The Way My Grandmother Sank

Jeff Jones

She died in the bathtub. Not from drowning. Not from old age, pills, or some grand, cinematic moment. She simply stopped. Her chest stopped rising. Her breath unthreaded from her ribs. Her body—still warm when I found her—floated in water that smelled of jasmine and lavender oil, scents she wore like a second skin. 

She died the way she lived: quiet but full of presence. 

I sat beside her on the cold linoleum, my knees pulled up, shivering but not from cold. I didn’t cry at first. I watched the water lap at her collarbone like it didn’t know what else to do. I stayed there until the sun shifted and I realized the silence in the house had changed. It wasn’t just absence—it was inheritance. 

My grandmother, Marylene Broussard, was a woman carved from contradictions. Her tongue was sharp; her hands, soft. Her laugh could roll thunder off a porch roof, but her silences were long and deliberate, as if she were always having a conversation with someone no one else could see. 

She raised me in a creaky shotgun house on the east side of New Orleans, where every floorboard knew our names. The walls held more stories than the mouths inside them. She taught me how to make roux before I could multiply fractions, told me which prayers went with which herbs, and warned me never to cut my nails at night or sweep someone’s feet unless I wanted them cursed in love.

She wasn’t what you’d call religious, but she was devout in her own way—devoted to the dirt, the river, and her dreams. She didn’t attend church but lit candles for the dead every Saturday. “God lives in the things you tend,” she’d say. “So tend well.”

My cousins said she was strange. The neighborhood kids said she was a witch. I believed them. Still do. 

She had a garden out back that grew things we never ate—plants with leaves that bled red when snapped, flowers that only bloomed under moonlight. She called it her “medicine patch.” When I got sick, she wouldn’t take me to the doctor. She’d brew something bitter, rub oil on my feet, and hum hymns no church had ever claimed. 

She was my entire world.

When I came out to her at seventeen—not in a loud declaration, but in a shaking whisper after dinner—she didn’t flinch.

“You ever heard of ‘Two-Spirit’?” she asked, like she’d been waiting for this moment. 

I shook my head, my throat tight. I was ready for disappointment, scripture, exile—the kind of pain that comes when the people who raise you don’t recognize you. 

Instead, she told me about her own grandmother, Alourdes, who walked between genders, read bones, and was buried in three different cemeteries because none of them could agree on where a “spirit-person” belonged. 

“She was the reason the storms passed us, even when the map said we were in the eye,” Marylene said. “The reason your great-grandpa never lost a crop. She knew how to ask the land for mercy.” 

That night, she made gumbo and set the table for three, even though it was just the two of us. “Some spirits come to listen,” she explained. “Especially when we tell the truth.” 

She never once misgendered me. She called me “they” like it was stitched into her bones. It was the first time I felt named, not labeled. 

But that’s the thing about people like her—they live entire lives behind curtains. There were rooms in her heart she never let me into. And I didn’t knock. I was too grateful for the acceptance I had to risk disrupting it. 

It wasn’t until after she died that I realized how much I never asked. 

After the funeral—small, humid, and full of the wrong kind of hymns—I stayed behind to clean the house. My family didn’t argue. None of them wanted to sort through the “strange old woman’s” things. They took what was obvious—jewelry, keepsakes, a few jars of her preserves—and left the rest. 

I found the shoebox on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, tucked behind a stack of Bible study books I’d never once seen her open. 

Inside were letters. Maybe thirty or forty. All addressed to the same name: Ida Mae Moreau. Some sealed, some not. Some written in fountain pen, others in shaky pencil. They spanned from 1957 to 1995. 

I read them all in one night. 

“I miss the way you made silence feel like a song.” 

“Sometimes I dream about the house we never built—the one with the yellow porch swing, the one you said we’d fill with foolish little gods and braver versions of ourselves.” 

“I wore that blouse you liked, the one with the tiny pink flowers. I pretended you could see me.” 

