Brother Robert by Annye C. Anderson

Author:Annye C. Anderson [Annye Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

II

THE AFTERLIFE OF ROBERT JOHNSON

CHAPTER 6

Brother Robert’s death began a time of pain for our family. Within four years, both of my parents were dead, Sister Carrie and Lewis had left Memphis, and my sister Charlyne and myself were broken apart. I went through this all before I reached the age of sixteen.

My father didn’t have a lot to tell girls, but he taught me every tool he had. I followed him around and helped with his work. I know he worked mostly for whites, and blacks could hardly pay him. My father had cancer, before that was well understood or talked about. He worked up until two weeks before he died. He was on our roof fixing a leak, and he had a fall. He’d gotten weak, and that put him to bed for good. He never was a lay-around person, always energetic and on the move.

We still lived in the duplex at the rear of 285 Georgia Avenue. My father was ailing in one half of the duplex, and since it was Thanksgiving, we were over on the other side cooking a wild rabbit. My older sister Charlyne and I had to watch the rabbit because my mother stayed with my father. I would come in and speak to him. He did know that he was dying, I was looking at his mouth when he said, “This is the end.” I never will forget. He didn’t appear to be afraid. I didn’t see the last breath go.

He passed on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1940. I hope he’s remembered as Robert Johnson’s first guitar teacher.

My mother, sister, and me went to live with the Comas family. Brother Pete took us all in. He was a very kind man. He and my father had grown up together. In addition to his son, son’s wife, and their children, it was a crowded house. We didn’t have much room to bring anything from the old house, but put my father’s trunk in the hallway, where it sat for a couple of years.

My mother still worked hard. She didn’t go back to picking cotton, she worked at the Kelly home, helping our white friends. She had high blood pressure and a kidney problem, and doctors didn’t know how to treat it.

I went over to see my mother at the hospital when she took ill. This was only a year and a half after my father passed. She wanted to know why everything was so dark in there. I didn’t realize she had lost her eyesight.

I was fifteen when my mother died. My friend Baby Lee’s mother, Mrs. Irby, made my mother’s shroud from white fabric I picked out at Goldsmith’s. She told me you don’t bury a woman my mother’s age in white, but Mrs. Irby made the shroud anyhow.

It was in March 1942, with the funeral held at New Light Baptist Church, next door to the Comas house. There was no room next to my father, so she’s buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, diagonally across from where my father is buried at Mt.

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