“Grandma, I need a piece of bread, please, because I'm going to prevent a murder.”
Mrs. Velma Stepforth did not even quibble with eight-year-old baby grandchild Gracie Trent, but handed her the bread and then followed the child … first to her oldest sister, days-from-eighteen-year-old Vanna …
“Please take this bread crust and put it in that treehole we saw walking Goody today and help me prevent a murder, Vanna.”
“What – well, OK,” Vanna said and went to do as her sister asked just so she could see what going on.
Gracie then went across the property line to the home of her friends the Ludlow grandchild, several of whom were looking at a little gnarled hole in the wall of the garage.
“Yep, that's definitely how that mouse is trying to get in – we've got him now!” nine-year-old George Ludlow was saying.
“Naw, we ain't doing none of that,” Gracie said, and stopped the whole conversation about how to kill the mouse in question right there. “I'mma need everybody interested in murdering this mouse to back up.”
After saying that, Gracie took a small piece of bread, and threw it at the hole – and at once, the mouse who had been chewing the hole big enough to get in there popped right out for that piece of bread. No sooner had the mouse eaten that little bit than another breadcrumb appeared farther away … and so by a trail of breadcrumbs, Gracie led the little mouse to its new safe home in the treehole with the bread crust already in it.
“I'm so glad – thank God!” seven-year-old Amanda Ludlow said as she hug-tackled Gracie on the way back. “I was trying to find the number to animal rescue, and you showed up.”
“Look,” Gracie said, “and I need everyone to hear me: we're not killing any of God's creatures around here unless they are trying to hurt us. We ain't doing none of that. God did not put me here to have us doing bad stuff on these animals that we see humans doing to other humans who are poor and just trying to get to somewhere safe. I was watching this thing about this big famous pianist who started practicing what he was going to do at our ages and so he got really good at it, so, we're going to practice being good to little things until we get to the big things and that's just it.”
“I love you!” Amanda said as she hugged Gracie again and kissed her.
“What just happened here?” George said.
“What just happened I think is called the Gracie Experience,” Col. Lee said. “You know how Edwina is so much like y'all's Lee great-grandmother, Hilda?”
“Yeah,” George said.
“One of Aunt Hilda's good friends was Mahogany Mae Jubilee, and that's Gracie's great-grand aunt. Madame Mahogany Mae was not letting anybody kill anything on or around the mountain just to be killing it. The Jubilees-of-the-mountain are all tremendous long-shooters, but not through practicing on random animals, and nobody got to kill anything for sport, either – and she used to tell the youngsters what it was and say at the end, 'and that's just it.' ”
George considered this.
“How did all y'all get used to so many women telling you what to do, though?”
“Never worry about whether it is a man or a woman telling you what to do, cousin,” Col. Lee said. “I know women generals, and I have no problem with them telling me what to do because they have the authority, they have the experience, and they do their work to make sure what they are telling me to do is right. Sometimes, Cousin Maggie tells me what to do … when I didn't know what needed to be done before that, and sometimes when I don't know exactly how.”
“Yeah, Grandma sometimes is really sweet about it, but Papa listens to her, too,” George said. “I guess it would be too much for men to have to know how to do everything and tell everyone else when we are only half the human race. I guess we do need everybody to use their brains and help us know how to do stuff.”
“It takes some men decades to figure that out,” Col. Lee said. “Hold on to what you have there, George. It will make your life easier, down the road.”