Sandra Hopkins is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
How did my grandpa, Papa Hop, know that it would be impossible for me not to put my tongue in the space where my first baby tooth had come out? How could he predict that all on its own my untamed tongue would find my soft, raw gum and seek to massage it? I wanted a gold tooth just like his. His teeth gleamed as he spoke. A piece of Timothy hay he was chewing on moved up and down as he shared the essence of his oral phenomenon.
“You will get a gold tooth, too,” Papa Hop said, with all sincerity. “Whenever a tooth falls out, if you don’t put your tongue in the hole, a gold one will come in to take the place of your missing tooth. As long you don’t put your tongue in the empty space.”
He sat in his Sunday suit with his legs crossed the way a lady does, next to his Mission oak desk. The typewriter where he had typed years of sermons sat on the desk. He was still wearing his hat and it was cocked back on his head. I stood silent, listening, watching his face for clues. Trying to keep my tongue from moving. I figured the best way to do that was not to talk.
But, before the day was over, before my grandpa even finished telling me the secret, my tongue had already misbehaved. It found its way into the fresh hole in my mouth and felt around the tender empty space. Felt for the sharp edges of the new tooth breaking through the gum. This was my first chance, but not my last, to get a gold tooth. I was just five years old when my grandfather planted the seed of wonderment. Curiosity was born along with a delight in tall tales and a belief in miracles.
What did he do to keep from sticking his own tongue in the hollow caverns when he lost a tooth? I wasn’t yet born when he lost his baby teeth. Did he get the gold teeth only when he was older and had learned to control his tongue? When I could write, I would call my story The Mystery of the Gold Teeth.
Papa Hop had more than one gold tooth. He must have kept his tongue in place, while mine wandered. He told me other stories, and I listened. He took my small hand in his old ones while I stood before him. Always seated at his desk, his hat tilted back on his head so I could see his face and narrow nose, a nose that mine would later resemble, with a bit of hay in his mouth. He told picture stories. One tale about a fox running after a rabbit all the while drawing on my hand with pen from point to point to show the route of the chase. At the end, a picture of a rabbit appeared on my hand where the dots were connected. He was unconcerned about the ink on my skin. He laughed.
“Now you can carry that story with you,” he said. I never wanted to wash my hands again.
He was a preacher, and my father was a “preacher’s son.” Papa Hop had promised his mama on her death bed that he would never play the fiddle again. That’s when the music stopped. And his preaching began. She believed music was of the devil.
My mother and father lived on Papa Hop’s land, before I was born. My older sister says it’s almost like we had two families. She and my sister, who lived in what had once been his country store in Danville, when my parents were young, make up our first family. Grandma looked after my sisters and cousins while my mother worked part-time, and my aunt worked in the mill. My father was away on a seven-month Navy cruise. With a six-year gap in between, the three younger children, including me, make up the second family.
But I think of myself as the bridge. After I was born in Staunton, Virginia, my father retired from the Navy and started a business in Norfolk. That is when my younger brother and sister were born. Five children in all, with me in the middle.
To visit Papa Hop and Grandma every few years, the five of us had to get out of bed at what my mother called an “ungodly hour” to travel before sunup. I watched the moon out the window of our Nash Rambler as it followed us in the dark from Norfolk to Danville. Since my grandpa was so close to God, teaching himself the Bible and how to be a preacher, I believed both would forgive us for getting up at an Un-Godly Hour. On the trip me and my brother and sisters flopped all over the backseat of the car sans seat belts to hold us in place while our car rounded steep mountains and burst from behind tall trucks to pass before the double line was visible. My mother held our baby sister on her lap. My siblings and I pushed and shoved and stuck our naughty tongues out at each other and guessed at how many miles to go on a road that seemed endless, until we all fell asleep. Which was the purpose of getting up at the Un-Godly hour—so my parents could eventually make the drive in peace.
