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My mother leaned over Minnie Lee, who looked miserable in her hospital bed.
"Are you ready to see Jesus?" she asked. A nod was all that Minnie Lee could muster as her daughter stood at the foot of the bed signing the paper to stop the life support machines. "You're going to make a beautiful angel," she said. "And you'll see our little mama."
"Our little mama."
She meant her own mother, my grandmother, Alice Lee Lane, who had raised Minnie Lee. They said it was the medication making her fade in and out, but from where I stood in the corner of the room, it looked to me as if Minnie Lee's life was flashing before her eyes.
It was summer in Douglas, Ga., and 12-year-old Minnie Lee Walton was at Alice's, where she could pretend to be the eldest of four girls instead of being the seventh child of a dozen.
Minnie Lee and Alice loved each other like they were family. It was coincidence that their middle names were both Lee, but it couldn't have been more fitting; they were twin souls, both of them sweet-natured and both of them colorblind.
Alice was saying goodbye until the next visit to the family's fishing camp, when she would bring Minnie Lee something nice. But the girl didn't want anything trivial, like a new dress, or a doll. She wanted to be part of Alice's family, and said so.
So Alice asked her husband. G.A. Lane was a forward-thinking man. It was 1930, and the world was changing, just not as fast in the leisurely South as it was elsewhere. He knew how naive his darling wife was. And being from a family of farmers, he knew what it meant to uproot a living thing and plant it in foreign soil. But he could never refuse Alice anything.
G.A. and Alice took turns behind the wheel to Bradenton, stopping by the side of the dusty road to have cold fried chicken dinners, picnic-style. Soon after they got home, my mother, her two sisters and Minnie Lee - now the eldest of four girls - were playing paper dolls together and having tea parties.
Over the years, as much as everyone's upbringing would allow, Minnie Lee was considered part of the family. G.A. used to pay the movie theater man extra to let them in after hours so that she wouldn't have to sit in the balcony. Alice made her the same beautiful dresses that she made for her daughters. They drove her to a black church every Sunday, where she met the Rev. Edward Cotton, whom she later married and had six children with.
Still, she didn't sleep in the same rooms with the other girls. She didn't eat at the dining room table.
But years later, like the honorary matron of the family, Minnie Lee took the front row aisle seat at Alice's funeral.
And this year, I took my mother to Minnie Lee's funeral, where we sat in the back.
They called it a "homegoing celebration," and most everyone wore white in remembrance of Christ's resurrection. Leave it to the white girl to wear a black dress. But that was the least of what I learned.
I learned that Minnie Lee had marched for civil rights in Bradenton while her white "family" was blissfully oblivious.
And I learned that she hadn't told some of the church members about us. I wanted them to know that a white family and a black girl managed to live as a family and love each other in the South in the 1930s and that it wasn't perfect, but that it meant something.
So in between the joyful singing and the heartfelt preaching, during the part of the service when people were sharing their memories, I walked to the front to speak, feeling conspicuous and foreign.
But as I fumbled through my thoughts, wondering if I was revealing a dark family secret, Minnie Lee's daughter smiled at me with her mother's sweet smile and nodded. Murmurs of "Say so" and "Yes, Lord" helped me express what was in my heart, and the acceptance I sensed made me feel like part of the family.
Almost.
Like Minnie Lee must have felt living in my granddaddy's house.
- Cynthia Lane is a freelance writer based in Bradenton Beach.