When we were children, "Brenda" would come in the mornings to help cook and clean. She was the helper, not the maid. At least that’s what my grandmother insisted on calling her--"Brenda the helper." She was also Brenda the storyteller. When we children weren't supposed to be listening, she told stories about who stole the money off the kitchen counter when my grandmother left the room—was a strange looking man who just walk in off the road and tek it just so, and no matter how I try I couldn’t move mistris. Is like me foot dem get pin down.
And then there were the stories she told us children. They didn’t seem to have a point, but we never minded. They were stories about young men and women meeting in school and falling madly in love and then graduating and getting married and living good together. She would change the names, but the stories all followed the same fairytale path: the couple never faced adversities, nothing ever intervened, the setting or tone never changed, and the ending was always predictable.
The stories' countermoral center was the narrator (Brenda) whose life was full of adversities, children, men (she never married), and who had never attended formal school. Her stories about unhampered love, about attaining a satisfactory level of education (for the time period), and about eternal marital happiness were probably her means of creative escape and maybe even an expression of her hopes for us children. The unchanging moral message of those stories, which was completely different from the way she lived, was my first introduction to fiction . . . those, and the ones she told my grandmother when something or other went missing in the house.