No matter what time we arrived, Papa Hop was waiting for us at the end of the dirt driveway. That’s another mystery to me. We only had landlines then for calling. Did he miraculously sense when our green Rambler contrasting with the red clay soil would come to a halt right in front of him? Or did he get up at the crack of dawn when his rooster crowed and wait at length for the seven of us to appear?
I jumped from the car and hugged him. I could smell his oldness. He pinched my cheek hard, so hard the tears almost came to my eyes. I knew exactly what he would say. Between gritted gold teeth as he pinched, he always said, “How sweet it is! How sweet it is!”
In Norfolk, we lived in a strictly constructed triangle. Home, school, church. To visit my grandparents was to venture outside the triangle, extending the hypotenuse, and enlarging my world. My grandparents’ home in Danville, a southern cotton mill town, where my grandfather had worked as a loom fixer for Dan River Mills, was a new point on the triangle with fields and old outbuildings waiting to be explored.
While Papa Hop was pinching my cheek, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a farm cat mosey past. When he let go of my face, my gums ached, but I pursued the agenda I had been cultivating on the way there. The grownups were in the house drinking coffee, eating sausage biscuits, and talking Pig Latin. I was free to explore.
I chased the cat down through the apple orchards and then into the cornfield where Bessie the cow was standing. Then, I climbed up and perched on Papa Hop’s old tractor, sitting right in the field where he left it. I went inside the old barn where his 1943 Ford was parked and pretended to drive, dreaming that one day he would give me that car.
I crawled on my stomach with my face pressed against the damp dirt floor, to wiggle underneath the rusty padlocked door into Papa Hop’s old work shed. Inside I discovered another mystery. I saw halos of light filtering in the windowpanes reflecting off wire rimmed glasses. Was that angel dust floating in the air? What did he do, just get up one day and leave his glasses laying there on the wooden bench and give up making or fixing things? That’s exactly what it looked like to me. All the tools askew and caked with dust and cobwebs from years of waiting for him to come back. The Mystery of the Abandoned Work Shed.
Papa Hop taught my father about God until he left home at seventeen to join the Navy. In turn, my father taught us that no matter what a person did, once they were baptized, they were saved and once they were saved, they were always saved. Some people can backslide, but they are always saved. We learned that if you sin, you will burn in hell and Jesus came to save us and He is coming again, so every day we should be looking for Him. To be saved you absolutely must be baptized. There is no other way. Some baptisms I witnessed myself as a child, at the river. I wondered how many of those people slid backwards. Did Papa Hop keep count? It was a mystery to me.
When we went back home, I carried my father’s wooden ashtray stand outside and stood at the bottom of our concrete driveway. My sisters in our first family along with my younger brother assembled on the pavement to listen. Though not yet three years old, he would have his turn next to “play church” at the ashtray lectern. I perched my small New Testament on top of the stand, where the ashtray was inset.
“Jesus will be returning in all His Glory.” I mimicked what I had heard Papa Hop say at his church, Shady Oak Church of Christ.
But I was still thinking about The Mystery of the Gold Teeth and my misbehaving tongue. I learned at church that in the Bible it says that the tongue is a small part of the body, that it makes great boasts, and we must consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
The tongue was powerful, it could investigate soft fleshy gums and interfere with the miraculous gift of a gold tooth. It could brag and set a great forest on fire.
I assured my siblings as I preached that our cousins who had burned down a field on my grandfather’s farm were still saved. They had just backslid. It was true though, that from just that one little spark his whole field had burned down.
My aunt made my two cousins “fess up” to Papa Hop. Of course it was an accident. They were sure he would whip the tar out of them. But The Mystery of the Small Spark was solved.
When my cousins told the truth, Papa Hop replied, between shiny gold teeth gripping a dry piece of hay, “I was gonna burn that field down anyway.” He paused and looked far off like he was considering what words his tongue would form. “To kill the weeds,” he said.
Share this post with your friends.
