Last night, I had another dream of my great-grandmother Amaya Hardy-Rougeaux, and just as she often does she spoke to me without speaking a word.  I am starting to notice that, she comes to me when I am troubled, and she brings me great comfort. 

The first time she appeared in my dreams, I saw her face as a cartoon up in the Heavens next to the moon, but larger.  She floated down to Earth extremely fast, and hovered over my face as I slept.  That night back in 2002, she told me many secrets about the spirit world and I never forgot the peace I felt in my soul while with her.

This time, she told me to share the story of her faith with the world, and I hear her speaking to me now as I type.  It's funny because when I was growing up with her, I never understood much of what she said.  My sweet, God fearing, "MaMa", spoke only French, but she learned how to say, "God Bless You", in English and she said it often to everyone she encountered daily.  She constantly talked to herself in French, and my grandmother would tell me that MaMa was talking to God, and praying for all of us.

MaMa lived with my grandmother the last thirty years of her life, and one month shy of making one hundred and two years old the Lord took her home while she slept like a baby. 

My mother was the only one of her sisters to never marry, and since she went to college and worked two jobs to care for me, I spent much of my time growing up at my grandmother's house. I was taught to care for my great-grandmother in her old age, and I admired her dearly.  She called me "Cher Bebe", which means dear baby.  I remember feeding her, giving her baths, changing her diapers, turning her, dressing her wounds, and combing her hair daily.  Sometimes she would moan out loud saying, "ohh Yay Yay", and then she would wink at me and say, "God bless you".  One time I counted, and she told me, "God bless you", twenty-six times in one hour.

I would crawl into bed with her and sleep in her arms, up until I was a teenager and my grandmother told me to stop because she was in too much pain.  Close to the end of her life, we had to cover the mirrors in her bedroom, because she would get frightened of her own image or she would talk to herself thinking that she was talking to her grandmother.

The story she wants me to share take place in Basile, Louisiana.  MaMa lived in an Indian village, and she was a fifteen year old virgin when Pappy at the age of forty-seven came to buy her from her father. 

She was part Indian and Spanish, and he was a mulatto being that his mother was an African slave, and his father was the Master.  He was privileged, and he lived in the Mansion with his white brothers and sisters, and he passed as a white man.  To keep the "White man" from taking over their village she was sold, and banished from the village forever.

After giving him four children, the nerves in her back went numb, and she became paralyzed from the waist down.  For three years she could not walk, and she was in constant pain.  Pappy then took MaMa in the back of his buggy to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and he wrapped her in sack clothe from the neck all the way down to her feet.  He laid her on top of the springs, and the hot water continuously washed over her heating her soul. 

The Indian healer in the town, anointed her with oil, and prayed for her to be healed.  When they unwrapped her, she got up and walked away like she was never afflicted.  The faith of my great-grandparents combined made her whole again, and she later had five more children as a blessing from God. 

The ninth child was my grand-mother Jesse, and she said that as a sacrifice, and to thank God for what he had done MaMa gave up supper since that day at Hot Springs, and she went without supper for over seventy years.  Pappy died when MaMa was still a young woman, but she never remarried, she went without a man for over sixty years as well.

The doctors said when MaMa died at one hundred and one years old, that she had the heart of a healthy fifteen year old, even though she smoked her pipe with Five Brothers tobacco everyday, all day.   It is ironic that I had five sons, when I think about that.

My grandmother Maw-Maw, also told me the story of the time in the early 1940's when word came to their small town in Basile, Louisiana that the image of Jesus' face was on a window pane in Lake Charles, Louisiana (my hometown). 

The entire town left on horses, buggies, and walking to go see this image of their Lord Savior Jesus Christ, and it took days for many of them to get there.  She was just a little girl, and she remembers looking at the window, but she could not see what the elders saw. 

This is the kind of faith that is embe dded into my spirit, and no man, or woman can ever shake that foundation from my soul.  I pray that you all had a person as great as my MaMa to look up to while growing up, and if not I hope you will soon meet someone like her.  It is no coincidence that she named my grandmother Jesse either......

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: Isaiah 11:1 (King James Version)