Coffee, Aunt Anzie, and Me – GET A SPECIAL EDITION OF BETWEEN THE TRACKS – $19.99

https://books.by/darryl-armstrong

I was eight years old when my Great Aunt Anzie became my “nanny.”

I also had Aunt Orey (Ora), Aunt Bazil (Basil), Aunt Lener (Lena) and Aunt Vick (Victoria)—names in the fifties really were poetic—but it was Aunt Anzie who guided me through my earliest years.

She stood about five foot eleven and weighed around 150 pounds, wore heavy clod-stomper shoes and simple homemade dresses. Her long silver hair reached her waist and every morning she wove it into a neat French braid.

She kept a single rocking chair on her front porch—just enough room for me and a hand-stitched quilt for my naps—and each afternoon she’d settle me in and tell me Bible stories until I drifted off. I loved those tales, never suspecting the darker ones in Scripture that later would give me pause.

Just before I started third grade, she introduced me to coffee. At breakfast she’d pour a strong, black brew over day-old biscuits, sweetening them with sugar. I called it “coffee cake.”

On birthdays and special occasions, she’d ladle rich chocolate gravy over the biscuits and fill my cup halfway with coffee, halfway with fresh cream. Elvis also liked chocolate gravy and homemade biscuits, I am told.

Aunt Anzie lived twenty-three steps from our back door, plus one step up to the porch of her little shotgun house known as the “Elder House.”

It had three bedrooms, a lean-to kitchen, a toilet curtained off in gingham, and a rack holding seven dresses she’d sewn herself—five for everyday, one for church, one for funerals—plus a long gray winter coat.

She owned two pairs of clodhoppers: one worn daily with missing buckles, the other polished and fitted with gold-tone buckles for Sundays. Her hose was the old-fashioned flesh-colored kind; her hair clipped back with what looked like whale bone; her glasses round and gold-rimmed with hooked ear pieces.

Aunt Anzie also had another duty: she’d ask my mother to summon the local elders—she never dialed or talked on a phone herself—and tell them she’d had a “vision” that it was time to “come home” for their passing. Inevitably they did come back—some literally in their final days—to eat her cooking, receive her care, and take comfort in her prayers. She truly had the gift.

In my second year of college, my mother phoned to say Aunt Anzie wanted to see me at home. I feared another death-bed summons, maybe my own, but when I arrived she simply announced she was ready to “pass over.”

I thanked her politely, certain she’d been mistaken—then a week later I got the call that she’d died peacefully in her rocking chair, Bible open in her lap. She had the gift, indeed.

But this story isn’t really about her passing; it’s about coffee.

Aunt Anzie lived on a small mill pension and whatever my parents could spare, so she bought one can of coffee every three months and blended it with homegrown chicory—about twenty percent coffee, eighty percent chicory—then mixed it with milk. All those years I thought I was drinking coffee; really I was sipping New Orleans-style chicory blend.

When I got to college and landed a job bussing tables, I had my first real cup of coffee in September 1968. I marched up to my supervisor and declared the brew a disaster, convinced no one knew what they were doing. Of course I was wrong.

Back home I complained about the terrible coffee at school, and Aunt Anzie, cheeks flushed, confessed that I’d been raised on chicory all along. Embarrassed, she swore to make it up to me. I assured her that was never going to be necessary.

Once I tasted genuine coffee, I began mixing it with chicory just the way she taught me, savoring the rich, familiar warmth.

And decades later, in every government office I worked in, fond recollections brewed as we kept two pots on the burner—“Darryl’s Coffee” and The Other One—so everyone felt right at home.

And, if you will excuse, I’m ready for another cup.