Grandpa Berto and Grandma Cheva

Last week, our oldest granddaughter, Joy, and her husband Joe, had their second baby boy.  Meet Rhett Alexander:

What most people probably wouldn’t realize is that Joy’s great great great grandfather could have been about as dark as her husband.

My dad’s father was Alberto Atanasio, or “Grandpa Berto.” He was Italian and Greek. I love it that my maiden name, the Greek name “Atanasio,” comes from a language with its own alphabet. 

Ατάνάσιω

All my life, I believed that Atanacio or Atanasio meant “Thomas” but I can’t find that anywhere -- instead, it is a form of “Athanasius” and it means “immortal” or “without death” (thanatos) or “eternal life.”

So maybe it was a given that one day, with a name like that, I would embrace John 3:16:

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” ~John 3:14-16  (New King James)

I did believe in Him, as soon as I found out about this, and He has never failed me.

The other great thing about Atanacio is that it begins with an alpha (Α) and ends with an omega (ω). These are the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet. You may recognize those two Greek capital letters in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus proclaims that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.  He is truly “without death.”

ΑΩ

If I ever met Grandpa Berto, it was very briefly or I was very young. For the most part, I rely on pictures to tell me what he looked like.  From the few pictures I’ve seen of him, Grandpa was fair, with snow white, rather curly hair. But my Uncle Sam has relayed some details about his father, so I’ll tell you what I know.

I’ve already told you he was Italian and Greek.  His father’s family migrated from Italy to Sicily, and then from there to Puerto Rico, where no doubt his European ancestors mingled with the local natives, but the timing is not clear.  Berto’s father was Emilio Atanasio.

His mother, Eudocia Medina, was blonde and blue-eyed.  The name “Medina” is found to be Castilian Spanish (or it can also be Muslim or Moorish, but for now, we’ll assume Spanish, since Eudocia was fair-skinned.)  And, of course, he grew up speaking the Spanish language in Puerto Rico.

Grandpa Berto was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and raised in the Catholic Church.  Here’s a picture of him, but nobody really knows where this picture came from.  I’m told that the robe is a liturgical garment called an “alb” and the black rope belt is a “cincture,” used in religious services (the mass) by members of the Catholic Church.  He may have been chosen for some type of service in the Church.  Or, maybe he was cast as Gabriel in the Christmas play?

Growing up with seven brothers and sisters, Grandpa Berto got a job cutting sugar cane.  When the company that owned the machinery sold it to a company in the Philippines, the cane workers had to find other jobs, so they moved to other places where there was similar work to be had, either to Hawaii or to New Jersey.

But Grandpa moved to Brooklyn instead of New Jersey, where farm labor jobs were not plentiful.  That’s where he became bi-lingual. He needed a job, and the factories were all owned by Poles, so he learned Polish.  You “do what you gotta do.”

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Dad’s mother, Eusebia Ruiz (or “Cheva” for short), was from Arecibo, Puerto Rico.  Her mother, Maria Valentine, was also blond and blue-eyed, and it is supposed that she was English.  But her father, Simplicio Ruiz, was one of the indigenous islanders, who were a friendly and beautiful dark-skinned people, the Tainos, a tribe of Arawaks.

The famous explorer and navigator Christopher Columbus, his expeditions, his discoveries, and his shortcomings, have been notable topics for discussion in 2020. His statues and memorials have been pulled down along with those of others, such as Confederate generals and slaveholders, who all seem to have fallen from grace. But there’s actually a massive monument to Christopher Columbus bigger than the Statue of Liberty in Arecibo called “Birth of the New World,” 360 feet tall.  I think that one will stay put for a while.

You may have heard stories about the Spaniards who came with Columbus to the New World and what happened to the natives in the Caribbean under their rule. But as I learned about the Arawaks, and particularly the Tainos, I spied this comment from a descendant of this people group -- curiously, on a Black History Month page:

“I have been doing a lot of research, my brothers and sisters, and the term “black” is a brand the Europeans try to put on us just like “Indians” were put on my forefathers who were Taino aboriginals.  Yes, you all have many key points.  There were high pigment humans in Northwest Amexem and Southwest Amexem (aka “Americas,”) and also in the islands around them.  With this being said, we cannot blame the low pigment.  We must love them and understand what happened in the past.  We must learn and build our communities and not be separated by black, red, yellow, or white.  We are all living beings and we must all love each other.  THERE IS ONLY ONE RACE ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH AND THAT IS THE HUMAN RACE.  I am a Taino, and I love my ancestors, so we must learn and not hate.”

I love the comment and wholeheartedly agree.  We cannot blame the low pigment humans!  You can read more about “Amexem,” what has been described as "an ancient name for the geographical region," here.

Grandma Cheva had fine, black hair and dark skin, but not as dark as her ancestors.  She would be called a Mestizo, a word that means a healthy mix of lighter European and darker native American parents, similar to Rhett. She grew up with four brothers and sisters, some who turned out lighter, and some who turned out darker.

