Miss Cookie-Personal Narrative

Miss Sadie

Miss Sadie no longer sits in her rocking chair on her porch on summer days. But I still can see her. The old chair squeaking with every sway of her big, brown body. Her summer dresses stained from cooking. I smell her sweet smelling kitchen. I see her gray hair pulled back in that awful, yellow banana clip. Most of all, I hear that voice. So full of character and wisdom.

I used to bring Miss Johnson cookies every summer day of 1988. I miss the days where I would sit on that shabby old porch and listen to her stories. “Melissa!” she would holler. “What “chu doin’ here? Come see me and my poor self, have ya?”

She once told me of her grandmother who escaped slavery, back when white men could only do anything, she would say. Her grandma ran for miles without food or water. It

I thought of how Blacks are treated today. I sighed. She would sing in her soulful, blaring voice, old negro hymns passed down from her mother and grand mother. I would sit there in amazement.

Once, Jimmy Taylor came walking by us yelling, “Melissa! Whattaya want with that old, fat, Black lady, any ways?”

Before I could retaliate, Miss Johnson said to me, “Now, you musn’t, we must feel sorry for that terrible child. His mother must have done gone and not thought him no manners!” She actually wanted me to bow my head and pray for him. (Even though I went to his house and punched him out the next day.)

My friends would tease me for spending the whole summer with Sadie Johnson, “The cookoo of Connecticut,” they called her. But I’m so very glad I did. She taught me then, to not care what other people thought. I learned that I could be friends with someone generations apart from my own.

My visits became less frequent when school started. I had other things to think about. Boys, clothes, grades. You know, real important stuff.

One day I was thinking, I haven’t seen Miss Sadie in a while. So after school I trotted up to her house amidst the twirling, autumn