when that was considered shameful, and she buried a baby at four months old.  She seemed to take baby William’s death hard, but she showed little emotion when her husband wouldn’t let her buy a tombstone for their baby boy.  No one knew the depth of that pain until 40 years later, on the day her husband died, and she left her house and went to buy a tombstone…not just for her husband but for their son who had died 40 years before.

These are just a few of many stories…some of which I’m sure she took to her grave.  But suffice to say, from the stories that have been willing to be told, pain and bitterness were as plentiful in Mamaw’s life as were turnip greens and smoked ham hocks.

So, I began to understand that somehow in her perspective on things, one pomegranate was surely enough for her grandchildren.  After all…they would need to be tough to survive.

This year, our pomegranate tree here on our farm in the Florida Panhandle had a bumper crop.  The prolific rain caused some of them to drop before they could ripen, but the tree was loaded.  Our grandchildren ate every fruit we had available.  There were no limits on how many they could have.  

You know what?  Healing is beautiful that way…healing makes us open and generous…healing makes us able to see the big picture…healing empowers us to forgive those who might have done better if they had had better opportunities.  

Healing gives all the pomegranates away, feeling no need to hold back for some skewed unexplainable position of self-preservation.

And if Mamaw could have been here when my pomegranates got ready, she could have eaten every single one.  And I like to think we might have laughed and maybe even cried together about it all…because now, surely, I can understand just a little better, and that makes the pomegranates taste just a little better, too.