Here’s a picture of my family with her, before we moved to the Philippines.  Notice the darker-skinned Taino in her?  And if she looks short in the picture, it’s because she really was -- my mother was only five foot two, and I was eight years old.  Grandma was “mi abuelita” -- my little grandmother.

Grandma Cheva was also raised in the Catholic Church.  Like Grandpa Berto, she also migrated to Brooklyn, where everything is free, of course.  It was there they met and married, raising four children, including my dad, who was her number three.

The family didn’t have much, but they got by.  The oldest of the four, Aunt Mary, saw the youngest, Israel, being born, and decided against having any children of her own.  Israel never married, and Uncle Sam was married later in life with only two children. So most of Berto and Cheva’s descendants are from my dad.  In those days, when you believed you had had enough children, the solution was to get two beds.

Sometime after the move to Brooklyn, either before or after they got married, they both moved away from the Catholic Church, and began attending a Spanish Pentecostal church. My uncle says they were converted.  In case that is confusing, just think of it this way.  In the Catholic Church, thanks to Christopher ("Christ-bearer") Columbus, the people of the island, including my grandparents, were introduced to and taught about Jesus (along with Mary and other saints). But in the Pentecostal church, they went a step further, and learned to know Jesus, and to have a personal relationship with God through the sacrifice of His Son.

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” ~Ephesians 2:4-9

And:

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” ~John 1:12-13 

Unfortunately, Grandma and Grandpa were legally separated after several years of marriage because they weren’t getting along too well and they didn’t believe in divorce.  It’s hard to know how the marriage fell apart for sure.  My uncle says the rumors of Grandpa Berto going crazy were not true -- they just had some kind of disagreement -- but we’ll never really know.

In the end, Grandpa Berto was hit by a drunk driver, while riding his bicycle. He died in 1972, after a long hospital stay.

Grandma Cheva passed away when my son David was a baby still -- that would have been in 1996. Uncle Sam really wanted me to come to the funeral, so I brought my nursing baby with me and we met him at the airport. My dad and all his siblings were there.

It didn’t take me long to really regret never having taken Spanish.  Indeed, another time, when we had made the trek to New York, my grandmother had asked me, very disappointed indeed, whether Spanish was not taught in my school, and if so, why had I not learned it?  It was hard to tell her I had taken French instead.  And now, here I was, surrounded by unknown cousins, who had come from various parts of the City, other states, and even from Puerto Rico, some of them with blue eyes and blond hair and some dark-skinned, but all of them speaking Spanish.

It wasn’t till I went back for the funeral that I understood how greatly my grandmother had been loved in her community.  In fact, she had to have two funerals because the facility was too small to hold all the people who wanted to be there.  I only had to go to one of them, and I tried desperately to understand even a word or two, but because both of the funerals were in Spanish, the tributes and accolades went over my head.  I was sad because I wished I knew more.

David made little squeaky baby noises and I tried to keep him quiet, but he would talk.  People only looked and smiled, saying he reminded them that even in death, there was Life.

Eternal Life.  In Jesus.  One song, sung as a solo, made me weep uncontrollably and I didn’t know why because I had no idea what was being sung, but I knew it ministered to my spirit.  I found out later it was a hymn I’d never heard before, but was a favorite in the Billy Graham crusades:

Face to face with Christ, my Savior, Face to face what will it be?

When with rapture I behold Him, Jesus Christ Who died for me?

Chorus:  

Face to face I shall behold Him, Far beyond the starry sky

Face to face in all His glory, I shall see Him by and by.

I wish I had been able to communicate with my grandma about the things that mattered.  But this song reminded me that she is in the presence of Christ, our Savior, and so I will be too someday.  And then … we’ll have a good, long talk!

The Epidermis of Me

   

 

  “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ 
     “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” ~Genesis 1:26-27

     “But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’" ~Romans 9:20

Who has not spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, analyzing their reflection, and then doing something to clean up their image?  I doubt I’m the only one. It is time to collect my thoughts about my skin, a very timely topic.

I have often wondered how people looked in antediluvian times:  that is, before the worldwide flood of Noah.  This colossal supernatural super-disaster claimed the lives of billions of people and left only eight measly individuals standing, along with an assortment of animals that were carefully selected and collected to live beyond the disaster.  The gene pool was significantly reduced for humanity, to say the least.  There could have been people with purple hair among Adam and Eve’s descendants, who didn’t have it from applying some sort of hair coloring -- they were born that way!  But all the people with purple hair, or the gene that caused it, would have been wiped out in the flood.

Hair is a part of the largest organ of the body -- our skin.  For the most part, people do not see our other organs.  If we’re fortunate, our hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, and most of our bones are not available for viewing.  Even our fat, while making us bulky, is still covered with our skin.

Our epidermis makes us recognizable to other humans, and it is our first line of defense from foreign agents that would harm us.  Without our skin, we would look pretty ghastly!  You might have the most beautiful eyes ever, but if we saw them turning freely in a skeletal socket, we would not recognize you at all.

