*
Vaticinate. From the Latin vāticināt-, meaning: to foretell, predict, prognosticate, or prophesy (a future event), as in: we walked out of the Alumni Memorial Building into a gray afternoon. Six years later I’d be back in that building again when I transferred from Tennessee State University to the University of Tennessee. On the Cox Auditorium stage, Gloria Steinem would deliver a lecture and afterward I’d stand in line at the microphone to ask her what she meant by the melting pot; Lucille Clifton would read her poetry as I clutched a copy of Blessing the Boats, then wait for nearly an hour for her to sign it.
On graduation day, Mama, Uncle Joe, and Dwen, other members from both sides of the family, gathered in Thompson Boiling Arena, texting my cell phone to tell me where I could find them among all the other celebrants filling the arena with an overwhelming din of excitement.
Granddaddy, of course, wasn’t there.
After college, I pursued an MFA in poetry at the University of Texas in Austin, where I wrote poems about how Granddaddy sometimes sat leisurely in the early morning hours eating a plate of peppered cucumbers and tomatoes glazed with oil and vinegar; how he told stories to his grandchildren about singing The Lord’s Prayer on the radio and hitting a high C.
I wrote of his love for words, like transmogrification, meaning: to alter or change in form or appearance (utterly, grotesquely, or strangely), as in: after he died, I crept through one of the windows in his house, crossed the dusty seams like a seasoned robber, slipped in and out of the rooms until I found his blue robe strewn across the kitchen countertop as if he’d thrown it in haste, a last act before his death. I traced the outside stitching, felt the cold silk against my fingertips, entered through the sleeves, bearing the weight of the robe on my back, swallowed up in it until it became the very skin hanging from his bones.