Free Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber Page A

children with brown and red and yellow and white skin, all clasping their rainbow hands together. Anna didn’t really understand why yellow people, for example, didn’t just stay in yellow countries. It was true her parents had come here from another country, but they were at least the same color as those who lived in New York, where they landed. America was too good to everybody and look at the problems it caused.
    Still, maybe Anna’s urging had had some effect on her daughter, or maybe it was just what the realtor showed them, a house they fell in love with, with two orange trees in the front yard, a plum tree in the back, and a pool on the side. The school was three blocks away, across no big streets, and the neighbors were all white.
    Of course the house wasn’t in Los Angeles where Anna had her antique store, but in a city an hour to the east, a few minutes drive to the college where Danny was a teacher. Because Anna had been courageous enough to learn to drive in a matter of weeks after Abram died (otherwise she couldn’t have continued to run the antique store), she figured out a way to visit the children by driving to their house on streets that never touched a freeway. This was no easy matter, since the freeways had been designed to make a long ride across the city feasible.
    With her heart in her mouth, Anna set out to visit the children in their new house holding her breath all the way, knowing that human beings were not meant to speed across the surface of the earth on wheels. But when she arrived laden with rye breads and challahs from the Jewish bakery on Fairfax Avenue, the children greeted her with screams of welcome. “Mom-Mom is here! Yay! Mom-Mom is here!” To be heralded that way was almost worth the panic of the trip.
    As soon as she and Janet had piled the breads into the freezer, she would set to work on the main purpose of her visit: educating her grandchildren. Together they played “Sheriff and Deputies” (this developed their reasoning skills), and made up outrageous rhymes (this developed their verbal skills). Anna gave them a musical experience as well, playing a special song on the piano for them, the story of “The Three Princesses.” This was a tale replete with a love theme, a battle theme, a funeral theme, and a wedding march (all taken from famous pieces of music) and even (once the princess and the prince had married) a few bars of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!” Anna’s granddaughters were rapt when hearing the familiar tale: “There were three princesses. One was tall and thin, one was short and fat, and one was young and beautiful.” Her three granddaughters always clamored to know which one of them Anna thought was the “young and beautiful.”
    â€œAll of you are young and beautiful,” she assured them. And they were. Anna, who was not maternal herself and did not have a soft heart and was not one to be moved by a pretty face, found herself adoring these girls with all her being. First of all, like her, they were extremely smart. Second, they were musically talented. Third, they had vocabularies like no other children their ages. She saw them as three little Annas, each one going forth in the world to spread her talents, her messages and her philosophy.
    Anna’s philosophy, which did not include the concept of “multi-ethnic,” was challenged when she learned that her down payment for the house in the good neighborhood was for naught. Almost as soon as Janet’s family moved in, the government passed a law that required her precious little girls, flesh of her flesh and mind of her mind, to be bused twenty miles to a colored neighborhood. There descendants of Bessie’s husband would share her granddaughters’ space, deform their minds, and threaten their bodies.
    â€œDon’t worry, Mom,” Janet assured her. “This is good for them. This will help them get along in the