When I was born, my hair was sparse and fine, and well, baby soft.  In my 20’s and 30’s, my hair was long and brown, and it had a bit of a wave to it.  It was still soft and fine, like my Spanish grandmother’s.  Now I have less of it again, but it is still soft and fine.  It turned gray, like my Greek grandfather’s hair, so that it sparkles in the light.  Unfortunately, we have hard water where we live, and everything turns rusty very quickly.  So when my hair turned gray, the rusty water began to change the color of my hair and now it’s a lighter brown with orange highlights.  Whether or not that is desirable, you might recognize me by that description.

You might also recognize me by my skin conditions. While I’m not in the same boat as Job,  I have at least four skin conditions that drive me crazy, including psoriasis, which, I’m told, is hereditary. During the ten years that my legs were covered with open, bleeding sores and scaly skin, if I ever wore shorts or capris, some poor honest child would sympathetically cry out, “What did you do to your leg!”  Now, I have a wonderful dermatologist, from Africa, by the way, who has worked out an effective treatment for that stubborn psoriasis for me, and I am no longer plagued by the constant itching.  Praise God!

You might recognize my fingernails.  They have always been weak and thin, and because of my underlying psoriasis, they are ridged.  I’ve always, always, always bitten off my fingernails, and I have often bitten off skin too.  (Sound gross?)  But I do, because I detest hangnails.

You may recognize me by the saggy skin under my chin, and the stuff under my arms that looks like an upside-down biceps.  One of the first things that disappointed me about the aging process was the saggy elbows.  My mom had that, but I always thought I could keep the great tight skin at my elbows.  Not to mention that my skin doesn’t look great in the belly area anymore.  After eight kids, there are some permanent stretch marks … but I generally don’t like swimming, so you won’t see them.

But then there are the other wrinkles on my forehead and at the ends of my eyes.  Some of these happened because we practiced heightening our facial expressions for Drama Classes every day at our house.  It was rather habitual, though, whether or not there was a play in the works -- smiling sweetly, laughing uproariously, and frowning sternly just happened and the accumulated family facial communications produced desirable lines that you could accent when it was time to apply stage make-up.

For identification purposes, if something tragic should ever happen and my body is found in a ravine, be sure to look for a certain red mole that my husband knows about.  I also have other various spots too numerous to mention, from the “J” scar on my left index finger to various small sores that never heal quickly. My toenails are orange from the same rusty water.  I have no tattoos, but I have two former earring holes that haven’t been used in many years so they have grown closed.  I don’t know much about my back.  You’ll have to ask my husband about that.

Okay, so you want to know, perhaps, what color my skin is?  You’ve been in suspense the whole time trying to figure that out?  That’s a good question!  I am green. That is, I have an “olive complexion.” And in the words of Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being green!”   

In the 1970s, in USAF Basic Military Training (BMT), women recruits did not have to shoot the M-16, but they did have to wash and iron their own uniforms, and they had to take a make-up class.  I have never liked the feeling of makeup on my skin, so this was definitely not my favorite part of BMT.  Being short, I really thought I could just sink down in my chair and remain unnoticed by that instructor as she scanned the class looking for a guinea pig with greenish tones to their skin.  But it did not work -- she spied me and I was required to sit quietly while she put orange stuff on my green skin to counteract the green and make my skin more neutral. It was a little pointless because none of my other classmates were green and able to learn how to do their makeup from my example.  And I couldn’t see what she was doing.

Relieved when she told us we were not required to wear make-up in the military, I totally put that behind me, and I’ve only had a few close brushes with cosmetics since then.

The color green is in none of the songs about skin color, such as “Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight.”  I could only categorize myself with the color white.  Even more modern versions of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” have brown, and still have white, but no green.  But that’s okay because my green is a pretty light hue. And who has ever found the true color of their skin in a box of crayons?  Peach just isn’t right.

All I can say is, like King David says in Psalm 139, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  My skin is not perfect, but it is carefully crafted.  The same genes that give me dry and itchy skin as an adult also spared me from the wonders of acne as a teenager. I did have a bout of psoriasis on my face for a while that gave me a taste of what it would have felt like, though.  And my itchy skin gives me a kinship with Job.  In reading his lament in the Bible, I could fully identify with him, but on a smaller scale, and I just know I would have been nicer to him than his friends, who judged him as a sinner just because he was covered with painful boils from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. I’m sure I would’ve whined a bit too.

In the end, my epidermis is so much more than its basic color!  Under our skin and hair, the organs in our bodies are all the same colors, and our blood is consistently red.  If I told you my height and my current weight now, you should be able to pick me out in a crowd. 

In 2020, we Americans were required to fill out census forms, and there’s always a question these days about race.  Here’s my answer:  according to Genesis, I belong to the race of Man, created on the sixth day.  There is no other.  But I have a Maker, a Divine Potter, who put the finishing touches on me, His project, by adding color to my skin, and I like it!  As with all of Mankind, I am made to be like Him, and that thought is simply awesome!

     “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.  He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.” ~Genesis 5:1-2