I was at Vocational Bible School. Sista Ide was teaching the class, I was in.We were all at the Orange Hill Holiness church. Words came that Uncle Pappa was on his last minutes of life. Sista Ide,his wife, took my little hands and we began running up the short way and across the street to the house, and into the front room where uncle Pappa lay on the bed. The women held my hand as we formed the circle around the bed and began singing. Aw we sang, we all watched as life took his feet, making its way up, and until the last breath, and he close his eyes.Then his sister, Aunt Maud, went and move her hand over his eyes, making sure that they were properly shut. Then they covered his face.

This was my very first experience with watching someone pass-over. It was a moving experience. One that would have prepared me for more to come. I have learned to not be afraid. My sister Doreen and her friends would later rebuke me, for going to watch the dying death of Uncle Pappa. To me this was one of the 'most beautiful experience' a way that we all must go, and an experience that the heavenly powers has dictates; just beautiful!

As times goes by, I would leant the signs of death, and boldly administered 'the last rites' for many. I recalled, been present at a place once, and some called for a Priest. My face lights up, and someone took my hands and say; " She can do!" After things had settle down, I pondered as to what is it about me, is it my countenance that signal, that indeed I was ordained to have been able to perform such a rites. I have been anointed to rebuke evil; even the devil. And then...

Yet, I must admit that as Uncle Pappa lay there dying, I had a thought in the back of my mind. Did he ask forgiveness for all his sins? Perhaps, here again they all though that I was too young to remember anything. I must have been no more than three, yet I remember.

Uncle Pappa was angry at this brother -in-law, so called brother-in-law as he put it. "The lazy SOB wasn't helping his sister with all them pickney." Instead, he was all too busy at Irene Bell's house. Coming- in at so surprise, his brother-in-law would have fathered two of Irene Bells children.

To this day, I am 'still trying' to figure-out what Uncle Pappa put in the goat-belly soup that day, up at Irene's house, to poison his brother-in-law. Therefore, as I was assisting is helping Uncle Pappa in his crossing-over, to the other side, it became my responsibility to see that he would go smoothly. Uncle Pappa would have appeared to me, one day, clad in white, as a way of me knowing that he thanked me.

It was here once again, that I would come to learn some of the deep secrets of Orange Hill people, my own people. This is why my Grandmother Emma had called me; 'An Old Skirt ' " For indeed, I never forget."

"Every generation blames the one before..." Instead of saying every generation becomes a cycle, 'something old; something new,' all in the reversal of the cycle. In that we and our generations [passed] are the same and one.