There were no declarations, no scandalous details. Just longing. Just memory. The kind that folds itself into corners and waits. 

Ida Mae died in 1998. I found her obituary in an old newspaper archive. Schoolteacher. Never married. No surviving children. 

And suddenly, I understood the way Marylene moved through the world—half alive in the present, half haunted by a version of herself that never had permission to exist. 

I asked my mother if she knew who Ida Mae was. 

“Some girl from back in the day,” she said, distracted, folding laundry. “I think they were close, but Daddy didn’t like her much. Thought she was a bad influence.” 

Bad influence. That’s how they named Black queer love in the 1950s. Dangerous. Shameful. Sinful. Invisible. 

My grandmother never said she was queer. Never said she wasn’t. But queerness isn’t always a flag you wave—it’s a frequency. A vibration in the marrow. A thing you recognize by how it moves, not how it’s labeled. 

She wore long skirts and gold hoops, loved Dinah Washington and hard peppermint. She didn’t flinch at thunder, and she never let me cut my hair on a Tuesday. She believed in signs. In spirits. In love that crossed thresholds. 

And I, her queer grandchild, born into a world marginally softer than hers, inherited not just her stories but her silences. 

It made me wonder how many other Marylenes there were. How many Ida Maes lived and died with their mouths full of unsaid devotion. How many letters sat in boxes under beds while the world forgot their names. 

I burned the letters one by one, not to erase them but to release them. I whispered every name aloud before striking the match. It felt like a ceremony, like a secret finally being fed to the sky. 

And when I scattered her ashes in the bayou, I didn’t ask permission. 

She’d told me once, “If I go first, don’t put me in no cemetery. I don’t want to be boxed in, even in death.” 

So I took her to the bend in the water where the clay turned red and the cattails leaned like old women listening for gossip. I wore all white. I poured her into the wind and let it take her. It felt like the first time she was truly free. 

Later, I stood there barefoot, mud pulling at my ankles, and I heard it—soft, beneath the cicadas and frogs: 

A humming. 

The same melody she used to sing while shelling peas. I never knew the words, and she never explained them. She’d just hum when the house was too quiet, like she was calling something back from the dead. 

And I thought maybe she was. 

Maybe she was humming to Ida Mae. Maybe Ida Mae was humming back. 

Maybe they were finally building that house by the sea. 

There’s a story Black folks don’t tell often, because it was beaten out of us, legislated away, turned to pulp by churches we were told would save us. It’s the story of queer Black folks—not just the brave ones who marched or married, but the ones who loved quietly. Who carried their queerness like contraband. Who translated their desire into food, fashion, rhythm, and ritual. 

They were our seamstresses, our teachers, our Sunday school pianists. Our aunts who “never married.” Our uncles who kept beautiful homes with “roommates.” 

And our grandmothers, who died in bathtubs still scented with the names they never got to say aloud. 

Sometimes, I still dream of her. She’s younger in the dreams. Her hair is loose, natural, falling down her back. She’s barefoot in the kitchen, cooking something that smells like roasted okra and secrets. There’s jazz playing. And someone else is there—just out of view. Laughing softly. Singing along. 

I wake up feeling loved and a little lost, like I’ve just been somewhere sacred and forgotten the address. 

In those moments, I light a candle. I speak her name. And I hum that song I still don’t know the words to. 

Because some stories don’t end. They just echo.

And some grandmothers don’t die. They sink into us.

And stay.

Jeff Jones was born on October 20, 1992, and raised in the heartbeat of Chicago. As a queer, nonbinary Black writer rooted in oral traditions and Southern folklore, Jones uses creative nonfiction to honor the voices buried by shame, erasure, or assimilation. Now in his thirties, Jones continues to nurture his craft with intention and wonder. Each piece he writes is an offering — to his family, his community, and the countless unnamed ancestors who made room for his voice. Through language, he seeks not just to tell stories, but to keep them alive.