My mother’s mother, my maternal grandmother, told me she had been born within a veil. In other words, she was born with a caul, or mask formed by the amniotic fluid, covering her face.
Tradition in the southern United States, and other places, holds that children born with a caul or mask covering their faces, possess special gifts. Some of these gifts bear paranormal or psychic abilities.
My grandmother could see ghosts. Though modest and quiet about her abilities, she told me that she communed with the dead. She seemed to have become aware of this capability when her beloved and eldest brother, was killed by a white man who then places his body on a rail road tracks then dismembered by a train rolling over it.
Devastated, my grandmother, searched for her brother at night, and encountered his spirit. Their coming together, his spirit or soul meeting her still alive and in the flesh, appeared to have been mutual, he wanting to reconnect with her and she seeking out him.
What most amazed me was how she possessed no fear. She relayed the story of her searching for and encountering her eldest brother and sibling as if it were the expected thing to do once a loved one has died, and so violently.
My grandmother told me this and other stories with firm confidence in what she had done, and experienced as if her experiences were a natural part of life. She also spoke of looking over her left shoulder and seeking spirits, what we call ghosts, adding, “If I don’t want to see them, I don’t look over my left shoulder.”
She spoke as if the dead had no power over her, rather she possessed with her ability to see them, the choice to acknowledge their presence and witness them in their searching.
I now realize the way in which she shared these stories of her life bequeathed me comfortable acceptance and natural understanding of the unseen aspects of life, those things invisible that exist within and among us and possess no less, if not more, powerful than the physical objects which we see and can touch.
My mother, daughter of my maternal grandmother, found little comfort in her mother’s psychic and paranormal abilities. The latter provided refuge for me from my mother’s anxieties and fears that stoked her anger and episodes of violent abuse.
(to be continued …)
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